ElitePinecone wrote...
Sparketh wrote...
Clearly, they don't need to upload the save itself to upload information about the save.
I imagine in that case they had a specific method to upload certain data to Origin accounts and have that reflected on the BSN. We don't know how it works, but if it were that easy to import save information into the Keep, don't you think they'd have done it already?
That doesn't imply that everything that will be in the Keep was recorded by that method, nor that they'd have legal permission to do anything else with it.
Besides, going back and arranging for that data to be imported into the Keep would probably require patching Origins again for three different platforms - which, when they've got the Keep, just seems like a waste of time and effort.
I don't know for certain why they aren't doing it, but my guesses are below. I'm not going to assume that they have our best interests in mind nor am I going to assume they're trying to screw us over in any way.
1) They don't want to spend the time/money because it likely won't be the deciding factor for enough customers. Since this is not something people like to hear, the inaccessibility of the save is a great excuse to not try.
2) The person who wrote that code is gone and either did not document anything or documented it poorly. If this is the case, tapping the existing feature is still possible by taking the data they already have, but any flaws in it will carry over. The game might suffer from the time/money investment necessary.
3) It has not occurred to them that there are ways to get the data without the saves. Sometimes large groups of people forget about something as small as data uploaded to BSN. You'd be amazed how often people attempt to derive data they already have.
This isn't the first time we've seen something like this either from BioWare. If you recall, it was stated that there was no way to carry over Oghren's approval rating to Awakenings. It was a number in a save file that they were already gathering data from. In fact, they even accidentally carried over the penalty for multiple gifts so that Origins gifts hampered your ability to get approval from Oghren. Really, if it was a value in the save you imported, it could have been pulled like any other value. It's just part of a dataset.
The reality is that if you have access to some of the data, you have access to all of it. The only thing you have to worry about is properly tweaking what you have to produce the desired results. This often means doing things like building conversion tables, finding the variables, etc... In the software development world, "We can't" often just means, "we won't". For the keep, they'd just have to create a conversion table to match the BSN data to Keep flags and then put rules in place.
The nice thing about working with data is that there's no magic to it. If you have the data, you have it. Anyone who tells you otherwise, doesn't understand the data or is lying.
Edit: The above sounds a bit critical on a reread. I recognize that there are numberous reasons why business decisions are made and that we, the fans/customers, aren't always privvy to them because it isn't always good business.
I would also like to point out that in the interview where he mentions not being able to access the save, he does say that they really want to bring in the values and, if memory serves, that they are still looking into it.
It should still be noted that while building a conversion table is relatively simple*, that it is likely to be extremely tedious and potentially time consuming. It would also require uploading multiple saves since the DAII upload data likely does not carry everything forward.
*Anyone with as little as a spreadsheet program, an exhaustive list of journal entries, and an understanding of the Keep's flags could build it.
Modifié par Sparketh, 04 février 2014 - 12:08 .
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