What qualifies as a spoiler can be a very subjective thing, so let’s discuss different ranges of what could qualify as a spoiler, from the very obvious, to the most unlikely of a spoiler!
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Music Used:
FFXIV Endwalker – Cradle of Hope
#ffxiv #endwalker
Chapters:
00:00 Introduction and Spoiler Warning
00:47 (1) Mechanical Spoilers like what actions a job learns
01:46 (2) Optional Dungeon with no context or story significance
03:09 (3) Optional Content with self-contained significant story
04:05 (4) Optional Content with MSQ significant Spoilers
05:17 (5) MSQ Dungeon with little to no story significance
06:08 (6) NEW Optional Content with MSQ significant Spoilers
07:20 (7) MSQ Spoiler with obvious unavoidable context
08:03 (8) Major MSQ Fight significant regardles of context
08:34 (9) Collectable items that can spoil story
09:30 Final Considerations
11:30 Fun Fact
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There's one kind of "spoiler" that I actually wish existed in the form of being able to see what a dungeon/raid/trials drops are (for minions etc.) and what they look like
I think context matters a lot, unless the fight spells out a spoiler very clearly. Otherwise, it's just a dude in a room for me. I remember seeing a glance of the Hades fight before I got to Shadowbringers and I never really saw the importance in it. It was only after going through the expansion that I really felt the gravity of the fight. It never made it feel weaker or anything because I didn't even know the context. To me at the time I got "spoiled", it's just a dude in a room.
No one wants to experience Aurum Vale for the first time
Spoilers = anything within the last 2 current patches.
Everything else is free game.
Players shouldn’t be watching videos about content ahead of them for learning purposes expecting not to get spoiled.
I would love someone to do story breakdowns for those of us ranging from people that just want something to listen to that we are interested in all the way up to the players that have every word memorized.
8:34 if I may share.
Such a big problem on EW release, I saw people, including receiving it, get harassed for such major spoilers for sprouts as wearing the elpis outfit or riding the doggy. Despite with 0 context, you wouldn't understand either. And if anything, harassing someone for that "spoiler" is, in itself, making it a spoiler.
Bonus points to people who do get stupidly angry if you dare mention a name. I've seen people get harassed for even mentioning Alphinaud in the NN, as if just stating his name magically just ruined everything for players (who either have no idea who that is so why care, or do know who that is so what surprise).
I started playing FF14 because of the Nier raid, so if anything I would say it could be a selling point for Nier fans
I’m sorry but people are to soft now a days. If you don’t want to be spoiled, don’t watch a video about content you are or will be doing….
That or just how about you do the content. If you didn’t understand, or want to understand further, watch the videos.
The surprise aspect is an interesting one, and it was covered over multiple points. Most people don't consider "neat surprises" to be spoilers, but it is nice having neat surprises as a new player and can make for fun moments when watching someone else play. For the most part, these things tend to be stuff that's more awkward to avoid bringing up, so conversations will naturally include them from time to time. It's more on the person playing to not expose themself to conversations and discussion if they want everything to be a surprise, though it's unfortunately simply going to be hard in some cases. Like if you've never heard of MMOs before, it might be pretty cool that you can use mounts, but you will undoubtedly see people on mounts before you unlock them. How neat or cool a surprise is will vary from person to person.
What gets me a little more in general with spoilers is the notion that they lose value over time. Every day, people are born, grow up, and discover things other people love. Even for people who have been of an age where they would be interested, they only have so much time to get to things one by one. I can gladly accept that some moments have their impact lessoned simply for reasons like other media copying or building on that. Think of how many twists would be cliches today, but not in the piece of media they originated from. There's almost a meta there and it's undertstandable for society to keep up with it. Some moments make for very good memes and it's easy to see why they get shared uncontrollably.
But for many old spoilers, not much is gained for spoiling them freely. I'd say it's better for people who haven't experienced that yet for whatever their reason might be to generally be considered when the alternative is a very minor gain in convenience. When a spoiler is actually relevant, it barely takes anything to pop a quick warning/question and then bring it into the conversation. When the cost is as low as that, being considerate seems like a no-brainer.
Despite that, I get that sometimes it's more grey because it's not just a minor inconvenience to really avoid. Depending on the game, it might even be a matter of the intention being that you go in thinking it's one thing and it's something completely different. Like when the game is kind of two games in one, even calling back to it can raise questions of why that game would be relevant. Check the first letter of each sentence in this paragraph if you want the example I'm thinking of.
I think dungeons and raids are rarely worth discussing as spoilers since you usually have little to no context for why you're in that place fighting those enemies to begin with. To use a relatively early game example, the Vault itself might not be a spoiler because there's tons of hypothetical reasons why you might be fighting temple knights, but the cutscene immediately after is huge spoilers and i will personally hunt down anyone who discusses what's in it. Emotionally impactful scenes matter more than vague and isolated plot points.
Honestly, when it comes to content creators I think as long as the title of your videos are sufficient to imply spoilers it's then on the person to decide if they want to watch the video.
Examples –
YouTube video – just put "spoilers for patch x.y" in the title. After that, they're responsible for if they get spoiled.
Twitch – literally just put what you're doing in the title of the stream. Something like "stormblood trial mount farm." If someone is only in heavensward, it's up to them to decide how much they care about knowing what the stormblood trial bosses are. The only one I would PERSONALLY consider a spoiler worth the washing is the end of 5.0 msq trial.
i'm friends with people who consider a crystaline floor in someone's g'raha cosplay screenshots a big spoiler, so i go with "everything non-mechanical is a spoiler" for their sake. personally, i'm immune – it's not a spoiler if it doesn't sully/rot/degrade the experience, and i'm equally happy experiencing stuff completely blind or with the only unknown being the writing style.
i also think it's unacceptable to "spoil" someone when they specifically and explicitly ask for information. sometimes it's relatively harmless "be patient you'll get there," but i've also seen "telling you whether or not endwalker will throw you into a panic attack is a spoiler," and when a friend escorted me through alexander they insisted to go into A12 as many times as it took to show me something neat but refused to tell me HOW to see it and it took 4 2-dps queues. terrible stuff.
(if you want to see the neat thing: after tank lb3, go into one of the 4 balls, complete the dps check, and look down off the platforms)
This is the toughest community to tip-toe around when it comes to spoilers. Being someone who doesn't care about spoilers since the context is more important than anything, I don't really have this problem and it makes it difficult to empathize with people who do care about spoilers. Still, because I love my friends and playmates, I try to do my best not to spoil anything. Down right refusing to even name town names or skill names. I'll just say something vague like "Go to the north area" or "Level 83 MSQ Event" not even calling it a trial.
The two things that I see most as spoilers are either gameplay and story. Pretty much, it divides into what the player values more. Super excited for the new raids? Well, do you care about the story, the mechanics, or both? Do you even care if there's context or that there's information at all? All of that will determine if that's spoilers or not. Want to see the story? Do you care about the journey or the destination? Both equally? That'll determine whether the context, the exact spoiler itself (without context), or both matter.
I think that the prevalence and "reverence" of something that is undoubtedly a spoiler, regardless of how much someone will care about it, has a soft time limit. Obviously, if you look up content of FF14 and don't want to know much of anything, look up ARR or ask someone ONLY about ARR and possibly HW vaguely. Right now EW content is so recent that anyone who cares will obviously find something that will spoil the fun, depending on if they care even that much. Telling someone EW is the end of the saga FF14 had first started telling will not present any problems as that is what it is billed as. If you look up FF14 that's the first and foremost thing you'll see about EW. In about a decade's time we might casually see the EW trials discussed casually, but I'll always say that people deserve to experience the game as they want. Simply put, the onus on whom has to avoid spoiling shifts from the community at large, to the individual with time.
Since this is discussing spoilers, anyone who cares to read this random furry's internet comment might want to stop here, as it's story time for me. StB/ShB spoiler in the next paragraph:
Funny enough, I forgot when Zenos reappears in the story exactly and thought two of my friends knew. Only one did. I ended up having to massively obfuscate what I meant to salvage THAT situation. I spun it as more a political resurgence and his lasting repercussions than him literally coming back. Thankfully, he bought it. I was on millimeter thin ice over the Mariana Trench with cinder block shoes welded to my feet with titanium that night.
Spoilers can go either way too. Like I remember getting back into the game after years because I randomly saw Ruby Weapon on Youtube, followed by the Seat of Sacrifice Trial which just made me wonder "wtf how can you end up fighting THIS GUY of all people. I want to find out"
I had an amusing 'spoilers' situation a while back. I like to type out goofy stuff in chat after beating up Nero in the Praetorium, and I used to tell him to try not to die before he could get to the moon. Until one time I had someone in the party go "hey no spoilers, I'm only in Stormblood," and I had to stop myself from replying that it wasn't actually spoiling anything, because then that might be a spoiler in itself. So now I've just been telling Nero to try not to die on the way to his home planet instead. 😛
At the start of the video, but my personal opinion going in is that there's kind of a bell curve of spoiler acceptableness. Spoilers start off very unacceptable, then gradually become more acceptable until the media in question becomes old enough that people who are adults were LITERALLY BORN after it.
So my example for this is when FF7 came out, in 1997-1998 spoilers were very rude to share. Then from about 1999 onward it became gradually more accepted until the game became relevant again when remake was announced… then the game became LESS acceptable to spoil from about 2016 onward and is at its height of not being acceptable to spoil again thanks to Remake and Rebirth. Because there are people who are in their 20s who were literally not born when the first came out.
Seen someone spoiling one of the parts of the msq in public chat where there was bunch of sprouts when asking help for that specific part. One of the sprouts unfortunately saw it before entire chat was flooded so that no one would see the spoilers. The unfortunate sprout was genuinely super upset and angry for a good reason as well.
Please for the sake of other people who play this game with you: DO NOT SPOIL any major part of the msq. If you really need to describe which part you are stuck or where you need help, send it as private message to someone who has played the game past that part / Finished the expansion. Remember there is always someone who has not finished the game yet, so before you type anything in chat, always ask yourself: is this possibly spoiler.
My every attempt to understand why people get bothered by spoilers in the first place just results in arguments so… lol idk.
To me a spoiler is talking directly about the plot in the MSQ. Anything else could very much fall into "Streisand effect", as in, if you don't mention a glam/title/minion/mount/furniture/etc being spoilers, probably no sprout would ever find out that thing is a reference to something important of the MSQ.
"Streisand effect" is an unintended consequence of attempts to hide, remove, or censor information, where the effort instead backfires by increasing awareness of that information.
This is why, if you don't want to spoil things to new players, you have to avoid doing these two things: don't talk about the MSQ unless you're 100% sure the people reading your message already know what you're talking about, and second, don't ever mention or point out something being a spoiler, because I've seen people that are like "bro don't wear a glam, you're spoiling about…" and proceed to write like 3-4 lines of text explaining in detail why that thing is a spoiler, effectively doing spoilers and causing the opposite effect.
I remember when I was visiting a friend's estate and I was checking decorations and stuff and they had a Loporrit doll somewhere and I saw when they put it away and told me something like "just ignore that, pretend you saw nothing, just forget about it" and I was like "wdym?" and I think I could notice they inmediately realized that hiding the Loporrit doll and trying to distract me about it ended up being the spoiler itself, cuz otherwise it could've passed as a random decoration, instead they trying to hide it brought more attention to it and made me more curious about it.
But what about information reveals during fan fest? For example the neir raids reveal. That would be a spoiler by any definition. But was revealed during a fan fest. Blue mage too. And blue mage is even less noticable than the neir raids. Lets not forget the live letters too.
Inherently they are spoilers. But at the same time advertisements. I want to say your nier raid example while servicing the point. Isn't as strong as it could have. Because it was widely advertised. I personally want opinions.
The MSQ spoiled me the story of the game
Well with something like the 2B outfit that you mentioned at 9:19, Id argue thats not spoiling anything because yeah there is a NieR raid, but even if you wanted to keep that a secret from your friend there is also a Yuna/Tidus cosplay outfit, and theres definitely no FF X raids in the game (Sadly! I hoped we'd get Sin for the endwalker alliance raid)
(SPOILERS IN THIS COMMENT)
I've been struggling with this concept, so I was really happy to see this video pop into my recommended. I never want to be that guy, but one of my friends is playing through the story, reading everything and really enjoying it, but my other friends who have skipped or played in the past are more fine talking about the story in spoilery ways that they don't deem as spoilers, but I do. With me often having to shield my friend who is actually taking his time with the story from what they say. For example, nearing the end of post-Stromblood, my friend who was skipping in the same vc as myself and my other friend as I watched him go through cutscenes, decided to randomly start talking about what they were doing. They were apparently being "vague" enough because they "didn't even know the characters names," but started with describing some mechanics from the Sadu fight, and Sadu herself in a general sense, just before the "little sun" cutscene (which they skipped thankfully, or I'm sure they would've brought it up). Anyways, I didn't get too on them for that, but had definitely asked them to stop.
But it had only gotten worse, with them eventually going on to say that you play as "the samurai dude" (Hien, in the Zenos fight instance) and even that "the dragoon guy" (Estinien) saves you (he didn't say saves from who, but still). I got very upset with them over this with the added context that we did know that they were ahead of us (and not far ahead of us, my other friend was around the Burn at this time) in the story saying these things, but once again they used the scapegoat of these not really being spoilers, which I of course disagreed with.
Okay, actual point of this post and enough ranting: The reason I am even this way and try to avoid even "minor" spoilers, is because you never know how any given story beat is going to affect someone. For example: I, like most others, got incredibly hyped at the Shadowbringers trailer. However, when my friend reading all of the story eventually did finish post-Stormblood and we watched the trailer, with his favorite job being Gunbreaker and seeing that Thancred (an obvious favorite scion of his) had not only taken up the job but was somehow protecting "Minfilia" again, he started to tear up in happiness and excitement for Shadowbringers. Something I could never see myself doing over a trailer. However others might show such a trailer to get their friends into the game, or give them motivation to keep playing. That's where I think disconnected-enough side story content and fights should be used. Because even something you might feel is a non-spoiler, could affect others in fantastic ways.
I said in an fc general chat endwalker is short and I got a warning 😂
People are so sensitivie 😂