Errata

Hey everyone! Recently we at the Ishtar Collective have been thinking a lot about spoilers.

I’m going to start this post by explaining what we are going to change and then go on to explain why we are going to change it. That might sound back to front to you but that’s the way I’m doing it.

What we’re going to change

From now on, whenever we add a new Entry or Vendor Interaction to the site we will set a ‘spoiler date’ for it.

The default spoiler date will be guessed based on the start date of the season.

As the season progresses and we get a better understanding of when content will be made available, we will update the spoiler date on individual documents.

Any documents that have their spoiler date in the future will be marked as ‘seasonal spoilers’, and have a red banner.

Any documents that have their spoiler date in the past week will be marked as ‘weekly spoilers’, and have a gray banner.

Any documents that have their spoiler date set to earlier than one week ago will look exactly as they always have.

Weekly and seasonal spoilers will also have their text blurred out by default, so if you accidentally visit such a page you still have to make a conscious decision to read the text.

We decided not to blur out the categories on the page. I know this isn’t ideal and we might reconsider this later.

For now all documents, whether spoilers or not, will still be searchable. We might also reconsider this in the future.

When documents are linked to from other pages we will try to show a spoiler icon. This isn’t always easy to do because of the way that certain pages are generated.

Why we’re doing this

Since the start of the Ishtar Collective we’ve always pulled content directly from Bungie’s API. Our assumption has been that if it’s in the API (and not marked as redacted) then it’s safe to put it on the site.

But at the start of Season of the Splicer, the update from the API contained a lot of content referencing events that hadn’t happened yet, and seemingly wouldn’t take place until the end of the season.

Spoilers are an inevitable part of building a website dedicated to Destiny lore, but it felt like the things in this update were spoiling too much.

I saw numerous threads on r/DestinyLore, comments on Twitter and discussions on Discord where people were frustrated that they knew what would happen toward the end of the season.

Talking to people that I know from the community I got some very different perspectives. Some people felt that if it was in the API then it should appear on the site. Other people felt that if it wasn’t available in the game then it shouldn’t appear on the site. And some people felt that even datamined content (which we don’t currently have on the site) was OK to publish.

Rather than base any decisions on individual conversations, I decided to put together a survey to understand how our users felt about ‘end-of-season spoilers’.

Analysis of the results

If you want to see the in-depth data you can skip ahead.

Overall, people were much happier about spoilers being on the site than I expected.

77% of respondents said that they were happy with end-of-season spoilers being on the site in some capacity.

I was really surprised that 25% of all respondents were happy for datamined content to be on the site — something that we don’t currently do right now, and realistically I don’t think we will ever do.

In terms of how we should display that content, 74% of people thought that there should be some sort of spoiler tag.

And 51% felt that seeing spoilers should be ‘opt-in’.

Some common themes in people’s written answers were that they didn’t want to make the site more complex to use. Clicking on a ‘reveal spoiler’ button is a little more complex, but hopefully not too bad.

Hopefully our proposed changes will go some way to reduce the risk of inadvertently spoiling content. Unfortunately I don’t think it’s possible to satisfy everyone’s requests.

If you have feedback please let me know on Twitter @IshtarColl or in our Discord.

Survey Results

I shared a link to the survey on the Ishtar Collective site using a notification banner, on Twitter and in our Discord.

The survey was open for around 48 hours and there were 1,117 responses.

Q1: How do you feel about the Ishtar Collective showing content that is currently available in-game, but that you have not yet acquired?

If we group together the responses that “think this makes sense on the site” we get the following results:

Q2: How do you feel about the Ishtar Collective showing content that is NOT currently available in-game, e.g. spoilers for the end of the season?

If we group together the responses that “think this makes sense on the site” we get the following results:

Q3: Given your answers, and thinking about an API update that takes place at the start of a season, which of these statements do you agree with? You can select more than one.

Q4: Do you have any other thoughts on this topic that you’d like to share?

There were 306 comments. Rather than listing each one, I’ll try to summarize the common themes. (Please note that none of these are actual quotes).

• “I want to avoid spoilers but I can’t help myself”
• “I want to have access to spoilers because I won’t spoil things for people, but I don’t want other people to have access to spoilers because they will spoil things for people”
• “The content should be released on the site at the same time as it is released in-game”
• “I don’t care if the content is not in the game yet, I just want to read it, but I would like it to have spoiler tags”
• “Please don’t make the site more complex to use”
• “I like being able to read the lore without having to unlock things in-game”

To be continued

Just like the rest of the site, this spoiler feature will evolve over time, based on feedback and on the lessons that we learn.

But hopefully it will be a step in the right direction.

Thanks for reading!