Many avid Fortnite fans are aware of the large data mining and leaking community on the Internet, providing a glimpse of what is to come in the future of the game. One of the more well-known data minters, TigerHypeX, recently sat down with Gfinity to talk a bit about what they do, and their plans for the future.
Devar-TTY's Chat with TigerHyperX
OK! Let's start off with a brief introduction! Tell our readers a little bit about yourself.
I'm Tiger, a 19yo student that started doing Fortnite Leaks since 2018 as a hobby. I'm also a C# Software Engineer and I work on different tools that are mainly Fortnite related.
What originally got you into data mining and Fortnite leaks? What was the learning process like?
When I started playing Fortnite during Chapter 1, Season 3 , I noticed that some people already knew things before they happened in the game and that's how I discovered the datamining community.
I was interested, so I started learning and going through files using UModel. Back then things were very difficult and complicated, but I slowly learned by myself and started to tweet simple leaks until I made a lot of friends and they helped me improve even more!
How has your process changed over the years? Has it become easier or harder to find the information you are looking for? Has Epic made changes to make it harder for data miners to leak information?
Things got way easier in 2019. That's when Asval created FModel, the tool that started a whole new era in the datamining community. FModel made leaking easier to everyone!
Then the FModel team grew bigger and more developers, including myself, joined the team. We added a lot of great features like generating cosmetic icons, challenge bundles, quests and various of other cosmetic types which are the key features in FModel.
Then in Chapter 2, Season 4, Fortnite v14.40 released and the leaking community got it's biggest hit. The file structure changed and we faced a lot of difficulties with datamining, but the FModel team worked for weeks to try and get things working again. Epic didn't do that purposely to break leaking, they only did these changes as a part of their process to better optimize the game.
Now leaking is pretty much back as it used to be before 14.40, but slightly more difficult for us devs as we need to generate a usmap file after every patch to make sure FModel is fully operating.
I hear you're teaming up with The Game Vlog on FNPedia 2. What will set this tool apart from others currently available?
FNPedia 2 will be quite easier and more "light" for beginners. It's mainly made for quick usage as a one click Fortnite leaking tool for content creators and other beginners to simply extract cosmetics and other things. The tool will have a modern and easy UI and a cool icon design. It'll be way more directed to beginners that are not experienced with looking into the files, so it's basically a very friendly tool.
Sounds fantastic. Have there been any tough obstacles to overcome during its development? Any interesting challenges?
With the experience I gained from working on FModel, combined with TheGameVlog's experience, I don't think there's something very difficult coding wise.
The Real challenge here is to overcome all the problems that FNPedia 1 had and raise the bar and try to implement everything in the best possible way this time.
We want to make FNPedia 2 better, faster, and easier than the previous one, introducing even more new great features!
What do you think about how Epic treated leaks regarding Chapter 3, asking major leakers to hold off posting, then leaking their own information?
When I got the request from Epic, I was happy to do as they wish and hold myself from leaking during Chapter 3. I even talked to the FModel team with HypeX and we agreed to not leak and we even decided to not publish the mappings to slow down leaking for others too!
However, before accepting we made multiple suggestions to Epic to ensure that their plan works in a better way and we asked them to contact some streamers to not cover leaks from other accounts. The next day Epic accidentally leaked an ad that spoiled the final part of the event before they went further and leaked the whole Chapter 3 trailer.
Personally I couldn't see a reason to not leak anymore. They leaked the most requested things by the community: the Battle Pass, the map, and gameplay changes. There's no reason why we should hold ourselves from tweeting leaks anymore since they pretty much revealed everything, and a massive amount of people watched the leaked trailer already.
Sounds reasonable. How closely to you work with Epic, and do they ever provide you with assets to promote Fortnite with?
We don't work closely with then, but some of us still have good relationships with some of the devs at Epic!
However, Epic never provide us with any assets and we barley get any official contacts from them. Most of their communications are usually asking to know how we got access to specific information. Still I really hope we can have a better relation with Epic, and I'm sure a lot of the lads there don't mind leaking knowing that we really create hype for the game and we have big respect for them!
What I want to say that we also form a big part of this community. Ee have a very large fanbase and we create a lot of hype around the game. I think we deserve a little better treatment from them the way they treat other content creators.
Do you feel that leaking upcoming content spoils the fun for some players who may just be looking for information on what is currently available? Do you try to hold back information until a certain point before releasing it?
I don't think leaking upcoming content really spoils the fun. In my opinion leaks create more hype about most things and make most people more excited about their release. Cosmetic leaks, for example, let you know what to save your V-Bucks for. The best proof for that is the fact that lot of people follow leakers!
However I could agree that some leaks are big spoilers , but usually these leaks are not from the files ( or encrypted ) else they are sent to some leakers by non official insiders from Epic.
Personally I hold back most of the insider leaks that I'm aware of because they are big spoilers, and just slightly tease them sometimes without revealing too much ( Shiina and Hypex pretty much do the same most of the time )
How much information do you share with other data miners in the community?
I usually share insider information with a very small group of very trusted people that I really trust ( Shiina most of the time ), and they share information with me too and we try to keep it a secret or tease it together.
Do you see yourself continuing with the work in the future? What are your post-college plans?
Yes! I really enjoy leaking and I made a lot of amazing friends and a great community here and I can't see myself leaving them behind!
This should be my graduation year so I'm trying to focus a bit more on college , I'm not certain what I'm going to do next, but i'll probably invest more time into my hobby and try to expand my content even more aswell as working on bigger projects or starting some on my own.
That sounds exciting! That about does it for the questions I have. Any other info you'd like to share about your work or FNPedia 2?
That's pretty much it! Thank you a lot for having me.
Where can people find you on social, the web, etc...?
Twitter account : https://twitter.com/XTigerHyperX2
Personal twitter account : https://twitter.com/RealTigerX
Youtube : https://www.youtube.com/c/XTigerHyperX
Note: Minor edits have been made to the text, such as capitalization and punctuation, for ease of reading.