Making Sense of the Genshin Impact 1.5 Patch Leak Drama

A few days ago, MiHoYo released a statement acknowledging the leaks that happened regarding patch 1.5 of Genshin Impact. The tone of the tweet seemed different from their past leak recognition statements as this wasn’t even posted on their Facebook page, only on their Twitter. The statement reads as follows:

Recently, we discovered the dissemination of leaked version 1.5. content. Such behavior not only disrupts our plans to develop and promote the new version, but also causes some Travelers to have misconceptions about the content of the new version.

— Paimon (@GenshinImpact) March 17, 2021

It’s understandable as these leaks were released even before the beta testing has started. These leaks contained two new characters, new bosses, and a housing system. However, behind this statement, drama has been brewing. Thus, the start of the Genshin Impact leak drama.

A Misleading 4chan Post

While the MiHoYo leak recognition thing was happening, some people began speculating what really was happening behind the scenes. I couldn’t locate the source from 4chan but a screenshot of the post emerged from my socials.

4chan post in question

The screenshot had to be censored as slurs were dropped and an NSFW image was used as a thumbnail. This post attempts to explain the “shitstorm” that happened in the Genshin Impact leaks. Portraying BigBoss as some kind of leaking vigilante that ended the four leakers (NepNep, Genshin Intel, Lumie, and Dimbreath’s) reign over monetizing the leaks that they have. The first part of the post disses MiHoYo’s security which isn’t new at all. Players have been asking for 2-Factor Authentication ever since finding out that their information might be compromised by hackers.

On the subject of leaks, I think you guys should add a 2FA on the game.
It's kinda weird it doesn't have one, considering how much money people spend on their accounts.

— Alex Moukala (@alex_moukala) March 17, 2021

However, that’s where the reliability of this post stops as things aren’t as clear-cut as the anonymous poster made it seem.

A Statement From Dimbreath

The Genshin Impact drama doesn’t end there. There exists a statement from Dimbreath, one of the prominent leakers of Genshin Impact. The statement started with an introduction intent on clearing the misunderstanding surrounding the drama in question. They then followed it up with paragraphs that essentially debunk the misconception that they time gate the leaks to gain money.

First of all, no, the leaks are time gated to build up hype not to “gain attention to earn money” as some people has been spreading around and to avoid MiHoYo to react the way they did yesterday which was probably due to the amount of content that was leaked by “unknown” parties.

My Ko-Fi and Patreon exist (and existed for years, at least for the Ko-Fi, Patreon was from when I released Ganyu back in January) because I develop and maintain three (and one private) bots that amount up to 25,000 Discord servers, over 1.5 million members and processing all four of them over 3 million messages per day and also game data repositories that people use to make their websites, bots, applications, etc. The Ko-Fi and Patreon have been there for if people wanted to support the work I did, reverse engineering, maintaining, and updating bots isn’t easy and hosting isn’t cheap either especially not where I am from. The bots are free to use, with no locked or paid features and so is the game data repositories which you can easily find on my GitHub. It makes me feel like all the work I did is being belittled because of all the people spreading lies.

And even then, the fact that there’s people that’s belittling and minimizing the fact of what has been an entire month of work for us is also kind of irritating, considering the amount of time and effort that it takes.

Dimbreath Statement

Then, they moved on to explain what actually happened from their perspective. Summarized, it’s as follows:

• MiHoYo messed up by making 1.5 beta available for the public to download. BigBoss and his team heard about it and proceeded to download the client and reupload it to their servers, essentially distributing it to a lot of people.
• A few days after that, unknown parties started mass posting the leaks.
• Hours later, we circle back to the tweet Paimon posted.
• Then, MiHoYo made the biggest mistake they have made so far. Releasing the development build of the beta… publicly.

They also said that NepNep and BigBoss aren’t affiliated with them and BigBoss has some kind of reason to harass Dimbreath as BigBoss was allegedly badmouthing Dimbreath on public discord servers. Dimbreath states that they don’t know why BigBoss is harassing them.

Genshin Impact Leak Drama: Conclusion

MiHoYo’s abysmal security and carelessness became the root of the problem. Sure, the beta testers need to sign an NDA and they’re still seen as a problem by MiHoYo. But if they haven’t made the mistake of releasing the devkit publicly, it wouldn’t have come to this. The drama ended with two of the most prominent leakers, namely Lumie and Dimbreath, disassociating themselves with the Genshin Impact community. They’re both still around, but they’ll likely start to keep a low profile.

Conclusion

MiHoYo has also shut down the beta testing of 1.5 due to the rampant leaking that happened. Here’s to hoping that MiHoYo will be slightly more careful when dealing with their devkits and their beta testing.