A bit curious regarding ending E (Spoiler ahead)

[Caboose]

hi there,
just beat the game, it was a great run but something bother me.
As you fight the credits, you end up being trapped and need help, nowadays with all the people who already beat the game it work. but when the game released? you weren't able to see the real ending until people started to sent their save in oder to help others?

[Ogami]

There are bot helpers in there too. Some generic names like 2B and such.
Those have been in the game since day 1.
The whole thing is more of a illusion, if you sacrifice your save game all that happens is that you name is added to the lists of bot helpers that can appear for a player.
Your data also is not really lost if that player gets hit during the shooting sequence. That would not work from a logical point, since nearly everyone gets hit multiple times and can at max add 1 new helper at the end.
Game would have run out of helpers looong ago if there were no bots and the data would really be lost.

So its more of a ( very effective) story telling illusion.

[Cacosubthree]

I've read somewhere that they have some of the developers' names as helpers in the early release of the game.

[DeadByLag]

I highly doubt that's how they design the game (server side). While I'm not a game developer, I have been developing IT systems for large enterprises, so let me chip in on the magnitude of absurdity of such a design, and how I'd design that feature.

If the very first player in the world to complete up to route E did not have anybody else to "back him/her up", than s/he will be forced to solo it. And not only the first player; the second, the third, the fourth, the fifth, and the sixth ALL have to solo it all the way to successfully register their completion server side. Just so that the seventh player can have six buddies.

And, if those first six were deleted off after the seventh player's attempt, then what happens for the eighth player? Does s/he need another six to solo in order to receive critical assistance?

The ratio of players who need help vs those who have the capability to solo is way too extreme. That simply does not make sense from a UX perspective to force six players to solo for the sake of giving one a break. The reality is most people would simply give up and uninstall the game in frustration.

If it were to me, I'd pre-seed the database with existing "sacrificial" records - like those from the developers and testers plus more fake records, so that the very first player in the world can already tap into a pool of "predecessors". The UX for every player would then be consistent.

As more and more actual players complete and decide to delete their saves, they register with the server and get recorded in the ever growing database. But nobody's record will ever get deleted; what the player sees on screen is just a random selection of existing records, real or fake. The six helpers are technically just a +6 attack damage buff, and has no true requirement for others to complete the game earlier.

[TheSeek]

Originally posted by DeadByLag:

If it were to me, I'd pre-seed the database with existing "sacrificial" records - like those from the developers and testers plus more fake records, so that the very first player in the world can already tap into a pool of "predecessors". The UX for every player would then be consistent.

As more and more actual players complete and decide to delete their saves, they register with the server and get recorded in the ever growing database. But nobody's record will ever get deleted; what the player sees on screen is just a random selection of existing records, real or fake. The six helpers are technically just a +6 attack damage buff, and has no true requirement for others to complete the game earlier.

That's exactly how it's done.
When a player sacrifices their save to "help others", what actually happens is just their name is added to a pool of names from which random names will be picked up to show as helpers for a different random player during the end credits fight.
Athough i might be wrong and i have no direct proof of this since I did not play this at launch, i doubt that developers or testers names appeared as helpers for those who first completed the game, simply cause those names are, well, in the credits you're fighting against.
On top of that, while we're made to believe that when one of our helpers gets hit and dies is when their save is effectively deleted from servers(and thus their name is also deleted from the pool of names), that's also most likely not true, as if ALL players were to sacrifice their data, it would eventually come a time when the pool of names becomes empty, and that can't happen.
So what they probably did is create a pre-existing pool of random fake names in which actual players' names are added in when they "sacrifice" their data, but no name is actually ever deleted, so that the pool will always have enough names for any amount of players that will need help.
After all, who would pay that much attention to which names appear in thousands upon thousands of end credits fights just to see if a name appeared more than once?