- Jan 17, 2019
- 70
Something weird happened on one of our computers, and I wanted to have your opinions on the matter.
My wife's playing Township on her Windows 10 desktop. The game is quite popular and is from the Microsoft Store. On the game settings, I have linked it to her Facebook account for save sync. A few days ago, I made a full reformat of her computer using the latest Windows 10 on USB (meaning reformatting and deleting every partition on every drive) and logged in using her new Microsoft account. This is a new Microsoft account that was never linked in any way to this computer. Upon reinstall, the very first thing I did was going to the Microsoft Store and download Township. To my surprise, upon launch, her game was restored to the way it was (her level, virtual coins, etc...), meaning her save was recovered.
What puzzles me is how's that possible? Here save couldn't have been loaded from a cloud save (new Microsoft account and not logged into Facebook or anything, as nothing else was installed). She doesn't play the game on any other device, so it couldn't have been loaded from some sort of network sync (if that's even a thing for games). My only guess is that Township logs your unique device ID and automatically loads your save from there.
While I've seen this behavior in some softwares (iolo System Mechanic will recover your license using your device ID even after a full reformat, for example), however I've never seen this happen with a game before. To my knowledge, if you log in to a reformated/reseted Windows/Mac/Android/iOS with a new account, you'll never recover a game save...
What's your take on this? Am I missing something obvious? I'd be glad if you guys could lighten me up as I love knowing how my tech works...
My wife's playing Township on her Windows 10 desktop. The game is quite popular and is from the Microsoft Store. On the game settings, I have linked it to her Facebook account for save sync. A few days ago, I made a full reformat of her computer using the latest Windows 10 on USB (meaning reformatting and deleting every partition on every drive) and logged in using her new Microsoft account. This is a new Microsoft account that was never linked in any way to this computer. Upon reinstall, the very first thing I did was going to the Microsoft Store and download Township. To my surprise, upon launch, her game was restored to the way it was (her level, virtual coins, etc...), meaning her save was recovered.
What puzzles me is how's that possible? Here save couldn't have been loaded from a cloud save (new Microsoft account and not logged into Facebook or anything, as nothing else was installed). She doesn't play the game on any other device, so it couldn't have been loaded from some sort of network sync (if that's even a thing for games). My only guess is that Township logs your unique device ID and automatically loads your save from there.
While I've seen this behavior in some softwares (iolo System Mechanic will recover your license using your device ID even after a full reformat, for example), however I've never seen this happen with a game before. To my knowledge, if you log in to a reformated/reseted Windows/Mac/Android/iOS with a new account, you'll never recover a game save...
What's your take on this? Am I missing something obvious? I'd be glad if you guys could lighten me up as I love knowing how my tech works...