Noa-senpai wa Tomodachi. - Vol. 4 Ch. 38 - A Day Alone With Noa-Senpai.

[PreStoneX]

Can someone explain, I'm genuinely curious what's the problem with sniping?

It's mostly just a moral issue.

You have a manga/manhwa/manhua that's being sort of regularly updated, and just because it gathers some popularity, some other dude or group wants to translate it, essentially sh*tting on all the hard work you did, and tries to take over/ride on the popularity you have gathered with your translations. (They wouldn't even know this manga exists without you, so its just rude to cut in.)

If they translated from the very beginning, from chapter 1, then its still fine, since in the end they are not trying to take over what you previously did, but are giving their own interpretation and version, even if they only do it for the popularity..., that's generally not taken as a snipe.

Basically; in scanlation, sniping is frowned upon most of the times. If its a random dude wanting to translate his favorite manga, that's still rude but way better than a group sniping, since for groups they usually snipe for money reasons. This also causes issues with the releases, since the group or person who was sniped may very well drop the manga to avoid competing over it for no reason, and the one who sniped can get bored or can realize the manga doesn't earn money and just stop translating it, so now we have a dead manga that's not being translated by anyone... this happened many times before.


That's why groups have this unwritten rule about sniping, to not try and randomly take over each other's projects, because without this scanlation would be pure chaos. Mangas or Manhwas with low popularity would get dropped and they'd target the popular stuff. The wait time for "taking over" is 2-3 months. If the group didn't upload any chapters in that timeframe, its usually free to take.

As for a personal experience: I translate Manhwas and 2 of my manhwas got sniped before, with the latest being just a few days ago. The manhwa 'Na Kang Lim' has gotten pretty popular after 160+ chapters, so a random ass site tried to earn some quick money by sniping the latest chapters with sh*tty machine translation and uploaded on their website with watermarks all over it, and people read their version first and even promoted it under comments because I was uploading chapters later on purpose. The other was for another manhwa that got around 24k bookmarks on another website (comick), so a random group is now trying to ride on its popularity to get some readers for their website and earn money from ads.


Edit: Another commenter mentioned the issue about lower quality translations, this is also true. Now that a group was sniped, it can very well lead to competition on who can upload chapters faster. Fast uploads == Low quality, since it takes time to deliver a good quality translation/clean and redraw/typesetting. Most groups resort to using Machine translation to just quickly get something out lol. Another personal experience for this is recently I have another manhwa I put in a lot of effort to properly translate and edit everything, since it had some pretty hard text effects on it, and since its a competition against another group, obviously the other group uploaded first with wrong translation and they didn't even bother to clean/translate/edit the bigger texts and just left the korean in there, but the readers didn't care. What comes first is what's being read, so for that chapter now there are way more likes on their version than mine, rip. So much effort for nothing

 

[orenzmania]

You are assuming that we aren't like her here, reading cute manga to staunch the gaping wounds of existential alienation.

Plus,

Spoiler

it's just fictional people.

Hold on, you're scaring him with those spoilers!!!!!!

 

[Poincare]

Ela deve ser um horror para lidar pqp
Toda boniteza do mundo com uma personalidade vampiristica de energia gzuz, da para tankar nao

Até que dá, se tiver o jeito de lidar com pessoas assim. Mas sempre é bom incentivar — eu particularmente prefiro fazer isso de forma mais sutil, expressando totalmente apenas quando é preciso — uma mudança, tlg? Mas não basta apenas isso: a pessoa precisa querer.

 

[rabidfish]

Ok I need to say something here. Everyone here is too mean to Noa. I get that she is super clingy and annoying but she hasn't really done anything bad to anyone. She is a good person and cares about her friends. I know that realistically, people with her emotional issues will, sooner or later, become a problem for themselves and others, but this is a fluffy manga, not real life.
So don't be mean.

 

[drEJ]

Ok I need to say something here. Everyone here is too mean to Noa. I get that she is super clingy and annoying but she hasn't really done anything bad to anyone. She is a good person and cares about her friends. I know that realistically, people with her emotional issues will, sooner or later, become a problem for themselves and others, but this is a fluffy manga, not real life.
So don't be mean.

I don't think they're being mean. Rather, I think they're being realistic, but I'm also sure most understand that it's still fiction. So it doesn't mean we can't criticize her just because it's fiction, but it also doesn't mean that we can't sympathise with her. 'Tis the beauty of nuance

 

[drEJ]

Thanks for the TL!

 

[AnotherDuck]

Everyone here is too mean to Noa.

She's not a person. She's a character. She has no feelings. Being "mean" has no meaning to her. And you can't dictate what others should feel about a character.

 

[rhinne]

Can someone explain, I'm genuinely curious what's the problem with sniping?

It makes it harder for people to make a living off their illegal hobby by farming donations or making you go to their website for ad revenue (sick mom, universal scanlators, ravana scans are good examples.).

 

[rabidfish]

She's not a person. She's a character. She has no feelings. Being "mean" has no meaning to her. And you can't dictate what others should feel about a character.

Too critical of a fictional character. Also see what has she done that's so bad? Send too many texts? Be too overbearing? Nothing close of what she could actually be doing, like emotional manipulation, gaslighting, threat to self harm, threat to blackmail, use her superior position in the work space to manipulate people.

She's much more put together than most people here give her credit for.

 

[AnotherDuck]

Too critical of a fictional character.

No such thing.

Nothing close of what she could actually be doing

This is basically the Appeal to Worse Problems fallacy. She could be a mass murderer, but she isn't. It's a non-argument.

She's much more put together than most people here give her credit for.

She's much more of a mental wreck than you give her credit for.

 

[Killthescribe]

Kinda interesting to see exactly how she thinks makes me think that she's not exactly in love with Rihito yet... keyword yet

I dont think she has a line for love, just a minimum for how important she has to be for someone, like she said this chapter, shes only willing to be his best friend at least, she'd probably be willing to date him if he asked.

 

[anonymousan]

Can someone explain, I'm genuinely curious what's the problem with sniping?

To add to what others said, what many seems to forget, maybe because it affects readers more, are aggregator sites.

They're basically sites that automatically snatch the first version of an uploaded chapter and re-upload them (sometimes without the credits) and ignore the other potential versions of the same chapter. They do it either for traffic on the site for ad revenue or because some sites like MangaDex are banned in countries. The latter case is good for the people from those places.

But, this case being an example, chapter 38 of Noa-san will only exist on those sites as Snippy's version (unless they're manually replaced). This one won't ever get there. And readers on said sites won't ever know there's anything wrong or why the chapter is lower in quality.

So tldr, readers who use aggregators will ever only be offered the fastest release which can be snipes. And they won't know what happened.

 

[Coongoon]

not a huge fan of upscales

 

[PreStoneX]

not a huge fan of upscales

I don't think its an upscale, we get the chapters from a raw provider in an already high resolution, and I don't think he upscaled

Edit: it was an accidental upcale, the dude just shrank the pages.

 

[onichin]

Ahem.

Boobs

 

[Xnagos]

I'd really like it if they remain friends and there isn't any romance, though I doubt that it stays like that.

If it were to stay that way the story would really need to hammer out her growth as a person already.

 

[Ramen5000]

Y u upload twice

cos i did something naughty

 

[chusetto]

Naked all the chapter but she's still a massive pain so no reaction from my pp

 

[Ramen5000]

Naked all the chapter but she's still a massive pain so no reaction from my pp

thats good, you're a strange person

 

[AdmiralSilver]

Put a bra on at least girl Holy FUCK