One of the reasons I uninstalled the game was how massive the file size had gotten =w= so it's nice to see them at least trying to do something about it

What do you mean with "=w="?

ASCII emoticon. The two "=" are the eyes and the "w" is the nose. It represents a bat head expressing a state of mind.
Check the username to understand my reasoning.

An emoticon in the same series as ones like OwO or UwU or °w° etc. I suppose they're pretty much localized to the furry fandom. =w= in this case is used to express no strong emotion in particular.. mostly like mild tiredness or slight annoyance

It’s some variation on UwU OwO 3w3 which, as far as I’m aware, imparts simply “cute” from Asian cartoons/animation.

I’m equally baffled by it but I was there in the beforefore times when smileys were visualising human faces.

:-)

Ah, I thought it was something like that, but with client integration.

I remember back in the days of phpBB and vBulletin forums and MSN Messenger, they had special emoticons that would replace text strings with a graphical icon, say, 8) would make a smiley face with sunglasses. Or (L) would make a heart.

I got so annoyed at how out of place the graphical emoticons looked that I trained myself to write them backwards to not trigger the program to replace my text.

So instead of writing :) I write (:

Just as I wrote that sentence, I reflexively reversed the first smiley and got confused when I was about to write the second...

Sorry for the tangent, and thanks for the explanation.

Ah, thanks!

I thought it was to demonstrate that the game was large (wide) in some way...

So instead of writing :) I write (:

Ah, I developed a similar habit for certain emoticons within messaging apps for example for something like :3 I'd replace the number 3 with the Cyrillic letter З which tends to look the same in most fonts, or otherwise switch the characters around as you do to not trigger the automatic emoji replacement haha

Translation: we removed a lot of unused assets we had bundled at the start.

FYI it's still massive. They boast a 40gb file size reduction but from what I heard the game is around 110gb now... which is still a lot.

Marvel Rivals reminds me of Rural Juror.