From: Malachi Petunia
Yes, yes, and yes, respectively. I have assembled and respectfully submitted my findings multiple times, and - as happens to almost everyone else who does so - was summarily dismissed with "you are wrong".
Hmmm... things were not always so. You joined in 2003; you know this.
From: someone
Linden Lab is particularly irksome because they:
- ask players to test their releases for them because of their unwillingness and inability
- bitch at their players for not having tested LL's product enough
- have publically posted "see we asked you to test but you didn't so we blame you"
- batch close preview bug reports with "we didn't look at this so will assume it fixed by release X.Y, please re-test and re-submit because we're too damn busy"
One of these practices (having players perform betatesting) is common in the game development sphere. I have always questioned this practice, but since this is the industry I am trying to shift to, I need to at least get used to the fact that it is there.
The others, I have not seen, but I have been gone a long time, and was not really here for that long the first time.
From: someone
Why do I care? I've invested a lot of time and effort into this game, would love to see it succeed, and am annoyed that they repeatedly shoot themselves in the foot and make grandiose statements about how incredibly novel their system is as an excuse for bad planning, bad management, and atrocious execution.
I do not question your motives... merely your method.
If LL has been as abusive as you describe, the methods are understandable, if still inefficient.
I am reserving judgment on whether such abuses have actually transpired until I am able to complete a forum search on such topics as would reflect this kind of content.
From: someone
Since you wanted to flop credentials out on the table, I have engineered (as in created from nothing) and deployed novel distributed systems of much greater complexity, higher node counts, tighter time constraints, much higher testability, and almost infinitely greater reliability.
I did not think I was "Flopping" anything... though your metaphor certainly is colorful.
I am comfortable with your credentials. I did not know them, nor was there any way for me to know by your previous posts that you were not simply a detractor troll. You offered nothing in your posts in the way of measurable or concrete information, simply abstractions and inferences with no details. This format is common among the trolls to incite disarray and speculative agonizing in the forums.
I figured, if it talks like a duck...
I stand corrected. I hope that you will also consider the reasons why I may have considered you a troll.
From: someone
Things I didn't do were a) tell my customers that there weren't problems when there were b) ask them to be my primary testers for releases c) told them that they should be lucky to have anything at all.
a) is common in all businesses run by marketeers. Phillip is still in charge is he not?
b) is common in the game dev community (Unfortunate, but true, since most game developers are not system crackers or griefers by nature... and those are the people that should be testing the game systems.)
c) is a bad business practice anywhere... but again, I am holding back on my judgment here, since I haven't seen this in the forums yet.
From: someone
Were these systems bugless? Nope, of course not. One of the more memorable ones that took us a really long time to find was a counter that would overflow after 180 days of continual uptime thus causing fault alarms to be triggered; however the entire system would recover within 1500ms so one might call that a mere annoyance.
Impressive.
How much time and money was spent looking for this "mere annoyance"?
Modern practice would relegate this to a "quality of life" issue, unless that bug was attached to a RTOS mission critical system that could not afford the 1.5 secs of downtime every 6 months...
...or the customer was willing to pay the bughunters' time for this trivial issue.
This is current business practice. I do not set the standard; but to compete, I must adapt to the environment that allows it.
In my case, I have returned to the employed workforce under someone else's management instead of heading up contract teams of my own. This has provided a number of unexpected benefits... Like having free time again. And allowing me to enjoy game dev related pursuits.
[/quote]
It can be done better, of that I am most certain. Why don't I bring my withering acumen to Linden Lab's service? There is no compensation that could cause me to associate myself with that firm. And in case you want to speculate, I expected far more of me and my staff than I do of LL, and did so when we were smaller and larger than LL as well.[/QUOTE]
I, too, had a very high standard for myself and my team... but eventually had to bow to the reality that contractor teams with lower stnadards were making more money because the exacting standards I required cost more money for the quality I could provide, but the clientele was not willing to pay above a certain point for a product, with or without bugs (In economic terms, perfection was too elastic for their budgets.).
Essentially, they were willing to accept more bugs than I was, as long as the product was cheap enough. (On time is not an issue in these calculations. I was able to provide "on time delivery" ... My track-record is 97% of all assignments on time, measured by codevolume. The one late project was a BIG one, and the client kept cahnging spec on us. (On the order of: "Hey...I just heard about this nifty new technology... I want this dingus to have TELEPATHY too... "
. erg. If you are interested in the details, I will be happy to share them with you in PM.)
