6 ms·

This sounds like complaining about users being able to report bugs.

brianwawok 8y ago
Do you run a business, say software? Or even a non-technical business like window washing or pet walking? If .1% of your pet walking clients made 20% of the complaints, what would you do?
- bluGill 8y ago
  Depends. Sometimes the complainers are telling you about issues that everyone else doesn't like about you, so you better fix those issues, otherwise the other customers will leave to someone else. Other times those complainers are just complainers who will never be satisfied and I'd fire those customers. Generally it is a mix so you need to read and consider every complaint.
- b_tterc_p 8y ago
  It depends on how much the .1% cost, how much they provide, and how ok it is to ignore them.
- chme 8y ago
  That depends on the complaints. If those complaints are valid and lead to a better service for everyone, then I would rather have them instead of not having any feedback.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- code_duck 8y ago
  If that .1% was using a specific version, I’d conclude the quality of that version was far lower than the mainstream offering.
- rightbyte 8y ago
  Wait what? What if only 0.5% of your costumers complain? Or that 0.1% of the pet you walk are cats and 99.9 dogs, and you get complaints that you are bad at walking with cats and bad at walking with dogs. Is it good use of the metric to conclude that the cats are the problem?
  - zeroname 8y ago
    It's a good metric to conclude that you should stop walking cats, no matter what the underlying issue is.
    - rightbyte 8y ago
      Maybe cat owners complain because their cats were eaten by the dogs, and you scared away other cat owners and lost profit.
      - zeroname 8y ago
        Same outcome. How am I going to convince those cat owners that I totally fixed the dogs-eating-the-cats problem? Cats don't even need to be walked really, certainly not alongside the dogs. Putting the cats into the equation was a questionable business decision to begin with.
  - noselasd 8y ago
    The conclusion here is stated in the article as "Issues specific to Linux were almost entirely graphics driver related, and unique to the platform." So somewhat similar to having 0.5% of your pet walking customers complaining about issues you can't do much about, or have to do extra work to make them happy - their doghouse at home is too small, their car has an issue so they can't come and pick up the cat - basically a subset of your customers giving you a whole lot of extra work for very little gain.
    - rightbyte 8y ago
      Ye, well I agree it's probably not worth the fuzz support Mac or Linux for gaming. But I mean, without numbers on how much extra dev time the linux port demanded it's hard to reason about what a 0.1% revenue increase means. 0.1% is still 0.1% and could have been more if it didn't crash at that rate and discouraged buyers. Since they released for Mac the game must have been programmed with cross platform functionality in mind.
- dejaime 8y ago
  Complaints or tickets? I would bet that in this game's case what is happening is Linux gamers are techy and will properly file tickets and try and be helpful. While windows players will simply do as I do on windows games and leave a negative review. Looking at the game's reviews, first two negative ones: > "wont fit my screen. no setting to scale it correctly... Looks like i have to go buy a new monitor to play this game to its full extent" > "Constant crashing. When it wasent crashing there were so many bugs involved it wasent funny. The classic one was way better and im happy I still have it so I can play. I will change my review if they fix the game and get it so people can play it, but fornow its just contant crashes. Beware! "
  - brianwawok 8y ago
    They are bugs, due to issues with linux drivers. Not helpful things to improve.
Ajedi32 8y ago
In this case it sounds like the bugs were mostly Linux-specific ("gfx driver related").
- dcbadacd 8y ago
  Reading the thread it seems this all happened a while ago: > The world of 2014 Linux graphics drivers was not a friendly place. We absolutely encountered issues where some driver revisions only worked on certain distros, and AFAIK we did not use anything specific to a Linux distro. About the same time Chromium project found a lot of GFX bugs and created a lot of workarounds but when I disabled all of them now in 2019, they don't seem to exist. Anecdotal experience but I think things have improved and it wouldn't be this hard any longer.
  - AnthonyMouse 8y ago
    In particular, AMD released the open source graphics drivers (AMDGPU) in 2016. There are still problems with nVidia/nouveau, but that's easily solved by not buying their hardware. The Intel iGPU drivers have also been solid for a long time, though the hardware may not be fast enough depending on the game.
    - zanny 8y ago
      AMD first started with open source graphics with the radeon kernel module and pre-SI drivers around ~2009. It was just that Mesa in 2010 was nascent and tiny with it only reaching OpenGL 3.0 support in 2012. It was less AMDGPU being a big deal in 2016 and more that was when Mesa hit approximate parity with the latest OpenGL.
      - AnthonyMouse 8y ago
        > It was just that Mesa in 2010 was nascent and tiny with it only reaching OpenGL 3.0 support in 2012. Which meant that people who wanted to play games were stuck with the proprietary fglrx and all the compatibility and other problems that come with a proprietary driver on Linux. The big advance of AMDGPU was that it was a usable open source driver that made it into the kernel tree, which meant that kernel changes would no longer break the driver people were actually using because drivers in the kernel tree get patched when the kernel changes.
TremendousJudge 8y ago
what?
boomlinde 8y ago
I read it more as an admission that they underestimated how hard it is to a game to work consistently across Linux graphics drivers. The user reports are used as a metric, not to damn the users.
ergo14 8y ago
Well as he mentioned those were autogenerated reports. That being said... I tried Planetary Annihilation and it worked without issues for me on Linux.

Do you run a business, say software? Or even a non-technical business like window washing or pet walking? If .1% of your pet walking clients made 20% of the complaints, what would you do?

bluGill 8y ago
Depends. Sometimes the complainers are telling you about issues that everyone else doesn't like about you, so you better fix those issues, otherwise the other customers will leave to someone else. Other times those complainers are just complainers who will never be satisfied and I'd fire those customers. Generally it is a mix so you need to read and consider every complaint.
b_tterc_p 8y ago
It depends on how much the .1% cost, how much they provide, and how ok it is to ignore them.
chme 8y ago
That depends on the complaints. If those complaints are valid and lead to a better service for everyone, then I would rather have them instead of not having any feedback.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
code_duck 8y ago
If that .1% was using a specific version, I’d conclude the quality of that version was far lower than the mainstream offering.
rightbyte 8y ago
Wait what? What if only 0.5% of your costumers complain? Or that 0.1% of the pet you walk are cats and 99.9 dogs, and you get complaints that you are bad at walking with cats and bad at walking with dogs. Is it good use of the metric to conclude that the cats are the problem?
- zeroname 8y ago
  It's a good metric to conclude that you should stop walking cats, no matter what the underlying issue is.
  - rightbyte 8y ago
    Maybe cat owners complain because their cats were eaten by the dogs, and you scared away other cat owners and lost profit.
    - zeroname 8y ago
      Same outcome. How am I going to convince those cat owners that I totally fixed the dogs-eating-the-cats problem? Cats don't even need to be walked really, certainly not alongside the dogs. Putting the cats into the equation was a questionable business decision to begin with.
- noselasd 8y ago
  The conclusion here is stated in the article as "Issues specific to Linux were almost entirely graphics driver related, and unique to the platform." So somewhat similar to having 0.5% of your pet walking customers complaining about issues you can't do much about, or have to do extra work to make them happy - their doghouse at home is too small, their car has an issue so they can't come and pick up the cat - basically a subset of your customers giving you a whole lot of extra work for very little gain.
  - rightbyte 8y ago
    Ye, well I agree it's probably not worth the fuzz support Mac or Linux for gaming. But I mean, without numbers on how much extra dev time the linux port demanded it's hard to reason about what a 0.1% revenue increase means. 0.1% is still 0.1% and could have been more if it didn't crash at that rate and discouraged buyers. Since they released for Mac the game must have been programmed with cross platform functionality in mind.
dejaime 8y ago
Complaints or tickets? I would bet that in this game's case what is happening is Linux gamers are techy and will properly file tickets and try and be helpful. While windows players will simply do as I do on windows games and leave a negative review. Looking at the game's reviews, first two negative ones: > "wont fit my screen. no setting to scale it correctly... Looks like i have to go buy a new monitor to play this game to its full extent" > "Constant crashing. When it wasent crashing there were so many bugs involved it wasent funny. The classic one was way better and im happy I still have it so I can play. I will change my review if they fix the game and get it so people can play it, but fornow its just contant crashes. Beware! "
- brianwawok 8y ago
  They are bugs, due to issues with linux drivers. Not helpful things to improve.

Ajedi32 8y ago

In this case it sounds like the bugs were mostly Linux-specific ("gfx driver related").

dcbadacd 8y ago
Reading the thread it seems this all happened a while ago: > The world of 2014 Linux graphics drivers was not a friendly place. We absolutely encountered issues where some driver revisions only worked on certain distros, and AFAIK we did not use anything specific to a Linux distro. About the same time Chromium project found a lot of GFX bugs and created a lot of workarounds but when I disabled all of them now in 2019, they don't seem to exist. Anecdotal experience but I think things have improved and it wouldn't be this hard any longer.
- AnthonyMouse 8y ago
  In particular, AMD released the open source graphics drivers (AMDGPU) in 2016. There are still problems with nVidia/nouveau, but that's easily solved by not buying their hardware. The Intel iGPU drivers have also been solid for a long time, though the hardware may not be fast enough depending on the game.
  - zanny 8y ago
    AMD first started with open source graphics with the radeon kernel module and pre-SI drivers around ~2009. It was just that Mesa in 2010 was nascent and tiny with it only reaching OpenGL 3.0 support in 2012. It was less AMDGPU being a big deal in 2016 and more that was when Mesa hit approximate parity with the latest OpenGL.
    - AnthonyMouse 8y ago
      > It was just that Mesa in 2010 was nascent and tiny with it only reaching OpenGL 3.0 support in 2012. Which meant that people who wanted to play games were stuck with the proprietary fglrx and all the compatibility and other problems that come with a proprietary driver on Linux. The big advance of AMDGPU was that it was a usable open source driver that made it into the kernel tree, which meant that kernel changes would no longer break the driver people were actually using because drivers in the kernel tree get patched when the kernel changes.

TremendousJudge 8y ago

what?

boomlinde 8y ago

I read it more as an admission that they underestimated how hard it is to a game to work consistently across Linux graphics drivers. The user reports are used as a metric, not to damn the users.

ergo14 8y ago

Well as he mentioned those were autogenerated reports. That being said... I tried Planetary Annihilation and it worked without issues for me on Linux.