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This is exactly the kind of post where I'd love to engage in the discussion, but I end up not doing so because I just feel exhausted and demotivated once I cons

• deadbunny 8y ago
  Isn't this what throwaway accounts are for? Sure you can't break NDAs and the like but a throwaway can give a lot of freedom from people piecing together stuff if you posted using an account you use daily.
  • Agentlien 8y ago
    I could definitely use a throwaway account. The thing is, I still don't want to say anything I'm not allowed to say. I do feel loyalty towards my employer, and I'm only protecting myself if I stay clear of saying anything which identifies me. And that includes referring to knowledge which I didn't realise not many have or just generally expressing myself with my own idiosyncrasies which I may not even be aware of.
    • hopler 8y ago
      EA's existential problems are crappy games and customer-hostile business practices, not some secret sauce at risk of being leaked.
      • Agentlien 8y ago
        There are plenty of interesting things I'd love to share and fun topics I'd love to respond to which have nothing to do with what you're referring to. I'm talking about a more broad thing where I also find it difficult to join more positively minded discussions.
        • eps 8y ago
          nevermind (Quick recap, since there are now replies - EA had a policy of owning everything you produce, including the off hours, and with their constant "crunch mode" they expected you to not have time for any pet projects to begin with. An inherently abusive company, and very brazen at that. It was like that when I interviewed with them several years ago, but I doubt things changed much.)
          • mulletbum 8y ago
            I am not from the game industry or anywhere near software mecha. Can you tell me why a company would want to pay you to work on your own pet project with their money without them owning the end result? I am just confused how this is a stipulation at any job. The place I work, if I designed a model for their products on their time, with their money, it is only acceptable that they own said product. Why would they allow me to go off an compete with them?
            • deleted 8y ago
              [deleted]
            • detaro 8y ago
              the key is on their time. Parent explicitly mentions everything while employed there, in your free time as well.
              • Davidbrcz 8y ago
                How the F* can this be legal ?
    • jbverschoor 8y ago
      The thing is, your employer probably does not feel loyalty towards you. Protecting yourself is the real reason.
      • cabaalis 8y ago
        Whistleblowing/etc aside, if you sign an NDA you should adhere to it. We should not respect people who don't hold to their agreements just because they have some juicy insider information about nothing of any consequence.
        • everdrive 8y ago
          I think there's some merit to you point, but what about people who "need a job now." Not everyone is in a position to be picky about who hires them.
      • jib 8y ago
        The argument of employers being these evil things that hold no loyalty is tiresome. Loyalty is not a black and white thing. I can list close to 15 years of small experiences that make me feel like my current employer truly cares. I’ve had very few negative experiences, and when I have had them I’ve said “hey that’s not cool”, and the company has fixed it as much as it could be fixed. The fact that I may be fired at some point does not invalidate that. To me, loyalty between a company and an individual is not about the contract of work, it is about the environment that exists while you are working. Both I and the company have the option at any time to terminate the employment, that’s just part of the deal. That does not mean long term loyalty and expectations can’t exist.
        • dvtrn 8y ago
          Seems to me the argument of employer loyalty I think is more than (but still involves the matter of) whether or not an employer will go to bat for you, and speaks more to the leverage an employer has in a situation where they're faced with retaining an employee or firing an employee. As in: most often than not, in more situations than not, they have most if not all of the leverage.
    • tuesdayrain 8y ago
      So don't say anything you're not allowed to say. I think the main point of a throwaway here is to say perfectly legal things, just without worrying about potential death threats.
  • jib 8y ago
    For me at least, I would not use a throwaway. The one thing we get asked to do for social media is always be clear that we have ties to the company but don’t speak for the company when commenting on things that could potentially be a conflict of interest. Both sides of that matter - I.e. I don’t want there to be any risk that someone doesn’t know I work at Blizzard when reading a comment (mostly because of native advertising rules) but I also don’t want them to think I speak for the company (mostly for fair disclosure rules). I think that’s a reasonable request and I feel like using throwaways goes against that (and make it seem like there’s something to hide when really there is not).
    • el_cujo 8y ago
      You can still be responsible and give people disclosure while using a throw away. The benefit is you don't have to worry about people mining your entire post history to look for stuff they can use to draw negative conclusions about you/blizzard. You can also never look at that account again after that post so you don't have to worry about any crazies sending abusive messages about Diablo Immortal or whatever.
• izacus 8y ago
  Not to mention that you'll probably end up with death threats or worse if you say something that one gamer group dislikes. The behaviour of gamers on social media has been awful beyond belief these last few years.
  • jfabre 8y ago
    You mean the behaviour of people.
    • usernam33 8y ago
      And companies.
    • jcora 8y ago
      No, he meant gamers. That doesn't absolve others from bad behaviour but "gamers", i.e. group-conscious, very online, hardcore players congregating on /v/ and many other such places, are probably _the_ most vitrolitic group on the Internet rn., save for those parts of the alt-right that don't play games.
      • whatshisface 8y ago
        How could you ever hope to measure and compare the relative vitriol of internet communities? Anyone's perception will be heavily biased by what the media likes to report on (drama on Potted Plant Watering.com is a lot less likely to make the news than tweets about violent video games, which are on the list of talking points already). The most vitriolic ones are probably sub-forums that we've never even heard of.
        • lawlessone 8y ago
          >Anyone's perception will be heavily biased i'd say biased by receiving a lot of death threats.
        • twic 8y ago
          It would be a fascinating project, but i confess i have no idea how you'd quantify the vitriol. I suspect that the posters here arguing that gamers are the worse are not familiar with some of the shenanigans going on elsewhere, for example: https://fanlore.org/wiki/What_happened_with_hivliving https://fanlore.org/wiki/What_happened_with_hivliving
• philipov 8y ago
  It doesn't help EA's image that they decided to call their game launcher "Origin," so we can remember all the game studios they've murdered any time they try to force us to use it. However, I will not blame you, poor cog, for management's unethical behavior. I hope you can find a better job someday.
• vaylian 8y ago
  Thanks for sharing this insight! In your experience: What is the biggest misunderstanding that customers (or critics) seem to have about the game development industry?
  • Agentlien 8y ago
    Wow, that's a really tough one. Turns out my answer became a really long one and touched on a number of things. The biggest one is probably that developers aren't hearing or understanding feedback. We're in the same forums, reading the same posts. When players have concerns, the developers have mostly raised the same concerns long before the game was shipped. But identifying a problem isn't enough. Sometimes fixing problems are very difficult or very expensive. Sometimes, thorough design and testing has shown that all the obvious improvements are actually worse in non-obvious ways. So developers do read the feedback. We just, for reasons I already touched on, mostly don't comment. On a similar topic, it seems a lot of players don't realise that we're not an army of drones in suits aiming to make money. Most of us, by quite a margin, are really passionate gamers who've decided we love games so much we want to make them our vocation and spend at least 40 hours a week on them. Every time I see a post about how "the developers" don't understand what "the players" want, I look around the office and see nothing but players, most of whom share the same feelings and concerns. Another big one, and this is something I realised that I myself was clueless of before joining game development, is how difficult it is to react quickly to feedback, fix bugs and add features. You often see players complaining that they've raised a concern weeks ago, and it still hasn't been addressed. Being allowed to release a game on consoles requires going through certification with the console manufacturer. This is a really big, costly endeavour which takes a lot of time and requires making sure you adhere to a staggering amount of rules.[0] This and other concerns regarding distributors and retailers mean what's on the physical disc needs to be in place months in advance, making it pretty old once the game is released. Add to that the fact that bringing out a game patch for PS4 or Xbox is very expensive[1] and requires you going through cert again, and you'll see why many developers try to schedule their patches way ahead of time. Obviously, you want to do rigorous internal testing to make sure you don't have to go back and forth with cert more than necessary. Which suddenly means you have a month-long gap between something being submitted for testing and the patch reaching your loyal paying customers. It's definitely painful, watching the angry comments flow in about an issue you solved weeks ago. Now, I'm not complaining about this. The cert rules and patch restrictions are almost always very logical and there to ensure high quality for the players. But they do come at a cost. [0] https://kotaku.com/so-how-long-do-sony-and-microsofts-approvals-processes-5080083 https://kotaku.com/so-how-long-do-sony-and-microsofts-approv... [1] https://kotaku.com/wait-it-costs-40-000-to-patch-a-console-game-5884842 https://kotaku.com/wait-it-costs-40-000-to-patch-a-console-g...
• PakG1 8y ago
  I think that whole thing came about because of EA Spouse, no? https://ea-spouse.livejournal.com/274.html https://ea-spouse.livejournal.com/274.html https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2013-03-28-ea-doesnt-get-enough-credit-says-ea-spouse https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2013-03-28-ea-doesnt-...
• danso 8y ago
  Yeah I honestly can't see how an insider, in this particular scenario, could feel comfortable and expressive without being at least 5 years removed from the situation. Seems like there'd be a natural inclination for the memories/discussion to devolve into nasty blaming, and/or the added pain of remembering if the company's disaster coincided with a personal tragedy/downtime. I've been fascinated with some of the most recent big blowups, like Bethesda's Fallout 76 and BioWare's Anthem. The former seems to be a product of heavy complacency; the latter has been such an unexpected disappointment that the reasons for failure seem like they could be innumerable. On the other hand, recaps by developers of their successes have almost always been the most fun things to read about, e.g. Starcraft [0], Crash Bandicoot [1] [0] https://www.codeofhonor.com/blog/tough-times-on-the-road-to-starcraft https://www.codeofhonor.com/blog/tough-times-on-the-road-to-... [1] https://www.naughtydog.com/blog/making_crash_bandicoot_by_andy_gavin_and_jason_rubin https://www.naughtydog.com/blog/making_crash_bandicoot_by_an...
• TheAceOfHearts 8y ago
  I always love encountering content and discussions from engineers or game designers who work at big games companies. I've befriended a few game developers over the years and they always have incredibly fascinating "war stories" which they share in private. Your hesitation is understandable, though. A lot of people forget that there's real humans behind these big faceless companies. There's lots of potential downsides to sharing stuff online, without many equivalent upsides. However, I think if developers were a bit more open and people got to peek behind the curtains a little it would help to humanize these big faceless entities. Even adding minor things like developer commentary to patch notes can cause a drastically different reaction from the community. If I'm often playing a game and something gets changed I think it's reasonable to wonder about the reasoning behind those changes. Being more open and communicating frequently with the community helps set expectations and build trust. To give a parallel from another industry, all of my favorite book authors are writers who give frequent updates and are quite open about their progress. Informing readers about your expected timelines helps temper expectations and it shows that you care, making people more likely to want to invest time in your series. If there's any kind of delay or a deadline gets missed the best thing you can do is communicate it quickly. Based on my experience, people tend to be incredibly understanding when they actually know what's going on. If all you get from an author is a vague date and it keeps getting moved around without any additional information it kinda feels like you're being jerked around. Since we're on the topic, I've also encountered people that work at game companies who are incredibly resentful towards their customers, which doesn't seem very healthy. Hating your users is probably a good sign that it's time to move on to something new. Taking on this attitude appears to engage a negative feedback loop as well, causing things to degrade further. The absolute worst attitude I've seen is calling customers entitled because they didn't buy your game, although I'd like to be charitable and say that it was likely due to the person being under an overwhelming amount of stress.
• behringer 8y ago
  I'm sure a lot of casino operators feel the same way.
• tru3_power 8y ago
  To be honest I don’t blame you. I have the same anxiety whenever I consider posting anything on the internet. Once it’s posted, there’s no going back.
• scarejunba 8y ago
  It's funny. This happens in most Internet forums. People ask questions often to seek validation rather than illumination. So they'll turn on you when you don't validate. And in the end, throwaway or not, why help anyone who really wants to bite your face off? The insiders will continue to be privileged wrt information because the outsiders can't behave.