15 ms·

Good on them for acknowledging something a little embarrassing and responding with gratitude instead ignoring to try to save some face.

by adwi 6y ago

dna_polymerase 6y ago
If shorter load times there translate to higher conversions in the same way this connection is observed by Amazon [0] this guy just made Rockstar a little fortune. Hiring the blogger outright and giving them a VP of Something Something Role would be more adequate. [0]: https://www.gigaspaces.com/blog/amazon-found-every-100ms-of-latency-cost-them-1-in-sales https://www.gigaspaces.com/blog/amazon-found-every-100ms-of-...
swinglock 6y ago
I'm genuinely surprised. Given how long they've left this untouched I thought they didn't care at all.
- de6u99er 6y ago
  Tbh: Looks more like they haven't been aware of it. This can result in severe consequences for the developers who worked on this particular part of the codebase.
  - aaomidi 6y ago
    No it won't. It's ridiculous to blame a few devs for this. C/C++ has unknown quirks like this.
- bogwog 6y ago
  They probably just didn't have anyone working on it that had the knowledge (or incentive and/or permission) to fix it. AFAIK they've just been adding content to the online portion for the past 7~8 years, and you don't need engine programmers to do that.
  - rubicon33 6y ago
    The fact that they didn't make this a priority to fix shows exactly how much this company actually cares about it's customers and it's reputation. It's unbelievable that despite the quite public outcry about the issue NOTHING was done until some 3rd party guy figured it out for them. I'm quite surprised they are even going to patch the game because the level of "we dont give a shit" I thought they had about this issue certainly would have prevented them from doing anything now.
    - indeedmug 6y ago
      Imagine all of the quadratic poorly written code sitting on your code base at your workplace. It's probably not a handful. People need to stop pretending that their code is optimized and magically linear all the time. No one looked at this because they didn't know it about. There is no reasonable way for any person to fix things like this unless they are actually looking for it. How many people at Rockstar would be responsible for engine details like this and have the skill to find and fix it? A game video company employees artists, sound effect engineers, and etc. They aren't full of programmers combing over the source code for quadratic footguns.
      - rubicon33 6y ago
        > No one looked at this because they didn't know it about. What are you talking about? Nobody knew about it? Is that a joke? This long loading issue was posted EVERYWHERE and was the reason so many people gave up on GTA v. It’s simply impossible that they didn’t know the issue existed. That they chose to ignore it is the reality.
        indeedmug 6y ago
        Looking back, I realize it's wrong to assert opinions as facts with no basis at all. I definitely shouldn't have said that when I don't work at Rockstar or know anyone who does. But I still think people are demonizing too much Rockstar and are trivializing the bug when it's far from obvious. In my opinion, there is a lot of hyperbole statements about this issue when it's more useful to think if your organization could or would catch bugs like this.
- dbbk 6y ago
  Seems most likely that they had just never dedicated the time to investigating the slowdown.
- whizzter 6y ago
  Frankly it might've just gone unnoticed however strange that sounds. Not privy to any details but a probably scenario is probably something like this. 1: Some dev gets tasked with implementing the system, at the time there probably wasn't that many ingame purchases so that 10mb json maybe was a 500k file tops? So going by the O(N2) factor it would've buzzed by in a second (probably faster since being smaller there would've been more cache hits giving another factor or 2). Being at about a second or less they don't even consider optimizing it since it's not noticed among all other assets being loaded. 2: The content/ops teams adds more IAP over the years (it's a datafile so that devs don't have to implement everything), since they're adding big models,etc they don't notice too big changes and probably just chalk it up to bigger models,textures,etc. 3: Engine devs (those most often tasked or obsessive about optimizations) might be running a cut-down server for most testing (not noticing the huge loading time) and probably presume it's other assets if testing in a full env. So in reality it's probably just an organizational oversight rather than "bad developers", now considering this public "shaming" they received they might actually place some people in an production optimization role for a while and optimize other parts if it's possible (the question is.. will they find it worthwhile to keep up in a longer period?).
  - konschubert 6y ago
    That’s why you sometimes need a task force of as few people as possible. “I want you to improve loading times whatever it takes” Sometimes you’ve got to go hunting instead of fishing.
jrimbault 6y ago
meta comment and completely feeling based : sometimes it really seems like companies, politicians, bureaucracies, don't have a process for acknowledging mistakes and/or lack of knowledge (and/or are seemingly not allowed to).
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- bendbro 6y ago
  Apologizing just gives fuel for revenge. In this case I think because the harm done was so small, it was economical to apologize. Edit: an anecdote from the professor of my college's startup program (a hundred-millionaire former CEO/founder)- "never say sorry."
  - abhorrence 6y ago
    There are at least some examples of startups choosing to apologize, and try to make things better in the future. I think the real advice is “don’t say sorry unless you actually mean it.” People see right through that, because your actions and follow through won’t match your words. But people seem to appreciate sincere apologies that come with substantive corrective action.
  - tinus_hn 6y ago
    You can easily just not say anything at all
  - el_dev_hell 6y ago
    > Apologizing just gives fuel for revenge. In this case I think because the harm done was so small, it was economical to apologize. Yeah, it's always a tradeoff. I worked at a non-tech fortune 500 for a few years and was able to see the inside of repair/warranty/disputes. These were very high ticket items and the brand was/is very highly regarded for after sales support. In the employee handbook for repair support staff (the people communicating with clients about the status of their repair/claim) there was a passage similar to the below: "Apologies MUST NOT acknowledge anything other than the customer's explicit feelings without written acknowledgment of fault from $MANAGER". I asked a member of that team to decipher WTF that meant, and they showed me an example email. They were only allowed to apologise in the below way: "Hi bob, we're sorry you feel our product is faulty". I always found these weasel apologies infuriating in my personal life.
rubicon33 6y ago
I'm not sure if "embarrassing" is the right word here. This bug has existed for years and has lead to hundreds, if not thousands of people quitting the game citing this exact reason yet Rockstar did nothing. I think "shameful" is really more appropriate. It's not like they simply didn't know this existed. I think they have known all along it existed and didn't give 2 shits to fix it.
- monkeypizza 6y ago
  Watch out not to condemn them no matter what they do. Sure, they messed up in the past, but given the situation they found themselves in when they saw this report, this response is still good. You risk making discourse difficult when you continue punishing people who are attempting to do the right after doing wrong for a while.
  - thitcanh 6y ago
    I disagree. They ignored the issue for years and that part won’t be erased from memory. They should be given credit for finally fixing it, but nothing more. What happened before this week was and remains forever shameful.
    - epivosism 6y ago
      Very likely that internally there were people who had an inkling this was going on, but could never convince product to devote time to put it in the backlog. This change is a win for that engineer. This example will be ammunition in internal debates about how much to weigh product pressure vs engineering suggestions that improvement is technically possible; the next time an eng says "let's look at this slowness one more time, it may be fixable more easily than you think", they might be listened to.
    - ramblerman 6y ago
      > What happened before this week was and remains forever shameful. lol without context you'd think something tragic actually happened here.
AdamJacobMuller 6y ago
> instead of ignoring as-if that's the worst they could do. Suing the guy, pressing for charges with CFAA or DMCA anti-circumvention. There were far worse ways this could have gone.
- sneak 6y ago
  It is a common misconception that the victim can "press charges" against someone for a criminal matter. This is entirely false. Only the prosecuting attorney (someone employed by the government) gets to choose when and how someone is charged with a crime. The victim has no say whatsoever in the matter, and indeed the DA can charge someone even when the victim doesn't want them to, or decline to prosecute even when the victim requests it.
  - londons_explore 6y ago
    In many places, a victim has quite a lot of say whether a crime is prosecuted.
  - AdamJacobMuller 6y ago
    I did not say "press charges". I specifically said "press for charges" deliberately. In that context meaning to attempt to persuade someone (in this case a prosecutor/police/etc) to actually press charges. Most of the time when people simply use "press charges" this is what they mean. I specifically used "press for charges" to try to avoid such pedantry. I guess I failed.

Good on them for acknowledging something a little embarrassing and responding with gratitude instead ignoring to try to save some face.

by adwi 6y ago

Good on them for acknowledging something a little embarrassing and responding with gratitude instead ignoring to try to save some face.

dna_polymerase 6y ago

If shorter load times there translate to higher conversions in the same way this connection is observed by Amazon [0] this guy just made Rockstar a little fortune. Hiring the blogger outright and giving them a VP of Something Something Role would be more adequate. [0]: https://www.gigaspaces.com/blog/amazon-found-every-100ms-of-latency-cost-them-1-in-sales https://www.gigaspaces.com/blog/amazon-found-every-100ms-of-...

swinglock 6y ago

I'm genuinely surprised. Given how long they've left this untouched I thought they didn't care at all.

de6u99er 6y ago
Tbh: Looks more like they haven't been aware of it. This can result in severe consequences for the developers who worked on this particular part of the codebase.
- aaomidi 6y ago
  No it won't. It's ridiculous to blame a few devs for this. C/C++ has unknown quirks like this.
bogwog 6y ago
They probably just didn't have anyone working on it that had the knowledge (or incentive and/or permission) to fix it. AFAIK they've just been adding content to the online portion for the past 7~8 years, and you don't need engine programmers to do that.
- rubicon33 6y ago
  The fact that they didn't make this a priority to fix shows exactly how much this company actually cares about it's customers and it's reputation. It's unbelievable that despite the quite public outcry about the issue NOTHING was done until some 3rd party guy figured it out for them. I'm quite surprised they are even going to patch the game because the level of "we dont give a shit" I thought they had about this issue certainly would have prevented them from doing anything now.
  - indeedmug 6y ago
    Imagine all of the quadratic poorly written code sitting on your code base at your workplace. It's probably not a handful. People need to stop pretending that their code is optimized and magically linear all the time. No one looked at this because they didn't know it about. There is no reasonable way for any person to fix things like this unless they are actually looking for it. How many people at Rockstar would be responsible for engine details like this and have the skill to find and fix it? A game video company employees artists, sound effect engineers, and etc. They aren't full of programmers combing over the source code for quadratic footguns.
    - rubicon33 6y ago
      > No one looked at this because they didn't know it about. What are you talking about? Nobody knew about it? Is that a joke? This long loading issue was posted EVERYWHERE and was the reason so many people gave up on GTA v. It’s simply impossible that they didn’t know the issue existed. That they chose to ignore it is the reality.
      - indeedmug 6y ago
        Looking back, I realize it's wrong to assert opinions as facts with no basis at all. I definitely shouldn't have said that when I don't work at Rockstar or know anyone who does. But I still think people are demonizing too much Rockstar and are trivializing the bug when it's far from obvious. In my opinion, there is a lot of hyperbole statements about this issue when it's more useful to think if your organization could or would catch bugs like this.
dbbk 6y ago
Seems most likely that they had just never dedicated the time to investigating the slowdown.
whizzter 6y ago
Frankly it might've just gone unnoticed however strange that sounds. Not privy to any details but a probably scenario is probably something like this. 1: Some dev gets tasked with implementing the system, at the time there probably wasn't that many ingame purchases so that 10mb json maybe was a 500k file tops? So going by the O(N2) factor it would've buzzed by in a second (probably faster since being smaller there would've been more cache hits giving another factor or 2). Being at about a second or less they don't even consider optimizing it since it's not noticed among all other assets being loaded. 2: The content/ops teams adds more IAP over the years (it's a datafile so that devs don't have to implement everything), since they're adding big models,etc they don't notice too big changes and probably just chalk it up to bigger models,textures,etc. 3: Engine devs (those most often tasked or obsessive about optimizations) might be running a cut-down server for most testing (not noticing the huge loading time) and probably presume it's other assets if testing in a full env. So in reality it's probably just an organizational oversight rather than "bad developers", now considering this public "shaming" they received they might actually place some people in an production optimization role for a while and optimize other parts if it's possible (the question is.. will they find it worthwhile to keep up in a longer period?).
- konschubert 6y ago
  That’s why you sometimes need a task force of as few people as possible. “I want you to improve loading times whatever it takes” Sometimes you’ve got to go hunting instead of fishing.

jrimbault 6y ago

meta comment and completely feeling based : sometimes it really seems like companies, politicians, bureaucracies, don't have a process for acknowledging mistakes and/or lack of knowledge (and/or are seemingly not allowed to).

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
bendbro 6y ago
Apologizing just gives fuel for revenge. In this case I think because the harm done was so small, it was economical to apologize. Edit: an anecdote from the professor of my college's startup program (a hundred-millionaire former CEO/founder)- "never say sorry."
- abhorrence 6y ago
  There are at least some examples of startups choosing to apologize, and try to make things better in the future. I think the real advice is “don’t say sorry unless you actually mean it.” People see right through that, because your actions and follow through won’t match your words. But people seem to appreciate sincere apologies that come with substantive corrective action.
- tinus_hn 6y ago
  You can easily just not say anything at all
- el_dev_hell 6y ago
  > Apologizing just gives fuel for revenge. In this case I think because the harm done was so small, it was economical to apologize. Yeah, it's always a tradeoff. I worked at a non-tech fortune 500 for a few years and was able to see the inside of repair/warranty/disputes. These were very high ticket items and the brand was/is very highly regarded for after sales support. In the employee handbook for repair support staff (the people communicating with clients about the status of their repair/claim) there was a passage similar to the below: "Apologies MUST NOT acknowledge anything other than the customer's explicit feelings without written acknowledgment of fault from $MANAGER". I asked a member of that team to decipher WTF that meant, and they showed me an example email. They were only allowed to apologise in the below way: "Hi bob, we're sorry you feel our product is faulty". I always found these weasel apologies infuriating in my personal life.

rubicon33 6y ago

I'm not sure if "embarrassing" is the right word here. This bug has existed for years and has lead to hundreds, if not thousands of people quitting the game citing this exact reason yet Rockstar did nothing. I think "shameful" is really more appropriate. It's not like they simply didn't know this existed. I think they have known all along it existed and didn't give 2 shits to fix it.

monkeypizza 6y ago
Watch out not to condemn them no matter what they do. Sure, they messed up in the past, but given the situation they found themselves in when they saw this report, this response is still good. You risk making discourse difficult when you continue punishing people who are attempting to do the right after doing wrong for a while.
- thitcanh 6y ago
  I disagree. They ignored the issue for years and that part won’t be erased from memory. They should be given credit for finally fixing it, but nothing more. What happened before this week was and remains forever shameful.
  - epivosism 6y ago
    Very likely that internally there were people who had an inkling this was going on, but could never convince product to devote time to put it in the backlog. This change is a win for that engineer. This example will be ammunition in internal debates about how much to weigh product pressure vs engineering suggestions that improvement is technically possible; the next time an eng says "let's look at this slowness one more time, it may be fixable more easily than you think", they might be listened to.
  - ramblerman 6y ago
    > What happened before this week was and remains forever shameful. lol without context you'd think something tragic actually happened here.

AdamJacobMuller 6y ago

> instead of ignoring as-if that's the worst they could do. Suing the guy, pressing for charges with CFAA or DMCA anti-circumvention. There were far worse ways this could have gone.

sneak 6y ago
It is a common misconception that the victim can "press charges" against someone for a criminal matter. This is entirely false. Only the prosecuting attorney (someone employed by the government) gets to choose when and how someone is charged with a crime. The victim has no say whatsoever in the matter, and indeed the DA can charge someone even when the victim doesn't want them to, or decline to prosecute even when the victim requests it.
- londons_explore 6y ago
  In many places, a victim has quite a lot of say whether a crime is prosecuted.
- AdamJacobMuller 6y ago
  I did not say "press charges". I specifically said "press for charges" deliberately. In that context meaning to attempt to persuade someone (in this case a prosecutor/police/etc) to actually press charges. Most of the time when people simply use "press charges" this is what they mean. I specifically used "press for charges" to try to avoid such pedantry. I guess I failed.