Yes, I absolutely agree that people who are using this as an excuse to attack other random women are an issue. Perhaps I didn't emphasize that point clearly enough. If you don't mind, I'll quote myself to re-iterate that point, because I think we're mostly in agreement:
The second part of the story is the mob reaction and ugly, sexist bullshit that was triggered in reaction to her own behavior, and unfortunately spilled over onto other targets as well. There are a lot of idiots who glom onto events like these and use them to launch personal attacks against people. Women do seem especially likely targets for them, but make no mistake - anyone can be a target.
But I've also seen a disturbing narrative that seems to be blaming ArenaNet for their firing of Price and Fries, which was completely justified IMO, and speculating that this is going to trigger some dramatic sea-change in the industry, where the mob can just pick any dev (especially female), and simply call for their firing.
As far as I've seen, game companies have not kowtowed to these idiotic and unjustified harassment of their female devs, instead, swiftly coming to their defense. From my perspective from someone inside the game industry, that's actually the response I'd expect, rather than the reverse. I say that because most game devs are actually pretty socially tolerant and consider themselves supporters of efforts to make a more equitable society. Our industry has a higher percentage of women than more programmer-focused tech fields, because we also employ a lot of writers, designers, artists, animators, etc, which have a more proportional representation than among just programmers (female programmers remain astoundingly rare). And as you might expect, we have a lot of very... interesting people in this industry, so I think most game devs, or at least ones I know personally, tend to be pretty tolerant of others as a rule.
So, my concern is that we not rush to scapegoat anyone in the game industry for a problem which I don't feel will truly manifest in the long term. I believe these were just "copycat attacks" of a sort that were riding on the coat-tails of an ugly mob reaction to the ArenaNet/Price issue. I'm not trying to downplay them, just view them in their proper context. I wish I had a good answer to solve this problem, but I at least don't want to see the debate travel down a narrative path which seems to pit the game industry against women, when in fact, the opposite seems true - at least from the limits of my perspective.
There are two distinct parts to this story. One is that Jessica Price verbally abused and denigrated a fan, for which she was fired (and a male colleague who doubled down on that went along for the ride, which no one seems to talk about). The second part of the story is the mob reaction and ugly, sexist bullshit that was triggered in reaction to her own behavior, and unfortunately spilled over onto other targets as well. There are a lot of idiots who glom onto events like these and use them to launch personal attacks against people. Women do seem especially likely targets for them, but make no mistake - anyone can be a target.
We have to keep in mind that it was Ms Price who was the instigator of this series of events through her own actions. Or rather, her over-reaction to a fan's innocent response to her piece. She somehow took that response and interpreted it in the worst possible way, and lashed out at him in public, multiple times. Did she deserve the overwhelming hate and bile that was spewed her way? No, of course not, but let's be clear: she absolutely fired the first shots in that nasty little exchange. She was not fired for "speaking out" on women's issues. She was fired for treating a fan like garbage in public.
Are women exempt from the rules other professional game developers are expected to follow? Had I lambasted a game's fan with which I was professionally associated and called him a "rando asshat" in a public forum, I'd absolutely expect to be fired. I don't believe for a minute that ArenaNet simply caved to mob pressure. And the notion that game development studios are going to suddenly start listening to and acting on random hate-mail complaints because ArenaNet fired Price for inappropriate comments feels beyond absurd to me. In fact, in the examples given, the studios took clear stands to protect their female devs from harassment, but concerns were expressed about "other studios", of course.
Let's certainly work to foster more civility between developers and fans as we can, and that includes standing up for women when they're harassed simply for being women in a public role. But this story has a bit more nuance to it than that, and I don't think it's helpful to pretend that nuance doesn't really exist and focus only on half the story.
One of the first things you learn in law school is that this kind of non-compete clause is virtually unenforceable in most U.S. jurisdictions as it is unconscionable as a matter of public policy. If you are so unskilled as to only be able to get a fast food job, then a non-compete clause would make it so you couldn't get -any- job.
Unenforceable? For years, it was those fast-food chains that were doing the enforcing by NOT HIRING people with previous fast-food work experience. That's the only "enforcement" a worker really cares about. "Unenforceable" only matters if you can afford to hire a very expensive lawyer.
Also, we're not really talking about traditional non-compete clauses as most people know them, despite the headline. We're talking about clearly illegal collusion between major corporations to suppress already-low worker wages. Calling it a "non-compete clause" is like calling a bank robbery a "third-party withdrawal".
One issue that matters to me is responsiveness and perceptible speed of the browser UI. In my experience, Firefox beat out Chrome in this regard, as the Chrome UI had a few noticeable stutters under heavy load, while the Firefox browser stayed responsive. That's probably not going to show up in a benchmark of any sort, as it's a very subjective experience.
I had briefly considered switching to Chrome after Mozilla pulled it's "Mr Robot" plugin stunt, and so I tried it out for a while. It was a pretty slight margin, but Firefox just *felt* faster to me, likely because of UI responsiveness. But beyond that, I missed a few of Firefox's minor quality-of-life features. Edge seems very much a take-it-or-leave-it experience. Firefox is becoming more like that, but still not as much as with Chrome.
And whatever problems Mozilla may have, and whatever idiotic decisions they still make, I still trust their motives more than Google or MS.
But she was responding to someone who seemed like a woman hating asshat who wants women to stop gaming and leave it to real men instead.
I didn't see that at all. Please read what kicked off this mess. I'll quote it exactly.
Really interesting thread to read! However, allow me to disagree *slightly*. I dont believe the issue lies in the MMORPG genre itself (as your wording seemingly suggest). I believe the issue lies in the contraints of the Living Story's narrative design. When you want the outcome to be the same across the board for all players' experiences, then yes, by design you are extremely limited in how you can contruct the personality of the PC. But, if instead players were given the option to meaningfully express *their* character through branching dialogue options (which also aren't just on the checklist for an achievement that forces you through all dialogue options), then perhaps players would be more invested in the roleplaying aspect of that particular MMORPG. Nonetheless, I appreciate the insightful thread!
The person who responded to her seemed very polite and had compliments for her post, but disagreed with one point of hers. From my perspective, he was trying to start a conversation with her about a topic he was very interested in. The guy is a well-known GW2 streamer and superfan, and actually seemed to admire her and the other devs. When he got rudely shot down, he even apologized and intended to just leave it at that (note: English is not his first language).
You getting mad at my obvious attempt at creating dialogue and discussion with you, instead of just replying that I am wrong or otherwise correct me in my false assumptions, is really just disheartening for me. You do you though. I'm sorry if it offended. I'll leave you to it.
How you could characterize this as some sort of female-hating tirade is beyond me. Did you just make that assumption without actually knowing what was said, or are you reading something more into this than I am?
I'm not defending the later attacks on her (and Peter) later, as that's inexcusable as well. But the initial exchange seemed fairly innocent to me, and for some reason, she took great offense to it and lashed out at him publicly (several times, in fact).
Perhaps it's because I don't do games and fancy graphics.
I'd say you're spot on here. C is great for relatively low-level procedural programming. If I have simple tools or highly procedural code to write, I almost always revert to more C-like code. It's just simpler and quicker for those types of tasks.
However, games tend to manipulate an insane amount of state... and not just simple, uniform state, but a crazy, diverse collection of state that represents an entire virtual world and all the ways that state can interact with each other). C++ is pretty good at encapsulating that sort of state and associated behaviors while keeping the complexity contained in smallish modules, all while providing some protection against programmer mistakes - if done correctly, of course. If done badly, the result is probably worse than if it was done in straight C.
You can pretty much count on whichever console maker is in the lead to act like a raging a-hole. You should have seen the way Sony treated developers during the PS2 heyday. They would basically dictate design decisions, even on third party titles. Oh, but if you were developing a PSP title, they were your best buddy, of course, because Nintendo was still kicking their asses in the handheld market.
I think, if you're being generous to the author, you can interpret "the machine" as "any massive bureaucracy." Having done contract work at some of the largest tech firms (Microsoft, Amazon, etc), this sort of story doesn't surprise me in the slightest. There's a massive amount of technical and process "machinery" in place, and it's almost impossible to fight against the inertia of these systems once they're set up.
Basically, someone forgot to push a button, the machinery started churning (exactly as it was designed to do), and inertia took over. It was an entertaining blog post, perhaps suitable for the dailywtf site, but not really much more than that.
That's a great analogy. You could certainly think of the in-game telemetry as basically a save game, but recorded over time with game time and player position associated with each event as it occurs. It's not exactly the same data as a save game, of course, because there's a bunch of internal state I don't care about and don't bother to record, but the principle is the same.
I completely hear you, and am not going to argue against your points, because I actually agree with all of them. But you're either missing or misunderstanding something fairly important: my retail game will have no telemetry.
The telemetry-gathering I'm describing is only for the beta version (the TEST version) of the game for which users will obviously pay nothing, and will have a big warning notice telling people that this version game will automatically send me feedback about their gameplay experience. It will also have a few built-in questionnaires ("rate how much fun you're having 1-5", etc) to find out things which automated metrics can't really help with, and allow them to add additional notes to me, so it's not like I'm trying to be sneaky about this. There are NO weird tricks going on, external or 3rd party DLLs, DRM, or anything like that.
I hope I'm being clear about what I'm doing here. Like I said, I think the term "telemetry" has just become so poisoned that I can't even use the word without people experiencing a visceral gut reaction, worrying that I'm doing something sneaky or evil. My game is going to be straightforward buy-and-play at a reasonable price, no DRM, no DLC, cross-platform... all the things many gamers say they want. I'm a gamer too, of course. It makes me a bit sad to think that I get lumped into the "evil" category of game developers simply because I'm using a tool to help me refine the game during the testing phase.
I don't really care about any of that sort of hardware profiling. If I want to look at general hardware tends, I just look up the Steam Hardware Survey.
Rather I'm talking about recording and analyzing data-points about the gameplay itself. For instance, I log every significant event as the player goes through the game. The player's location in the world over time, enemies killed, times died, when they switched weapons out, and so on.
The point of all that is to help me to balance the game better. For instance, if I see a huge spike of deaths at the third boss in the game, I know that maybe it's a bit too difficult, and should be toned down a bit, or perhaps I need to telegraph hints about how to beat it more clearly.
And again, this is only really useful in beta versions, while I can still make adjustments to the game's balance before the game's final release.
Analytics might be valuable to YOU. A developer. But that doesn't make it okay. If you are are gathering data server-side for a multiplayer game that's one thing. But if you are gathering ANY data AT ALL from user's PCs, that represents an unacceptable risk to end users for no benefit to them. It's customer-hostile. You've only been getting away with it because people don't know you are doing it. Don't do it.
I haven't done anything yet, because my game isn't in beta yet. Beta testers will be informed that I'm collecting information about their gameplay sessions, because this is more reliable than having them try to remember and describe their experiences. Of course, that feedback will be welcome too.
Just to be 100% clear, I'm talking about in-game metrics. That is "how often does the player die". "Which weapons do they prefer to use?" "Are they getting stuck anywhere?" And so on. Not personal information about anything on their computer system. This is 100% for gameplay tuning, and is ONLY for beta copies of the game, which are released in order to help polish the game before release.
See, this is why I'm pissed at game companies that are poisoning the well for developers like me. I can't even discuss the matter without getting modded as a troll.
Then you install and run that shit during testing. There's no good enough reason to let automated collection of exploitable information continue outside the explicit control of a development environment. "Just trust us, this information won't be misused" is bullshit you'd do well to leave behind.
Yes, that's why I said it would only be used in pre-release version of the game - meaning copies of the game that are distributed only for testing purposes. At least read the post in full before you rant at me.
As a game developer myself, gameplay-related analytics are incredibly valuable. That is, metrics that tell game designers about how the player progressed through the game in various ways. I'm currently writing my own system that measures this data in pre-release versions of the game. Done correctly, this only identifies the users as an opaque and anonymous GUID, and doesn't store any personally identifiable information. That is, it has nothing to do with marketable information, but is just used to help improve the game during development.
But seriously, to hell with all these companies that think they have a right to slurp up all your personal information, just because. I think a lot of them seem to believe it doesn't hurt the user, so why not try to earn a few extra bucks via some hidden API. But every time something like this happens, it erodes the trust of users. It's just not worth it.
Is it just me, or has "Fake" now become one of those annoying headline clickbait words?
Anyhow, it's just a man-made seismic event. And it's not like this hasn't been happening for a very long time. I recall various local sports events triggering nearby seismometers, which seems to be a favorite story in local news. These instruments are incredibly sensitive, and will pick up stadium crowds, construction, excavation blasts, and of course, underground nuclear tests.
Good for Mexico, I guess, but not sure why this is notable for Slashdot.
Self checkouts are just a normal checkout where they make the customer do all the scanning and bagging, and their verification system uses precise weights of the product, which is a pain in the ass and fails rather too often. They're more a cost-savings for the store than a convenience for the customers. That's not remotely the same thing as being able to walk right out of the store with purchases, which would drastically improve the shopping experience.
From what I've seen, my entire industry (videogames) has more or less adopted agile/scrum, and it's not really a bad thing. Frequent short stand-up meetings can be useful, although the idea that you CAN'T sit down seems childish to me. In my current job, we cluster around hallway whiteboards, so I don't mind that so much. If you're forcing everyone to stand when there are chairs in the area, it just feels silly. You should be able to gently enforce time rules without that.
The language regarding "user stories" and "sprints" is also seems a bit silly to me in its rigid adherence. But I'll admit it does help to focus on who the "customer" is, and forces the developer to deliver reasonable progress at reasonable milestones, something that should occur in any sane system. It really doesn't have to be agile/scrum, but it seems like that's what we have, so it's the framework we use.
Generally speaking, I'd say the one benefit agile tends to bring is that it officially discourages developers from hunkering down into a huge project and simply "going dark" for a year, at least if done correct. Those types of going dark periods often don't end well. I've always thought that was common sense anyhow, but it's probably better for leads and producers to be able get a bit more visibility into those sorts of projects.
Like all methodologies, it's not going to turn a dysfunctional institution into a well-performing machine, while it will probably just help an otherwise competent team to stay on top of their project a little better. You can even see it failing in one department and working well in others, even in the same organization. In a sense, it's sort of like coding standards. It's far better to have a coherent coding standard, regardless of which arbitrary stylistic decisions it may make, just to keep the code looking like it's all part of the same system.
I think the arguments that they can't help the overall vision of a problem is fundamentally correct, but it's a bit misplaced to blame that on agile. In my opinion, NO system or methodology can polish a turn. Getting your developers behind the project vision and sticking to tasks that help reinforce that singular vision is up to the team leadership. If that doesn't happen, then, simply put, it's a massive leadership failing, and no "system" will fix that.
Agreed. Once again, and equally pointless as every other time it's been done, these articles talk about "most used / most popular programming languages" as though you could talk about "most used / most popular vehicular-based transportation" and have it mean anything at all except for statistics or bragging rights.
Since this is slashdot - a car analogy: Just like the fact that a basic car is probably the "most popular" vehicular transportation doesn't mean it's the best at all jobs. Like crossing an ocean or a continent or a lake, or perhaps whether you wish to optimize for speed or cargo capacity, all of which would be better suited for less "popular" and more specialized vehicles.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, I absolutely agree that people who are using this as an excuse to attack other random women are an issue. Perhaps I didn't emphasize that point clearly enough. If you don't mind, I'll quote myself to re-iterate that point, because I think we're mostly in agreement:
The second part of the story is the mob reaction and ugly, sexist bullshit that was triggered in reaction to her own behavior, and unfortunately spilled over onto other targets as well. There are a lot of idiots who glom onto events like these and use them to launch personal attacks against people. Women do seem especially likely targets for them, but make no mistake - anyone can be a target.
But I've also seen a disturbing narrative that seems to be blaming ArenaNet for their firing of Price and Fries, which was completely justified IMO, and speculating that this is going to trigger some dramatic sea-change in the industry, where the mob can just pick any dev (especially female), and simply call for their firing.
As far as I've seen, game companies have not kowtowed to these idiotic and unjustified harassment of their female devs, instead, swiftly coming to their defense. From my perspective from someone inside the game industry, that's actually the response I'd expect, rather than the reverse. I say that because most game devs are actually pretty socially tolerant and consider themselves supporters of efforts to make a more equitable society. Our industry has a higher percentage of women than more programmer-focused tech fields, because we also employ a lot of writers, designers, artists, animators, etc, which have a more proportional representation than among just programmers (female programmers remain astoundingly rare). And as you might expect, we have a lot of very... interesting people in this industry, so I think most game devs, or at least ones I know personally, tend to be pretty tolerant of others as a rule.
So, my concern is that we not rush to scapegoat anyone in the game industry for a problem which I don't feel will truly manifest in the long term. I believe these were just "copycat attacks" of a sort that were riding on the coat-tails of an ugly mob reaction to the ArenaNet/Price issue. I'm not trying to downplay them, just view them in their proper context. I wish I had a good answer to solve this problem, but I at least don't want to see the debate travel down a narrative path which seems to pit the game industry against women, when in fact, the opposite seems true - at least from the limits of my perspective.
There are two distinct parts to this story. One is that Jessica Price verbally abused and denigrated a fan, for which she was fired (and a male colleague who doubled down on that went along for the ride, which no one seems to talk about). The second part of the story is the mob reaction and ugly, sexist bullshit that was triggered in reaction to her own behavior, and unfortunately spilled over onto other targets as well. There are a lot of idiots who glom onto events like these and use them to launch personal attacks against people. Women do seem especially likely targets for them, but make no mistake - anyone can be a target.
We have to keep in mind that it was Ms Price who was the instigator of this series of events through her own actions. Or rather, her over-reaction to a fan's innocent response to her piece. She somehow took that response and interpreted it in the worst possible way, and lashed out at him in public, multiple times. Did she deserve the overwhelming hate and bile that was spewed her way? No, of course not, but let's be clear: she absolutely fired the first shots in that nasty little exchange. She was not fired for "speaking out" on women's issues. She was fired for treating a fan like garbage in public.
Are women exempt from the rules other professional game developers are expected to follow? Had I lambasted a game's fan with which I was professionally associated and called him a "rando asshat" in a public forum, I'd absolutely expect to be fired. I don't believe for a minute that ArenaNet simply caved to mob pressure. And the notion that game development studios are going to suddenly start listening to and acting on random hate-mail complaints because ArenaNet fired Price for inappropriate comments feels beyond absurd to me. In fact, in the examples given, the studios took clear stands to protect their female devs from harassment, but concerns were expressed about "other studios", of course.
Let's certainly work to foster more civility between developers and fans as we can, and that includes standing up for women when they're harassed simply for being women in a public role. But this story has a bit more nuance to it than that, and I don't think it's helpful to pretend that nuance doesn't really exist and focus only on half the story.
One of the first things you learn in law school is that this kind of non-compete clause is virtually unenforceable in most U.S. jurisdictions as it is unconscionable as a matter of public policy. If you are so unskilled as to only be able to get a fast food job, then a non-compete clause would make it so you couldn't get -any- job.
Unenforceable? For years, it was those fast-food chains that were doing the enforcing by NOT HIRING people with previous fast-food work experience. That's the only "enforcement" a worker really cares about. "Unenforceable" only matters if you can afford to hire a very expensive lawyer.
Also, we're not really talking about traditional non-compete clauses as most people know them, despite the headline. We're talking about clearly illegal collusion between major corporations to suppress already-low worker wages. Calling it a "non-compete clause" is like calling a bank robbery a "third-party withdrawal".
One issue that matters to me is responsiveness and perceptible speed of the browser UI. In my experience, Firefox beat out Chrome in this regard, as the Chrome UI had a few noticeable stutters under heavy load, while the Firefox browser stayed responsive. That's probably not going to show up in a benchmark of any sort, as it's a very subjective experience.
I had briefly considered switching to Chrome after Mozilla pulled it's "Mr Robot" plugin stunt, and so I tried it out for a while. It was a pretty slight margin, but Firefox just *felt* faster to me, likely because of UI responsiveness. But beyond that, I missed a few of Firefox's minor quality-of-life features. Edge seems very much a take-it-or-leave-it experience. Firefox is becoming more like that, but still not as much as with Chrome.
And whatever problems Mozilla may have, and whatever idiotic decisions they still make, I still trust their motives more than Google or MS.
Also, we now know that you own an iPhone. We're closing in on your true identity, one data point at a time!
What about pissing on the walls of an elevator?
But she was responding to someone who seemed like a woman hating asshat who wants women to stop gaming and leave it to real men instead.
I didn't see that at all. Please read what kicked off this mess. I'll quote it exactly.
Really interesting thread to read! However, allow me to disagree *slightly*. I dont believe the issue lies in the MMORPG genre itself (as your wording seemingly suggest). I believe the issue lies in the contraints of the Living Story's narrative design. When you want the outcome to be the same across the board for all players' experiences, then yes, by design you are extremely limited in how you can contruct the personality of the PC. But, if instead players were given the option to meaningfully express *their* character through branching dialogue options (which also aren't just on the checklist for an achievement that forces you through all dialogue options), then perhaps players would be more invested in the roleplaying aspect of that particular MMORPG. Nonetheless, I appreciate the insightful thread!
The person who responded to her seemed very polite and had compliments for her post, but disagreed with one point of hers. From my perspective, he was trying to start a conversation with her about a topic he was very interested in. The guy is a well-known GW2 streamer and superfan, and actually seemed to admire her and the other devs. When he got rudely shot down, he even apologized and intended to just leave it at that (note: English is not his first language).
You getting mad at my obvious attempt at creating dialogue and discussion with you, instead of just replying that I am wrong or otherwise correct me in my false assumptions, is really just disheartening for me. You do you though. I'm sorry if it offended. I'll leave you to it.
How you could characterize this as some sort of female-hating tirade is beyond me. Did you just make that assumption without actually knowing what was said, or are you reading something more into this than I am?
I'm not defending the later attacks on her (and Peter) later, as that's inexcusable as well. But the initial exchange seemed fairly innocent to me, and for some reason, she took great offense to it and lashed out at him publicly (several times, in fact).
Perhaps it's because I don't do games and fancy graphics.
I'd say you're spot on here. C is great for relatively low-level procedural programming. If I have simple tools or highly procedural code to write, I almost always revert to more C-like code. It's just simpler and quicker for those types of tasks.
However, games tend to manipulate an insane amount of state... and not just simple, uniform state, but a crazy, diverse collection of state that represents an entire virtual world and all the ways that state can interact with each other). C++ is pretty good at encapsulating that sort of state and associated behaviors while keeping the complexity contained in smallish modules, all while providing some protection against programmer mistakes - if done correctly, of course. If done badly, the result is probably worse than if it was done in straight C.
You can pretty much count on whichever console maker is in the lead to act like a raging a-hole. You should have seen the way Sony treated developers during the PS2 heyday. They would basically dictate design decisions, even on third party titles. Oh, but if you were developing a PSP title, they were your best buddy, of course, because Nintendo was still kicking their asses in the handheld market.
I think, if you're being generous to the author, you can interpret "the machine" as "any massive bureaucracy." Having done contract work at some of the largest tech firms (Microsoft, Amazon, etc), this sort of story doesn't surprise me in the slightest. There's a massive amount of technical and process "machinery" in place, and it's almost impossible to fight against the inertia of these systems once they're set up.
Basically, someone forgot to push a button, the machinery started churning (exactly as it was designed to do), and inertia took over. It was an entertaining blog post, perhaps suitable for the dailywtf site, but not really much more than that.
Maybe Uber WAS negligent. This article does not convincingly make this case.
Perhaps. But we do have the evidence that their car mowed down a pedestrian it should have easily detected.
"A person walking in front of a moving car" isn't exactly some incredibly rare edge case that no one could have thought to test for.
Okay, I'll bite. The "article" doesn't even answer the question. What the heck is an ICE employee? A gas-powered employee?
Answer via Google: U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
That's a great analogy. You could certainly think of the in-game telemetry as basically a save game, but recorded over time with game time and player position associated with each event as it occurs. It's not exactly the same data as a save game, of course, because there's a bunch of internal state I don't care about and don't bother to record, but the principle is the same.
I completely hear you, and am not going to argue against your points, because I actually agree with all of them. But you're either missing or misunderstanding something fairly important: my retail game will have no telemetry.
The telemetry-gathering I'm describing is only for the beta version (the TEST version) of the game for which users will obviously pay nothing, and will have a big warning notice telling people that this version game will automatically send me feedback about their gameplay experience. It will also have a few built-in questionnaires ("rate how much fun you're having 1-5", etc) to find out things which automated metrics can't really help with, and allow them to add additional notes to me, so it's not like I'm trying to be sneaky about this. There are NO weird tricks going on, external or 3rd party DLLs, DRM, or anything like that.
I hope I'm being clear about what I'm doing here. Like I said, I think the term "telemetry" has just become so poisoned that I can't even use the word without people experiencing a visceral gut reaction, worrying that I'm doing something sneaky or evil. My game is going to be straightforward buy-and-play at a reasonable price, no DRM, no DLC, cross-platform... all the things many gamers say they want. I'm a gamer too, of course. It makes me a bit sad to think that I get lumped into the "evil" category of game developers simply because I'm using a tool to help me refine the game during the testing phase.
I don't really care about any of that sort of hardware profiling. If I want to look at general hardware tends, I just look up the Steam Hardware Survey.
Rather I'm talking about recording and analyzing data-points about the gameplay itself. For instance, I log every significant event as the player goes through the game. The player's location in the world over time, enemies killed, times died, when they switched weapons out, and so on.
The point of all that is to help me to balance the game better. For instance, if I see a huge spike of deaths at the third boss in the game, I know that maybe it's a bit too difficult, and should be toned down a bit, or perhaps I need to telegraph hints about how to beat it more clearly.
And again, this is only really useful in beta versions, while I can still make adjustments to the game's balance before the game's final release.
Analytics might be valuable to YOU. A developer. But that doesn't make it okay. If you are are gathering data server-side for a multiplayer game that's one thing. But if you are gathering ANY data AT ALL from user's PCs, that represents an unacceptable risk to end users for no benefit to them. It's customer-hostile. You've only been getting away with it because people don't know you are doing it. Don't do it.
I haven't done anything yet, because my game isn't in beta yet. Beta testers will be informed that I'm collecting information about their gameplay sessions, because this is more reliable than having them try to remember and describe their experiences. Of course, that feedback will be welcome too.
Just to be 100% clear, I'm talking about in-game metrics. That is "how often does the player die". "Which weapons do they prefer to use?" "Are they getting stuck anywhere?" And so on. Not personal information about anything on their computer system. This is 100% for gameplay tuning, and is ONLY for beta copies of the game, which are released in order to help polish the game before release.
See, this is why I'm pissed at game companies that are poisoning the well for developers like me. I can't even discuss the matter without getting modded as a troll.
Then you install and run that shit during testing. There's no good enough reason to let automated collection of exploitable information continue outside the explicit control of a development environment. "Just trust us, this information won't be misused" is bullshit you'd do well to leave behind.
Yes, that's why I said it would only be used in pre-release version of the game - meaning copies of the game that are distributed only for testing purposes. At least read the post in full before you rant at me.
As a game developer myself, gameplay-related analytics are incredibly valuable. That is, metrics that tell game designers about how the player progressed through the game in various ways. I'm currently writing my own system that measures this data in pre-release versions of the game. Done correctly, this only identifies the users as an opaque and anonymous GUID, and doesn't store any personally identifiable information. That is, it has nothing to do with marketable information, but is just used to help improve the game during development.
But seriously, to hell with all these companies that think they have a right to slurp up all your personal information, just because. I think a lot of them seem to believe it doesn't hurt the user, so why not try to earn a few extra bucks via some hidden API. But every time something like this happens, it erodes the trust of users. It's just not worth it.
Is it just me, or has "Fake" now become one of those annoying headline clickbait words?
Anyhow, it's just a man-made seismic event. And it's not like this hasn't been happening for a very long time. I recall various local sports events triggering nearby seismometers, which seems to be a favorite story in local news. These instruments are incredibly sensitive, and will pick up stadium crowds, construction, excavation blasts, and of course, underground nuclear tests.
Good for Mexico, I guess, but not sure why this is notable for Slashdot.
Here's one contributor that lays out a lot of the issues with the project in some detail.
https://blog.emacsen.net/blog/...
If you legalize all drugs there will be so many dead kids you dumbass. OTOH, it might be a reasonable solution to our overpopulation problem.
Legalization means legal for adults, not children. It would likely still be 21 and older.
Probably a few kids would sneak some pot, just like they do now. And likely the same number of kids would die from pot overdoses, which is... zero.
Self checkouts are just a normal checkout where they make the customer do all the scanning and bagging, and their verification system uses precise weights of the product, which is a pain in the ass and fails rather too often. They're more a cost-savings for the store than a convenience for the customers. That's not remotely the same thing as being able to walk right out of the store with purchases, which would drastically improve the shopping experience.
You can still purchase Microsoft Office outright and not use any cloud features. I enjoyed your Haddock-like rant, though.
From what I've seen, my entire industry (videogames) has more or less adopted agile/scrum, and it's not really a bad thing. Frequent short stand-up meetings can be useful, although the idea that you CAN'T sit down seems childish to me. In my current job, we cluster around hallway whiteboards, so I don't mind that so much. If you're forcing everyone to stand when there are chairs in the area, it just feels silly. You should be able to gently enforce time rules without that.
The language regarding "user stories" and "sprints" is also seems a bit silly to me in its rigid adherence. But I'll admit it does help to focus on who the "customer" is, and forces the developer to deliver reasonable progress at reasonable milestones, something that should occur in any sane system. It really doesn't have to be agile/scrum, but it seems like that's what we have, so it's the framework we use.
Generally speaking, I'd say the one benefit agile tends to bring is that it officially discourages developers from hunkering down into a huge project and simply "going dark" for a year, at least if done correct. Those types of going dark periods often don't end well. I've always thought that was common sense anyhow, but it's probably better for leads and producers to be able get a bit more visibility into those sorts of projects.
Like all methodologies, it's not going to turn a dysfunctional institution into a well-performing machine, while it will probably just help an otherwise competent team to stay on top of their project a little better. You can even see it failing in one department and working well in others, even in the same organization. In a sense, it's sort of like coding standards. It's far better to have a coherent coding standard, regardless of which arbitrary stylistic decisions it may make, just to keep the code looking like it's all part of the same system.
I think the arguments that they can't help the overall vision of a problem is fundamentally correct, but it's a bit misplaced to blame that on agile. In my opinion, NO system or methodology can polish a turn. Getting your developers behind the project vision and sticking to tasks that help reinforce that singular vision is up to the team leadership. If that doesn't happen, then, simply put, it's a massive leadership failing, and no "system" will fix that.
Agreed. Once again, and equally pointless as every other time it's been done, these articles talk about "most used / most popular programming languages" as though you could talk about "most used / most popular vehicular-based transportation" and have it mean anything at all except for statistics or bragging rights.
Since this is slashdot - a car analogy: Just like the fact that a basic car is probably the "most popular" vehicular transportation doesn't mean it's the best at all jobs. Like crossing an ocean or a continent or a lake, or perhaps whether you wish to optimize for speed or cargo capacity, all of which would be better suited for less "popular" and more specialized vehicles.