Welcome again to everybody! Make yourself at home. In the time-honoured tradition of our group, here is the weekly discussion thread.
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There is some free software on which I occasionally provide feedback, and I decided to go to the developers’ forum and submit my feedback there. This time my feedback was about typos, which for a coder should be the easiest thing in the world to fix. (Am I wrong?) I reused somebody else’s thread on the same problem, to which the designers had happily attended earlier, until I contributed to it. This was their reply to the typos that I found:
First of all, no, I can’t, and second… can they seriously not figure out how to take notes from others? Why do I need to submit a ‘pull request’ for a typographical error? What is the g‐ddamn point in handling this issue bureaucratically? I mean, if these were professionals who worked on this for a living, then yeah, I’d expect them to act grossly incompetent. But when it’s volunteers doing it, that’s something else.
At least they try to work on this software on a regular basis. With nearly all professional game designers, it’s pump and dump. For example, I submitted requests to Nightdive Studios and Bethesda Softworks for some very simple fixes: implementing some unused sounds, implementing some unused animations, restoring a few sounds (which I happily provided), implementing some unused text messages, and implementing an NPC sequence. None of those except for one could be described as ‘ambitious’ for a coder. Do you know how many of my requests they implemented? Zero. Zero of my requests.
I was not the only one screwed over either. A couple of years ago I saw somebody describe a level that crashes when a player touches a certain spot, and I saw an employé explicitly acknowledge it. It’s been two years, and yep, the crash is still there; anybody can trigger it simply by moving into the spot. Judas Priest, this is the kind of shit that a modder could fix and yet somehow the professionals can’t be bothered.
Must be a bureucratic mess to not even bother fixing simple stuff, or the devs are overloaded with work from other projects, or they are just lazy af.
Especially on Bethesda, like i bought F04 last week and the game is barely playable, they even made a “next gen patch” last week but i still can’t play above 60fps because dialogue breaks.
Speaking as a FOSS maintainer, typos should be trivial to fix as long as it’s in a language the devs are fluent in. The kind of up front work you mentioned putting in to your tickets is practically the platonic ideal of a good issue.
Speaking also as a corpo codemonkey (like the people at Bethesda), management and product consistently — through short-sighted hair-brained schemes and giving zero shits about what actually goes into making a software product — raise a shit ton of barriers to getting even simple things done. This leaves little choice but to make quick but shoddy ways of implementing features to meet the deadline, which in turn creates tech-debt which is itself a barrier.
I could understand the “just make a pull request, bro” response if someone comes in demanding a vaguely defined feature that seemingly no one else has expressed interest in. We’ve used that answer several times for issues raised for Lemmy. In your case though, the response seems unwarranted.
It would be cool if indie devs were immune to this but I’ve had early access devs argue with me about why they shouldn’t have to fix bugs which broke the main questline in their game etc. Generally am pirating that shit because fuck Eaccess
Oh wow, that is awful. I thought that these designers were being difficult for neglecting some aesthetic issues, but refusing to address game‐breaking bugs? The only excuse that they have is that they are so tired from work or family life that they don’t feel like jacking around with their projects. In which case, it would be better to officially put them on hold rather than arguing with people. Otherwise, it’s a waste of time for everyone.
Yeah I then found out other people had the same issue and had even been told to turn on cheats in response to bugs in a survival character permadeath game lol
Only if it is translated and they use the original english as the “key”, i.e. changing the English breaks the translations. Otherwise it is very easy.