Schmoe wrote on Jul 26
th, 2012 at 11:21pm:
I have no basis to speculate about the work environment, but two things stick out that I'm sure could grind anyone down:
1. Nerd rage after nerd rage after nerd rage, despite their best efforts to work with the community. This, coupled with a general lack of participation on Lammania.
2. Bugs that just. won't. die. He's in QA, so I'm sure it's especially frustrating to see the same damn things break time after time. I imagine it's a pride thing. It probably makes it tough to come out and take a stand when you have no faith that the whole thing won't implode in a fiery explosion and prove you wrong, just like the last X number of times. You have to have confidence to take a stand. I think it would be hard to have confidence in the product, just based on my observations.
At any rate, I still think he's a good guy.
I concur.
Though on the Lammania subject he promised to find a way to reward participation on live and did... even if he couldn't reward everybody. My White Doggy Pet is not much ( along with the pots ) but it's still a reward for bug hunting.
As a 'Fireman' in Telecom, Bugs in complex systems are tough to kill... and in some case we just have to bear with them ( we have one on e system that shows it's head every few month... The workaround is a PITA to do, especially at 0:Indecent Hour in the night, but it won't get fixed, ever, because hunting it down is even more a PITA. ( Apache, Java, Named Pipes and Solaris Process control Interactions )
And I won't even start on bugs that reappear, but I can make a few educated guesses from my job. In telco the software has a 'patch area' along with the software blocks. If a given block needs to be patched the patch goes into that area. When a major revision of the software is made the patches are either integrated into the main code ( if needed ) or lifted [ read : updated ] to fit the new revision of the software block. Now as there's several hundred software blocks in a whole telco system, you end up with several thousand patches... Some are lost, some are forgotten, some are not deemed worthy of update, and it's can be decided that the software change should fix some other... thus old bugs rearing their head once again. ( and me being called at an hours where I'd really prefer sleeping, fucking or play DDO instead of rumaging through a bug/patch database to try to find a fix to a problem [ or creating my own patch on the fly, or fixing the problem by restarting the system, or ... ] )
So yes I'll bash MajMal when he deserves it, but the rest of the time I know the thankless task he has to perform.
We all need to remember he got dumped on a 6 year old piece of code that seems to have no revision information, no bug tracking and the complexity of telco software ( massive real time actions handling on several separate processors with a near real-time backend ). Add to that a huge database ( that they are not willing to purge of the inactive stuff ) with a ( probably shitty ) data model that could use a complete redesign due to the 6 years of added ( crafting, epic, My DDO, ... ), removed ( Offer Wall, XP Debt, ... ) or broken things ( Guild Ranking, My DDO, ... ) that never truly worked.