Loot Boxes are Gambling - Get fucked EA

[Cantih]

Every single one of us had mandatory overtime. The support manager (doing tech support meant OT was doing QA work) said no exceptions, everyone had to work the holiday weekend. He had our supervisors tell us that, then promptly left for a four day weekend.

Please tell me someone keyed his car or something.

[D44kpunk]

This is why you're starting to see a shift more towards indie development, in part to get away from it. Seeing first hand how it goes soured me pretty damn quickly on the industry, which is why I wound up cracking a couple of beers with my immediate supervisor when his boss let me go with zero notice so they could save 1.50 an hour to give my position back to a contractor instead of shedding tears.

You laugh at testers only finding bugs, but a lot of people who actually work in production, level design, etc, they all start as testers. And you have not experienced hell until you've had to test or do QA (yes, they are actually separate, QA is typically after testing is done and a final passover was necessary on a game before it went gold, the days before day 1 patches) On Pooh's Party Adventure or whatever the next Barbie game was. If you wanted to have any chance of advancing, you treated that shit like you were doing the latest CoD, Final Fantasy, Halo, etc, even if you wanted to blow your brains out while downing a fifth of Jack to forget you just got done playing said game for 12 hours straight, 7 days a week for the last 6 weeks.

We had one incident where the week of July 4th in 01, during QA we discovered a game crippling crash in all versions of Madden. The game was slated to go gold in 6 days, and there was no pushing that back. Every single one of us had mandatory overtime. The support manager (doing tech support meant OT was doing QA work) said no exceptions, everyone had to work the holiday weekend. He had our supervisors tell us that, then promptly left for a four day weekend.

We had another incident on one of the NCAA Football games, 3 days before the game went gold, a bug was discovered that changed the identification of each player from their # to the actual person's last name, which would have really fucked both EA and the NCAA as it would have shown 100% that the NCAA was using athlete's likenesses for profit. All the QA Leads, plus 3 of the support leads had to pull a 36 hour shift to ensure the bug was fixed. Again mandatory.

Now tell me again why these people don't deserve a cut of the bonuses issued for games when they hit ship date metrics, sales metrics, etc but the bean counters and people sitting in offices all day doing next to nothing on the game do deserve it?

Easily replaceable skill set, highly sought after job

[Roranora]

The article isn't about the developers. It's about the game testers that make $13 an hour and feel slighted they don't get bonuses. The developers are the ones the article is complaining about.

I think you said you didn't read it all so.. while that's primarily true it's about Volt-contracted QA/testers, it is also about developers, some Treyarch employees and some also contractors. Where it highlights the Teslas and the beater cars in the developer parking lot, it's touching on some of the differences between these staff as well . Meanwhile, the QA/testers are in an entirely different parking lot.

It also touches on all developers and testers (both contractors and employees) feeling the crunch and the effect of poor project management like nixing the campaign and months'/years' worth of work with it as well as executives forcing hasty implementation of features such as loot boxes in BO4.

[Rhyis.]

This is why you're starting to see a shift more towards indie development, in part to get away from it. Seeing first hand how it goes soured me pretty damn quickly on the industry, which is why I wound up cracking a couple of beers with my immediate supervisor when his boss let me go with zero notice so they could save 1.50 an hour to give my position back to a contractor instead of shedding tears.

You laugh at testers only finding bugs, but a lot of people who actually work in production, level design, etc, they all start as testers. And you have not experienced hell until you've had to test or do QA (yes, they are actually separate, QA is typically after testing is done and a final passover was necessary on a game before it went gold, the days before day 1 patches) On Pooh's Party Adventure or whatever the next Barbie game was. If you wanted to have any chance of advancing, you treated that shit like you were doing the latest CoD, Final Fantasy, Halo, etc, even if you wanted to blow your brains out while downing a fifth of Jack to forget you just got done playing said game for 12 hours straight, 7 days a week for the last 6 weeks.

We had one incident where the week of July 4th in 01, during QA we discovered a game crippling crash in all versions of Madden. The game was slated to go gold in 6 days, and there was no pushing that back. Every single one of us had mandatory overtime. The support manager (doing tech support meant OT was doing QA work) said no exceptions, everyone had to work the holiday weekend. He had our supervisors tell us that, then promptly left for a four day weekend.

We had another incident on one of the NCAA Football games, 3 days before the game went gold, a bug was discovered that changed the identification of each player from their # to the actual person's last name, which would have really fucked both EA and the NCAA as it would have shown 100% that the NCAA was using athlete's likenesses for profit. All the QA Leads, plus 3 of the support leads had to pull a 36 hour shift to ensure the bug was fixed. Again mandatory.

Now tell me again why these people don't deserve a cut of the bonuses issued for games when they hit ship date metrics, sales metrics, etc but the bean counters and people sitting in offices all day doing next to nothing on the game do deserve it?

imagine outing yourself as an anarcho-communist

[Melena]

Please tell me someone keyed his car or something.

Nope, someone one upped it though. Since this was the early days of the internet due to Black Tuesday as we called it (the mass layoff day) his corporate e-mail account got signed up for about every imaginable porn site you could imagine. Was pretty fucking hilarious to see about 4 IT reps and managers all standing sheepishly around his desk trying to figure out why he was getting so much spam. Eventually karma caught up to him. He fired someone by getting rid of their position as he had no grounds to fire him and the dude was insanely popular with everyone. He eventually got promoted and his new boss hated him, so he killed off the position to fire him.

[Melena]

Easily replaceable skill set, highly sought after job

Yeah, I'm going to chalk it up that you've never done game testing or QA before. There's a reason why the average shelf span is a few months.

[D44kpunk]

Yeah, I'm going to chalk it up that you've never done game testing or QA before. There's a reason why the average shelf span is a few months.

didn't say it didn't have high turnover, said it was an easily replaceable skill set and highly sought after. but yeah sure

QA in the real world isn't similar to game testing, QA generally, at big companies, has access to the code and can suggest fixes or is at least code savvy. sometimes they run simulations against the code such as stress test simulations and that sort of thing. these people aren't getting paid $13/hr. i don't think this is the skillset same as people who find bugs on video games.

by your logic you could call beta testers QA. i have no problem calling video game testers or beta testers QA, but in this specific scenario it's an easily replaceable skill set (nothing really) and a highly sought after industry (vidya)

[Roranora]

There's also a good comment on kotaku from a former tester who found a huge trademark violation (a verbatim Starbucks menu) in a game, saving the studio embarrassment and potentially very costly litigation. Nevermind praise or a performance bonus, he just got an ass-chewing along with his fellow testers for not finding it sooner.

[Melena]

didn't say it didn't have high turnover, said it was an easily replaceable skill set and highly sought after. but yeah sure

QA in the real world isn't similar to game testing, QA generally, at big companies, has access to the code and can suggest fixes or is at least code savvy. sometimes they run simulations against the code such as stress test simulations and that sort of thing. these people aren't getting paid $13/hr. i don't think this is the skillset same as people who find bugs on video games.

by your logic you could call beta testers QA. i have no problem calling video game testers or beta testers QA, but in this specific scenario it's an easily replaceable skill set (nothing really) and a highly sought after industry (vidya)

QA at most places absolutely did not have access to code. QA in the gaming industry is last look before launch on top of ensuring all standards set by the big 3 are met. And easily replaceable isn't a skill set. Yes they will hire twenty rando's to do it but it's not an easy skill set and is one of the reasons besides crunch, shit pay, and treated like crap by major developers that turnover is so high. For every twenty testers you hire, you may get 1-2 axing testers, a few decent testers and rest will be scrubs you practically have to babysit.

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[Rhyis.]

quality assurance in the real world is a mix of process management (sops, training processes, etc) and then auditing those processes. it's a vastly more technical job than what you've described in the gaming industry. in the car industry, for example, they'd be paid huge money

[zoobernut]

They reason they aren't paid huge money in the game industry is because while it is a very difficult and technical job to do right the supply vs. demand of the job market is way out of wack and employers can exploit that. You have massive quantities of know nothing young kids who would practically pay a company for the honor of working for them.

[Greatguardian]

Honesty if you work in the game industry, you absolutely have to love what you're doing. The main group of people in my FFXI/WoW guild are all in the game industry, and I think the longest any of them have stayed at one company is maybe 3 years.

This mentality is 100% the problem tbh.

People love working in the industry.

That is always, every single time, a massive fucking detriment to the employee.

At least with teachers, choosing to stand up and say "Fuck this, I'm not putting up with this crap any more" has massive negative impacts on children. There is no real negative societal impact of people in the gaming industry collecting saying "Fuck this. This isn't worth it."

It's also why Esports is absolutely fucked as an industry. It's easy to pay everyone in experience when there are literally thousands of applicants for every position willing to drop out of school to come work for you.

They reason they aren't paid huge money in the game industry is because while it is a very difficult and technical job to do right the supply vs. demand of the job market is way out of wack and employers can exploit that. You have massive quantities of no nothing young kids who would practically pay a company for the honor of working for them.

Preach.

[djzombie]

QA at most places absolutely did not have access to code. QA in the gaming industry is last look before launch on top of ensuring all standards set by the big 3 are met. And easily replaceable isn't a skill set. Yes they will hire twenty rando's to do it but it's not an easy skill set and is one of the reasons besides crunch, shit pay, and treated like crap by major developers that turnover is so high. For every twenty testers you hire, you may get 1-2 axing testers, a few decent testers and rest will be scrubs you practically have to babysit.

I do QA testing and User acceptance testing at work and I do have access to source code. That is beyond what we're expected to look at but we do have access.

However we usually look at the data output and work backwards from there.

[Melena]

When I was at EA they never trusted us with that. Knew people at Blizzard, Sony, and 3DO (back when they were software only, fuck I'm old) and was the same thing. Super paranoid about leaks and piracy. I remember doing final CQC (their term for QA at EA) on Red Alert 2: Yuri's Revenge and the Westwood rep was watching us like a hawk. Soon as the shift was done we had to hand him the CD's and he would lock them in his briefcase before leaving.

Tommorow never dies was another one that was hell with the developers, made worse by the fact the initial cqc build (remember, this was supposed to be final set of eyes before it ships) was in such a horrid state after 2 hours they collected all the disks and said fuck it and wound up delaying the game by a few months.

So many damn horror stories from when I did it, I still have nightmares about it. Yuri's Revenge and NHL 2000 were probably the smoothest games I worked on bug wise.

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[djzombie]

When I was at EA they never trusted us with that. Knew people at Blizzard, Sony, and 3DO (back when they were software only, fuck I'm old) and was the same thing. Super paranoid about leaks and piracy. I remember doing final CQC (their term for QA at EA) on Red Alert 2: Yuri's Revenge and the Westwood rep was watching us like a hawk. Soon as the shift was done we had to hand him the CD's and he would lock them in his briefcase before leaving.

Tommorow never dies was another one that was hell with the developers, made worse by the fact the initial cqc build (remember, this was supposed to be final set of eyes before it ships) was in such a horrid state after 2 hours they collected all the disks and said fuck it and wound up delaying the game by a few months.

So many damn horror stories from when I did it, I still have nightmares about it. Yuri's Revenge and NHL 2000 were probably the smoothest games I worked on bug wise.

Yea I don't work in the games industry so my company is a little more lax regarding what is accessible. We have access to dev, qa, and live production servers. Sometimes testing new product setups before the our server admins have had a chance to setup the directories for a customer that I need to post files to, I'll skip file routing (delivering it to the FTP server) and then use putty to connect to our unix based production server and pull the files produced right off the live production server.

The process above indicates I have read and write access to all those servers, I have to to do my job. Source code for production also resides on those same servers which is why we have access.

Our business is fundamentally different though in that most of our data is publicly sourced and readily available on the interwebs. We just aggregate it, normalize it, and output it in different formats, products, and delivery methods based on our customer needs.

[Mrbeansman]

You guys saying you've never bought a lootbox realize you're not the target audience for them right? Like it's pretty well know that exploiting problem gamblers and people with addictive personalities is literally the business plan for loot boxes that's why the term whale exists.

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[djzombie]

You guys saying you've never bought a lootbox realize you're not the target audience for them right? Like it's pretty well know that exploiting problem gamblers and people with addictive personalities is literally the business plan for loot boxes that's why the term whale exists.

In my younger days I didn't open loot boxes, but I did buy skins for counter strike from the steam market. I justified it because I always have these small amounts of money left over from adding steam cards to your account. So you could buy cool looking skins for 1 or 2 cents each in some cases. They aren't rare skins but it's better than looking at the default weapons.

It's really easy to justify those 2 cent purchases. I wouldn't open lootboxes for the same reason I don't go to casinos, the odds are stacked against you.

If I was gonna go gambling in a casino I would want to buy into a texas hold em tournament because I'd want to play against other players not the house. You can manipulate other players, you can't manipulate the odds of the house.

[Salodin]

In my younger days I didn't open loot boxes, but I did buy skins for counter strike from the steam market. I justified it because I always have these small amounts of money left over from adding steam cards to your account. So you could buy cool looking skins for 1 or 2 cents each in some cases. They aren't rare skins but it's better than looking at the default weapons.

It's really easy to justify those 2 cent purchases. I wouldn't open lootboxes for the same reason I don't go to casinos, the odds are stacked against you.

If I was gonna go gambling in a casino I would want to buy into a texas hold em tournament because I'd want to play against other players not the house. You can manipulate other players, you can't manipulate the odds of the house.

Scared money dont make money

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[Rhyis.]

When I played the pokemon trading card game I bought booster packs, which is exactly the same principle as a loot box except you get something tangible.
Think of the children.

[Salodin]

When I played the pokemon trading card game I bought booster packs, which is exactly the same principle as a loot box except you get something tangible.
Think of the children.

Not the same thing cause most games dont let you resell loot box items?

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