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Comment by mmanfrin | Hacker News Reader

When Bluehole take down PUBG for 5 hours, there's no communication outside of two tweets. When Epic see degraded performance for less than 2 hours, they give a postmortem.

There's a difference in the level of respect each company gives for its customers. I play PUBG a lot, but I want to see Epic win in the long run.

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There might also just be the ability for the developers to understand what actually went wrong. I think the guys at Epic spent a lot of time building their system so they can understand it and I'm not sure that PUBG developers started out with that in mind.

Do you (or anyone reading) have any way to expand upon this? I.E. what sorts of patterns/practices/tradeoffs lead to building a more "understandable" system?

Most of the time you have to write metrics into the code (and have a place set up to collect the data), that alone is a step a lot of places don't do or don't do enough.

1) Experience - knowing what you are gonna want to know in the future and knowing what is likely to go bad.

2) Investing in logging early, so that your system is giving you metrics as it grows

3) Understanding that logging and metrics are a conversation that happens with a system over time. You don't do it once and then are done, it's like teaching a child to talk. You have to leave room to expand, and be actively building a 'vocabulary' in your logging and metrics that makes your day-to-day simpler.

4) KISS -- at least on the "big stuff". Your high level architecture should be 'clean' in the sense that issues can be isolated and readily assigned to a subcomponent. I find that isolated communication points that let you bifurcate responsibility are key to quick deductions. Ie the backend publishes data to a store, front-end reads data from that store, so if the data store agrees/disagrees with either you know exactly where the problem is.

There isn’t even a custom message for “scheduled server maintenance” vs “our servers are busy” (which I can get multiple times a night anyway). You NEED to check the tweets to find out which it is. I love PUBG, I just wish it was made by more competent developers.

It's astounding to me how the last couple patches have made performance worse and introduced new, gamebreaking bugs. The last patch took everything down for 5 hours. The patch before tanked FPS by like 40%. The patch before caused 2/3rds of games to spawn players below the match or simply crash on load.

They don't do QA, and their 'deploy process' takes everything down for hours. It's embarrassing.

> They don't do QA, and their 'deploy process' takes everything down for hours.

This reminded me of this classic: https://engineering.riotgames.com/news/automated-testing-lea...

I'm putting it in a to-read list after 2 minutes of skimming, but that looks like an excellent article.

Sounds like Riot have a good head on their shoulders about how to handle testing games.

If you come from a different domain, it's important to realize that testing games is much more difficult than testing a lot of other types of software. And much like other kinds of software, when it's done well it looks easy.

I have no love for Riot-the-games-company, but there are pretty good reasons why Riot-the-software-company is so well-respected. Bear in mind that stuff like that blog post are just the upper crust of that iceberg. They basically took the notion of Chef best practices away from Opscode (now Chef, Inc.) and completely redefined them with environment cookbooks and Berkshelf. Things in devops have moved on somewhat, as they always do--but they were, and I assume still very much are, serious about building good processes and the tools necessary to make them better.

I wish Valve would do this for Dota 2.

Exploits are such aheadache my friends and I just quit playing pubg. I am not sure how bad hacking is in FR with only a week of gameplay time, but so far I haven’t encountered any really strange kills. FR shooting is actually very lax. You don’t need to aim very precise to get a hit mark.

Its backstory is famously that it was developed by some guy as a side project, and that guy's tacky username is in the title.

I mean, what did you expect?

Sort of. BattleRoyale was initially developed as a mod for ARMA 2 by Brendan Greene (PlayerUnknown). He then went on to make a mod for ARMA 3, then later worked with the H1Z1 devs for the H1Z1 battle royale mode named King of the Kill.

After that, he moved on to making his own game with a supporting development company fully centered around his ideas at his direction with creative freedom that was not limited with being a mod (ARMA 2/3) or under the restraints of a larger company (SOE/Daybreak with H1Z1).

Brendan is largely the progenitor of the video game battle royale mode, and his name carries a lot of weight in the genre itself.

The first 3 versions were. PUBG as we know it was developed by an professional studio.

PUBG combines great game design with terrible technical implementation and bad community management. I'm with you on hoping that epic will succeed in a long run.

Why does it need to be a zero sum game with one winner? Fortnite and PUBG are two very different games fundamentally and there is no reason they can't exist side-by-side.

  two very different games fundamentally

No they are not. Sure, they have different art styles, some different mechanics, but they are the two largest Battle Royale games out right now. The only games I would consider to be closer to PUBG than Fortnite are perhaps H1Z1 and the Arma mod (that PUBG devs made).

However, as for:

  Why does it need to be a zero sum game with one winner

It doesn't, but I am so thoroughly frustrated with the PUGB developers that I hope they suffer financially enough to do something about their poor development practices.

Fortnite started out as something very different and they made the Battle Royal part of it free which is why it has so much traction.

Yes, they are different. Fortnite is arcade-y and the end game changes significantly due to the building mechanic. PUBG is much more methodical and strategic. I play both for different reasons and clearly the market can support two wildly successful battle royale games with 3mil+ CCU. So again, why do need to have a “winner”?

Your desire to see them suffer because god forbid the servers go down for five hours is an example of the shitty toxicity game developers have to deal with from fans nowadays. Blue hole isn’t Epic, they don’t have the resources or the comparable talent, but they made a really fun game. Isn’t that enough for $29.99?

Dev, singular. PlayerUnknown/Brendan Greene did the ARMA 2 and 3 mods by himself, and was brought in by Daybreak/SOE to direct the creation of the H1Z1 BR mode.

>A zero sum game with one winner

A "battle royale" if you will.

I want the gunplay of PUBG with the support of Epic.

A little counter to that narrative, Epic has really been letting me down lately.

When Epic started the UE4 project, they promised to take care of us gnu/linux users. I bought in the second I could. Immediately they started ignoring us. The first year and a half or so most of us Linux people were using a community fork because Epic refused to merge changes. We banded together and we're forced out of their irc and had to form another channel. I tried to be understanding, at first thinking they were low on resources. As time went on and games like Paragon (which I payed $20 for at release and which has now been abandoned, and I'm still waiting for my refund for over two weeks), and Epic started showing off how well things were going, they still basically abandoned us. There is still no marketplace/launcher on Linux, so to retrieve my $500 worth of assets I have to use a windows computer. Major bugs persist in all branches, and not just for the native editor... games like pubg would love to ship for Linux if the crosscompile tool gain wasn't an exercise in cryptic puzzle solving (which is why so many UE4 games are windows only not by choice. All pleas for more resources and love on the forums are met with comments about marketshare and how unworthy Linux is of their time and resources.

They promised us all this love and then after many of us spent lots of money on them they just ignored us. I'm thankful for the attempt for a native Linux editor, but crashes and uncompilable projects have essentially halted dev for me to the point I'm having to consider godot and blender even though they aren't nearly at feature parity, and due to epics licensing all that money on assets is wasted since those assets can only be used in UE4...

I love UE4 when it works. Blueprints, the animation and rigging system, the camera system are all wonderful to work with. I want to use it... but I'm feeling increasingly taken advantage of by Epic.

Tim, if you're reading this, how about a post mortem of the abandonware that is the Linux editor?

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