This bug has existed for years and has lead to hundreds, if not thousands of people quitting the game citing this exact reason yet Rockstar did nothing.
I think "shameful" is really more appropriate. It's not like they simply didn't know this existed. I think they have known all along it existed and didn't give 2 shits to fix it.
You risk making discourse difficult when you continue punishing people who are attempting to do the right after doing wrong for a while.
This example will be ammunition in internal debates about how much to weigh product pressure vs engineering suggestions that improvement is technically possible; the next time an eng says "let's look at this slowness one more time, it may be fixable more easily than you think", they might be listened to.
lol without context you'd think something tragic actually happened here.
I can't believe you're missing this huge point.
On the other hand, a few days of doing the absolute bare minimum of quality control doesn't undo a decade of actively hostile practices. They're still very very deeply in the red when it comes to their relations with the playerbase and for good reason.
Paying $10k to the person who documented this bug is a good start, but you need to do a whole lot of work to make up for the impressions caused by that kind of prolonged systemic negligence.
Have you heard the one about the country with the death penalty for all crime? It just leads criminals to maximally try not to get caught, without regard to damage done [i.e. removing all witnesses to even the smallest crimes]. This isn't what you want; even within "negative" relationships both sides lose when you don't have a gradient of responses.
A criminal prosecuted for murder and petty theft simultaneously can't really go around complaining that they got 25 years in gaol for stealing an apple, but if everyone had already known about the murder and dealt with that accordingly it'd be pretty harsh.
(not that fixing a bug is exactly a criminal act, but the general principle remains)
> I think "shameful" is really more appropriate.
When you make an inadvertent mistake in the future, karma is coming for you: people will speculate that you "didn't give 2 shits".
This bug existed for a very long time and was the #1 outcry from gamers. It is well documented all over the internet.
Every company I’ve ever worked at and every code base I’ve ever worked on would have made this a #1 priority. If it were a technical limitation of the devs I would agree it is “embarrassing” but this was not outside of their ability.
I simply don’t blame the devs, I blame management. Management should have allocated the resources to fix this truly game breaking bug but they didn’t because money was still flowing. Is it any coincidence that ads played during the 6+ minutes you would wait to get into a game?
> This one escaped, because stuff happens.
No, they mostly just don't listen to their players when compared with other game companies.
Sure, ideally there would be someone internal advocating for a fix like this on behalf of customers. But Shameful isn't the right word. It's a miss like any other.
I personally feel like the magnitude of this -- especially compared to how simple the solution is -- makes it a miss that's really much more extreme than most others.
EDIT: Though I agree that "shameful" isn't the right word to use. Rockstar wronged themselves much more so than any other party.
If the fix had been some super application specific super obscure thing, we would all understand.
Instead... the bug is easily describable to anyone who knows what JSON is and the fix is “don’t parse JSON the slow way”.
So I think some of the leniency afforded to the devs may be misplaced. Then again, hindsight and all that.
I’m sure GTA has unlimited bugs to look into, but a bug that turns people away before they even start should have probably been given higher priority.
Would we?
Even if I don't understand what it's doing, devs doing nothing about an O(n^2) algorithm that takes multiple minutes every load is clearly a big mistake.
Even if it's something that has to be that slow, cache the result.
That said, they're all things like "refactor the frobnicator code so it's more obvious what it does" and "make templating system log changes to server". Nothing on my list says "Look in to that major performance issue that literally thousands of customers complain about every single day". That stuff gets sorted immediately.
Since switching the file format is probably some work, maybe involving many differnt teams and network protocols, the bug was closed because it too much efford.
And then, whenever somebody complained, the old bug was referred which unfortunately never got a proper analysis.
Sad, but I saw this happening many times in the past in some projects. Since the old and wrong analysis will be in many powerpoint slides and heads, it is incredible hard to argue against or get even time to work on such a problem. Usually, you need someone who just takes some time form other projects without telling anyone and ninja fixes the problem to solve it.
Just as I'm certain that this unsolicited 3rd party fix was used to settle some old scores.
Corporate politics is a blood sport.
And if they didn't care at all given what you say then why would they care to implement a fix for it all these years later?
The game probably has tens of millions of lines of code.
I'm glad they shipped. If they can enhance the startup time, great, bonus for them. Additional credit for thanking the third party that uncovered the perf issue.
I also think it's relevant to note that GTA V has sold 140 million copies, 20 million last year alone, and Rockstar makes hundreds of millions of dollars a year on the title. For a multi billion dollar product to have a known, relatively simple, problem is shameful. I don't know what went wrong, but I don't think it was the competency of engineers or the complexity of the problem that allowed this to fester.
[0] https://nee.lv/2021/02/28/How-I-cut-GTA-Online-loading-times...
Not to take away from the feat and initiative of doing so without access to source code.
There are a lot of excuses for why this wasn’t fixed but no great reasons.
Bugs happen. Serious bugs happen. They will always happen. Shaming people for bugs undermines institutional robustness against bugs because it incentivizes people to hide mistakes. Furthermore, companies with blame-n-shame culture typically fault users when those users make inevitable "mistakes" statistically guaranteed by bad UX design.
In contrast, transparency is good, acknowledgment is good. Rockstar acknowledged fault and rewarded the reporter, which is difficult. That's a positive institutional arc I'd like to encourage, at Rockstar and in the wider industry.
If you stop at "embarrassing", I'm with you. But when you proceed to "shameful", that's quite different and we part ways.
Not fixing a serious, visible, known bug for six years is what’s shameful. There is nothing positive about neglect like that. It’s kind of admirable that they actually rewarded the guy but it shouldn’t have even got to that point.
Totally agree you should not shame for bugs. The shame is for ignoring this bug until one of your customers finally had enough and fixed it by patching the binary. If it was my company I would feel ashamed.
Managerial problems that allow high-impact, low-fix-time, high-prevalence bugs to exist for 7 years are shameful and are in fact poison to an organization themselves.
Don't mistake the shaming for really being about the bug itself here. The problem isn't the bug, it's the organizational culture that allowed such a massive, easily fixed, widely encountered bug to persist for 7 years in a game that has made them $6 billion dollars over the last few years.
Yes, they should be ashamed of this.