Game News Oblivion mage quests (highly intricate stuff)

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I'd rather blame unknown shareholders than developers in most cases.

Hey, I was wondering about that some time ago. Thx for the info

And I'm talking about French people here. I'm not sure they even know what LOL stands for.
Our girls shave their armpits now btw.

Ferrinners r funni.

Meh, fuck that. Nobody forces developers to sell their fucking souls to clueless shareholders. They're just as fucking guilty as the suits. Maybe even more so, since a suit can make a shitty decision, but it still takes a developer to implement that into a saleable consumer product.

I'd like to think software development is a simple as you describe it.

I work as a junior web programmer for a software company. Last year, all of a sudden the number one priority of the dev team became the development of an anti-piracy system.
To hell bugfixing and new functionalities, all that mattered was to develop a protection system in order to hit the Asian market. The company completely sold out to our chinese retailer.
We, devs, all knew the first second that it will be a disaster. First, anti-piracy is not our trade. Second, our customer base is mostly schools and universities where a per workstation anti-piracy system is not relevent. It would have worked with an online game but not with software that is deployed on hundreds of workstations through the network.
We knew it wouldn't work and that we may lose a lot of customers.
We fought for months against this ludicrous project but to no avail. But we all needed our check you know. So we made that stupid anti-piracy system as best as we could trying to find the best effective protection/customer exasperation ratio. We worked for a year on that stuff and the software still has bugs that were identified months ago. We invested a lot of work in customer support and did our best to defend that anti-piracy system. Because it is our job.

What were we supposed to do ? Quit ? Botch it while secretly implementing new features and fixing bugs ? Bash this system on bulletin boards ? Join our angry customers in newsgroup and claim 'Yay our anti-piracy sucks ball, fuck <insert company name> !' ?

You can't ignore upper management decisions and you can't choose who takes the helm of a company as a developer.

So please, bash the CEOs, publishers, shareholders all your content, but leave the developers alone.

Sorry Seboss, i was not having a go at the programmers/artists etc. I take issue with the profit motivated management and corporate mentality of screw the user, greed is good. How many games have been realeased that are buggy or completly broken because the company wanted to make a quick buck. Then you get these small independent studios who have a great idea, but not really the resources to produce and market the game so they have to sell their souls the the devil *cough EA cough*, and these big companies just swallow them up and spit them out the other end.

Yeah, but you can choose not to work for them. Hell, you can choose not to be a fucking software developer.

I mean I do have sympathy for people who have a need to support their family and therefore are more or less "forced" to take on shit jobs just to get by, but that's not an admirable attitude for a game developer, either. Find another "just-a-job," and have some fucking principles.

It really irks me when people try and pass off the "grunts" as being completely innocent victims of tyrannical management. Games don't make themselves, and blaming the publishers/CEOs/shareholders exculsively is just passing the buck.

Yeah right. I'm tired of fighting my boss, you and my customers at the same time. We can choose not to work for them... Do you think getting a job in software development as a junior dev is a matter of 'choosing' the right company. The company choose me, not the opposite. Moreover, before that stupid decision about anti-piracy (that comes from outside entities), everything was going smoothly.

Yay, let's forfeit 6 years of Software Engineering education and let's move to Montana to grow nails. Sure I have principles, but you don't sacrifice everything for a disagreement on a game design decision. These guys are not some heroes of a RPGs. They are real people, they like stability, they are afraid of their boss, of losing their job, they have bills to pay. Some has the guts to slam the door (ie the Daikatana dev team) but most STFU and do their fucking JOB.

People who work on games are just, regular people, engineers who do their job. They're not fundamentalist RPG nerds like you are. And they have feelings too. Bashing the shit out of them on the internet is certainly not the right way to help them make better games or to struggle against corporate corruption. Except for Dererk Smart. But that's another story.

I'm not trying to fight you, but it's still a cop out when someone tries to absolves themselves of something they're "guilty" of. It's just a matter of where the line is drawn. Would you for instance willingly comply with unethical or outright criminal practices at the behest of management? I just have a different set of ideals, and I'm not trying to condemn you for yours, but I definitely don't agree with them.

Okay this isn't about a single questionable design decision. This is about earning a living doing something disagreeable. I'm not encouraging anyone to forfeit their vocation on a whim, but I'm questioning the idea that it's acceptable to just ride the tide and blame management.

My point is that they don't have to. And at the very least, they can show some dissent, instead of just rolling over and fucking taking it. I heartily encourage real people to act like real people and not like hive drones whose only concern is a regular paycheque.

I'm not bashing. I'm being very heavy-handed with my message, sure, because it's something close to my heart. I take issue with the idea of absolving participants and contributors to something I fervently disagree with. I'm standing up for something I believe in, and that's not helping clueless fucking suits further their own greedy means.

And hey, they're never going to listen to me, so I may as well do my best to make an impression on regular people with feelings who might actually agree with me and make a change for the better. Even if that change is only getting themselves the fuck out of an industry that treats them like shit, and probably always will.

But hey, it's not like I'm bitter or anything.

Yeah well. I'm just as bitter as you because I ruined a year and a half of my professional like on a stupid project. And it's not over.
But that doesn't mean I'm ready to get fucked forever. As much as I need the money, like I said I have principles and ambitions and I'll certainly move on if the situation doesn't improve, eventually. But that's no easy decision.
I think it differs a lot from countries to countries.
I guess it's quite commonplace in the Anglo-Saxon couintries to leave your job, move from one coast to another and start a new life.
In France, the custom is to stick to your job as long as possible. Unemployment is a real problem too, so you have to make sacrifices.

Fortunately France is still a stronghold of innovative -or at least 'different'- video games (Omikron,Arx Fatalis, Farhenheit, Saga of Ryzom...) so there's still hope for me to have a really exhilarating job eventually.

Personally, I like to blame Square and my 11 year old nephew for the state of RPGs.

Though for NWN, I blame wotc for not permitting parties.

I blame Volourn for NWN. Exclusively.

You know you've reached a sad level of fanaticism when you call for people to quit their jobs because some people have different tastes in entertainment than you do.

This is getting downright frightening.

You're still an idiot.


@seboss

Unless you want to ruin your life, you need to start looking for a new job. The kind of mentality worked 50 years ago, but not today and especially not in software. If your company is precarious and you end up holding the bag, that is likely to be it for any career you might have had.

Well yeah, I went through exactly that, so I know how tough that decision can be. And even though now, a few years on, I have pretty mixed feelings about it all, I do feel better for having moved on.

But I apologise for coming across a little strongly. Something really got my blood boiling today, and what better place to vent than the Codex?

Hey, fuck you. This isn't about "different tastes," this is about whether or not you should support something you disagree with just because you're being compensated in purely monetary terms.

You are welcome.

I'm quite upset about what was going on in my job these last few months and I certainly did not imagine finding the opportunity to discuss that on a RPG bulletin board

I said start looking because there is so many protection rom kits out there that is a waste of resources to develop copy protection when its easy to just get one of the avaible ones.

Your company cannot get the priorities strait, what they did was a waste of resources and I hope they die, fast ...

That was one of our main points against that project.
But, we develop softwares for Windows, MacOS and Linux. We have several type of licence as well: standalone, network (token server), multi-workstation installs. Classic protection rom kits were not fit to our problematic. CD-Rom protection, dongles would not work in a networked environment and they're not multiplatform. So my idiotic ex-manager (the guy got fired after that disaster) assumed that we could develop our own solution, fit to every situations and OSes described above. In three weeks. With two guys.

Fortunately we have kind of a monopoly in our branch so we survived. Thanks to massive investments from American shareholders....

Well, that is not much of a disaster now that you share all the details. It shakes your customer confidence a bit, but you seem to have survived.

I have seen epic disasters that spanned decades and have lost companies hundreds of millions.

Software is just a complex business. There are nonstop disasters. I used to waste time and effort arguing, but now I just smile to myself when I see Disaster #235 coming up, which I have seen already three times.

At one place I worked, a friend and I joked that they had a big Wheel Of Mistakes in the boardroom and regularly as clockwork they would make the same mistakes over and over and over.

(sigh) I've been in the craft for only 4 years and I know that just too well already...

Hehe. Hilarious notion.

And you "disagree with" it because of "different tastes." The comment stands.

Well, sure, if you disregard the "different tastes in entertainment" bit, and pretend the "different tastes" apply to something else entirely.

It is more than taste. His company is making a very foolish decision, which means he needs to reconsider whther to continue on there. It turns out to not be quite the disaster it could have been, but it hardly inspires confidence in an employee....

He isn't just talking about the one poster's circumstances. He's talking about Bethesda employees specifically, and seemingly drawing parallels to other game development companies.

He's telling Bethesda employees to quit their jobs and/or raise hell because he disagrees with their game designs.