[TRENCHES] Thursday, July 4, 2013 - Encryption

Geth

Encryption
http://trenchescomic.com/comic/post/encryption

Knowledge is dangerous

Anonymous

I did QA for a summer job one year for an independent testing firm. This was exceedingly different from doing it in a studio as far as I understood. There’s all the hard work and crunch-time and none of the light-hearted atmosphere during the better times. The schedule was fairly grueling but we were all gamers and with grim determination we kept going at it just for 10 bucks an hour and for making our industry better.

At least that was my thought until I worked on a reasonably big project. A licensed RTS. We were put on this project with only 30 bugs logged by the devteam. By the time it was over we logged several thousand, ranging from game-crashers to spelling errors. But my favorite one took the cake. If you pressed B it would instantly crash the game to the desktop.

Now that was interesting, I filed the bug, told my testing lead… But then I did a bit of digging in their files. I found out that the company had been cribbing their engine from another popular RTS from a few years before. Namely Warcraft 3. Pressing B would try to call up part of the engine code to open a building menu. This particular game didn’t have a building menu and so the engine would divide-by-zero and crash.

I added an addendum to my bug report saying “Bug most likely tied to engine issues”. Innocent enough, helpful even. But it showed them I knew too much. The next week we recieved a notice from the publisher that they cancelled our contract.

Ah well, knowledge is a dangerous thing.

RMS Oceanic

There's movie potential in that story, possibly a conspiracy thriller?

Henroid

AYCEBS? What does that mean?

Smrtnik

Henroid wrote: »

AYCEBS? What does that mean?

wouldn't you like to know

klemming

Smrtnik wrote: »

Henroid wrote: »

AYCEBS? What does that mean?

wouldn't you like to know

I don't think so, none of the initials line up.

ash7

All You Can Eat something something (maybe buffet, but there was that basket of fries)

PedroAsani

All You Can Eat Bread Sticks, My Friend

PedroAsani

Hint: My Friend is possibly Samuel L. Jackson

Risen_Daemon

Yea, AYCEBS threw me for a second, cuz i was like, why would you want to eat bulls***, but I figured it out. OG is Olive Garden (used to be friends with a waitress there, and also Gabe has mentioned it in reference to his love for Andes mints) AYCEBS stands for all you can eat breadsticks!

metfansc

I love how this guy interprits his own story, the story could have been that he "let on he knew to much" and that they were "stealing" an engine, or it could just be that they cancelled the contract for a million other reasons and he knew nothing about what he was talking about.

Gaslight

I like that Isaac picks all of his secret serious meeting locations based on the availability of all-you-can-eat sides and appetizers.

sirmarksalot

metfansc wrote: »

I love how this guy interprits his own story, the story could have been that he "let on he knew to much" and that they were "stealing" an engine, or it could just be that they cancelled the contract for a million other reasons and he knew nothing about what he was talking about.

Exactly. What if the developer saw thousands of bugs, decided that in its current state, it didn't warrant tens of thousands of dollars a month in testing, and they should just finish the damn game first? Or maybe the rest of the thousands of bugs were of low quality, and the devs were getting overwhelmed in duplicates? So many possibilities.

Redthirst

Gaslight wrote: »

I like that Isaac picks all of his secret serious meeting locations based on the availability of all-you-can-eat sides and appetizers.

Yeah, and I love how he delivers all of his secret messages.

RatherDashing

I'm pretty sure Isaac used the phrasing "IT IS I" because it sounds like more acronyms even though it's not.

brocade

Man.

Dude tells a story about how his entire team was fired after he let on that he'd figured out they were cribbing the warcraft III engine, and folks still manage to find a way to side with the employer. It's possible there was, coincidentally, an alternate explanation for why they decided to sack the QA team, but I'm not inclined to put too much weight on the diligence of guys whose game crashes whenever someone presses the "B" key.

Ori Klein

Bad publisher is bad. Should've snitched.
If I were onto speculation, I would say a certain early DOTA game comes to mind.

agoaj

b is for bad why would you press it?

twesterm

This guy assumes he was fired for knowing too much. He was really fired for probably spending hours researching why that bug happened when the person who the bug was supposed to go to could troubleshoot and fix it within 5-10 minutes.

IamTooch

RatherDashing89 wrote: »

I'm pretty sure Isaac used the phrasing "IT IS I" because it sounds like more acronyms even though it's not.

I = Isaac. 'I' is his spy acronym. Pretty clever, really...anyone intercepting the message is going to assume 'I' must be somebody whose name does not start with I, (Cf. The Cheat's birthday) hence removing him from suspicion. At least, it worked for me.

Hahnsoo1

It is extremely unlikely that one bug found by a tester at an independent testing firm would cause the developer/publisher of the title to terminate the contract with the firm. They are far more likely to mark it with their equivalent of "whatever" (working as intended, pending next build) and move on. There are many reasons to stop working with an independent testing facility, but this bug isn't one of them.

Demobot

I started reading the tale, but had to stop at 'just ten bucks an hour'. Cry me a river.

Incenjucar

Demobot wrote: »

I started reading the tale, but had to stop at 'just ten bucks an hour'. Cry me a river.

It's extremely bad pay for someone with a college degree (which is often required for QA work.)

I make a lot less now as a tester about to start year 4 than I did day 1 as an administrative assistant at a construction firm in a poorer area.