[TRENCHES] Tuesday, February 25, 2014 - No Good Deed Goes
LegionPerseus VeilRegistered User, Moderator, Penny Arcade Staff, Vanilla Staff vanilla
No Good Deed Goes
http://trenchescomic.com/comic/post/no-good-deed-goes
Fowl play
AnonymousA few years ago I was working as a tester on a AAA title that you’ll all have heard of, when I ran into one of the most amusing and bewildering bugs I have ever experienced. After around 20 minutes of play, all projectiles in the game would turn into chickens. Your guns would fire chickens, the enemy guns would fire chickens, and tanks would fire chickens as shells.
Whilst this was initially rather amusing, it was obviously not intended behaviour. Furthermore, it wouldn’t reproduce on any other computer but my testing station. I filed a bug, and was instructed by one of the devs to re-install the game. I did so, but the problem persisted. Several other suggested solutions failed to work, too. By this point, my ability to test the game was rather diminished.
A couple of days later, a developer showed up in the testing department along with the project manager. I walked them through the bug, and after we all stopped laughing we set out to find a solution. During a re-install, the developer spotted something strange. My installation image was on a shared network drive, but it was not the usual one. I’d had my machine set up by the testing manager, so I had no idea that anything was amiss. They switched to the correct image and the bug disappeared.
I was later informed by the developer that the image I was using was an unofficial build on a developer’s machine, which had had some of the copy protection code removed. The computer also had a BitTorrent client installed, seeding an ISO of the build on a popular torrent site, months before the game was due for release. Thankfully, in this case, our office internet connection had horrendously poor upload performance and we managed to kill it and fire the developer before the whole file was leaked.
The “feature” still exists in the release and, from what I’ve read, plagued most people who downloaded the first pirate releases.
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Even if I buy a game, I want to get a pirate copy if I know there's something like that in there. Or just a launch command that simulates piracy.
Yup. As I've said before, this comic makes no sense anymore. Cora had always expressed profound respect for Q. She went against him for the customer, but that wasn't to "fuck with that jagoff", it was to protect the customer.
It's too bad. The comic was likeable when the characters weren't all horrible people.
Either that or Chicken Invader
so then that was never?
so then that was never?
I suspect the fact Cora has now seen Q's disregard for customers has made her lose whatever respect she had for him.
There has never been a time when they weren't all pretty horrible. Some people just didn't realize that Cora, for one, was horrible because she is a White Knight.
No, but we can consider her horrible for concealing Isaac's incompetence in hiring a ridiculous number of people for the QA team, which is bound to have negative consequences for the company, and for the various things she's done in the past that have actively fucked over her co-workers
She does the word search in highlights, yes.
Seeing as they had their computers taken away and couldn't do their jobs as a result of the mole hunt, I'd say yeah, they were adversely affected.
Another instance of her screwing her co-workers is when she let Marley take the fall for her leaks. Yes, Isaac was the one who framed Marley as the mole in some sort of misguided attempt to win Cora's affection (and Marley probably deserved to lose his job anyway for being an incompetent pothead), but for all her indignation about what an asshole Isaac was afterwards she could have stepped up and admitted responsibility. She was happy to reap the rewards of the framejob even if she acted upset about it.
As for the game going F2P as a result of the player protest Cora organized, yes, that was the result, but it isn't the one Cora intended and certainly not one she expected. For all she knew the protest would cause the game to fail and cause everybody to lose their jobs. Cora and her co-workers also didn't reap any of the profits of the game going F2P; Q (and probably the other developers) did, but all Cora and the others got out of it is going from one shitty company to another in the same type of bottom-rung jobs.
Now Cora is happy to see the company suffer just because of her dislike for Q and her grudge about the way they've handled her father's IP...when even her father himself has made it clear he's cool with it, and the failure of the game will, once again, probably result in everybody losing their jobs (and stop the flow of nice royalty checks to dear ol' dad). And let's not forget she was the one who helped talk her dad into signing the rights to his work over to Q's company in the first place, which she did knowing Q's less-than-scrupulous mindset about monetizing a game and managing the player community.
Cora has very strong opinions about the way games companies should treat their players and their source material, and some of those opinions may even be correct and admirable up to a point...but she acts on those opinions in a short-sighted and fanatical way with no regard for how the consequences of her actions will affect the people right in front of her (like her co-workers and even her dad) because everything she does is justified in her mind because she "Fights for the users" or some other firmly held self-righteous conviction.