Straight-up Question, no game

Yepyep
Yepyep Posts: 982 Critical Contributor
in MPQ General Discussion

How many coders do you have that work on this game?

Comments

  • Yepyep
    Yepyep Posts: 982 Critical Contributor

    Follow-up: are your coders degree-holders in EE or related fields?

    How many people are actively involved with implementing, and more importantly, fixing, the PvE and PvP environments?

    Are your coders using AI to do their "coding" or are you employing bespoke coding or purchasing code to change the game during the year of 2025?

    People are paying money. Give us some answers.

  • bluewolf
    bluewolf Posts: 6,660 Chairperson of the Boards

    lol they won’t tell you.

    I found a post online recently that a former CS person made, saying the company was good to work for but in Sept they were laid off. Game industry issues. They worked for 505.

    The game has been using subcontractors for things for years.

    They have zero obligation to update the credits to remove former employees (and we see how many bugs they leave in; updating the credits seems like a bottom tier priority). BCS is private so it doesn’t have to disclose anything they don’t want to, at all.

    Hound on reddit keeps saying a top coder left in Sept or October. And some other personnel. Idk where he gets the info but I’m not doubting it. Maybe in Sept they had a wave of layoffs.

    From the outside the result matters more than the cause. Did they cut the team back and move them to more lucrative projects? Or just lay people off? Is the team being paid less due to revenue shortfall and therefore doing less work in retaliation, refusing to do any extra work beyond a strict timeframe? Maybe all the work is being done by subcontractors except for a few perm staff and the subs are former employees who are only doing exactly what the work says they need to do or something.

    Who knows and in the end the game itself is what it is.

    Unity is not going away. It has been in place since July for everyone. They obviously have no capacity to tackle a whole mess of bugs and keep messing up basic stuff like which characters are essential. Some stuff that had easy tools to fix (memory bloat) they completely ignored until we yelled at them on Discord repeatedly.

    All you can do is look at what it is and decide what to do with your time and money as a result.

  • entrailbucket
    entrailbucket Posts: 7,747 Chairperson of the Boards

    They need to give us the names, home addresses, social security numbers, and phone numbers of everyone who currently works on the game or ever has. Before we invest our hard earned money in this game we should be able to run background checks on their employees and interview them extensively.

    Actually, maybe we can get DNA samples too? That might be asking too much!

  • ThaRoadWarrior
    ThaRoadWarrior Posts: 9,632 Chairperson of the Boards

    As a game industry veteran who has no relation to this game other than playing, they should absolutely leave the names in the credits because that is important in the same way as working on a movie or tv show is to your ability to get hired. That being said as a live service game, it would be desirable if there were a current/past demarcation. There is no shame in having a smaller Live Ops team, it may even lighten up the critique on them of people knew how many bones were in the skeleton crew. Or it may not, people are entitled these days.

  • entrailbucket
    entrailbucket Posts: 7,747 Chairperson of the Boards

    Just as an aside, as a software development professional, the idea that qualifications somehow impact coders' quality of work in any way is laughable and reflects a complete lack of understanding of this industry.

    Some of the worst code I've ever seen was turned in by people with multiple advanced degrees, and some of the best folks I've ever hired had no post-secondary education of any kind. I've seen brilliant, elegant, well-executed code from the cheapest offshore firms, and absolute disasters turned in by 7-figure, top-flight consultants.

    I haven't worked with the AI coding tools, but I imagine they're just like anything else in the industry. We've had various ways of accomplishing the same things for decades. Teams with good process and good management will achieve good results, and teams that don't have those things will fail, regardless of tools or languages or coders' education levels (LOL) or anything else.

  • KGB
    KGB Posts: 3,957 Chairperson of the Boards
    edited 17 November 2025 19:07

    @entrailbucket

    This has also been my experience in the software industry (1990 till now).

    I imagine it's like this in a lot of other industries as well.

    KGB

    P.S. I can't imagine a 7 figure consultant failing that badly along with the failure of the company hiring them to identify that 7 figure consultant as a bad risk.

  • entrailbucket
    entrailbucket Posts: 7,747 Chairperson of the Boards
    edited 17 November 2025 19:54

    @KGB said:
    @entrailbucket

    This has also been my experience in the software industry (1990 till now).

    I imagine it's like this in a lot of other industries as well.

    KGB

    P.S. I can't imagine a 7 figure consultant failing that badly along with the failure of the company hiring them to identify that 7 figure consultant as a bad risk.

    I've been through some stuff, man. I've seen things you can't unsee.

    Fwiw, once you get to that level of megafailure, it's the lawyers sorting it out.

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