[monkeypizza]

Watch out not to condemn them no matter what they do. Sure, they messed up in the past, but given the situation they found themselves in when they saw this report, this response is still good.

You risk making discourse difficult when you continue punishing people who are attempting to do the right after doing wrong for a while.

[thitcanh]

I disagree. They ignored the issue for years and that part won’t be erased from memory. They should be given credit for finally fixing it, but nothing more. What happened before this week was and remains forever shameful.

[epivosism]

Very likely that internally there were people who had an inkling this was going on, but could never convince product to devote time to put it in the backlog. This change is a win for that engineer.

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.

[ramblerman]

> What happened before this week was and remains forever shameful.

lol without context you'd think something tragic actually happened here.

[thitcanh]

Losing customers over such a simple, known problem, over years… is tragic for a company like Rockstar. This is like Microsoft ignoring a bug that made Windows take 10 minutes to start and just letting that happen for 5 years. Now tell me that’s not tragic.

[fomine3]

Anyway GTA5 is just a game.

[thitcanh]

To you it's just a game, to Rockstar GTA is literally a multi-billion dollar product with a household name that politicians talk about.

I can't believe you're missing this huge point.

[sellyme]

> You risk making discourse difficult when you continue punishing people who are attempting to do the right after doing wrong for a while.

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.

[monkeypizza]

Right. I'm not saying eval(their net behavior)>0; I'm saying that if your response function is always negative, you lose the ability to influence their response.

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.

[sellyme]

The crux of this is that most readers presumably found out about both the bug and the fix in relatively short proximity, and their response is negative to the combined events, not to the knowledge of just the patch.

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)