[vouwfietsman]

Although this is possibly true, at any time the dev team could've gone: "loading is slow man, can we just profile it and see if there's anything obvious?". To someone with access to the source code and a debugger, that's probably less than 30 minutes of time to go from zero to hero.

I've done this kind of stuff many times, and something like a json array taking minutes to parse would likely be very very obvious when looking at a trace.

[oreally]

The dev team is usually under immense pressure to deliver. This probably slipped under the radar to let all the other features get through.

The maintenance team probably maintains other games as well.

Then you add in the knowledge loss through the churning of developers and over time the organization forgets how things should be.

[vouwfietsman]

Again, you're not wrong, but none of those things are insurmountable. If the team is really so stressed it cannot spend 30 minutes, over the many year of the existence of that bug, that seems like a development environment close to hell.

Knowledge loss is precisely my point: there is very little a-priori knowledge needed to solve this, the guy who found the bug proves that.

[oreally]

Yea development environments are close to hell in game development, won't argue that.