Because I have to and it's relevant (Criticism)

by MacAddictXIV , Seattle WA, Monday, January 22, 2018, 09:50 (2531 days ago) @ squidnh3

Cool: We designed the system a certain way, and that made it hard to delete multiple things. That's on us. We're going to redesign the system for next time. It's a standard feature, especially since deleting all your shaders would literally take hours.

Not cool: This is a hard problem.

I don't mind when people make mistakes, but I mind when they don't admit it and learn from them. Bungie literally said they were going to improve communication, then didn't communicate during faction rallies. They are just not learning from mistakes and making them over and over. And that makes me feel embarrassed for them. They are written about as a joke by major publications.

The "hard problem" thing is definitely annoying. A lot of really smart, talented, and hardworking people obviously work at Bungie, but even those people can make really dumb mistakes. People that are talented often have trouble admitting mistakes, and in this case Bungie is taking the "this problem is so hard, you could barely understand it!" route, which is a poor choice.

This isn't a Bungie-specific issue: computer science as a field struggles with this problem, probably because it's relatively new. Things-that-seem-simple-but-are-really-actually-complicated is a problem in all science and engineering endeavors, but those fields have had many more years to develop responses to the issue.

I agree with all of this as someone in the industry. I will also add that developers don't normally make decisions. They make input and do the work, but if someone told them to make shaders to exactly like other items then that is most likely what they will do. Now, I don't think that the gaming industry is exactly like other areas, nor do I assume that Bungie is like every other gaming company. But my bet is that someone told the developer to do it how it is and the developer got half way through it and thought that maybe there should be the ability to discard multiply shaders. This person either said "well, it's not on the Spec doc" and kept going or he told a manager and the manger said either "it's not on the spec doc" or "it could introduce more problems than it's worth at this point"

Ultimately, I don't care how it was created. I care how they are planning on changing it (not fixing it, because technically I don't think it's broken). And if it's as hard as the Heavy ammo bug, then they need someone to get up on stage and explain why to alleviate some of the pissed off people.