I don't think you've been following this story. If you looked into the technical details [0], and surrounding context, you would understand why your comment isn't particularly insightful. For example, terrain has nothing to do with this bug and it isn't a complex fix that interacts with "millions of lines of code." A single run of a profiler would have caught this.

I also think it's relevant to note that GTA V has sold 140 million copies, 20 million last year alone, and Rockstar makes hundreds of millions of dollars a year on the title. For a multi billion dollar product to have a known, relatively simple, problem is shameful. I don't know what went wrong, but I don't think it was the competency of engineers or the complexity of the problem that allowed this to fester.

[0] https://nee.lv/2021/02/28/How-I-cut-GTA-Online-loading-times...

I think you missed previous news about this. This was an incredibly trivial issue that would show up in any use of a profiler on the slow startup screens. The fact they didn't is that they're either unable to run profilers on their code at Rockstar (which would be shameful indeed) or they never bothered to do so. Either case shows egg on face at Rockstar.

Strange that this was this downvoted. It is an issue that a single dev with a profiler should've been able to identify very easily. That they hadn't addressed it despite it being such an annoyance for so many users for so long is embarrassing.

Not to take away from the feat and initiative of doing so without access to source code.

+1 — it’s an item a single person without access to the source code was able to diagnose and fix.

I’m pretty shocked at all the defending of the game company here, honestly. Highly visible bug, affecting high percentage of users, relatively simple fix. I take pride in the software I wrote and would be personally very embarrassed if I caused this AND didn’t fix it for years. I guess companies don’t have feelings and can’t feel shame but I would personally feel shame as a supposed professional!

There are a lot of excuses for why this wasn’t fixed but no great reasons.

The idea that screwups are "shameful" is poison in any organization. I fight it in the companies I work for, I fight it here.

Bugs happen. Serious bugs happen. They will always happen. Shaming people for bugs undermines institutional robustness against bugs because it incentivizes people to hide mistakes. Furthermore, companies with blame-n-shame culture typically fault users when those users make inevitable "mistakes" statistically guaranteed by bad UX design.

In contrast, transparency is good, acknowledgment is good. Rockstar acknowledged fault and rewarded the reporter, which is difficult. That's a positive institutional arc I'd like to encourage, at Rockstar and in the wider industry.

If you stop at "embarrassing", I'm with you. But when you proceed to "shameful", that's quite different and we part ways.

Just to clarify my point: The bug was a screwup. We’ve all done screwups. My worst bug was an amateur hour royal screwup that resulted in DDOS. Nobody should be shamed for bugs, including serious ones that get to production.

Not fixing a serious, visible, known bug for six years is what’s shameful. There is nothing positive about neglect like that. It’s kind of admirable that they actually rewarded the guy but it shouldn’t have even got to that point.

Totally agree you should not shame for bugs. The shame is for ignoring this bug until one of your customers finally had enough and fixed it by patching the binary. If it was my company I would feel ashamed.

I haven't read all the comments on these articles, but I haven't seen anyone claim that the bug shouldn't have happened, that anyone should lose their job, that no one "good" makes those sort of mistakes, etc. But this was a bug that lasted long enough and irritated enough customers that one of them finally diagnosed and seemingly fixed it without ever looking at their source code. That's one hell of a process failure. And splitting hairs over whether we would feel professionaly "embarrassed" or "ashamed" in a similar situation is pretty silly.

Everybody makes mistakes. Bugs are inevitable.

Managerial problems that allow high-impact, low-fix-time, high-prevalence bugs to exist for 7 years are shameful and are in fact poison to an organization themselves.

Don't mistake the shaming for really being about the bug itself here. The problem isn't the bug, it's the organizational culture that allowed such a massive, easily fixed, widely encountered bug to persist for 7 years in a game that has made them $6 billion dollars over the last few years.

> now Rockstar is suppose to feel ashamed because they didn't fix a big performance issue that affected startup times?

Yes, they should be ashamed of this.

It's true that the game is probably absurdly complex, but how did they never profile loading times?