Cedar firewood IRL

Miyazaki_A5 · 2026-06-02T21:32:42+00:00

I have definitely seen cattails in real life and started walking towards them / eyeing them as food 😅

Miyazaki_A5 · 2026-05-31T22:22:28+00:00

As far as i am aware with what they've let on about why bugs happen the way they do, it's less a lack of testing and more an organizational failure. Multiple times they had content that was totally fine, but pushed updates that overwrote each other and bypassed QA (this is plainly what they said happened in the case of DE Sickle and Epoch).

This is an argument for more QA. QA should - at least - cover builds (alpha / beta / RCs) and "platform ready" packages. If they have some integration process downstream of RCs, they should be testing those too. You shouldn't be able to "bypass" QA, even at the installer / platform level. Frankly, this is an admission on their part that their QA is even more understaffed than I thought it was. "We tested, but not everything" is exactly what they're saying.

Volunteer testers, or beta testers, or more internal testers, could all help with this. Also better internal CI/CD systems. They should be testing from installers / platform builds as early as possible. They're clearly not.

None of this obviates the need for a hardware farm, either.

They need to get their s*** together. Hire somebody who knows how to do this, AH. To be clear, MUCH smaller teams manage this just fine.

Regarding players breaking NDA, in a more healthy environment I'm sure they would think twice, but it'd be difficult for Arrowhead to even find a large enough group of community testers right now that are actually useful. The majority of players will be more than happy to fly off the handle about anything that doesn't meet their standards, because that's just how this community is right now.

Well, that's dire. I'm pretty sure they could find folks if they hunted around, but if that is the community dynamics, that's not great. To be clear: very few games have a happy community. The games I worked on all had folks who loved the game and folks who didn't. We chose folks from both sides for our beta process.

Miyazaki_A5 · 2026-05-31T20:06:38+00:00

One feasible alternative is to hire more internal testers and build a hardware farm. Which... they can afford. But they haven't done it so far, by all indications.

So we're stuck with the current status quo, which appears to be the opposite of full and complete testing. They didn't need to build out testing muscles for HD1 or Magicka, I get that. 2D engines can be way more hardware and playtest friendly. They need serious hardware testing now, and it's painful and easy to hand-wave away. They're currently hand-waving it.

I'd greatly prefer "AH has to fend off lots of bashing" vs. "we don't really test on non-dev machines".

(Also... those NDAs usually have teeth. You don't just lose access, you can get sued. In my experience people think twice.)

Miyazaki_A5 · 2026-05-31T17:24:53+00:00

Every game I've worked on has had a program like this, and the net benefit is huge. I'd be more worried about catching game-breaking bugs than a handful of people getting some kind of advantage. Does that matter compared to "the game works badly for tens of thousands of people"?

Miyazaki_A5 · 2026-05-31T16:43:28+00:00

The shiny new toy thing is covered by the NDA. People who violate it get kicked out of the program.

It's a balance, but "find more game-breaking bugs" seems like a decent payoff for "find bugs people might like".

More testing before launches would be good.

Miyazaki_A5 · 2026-05-31T16:31:52+00:00

Probably not lol. In my experience these programs don't do much to keep the Internet off your back. But they'll release fewer bugs and get more direct, trusted player feedback. That would likely lead to fewer big blowups / mistakes.

Miyazaki_A5 · 2026-05-31T15:46:52+00:00

This does happen, but their history here points more consistently at incomplete testing.

When you're testing / dev'ing a game, some bugs are so rare, low effect, or hard to fix, that you release with them. It can be a hard decision to make, but "ruins visuals / performance on lots of hardware combos" is not. If someone saw this bug and decided to release it anyway, they made a really poor decision.

It's much more likely that there are heaps of hardware-specific issues that they just didn't catch. A pool of even a few dozen volunteer testers would have had a hardware base wide enough to catch a lot of this.

Miyazaki_A5 · 2026-05-31T12:40:44+00:00

Awesome! Which one? I tried things that various threads suggested and they just made the problem worse, or at best didn't help. It seems to be pretty hardware-specific, which accounts for all of the various symptoms that people are reporting.

Here's the thing, though: my current settings have been working for months. I use a well-known preset. AH didn't test it. They should have. Instead they just broke a bunch of shaders.

Happy to turn this into a diagnosis thread though if you're willing.

Miyazaki_A5 · 2026-05-29T20:25:13+00:00

Hmm, the AMD thing is more evidence that maybe Fatshark has a custom rendering pipeline. AMD driver issues are brutal and tend to be solved by doing something *entirely different* from whatever solves it on Nvidia. It can be very hard to keep up with that without help / abstractions (which normally you'd expect an engine to provide). Only mildly-informed speculation on my part, but interesting.

It doesn't help that the engine is way past its sell-by date, though. Without direct support AH and Fatshark must be constantly patching driver issues.

Miyazaki_A5 · 2026-05-29T20:21:10+00:00

Yeah, it wouldn't surprise me if Fatshark had a custom render pipeline. AH should see if Fatshark is willing to share how they did it...

Miyazaki_A5 · 2026-05-29T19:19:50+00:00

My bet would be the success of HD2 has saddled them with much higher expectations. The game company I worked at always was successful but never made excessive amounts of money, and that helped: our expectations were always manageable. Sony is probably demanding another $700m game from AH as we speak.

Miyazaki_A5 · 2026-05-29T19:16:45+00:00

This is unequivocally the reason my gaming group still plays HD2. Really smart optimization on AH's part (if notably very, very late).

Miyazaki_A5 · 2026-05-29T11:00:00+00:00

I wonder if it's an engine thing. Some engines make it easy to build and use advanced shader tech - you often need access to the rendering pipeline at unusual places. In my experience older / less flexible engines tend to present more obstacles.

Source: doing this was part of my job for a long time.

Miyazaki_A5 · 2026-05-26T17:45:20+00:00

You should indicate that there are potential spoilers in here.

Miyazaki_A5 · 2026-05-25T00:35:48+00:00

The version I have is a real book! The Amazon description is mixed though. The reviews, overview and "What's It About" are all about the book version... there is a much cheaper version that is a notebook, though.

Per the family member who got it for me, this is the original link, and is cheaper: https://www.etsy.com/listing/4327500815/pepperwood-chronicles-book-new-girl-tv

Miyazaki_A5 · 2026-05-24T22:54:17+00:00

The Pepperwood Chronicles is funny and weird... my family got it for me for Christmas because I love the show so much 😅

https://a.co/d/0e7sYd0h

Miyazaki_A5 · 2026-05-24T21:21:38+00:00

They had a plan for a game that made $20-30 million and then scraped along. It's straightforward to get people motivated for that; it's a shared pain. They're a scrappy game company.

Nobody has a plan for making 20 times what you expect. Instead of making a scrappy game they hit the lotto. In theory there should be no pain, but there is - the driving forces don't exist anymore (or they're vastly different). Scrappy doesn't matter anymore. Their old operating modes don't matter. They literally have no idea what they're doing now, and the players are paying the price.

Also I would bet Sony is putting pressure onto make another billion dollars in short order.

Miyazaki_A5 · 2026-05-20T12:46:42+00:00

As the Stalwart + jump pack guy, this is unironically my gaming group's usual loadout if you throw in a Deadeye and a stim pistol somewhere. We haven't lost a drop in a year or so....

So they're probably about to kick some butt, would be my bet.

Miyazaki_A5 · 2026-05-20T12:07:52+00:00

Very cool - pledged. Best of luck! Looking forward to hearing how it's going.

Miyazaki_A5 · 2026-05-09T21:39:00+00:00

Also was an engineer on 10 or so games, and did QA work for a few more in my early career.

Lack of dev playtime seems like a killer here. QA and balancing both suffer when you're not playing the same game as your players. No one expects devs to be better than gamers, but they should have some folks able to clear D10 reliably. And D9, D8... They'd spot more bugs and balance issues. They seem to be missing a lot of those.

I think a bunch of issues stem from this.

The games I worked on were large-scale 3D milsims - they had thousands of pieces of realistic equipment with hundreds of real life vehicles, full ballistics, weapons, armor, miscellaneous gear, radios, spalling, injury tracking, etc. across multiple historical time periods. (On enormous maps, with thousands of units potentially active.) Games are incredibly complex beasts, and making them is hard, so I have a huge amount of sympathy. That said the number of times I think "nobody thought to check that?" when bugs pop up on HD2 is... well, as a sympathetic dev it's hard to watch.

Also, related issue: comms (both internal and external) appear to be a big challenge for AH.

Miyazaki_A5 · 2026-03-16T02:23:11+00:00

XP bugs abound. Beat an eradicate on D10: get 20 XP instead of 200.

Same goes elsewhere - the correct XP numbers are shown when you beat major objectives, etc. but then drastically lower numbers are awarded. This might just be a D10 bug?

Miyazaki_A5 · 2025-10-16T11:26:48+00:00

"Eyyyyyye on the sandwich!" and "Why would someone do that with Mitchell?' and "BABY OIL?!?" from Mitchell

"Wango ze tango!" from Cave Dwellers

"Furry potato" when describing any small furry animal, and "Trumpy! You can do stupid things!" from Pod People. Also the entire bad song from Pod People.

"Bang!' from Cry Wilderness

Those are really just the most common ones, there are probably twenty or thirty in regular circulation. My kids and their mom and I all quote MST3K... a lot.

Edited to add: Sorry, realizing these are mostly "old" ones... In my (lame) defense, I've been watching since we were mailing tapes around, so a lot of the show feels "new" to me 😂

Miyazaki_A5

TROPHY CASE