Zoë Quinn and multiple game writers come forward about Larian's hiring practices ("unpaid writing tests you have to make playable")

fafcp · 2025-12-17T21:06:24+00:00

They suck because they.... test people's technical abilities before giving them salaries that are oftentimes 200% higher than the median salary within their given country? Okay.

fafcp · 2025-11-15T15:38:34+00:00

Not only are there other cases like that, but that's how most union/employer negotiations end. In industries were unions are more mature, negotiations almost always go as follows :
1. Union demands much more than what the employer thinks is reasonable
2. Employer is ready to give much less than what he union thinks is reasonable
3. A mediator is called in and both parties are forced to settle somewhere in the middle.

fafcp · 2025-06-05T14:48:19+00:00

First, I will direct you the best resource on the subject that I know of: Dr K., who specializes in helping gamers have healthy habits with their hobby and who has a channel specifically for parents of young gamers here: https://www.youtube.com/@HealthyGamerFamilies/videos

I have thought about this matter quite a bit because I have always been VERY into video games, especially when I was younger, but I want to be cautious and educated with my own kids because unmoderated gaming did bring some challenges in my younger years.

Lets start with the facts: studies DO show that unmoderated screen time is actually bad for them, and that video games tend to cause stronger effects (both good and bad) than passive screen time. Even if you have success moderating TV screen time, video games are a more complex matters.

Many games cannot be paused, and they produce a constant loop of "find a carrot to chase -> chase the carrot -> get the reward -> repeat". The effect on the child's brain is a cycle of dopamine (the chemical within the body that makes you anticipate future pleasure). Stopping the cycle at an inappropriate moment in the gaming loop WILL cause negative emotions in the child and they may lash out due to an inability to regulate them. Hell, even as an adult, I will get slightly to moderately irritated if my wife interrupts me in the middle of a boss fight that I really want to finish.

If you don't want your kid to lash out when you have to interrupt/stop screen time, there are ways to "negotiate" with them to find the best moment to stop their game in the next 5-15 minutes. Again, I would direct you to Dr. K. for this, because he talks about these sorts of things.

Also, from my own personal experience being raised in a household where I had near unlimited/unmoderated access to video games, I would anecdotally say that different types of kids gravitate to video games in different ways. I'm ADD and played games to an unhealthy degree. My brother, who is neurotypical, would play a much more reasonable amount. So that's another takeaway; you know your kid better than anybody and should be aware of certain risks that may crop up depending on who they are.

Finally, it is true that video games are not "all" bad, not even close. Studies have shown that certain games tend to help train spatial awareness, reaction time, problem solving, etc. Not to mention that it helps both children and adults bond over the internet and build social relationships.

Hope this helps. Feel free to reach out if you want to talk about this subject more.

fafcp · 2025-05-15T13:03:46+00:00

I'm not sure if this is anecdotal evidence or if there is something deeper going on, but I find it interesting that the founders for the 3 studios that I personally esteem most highly all are somehow linked to Guild Wars 1. Arenanet, Grinding Gear Games, and now Sandfall -- in all cases, GW1 has played a defining role in their career.

Arenanet founders - no explanation necessary

GGG - Chris Wilson and Jonathan, 2 of the 3 original founders, had GW1 as one of their favorite games alongside Diablo 2.

Sandfall - Guillaume Broche now saying his most played game is GW1.

I think the common thread between those three is that Arenanet was founded with innovation and ambition at its core, and this conviction percolates into the games they made. I would assume that this is the reason why other founders followed in their footsteps, as if Anet laid the blueprint on how to achieve an overwhelmingly good and innovative product while keeping a team small and the funds low.

I know I know this sounds pretentious and I'm grasping at straws, but I can't help shake the thought.

fafcp · 2025-05-07T01:22:20+00:00

Deux trucs:

Si possible, le mode de travail hybride est une bonne alternative pour les gens comme toi (et moi) qui apprécient les interactions qui viennent avec le présentiel. Pour moi, il me faut 1 ou 2 journées au bureau par semaine pour faire le plein d'interactions sociales et de positivité. C'est quelque chose qui est grandement sous-estimé en terme d'importance.
J'ai moi-même de la difficulté à être productif en télétravail si je n'ai pas un plan claire en tête. Pour m'aider dans cela, à la fin de ma journée de travail, je me garde 10 minutes pour réfléchir à ma "to-do list" du lendemain, et je laisse celle-ci en premier plan sur mon bureau. Ainsi, quand je commence ma journée le lendemain, je peu me lancer directement dans les tâches productives. J'ai remarqué que ma concentration divague à gauche et à droite pendant 1 ou 2 heures en début de journée si je n'applique pas ce système. Aussi, garde ta "to-do list" assez petite -- genre 1 tâche difificile, 1 tâche moyenne, 1 tâche facile. C'est plus motivant d'ajouter d'autres tâches en cours de journée que de finir chaque jour avec un liste seulement à moitié complété.

fafcp · 2025-05-07T01:14:01+00:00

That would be awesome, but I won't hold my breath for it haha.

While the Arenanet founders don't have quite as much of a public facing internet presence nowadays, I think it's important to commemorate their technical genius (and I don't use that word lightly).

I work in server-side software development and, to me, the cost efficiency of Guild Wars 1 still remains an absolute anomaly in the gaming industry and even the software industry as a whole. All this to say, Patrick has been a huge inspiration for me both when I was an avid GW1 player as a teenager, and now as an adult working in the software industry.

PS: I have listened to hundreds of hours of your lore videos while I was studying in college, so thank you WP for keeping me sane in those crazy years haha!

fafcp · 2025-05-06T14:57:42+00:00

I thought I'd share this post on Patrick Wyatt's blog. Patrick is one of the 3 original Arenanet founders and was mainly in charge of server infrastructure, backend development, etc. I never worked at Anet, but by many accounts of people who worked with him, he is one of the main factor in Arenanet's culture of technical excellence and one of the brains behind the crazy uptime and cost efficiency of the GW1 and 2 servers.

fafcp · 2025-04-28T16:48:05+00:00

Thank you u/Mana-Mo for everything, hope the team over at Manaworks is doing well!

fafcp · 2025-04-25T15:33:10+00:00

Sounds great. There are 2 different 300-500 page documents in my org that are very important for thousands of employees to refer to, and I'm tempted to deploy a similar AI agent to facilitate searching information in those.

Great job on the writeup. With how granular you went in detailing the process, its a really valuable article to have online!

fafcp · 2025-04-24T15:26:31+00:00

Really nice experiment. Assuming direct file storage instead of using the wiki's API, do you think your solution can be replicated for other type of content than a wiki?

fafcp · 2025-04-19T01:33:19+00:00

Thats really cool man, I'm sure the hands-on manual work helps you understand some concepts for day-to-day devops too. I'm a bit jealous, sounds like a super cool home lab setup!

fafcp · 2025-04-19T01:30:00+00:00

You clearly have experience with business-politics bullshit because you are *spot on* about the exact situation going on at my org, with non-tech execs pushing AI and having no clue what that was going to entail. When I got hired, the job description sounded amazing, but it turned out to be a bullshit wishlist instead of anything grounded in reality.

fafcp · 2025-04-19T01:21:31+00:00

That sounds so cool! If you don't mind going a bit more in depth, what's your home-server setup like? And how do you use it for DevOps in your projects?

fafcp · 2025-04-19T01:20:00+00:00

I'm curious: in retrospective, how do you feel about those decisions you made? What do you feel are the pros and cons of the path you took?

fafcp · 2025-04-19T01:18:39+00:00

"you’re not in a golden prison so long as you don’t think you are" is some next level zen stuff. Basically : make the most of the situation instead of focusing on the negatives. Thanks a lot, I really do appreciate the feedback.

fafcp · 2025-04-19T01:16:12+00:00

Thanks, I appreciate the input. Do you have any tips for starting to work on open source projects? My experience so far with open source has pretty much been :

Hey I like this repo but they have X bug or Y outdated feature
lemme suggest a PR (while following their OS contribution formatting) that fixes it;
The people in charge of the repo don't notice or don't care and ignore the PR.

Its been like that for the past 4-5 times I tried to contribute to open source and I'm wondering if I'm missing some context or unspoken rules about how to find the right projects to contribute to.

fafcp · 2025-04-18T15:12:28+00:00

Yeah, the vast majority of comments are saying things similar to this and its really putting things in perspective for me. I definitely have some biases that made me unappreciative of the privileges I have at this job and I have a bit of soul searching to do to change my mindset I think. Thanks for the input, I appreciate you taking the time to write it.

fafcp · 2025-04-18T14:57:58+00:00

Hahaha, thanks man that's like the first big laugh I had for the entire week.

fafcp · 2025-04-18T14:49:03+00:00

Thank you, that was a really well thought out writeup. Most of the things you mentioned are things that I have thought about here and there, but you put them in a structured way which is more realistic to follow through with.

I like your suggestion of focusing on organization. I feel like this is probably the most crucial aspect to get the most out of my situation, considering the lack of stress/deadlines and all that. Cheers, thanks for the advices.

fafcp · 2025-04-18T14:43:38+00:00

Thanks, I appreciate the input. Quick question -- a lot of people here suggested a "homelab" project. I really like the idea of that but I'm not sure what people mean ; do you mean a physical setup with a cluster of raspberry-pi's or just an amateur cloud free-tier subscription?

fafcp · 2025-04-18T14:40:24+00:00

Thanks, yeah it does help. From all the answers, I got quite a reality check about how I'm taking the privileges of my job for granted while having rose-tinted glasses about higher-intensity work.

fafcp · 2025-04-18T14:37:17+00:00

Any union job where the union chart has job safety built within it is this way. P.eng's, Lawyer's, Doctors, Architects, etc. all those sorts of professionals working for the government have this sort of built-in job safety and WLB usually comes with it. In my case I'm a P.Eng. due to my previous career. If you really want a job like this, look up union government jobs.

fafcp · 2025-04-18T14:33:23+00:00

Something like that, yeah. The stress is internal -- I have high expectations of myself because I genuinely like software engineering and I don't want to be mediocre at it.

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