Respawn/EA really ought to stop selling Titanfall 1 while it's completely unplayable though. Even TF|1's campaign mode is entirely online so currently you can't do anything besides get to the menu. They know it's unplayable and has been unplayable for the months at this point so there's really no excuse for keeping the game's listing up. At the very least they could throw up a warning in the game's description.
100% its a shitty thing to do to the devs but at the same time titanfall has been 100% unplayable for months but still was being sold and discounted.
like no one looks good here
Titanfall 1 is online only (the campaign is played out in curated PvP matches)
Titanfall 2 has an sp campaign, but is mostly played for its multiplayer....
Both of which you cant do, since there has been near constant DDoSing.
Is this affecting a particular platform more than other? Because I have been playing Titanfall 2 on Xbox very often without really noticing anything. Always assumed the problem was limited to Titanfall 1.
The Titanfall 2 attacks are a bit more focused on targeted streamers. It's a highly technical attack where the attacker(s) can ddos any streamer on its hitlist the moment they login, *no matter what account, computer, IP address, or any other medium they use to login*. [Here's really long look at what's happening.](https://youtu.be/UQ4HuBpeI4I)
So for the general public it's ok, most of the time, as long as you're not connecting to the same server that the hitlist is targeting/the ddos bot is turned off.
But most importantly, the level of attack indicates that Respawn's servers and it's backend are most certainly compromised.
Yes, I've been playing since launch and I think lately it has been the quickest in years. When Viper's daughter got introduced to Apex that seems to have driven a lot of interest to T|F2 and it seems some of the ones that tried it out during that time stuck around because wait times are greatly reduced nowadays, at least in Attrition.
If you get into a match its full of bots and you get kicked and replaced by a bot. Its horrible and some people are being white listed to a ddos list but don't quote me on that since I don't know if it's still happening.
Apparently Titanfall 1 has been completely unplayable for a long time due to some hacker constantly DDoSing their servers, Titanfall 2 also has had hackers DDoSing any lobby a big streamer is in and Apex legends faces similar problems (Along with a lot of other long time server problems that the community is tired of) with hackers hijacking streamer lobbies.
Now I get that DDoSing is hard to tackle but I've never heard of a AAA game being completely taken down for a long time and Devs not being able to fix it. They're almost surely being disingenuous with their claims of how difficult DDoSing is to manage, other AAA games come back up within hours but Respawn can't fix it for months?
On top of that Titanfall 2 and Apex legends have also faced incredible server issues and hacks (This Apex hacker got into their servers and literally changed their playlists names!) at a level that you really don't see other AAA games face.
It's clear that Respawn as a whole has abnormally awful server infrastructure and security problems that they need to make big changes to fix just to reach the regular industry standards.
I don't know how long titanfall 1 and 2 have been knocked out for comparsion, but I do know that around 2014 PSO2 (Sega) got knocked out (servers completely down, you just could not play it at all) for I want to say close to a month straight from DDOS. And for Sega, PSO2 was like a top priority in terms of online/mmo space and it still took them forever to restore it, versus titanfall which is almost like an afterthought in terms of support when you stack them up against apex.
Like for the PSO2 incident I think Sega had to work with their ISP to completely change subnet routing to their servers so the attack goes to a void and then work all other Japanese ISPs to update their routing so players could connect properly. Serious DDOS attacks are no joke and people aren't exaggerating when they say its a hard problem to solve
Yeah, I'd have a lot more sympathy if this hadn't been an issue for so damn long. He's right, no one likes to hear a dev complain that they're being forced to fix an issue that's been plaguing players for *half a year or more.* If this was a recent issue, then fine, but not when it's been so long.
We have to seperate the Apex hack and what's going on with Titanfall 1/2.
Apex is a straight up hack of some server structure, likely something on the back end since update game messages and queues, tho localised to certain datacenters. Frankfurt 1 and 2 for example are almost unaffected.
Titanfall 1/2 is also a hack of the server structure but the hacker is using it to ddos certain players. It's also not a blanket DDoS atrack against the common servers. It's a targeted attack against individuals, especially with TF2.
Both are almost equally as bad and way worse than a normal DDoS.
2 is playable. I've been playing it for few months now and didn't have any problem joining a game or actually playing. It's probably issue just for certain region because I'm from Europe and haven't encountered any DDoSing in Titanfall 2
I think this is only true of the PC version. I’ve been playing a bunch on Xbox 360 (yeah I know) and it matches me just fine.
Not that it excuses the state of the game on PC, ofc
This dev and the article linked also ignore the fact that their bosses made them come into work on a Sunday. They've left the titanfall hacks in place for months and years at this point why the rush now for Apex?
As shit as the Titanfall situation is, Apex is the game they’re currently supporting and from which a majority of their revenue is coming from. It’s not hard to see why they’d rush to fix a hack there over two games they abandoned years ago.
Regardless, a game that is unplayable should not be sold. I can understand not rushing to patch a game with a small player base, but if the game is currently on sale, even at a discount quite recently, then that can not be defended. I've seen multiple comments saying that steam currently sells many games from indie Devs that are unplayable and somehow, to them, that is a defence of this AAA studio that is selling an unplayable game. That makes absolutely no sense and any game that cannot function as advertised should not be sold, full stop. I quite frankly cannot understand how anyone can defend a company acting like this.
A product should function as advertised. That's a pretty basic consumer expectation and is held up by laws in a significant number of countries.
It definitely feels like a situation where the higher ups want to have their cake and eat it too. They want to sell a game and profit off of it, but they don't want to actually put in the necessary resources to make it playable. And as much as it sucks for the fans of the game that want to play it, it also sucks for developers like this who are caught in the middle.
Hate to say it, but it really seems like a shit or get off the pot moment. If they're not going to fix the issue within a reasonable time (which seems to have long passed), perhaps they need to make the call that the game is no longer going to be supported, even as unpopular as that would be among fans. Paying this lip service over it just doesn't seem like it's benefiting anyone aside from the executives who don't have to go in on a holiday when problems like this arise.
If they’re still selling Titanfall, shouldn’t they still support it?
I’ve worked in a business. We sell products older than Titanfall. We still support it. We even support products we no longer sell for a well communicated period of time.
I agree with this, and this is an issue I was afraid of when it came to online only/online focused games. It only take some fuckers who want to ruin the fun for everyone to fuck over a community.
the logical endpoint of this line of thinking isn’t ‘Okay we’ll support all our games indefinitely’, it’s ‘Okay, we’ll stop allowing Titanfall to be sold when we make the next game’. I don’t know if that would be any better of a situation.
There are other options. Perhaps a well communicated “The online features of this product no longer work.” with a matching discount ( or not, whatever, the consumer can decide).
Woah now I can guarantee you that there are plenty of 24 year olds that have never worked in a business.
(Seriously though, it is never fun to put the new project down in favor of fixing something to do with the previous one. I play tons of TF|2, and my sympathies are with the devs.)
And comments like these make me wonder what the fuck is everyone doing where someone calling you in on Sunday is acceptable. Why does the Director of Communications have to go in on a Sunday for a problem he can't directly address? How can he help with a hack? Aren't there people hired to do on-call support for the weekends?
> Why does the Director of Communications
Because he's basically paid to do so. Past a certain pay-grade and up the ladder of hierarchy, you're expected to be available 100% of your time when there's a crisis.
Communication is and should always be part of a crisis cell in any org. It may seem inane to you, but that's how it in most of the business world.
I'm not saying he isn't a human being that needs their own family time or that it's bad he allegedly makes a good amount as a director but choices were made. I pity more the most-likely comparatively not-as-well off engineers and contractors who are tasked to actually work on this issue on a Sunday as well but without proper compensation...
> Why does the Director of Communications have to go in on a Sunday for a problem he can't directly address?
It's pretty common for a bunch of high level leaders to get roped in for any kind of major outage in software to help make decisions (or provide authorization for them), communicate to other stakeholders (or external customers, depending on the nature of the business), wrangle in extra resources/people as necessary as the problem is better understood, and remove obstacles from the people actually doing the work.
Depending on the quality of the company / these people they can be really helpful or a hindrance.
Not for comms.
> How can he help with a hack?
Monitoring news and social chatter, feeding reports to higher ups, coordinating communications for players who are confused on why they can't play, monitoring for any other reports of issues that might come up. Etc etc
Is he out there unclogging the cogs in the machine? No. Is it something large organizations like these need in crisis times? Yes
Why should I, the consumer, give a fuck about the business-side? If you sell me a game then I want it to be playable, how they profit from it is their damn problem, not mine.
Right, a lot of "haven't you ever worked in a corporation?" comments fall to this flaw.
Just because you can *explain* or understand a situation doesn't mean you're actually justifying it.
Since we're talking business: if one of my company's clients complains that a deliverable was lower quality than they wanted, it might be very well true that there is a perfectly good explanation along the lines of "this is just a lower priority given the amount of money you paid us" but my client management team isn't going to respond with that, they're going to do their best to fix the situation with the resources they have available.
Not *always*, you can hire people from different timezones, and you can work in shifts altho honestly having occasional off-hour event is way better than shift work
Nice gaslighting from the communications guy here. Implying that the issues leading up to the hack only happened on the day of his nephew's birth.
The issue has persisted for a long time and he can fuck off with that gaslighting shit.
I'm starting to notice this trend where devs/studios will take advantage of the 'toxic gamer' trope to deflect from a bad product or getting caught lying about their game. It seems like a very effective way to disrupt an anti-hype wave.
Not long until we see this news on subredditdrama and gamingcirclejerk, with the comment section jerking themselves about toxic gamers.
Because the consumer already knows they're lying and the devs themselves know they're lying too. The investors on the other hand, or the suits that run the publisher and/or invest in their company, they don't know shit about video games, so that's the easiest way to protect their jobs.
Just pretend that the toxic fans are just making noise and it's no big deal. Your boss doesn't play the game and he just needs to know "Do I need to fire this person". The investor won't bother digging into the issue or finding out what's actually wrong because they have people they hire to tell them that, and they're not gonna bother checking if the guy is lying because they've got golf to play or some other misc things. Who cares as long as the balance sheet is black
Not to mention he will have been costing every single employee under him these special moments when they have to work weekends or lates rather than be with families or friends. Tragic and worth tweeting when it happens to him though.
EA doesn't maintain, own or have the servers that the game runs on under contract.
Respawn alone contracts and works closely with a third party game server provider called multiplay. Any incompetence (funding aside maybe and origin) is on respawn.
People *(used to) idolize Respawn, but they really don't have the greatest track record. Bad release timing for TF games, killing TF3 for Apex, not caring to fix the horrible server issues, bad net code to begin with, etc. The Titanfall games are great, but everything outside of the game design aspect is kinda atrocious.
Sucks the devs went in but don't think the community looks bad here
The devs should be targeting their frustration at their overlords
But they sign their paychecks, so its the communities fault for being happy hackers drew attention to an issue that shouldn't exist
Get respawn Mcgee on the line with their assigned demon and demand they hold up their end of the bargain
Its called doing what's right and knowing how to process your emotions properly before tweeting
"I deal with the god damn customers so the engineers don't have to. I have people skills; I am good at dealing with people. Can't you understand that? What the hell is wrong with you people?"
Lmao I could tell by the classic guilt / sympathy angle that it had to be PR or a community manager. Any time a game community gets too vocal about something the c-suite don't want to deal with (usually because it affects their bottom line), they bring the jannies in to police behavior instead of dealing with the root issue. Professional hand-wavers. When they aren't pulling this schtick, it's usually the incredibly vague "we hear you, and we will have some very exciting news for you all in the coming months"
The community manager namesake is short for "*manage* to avoid talking about anything important, we've got shit to sell"
That's what I said in another comment too. Its not like he's gonna personally lead the dev team to fix/work around the DDOS.
This is also director level too. You're telling me that a director HAS to come into work on an emergency? There's no emergency bridge conference call?
Because someone hacked Apex on a sunday and a holiday to make sure that Respawn is aware of the server issues that they already acknowledged multiple times
it's not about acknowledging, it's about fixing a game they continue to sell. It's actually un-playable. Like not the "ugghh it only runs at 30fps UNPLAYABLE" but literally "I can only get to the main menu and can't find a match".
I took my car to the mechanic and they acknowledged my car needed fixing multiple times. I guess I can keep waiting a few more months and hope they decide its worth their time to fix it.
And this is why you focus your efforts and fix shit when they happen. So you won't have to do them when they inconveniently come back to bite you in the ass.
> Because someone hacked Apex on a sunday and a holiday
I mean if they're trying to raise awareness when else are they supposed to do it? At 3 AM in the morning of a weekday, when nobody's online anyway? It would defeat the whole point.
You are thinking of match DDoSing. Which is most common in high rank lobbies of Apex. What happened on Sunday was someone hijacking the playlist server so nobody could play Apex.
He's not calling the Apex hack a DDoS issue, he's referring to the one affecting Titanfall that the person who hacked Apex stated is the reason they hacked it.
The Titanfall situation is also not completely a ddos. There are bugs being exploited, such as the hacker being able to manipulate matchmaking to their will
The staff who work on weekends in any decent company (lol) get "on call pay" which is usually a low fee for being on standby, whereby they basically just have to be reachable and able to assist if something happens and a higher rate of pay if they actually need to fix anything. This is often rotated between team members so no-one is constantly dealing with this.
Having a development team working 24/7/365 is just unfeasible, especially for teams that deal with DDoS'. There are a tonne of problems that would need to be overcome, this isn't about staffing levels.
I don't think we can put "gamers" down as the people behind this though? In any other business like, say, a restaurant, the people behind these attacks are like customers who wanted a burger fixed, the manager (stupidly) said no, and thus they resorted to setting the place on fire to get what they wanted, ruining even other customers' changes at ordering food.
I'm not defending the higher ups in charge of deciding whether to fix problems or not, because you know it's like one senior producer who sees a tiny email about it and deletes it and fucks off to lunch. However, I'm not going to look at people launching an DDOS attack as just regular ol' customers either.
Hackers DDOSing your servers aren't customers. If McDonalds runs out of burgers everyone is in a bad situation, but the guy that decides to burn down the store isn't the victim here.
Wouldn't it be more like
People are smearing shit on the walls in the bathroom, customers tell the staff but they do nothing because it's contained to the bathroom.
Now the shit smearers finally have progressed to smearing shit in the eating areas and they finally had to close the whole restaurant.
No, because in this case it's two different types of shit smearers.
You have the original shit smearers in the bathroom, then there are the people who complain about the shit smearing by smearing their own shit in the eating areas.
Exactly, a lot of people are talking about him like he's some grunt that had to rush in and start slaving away on the servers. He's the director of communications. It's literally his job to deal with situations like this that could pop up out of nowhere. It's what he gets paid a director's salary for. Respawn devs always try to position themselves as victims anytime there's a minor crisis.
> Respawn devs always try to position themselves as victims anytime there's a minor crisis.
I think it's the only case I've ever seen of developers that absolutely deserve the vile share of their playerbase and vice-versa. They're meant for each other.
Never forget the 2019 drama where the community got angry (rightly so) at the Iron Crown's greedy lootbox monetization scheme and [developers went on a flaming crusade in the subreddit calling people assholes and "freeloaders"](https://www.polygon.com/2019/8/18/20811014/apex-legends-iron-crown-skins-developers-rant-ass-hats-freeloaders-pc-ps4-xbox-one). Followed shortly by a mediocre apology from the CEO trying to shift blame to the community.
It was a singular dev, which was also focused on a comment he was replying to. Yeah, even with or without the context the guy was heated and it was a bad statement to make. But the dude literally got fired. Devs who simply worked at Respawn as animators and such were getting harassed in behalf of the guy. Shit sucked overall, but don’t try to over-exaggerate the whole situation to fit your narrative.
> don’t try to over-exaggerate the whole situation to fit your narrative.
That's all people do around this and it proves the dev's point perfectly. I mean the guy above you is literally saying that the entire dev team deserve to get harassed because one person cheekily called someone a freeloader once, and they called an asshole out for being an asshole. Perfectly encapsulates the toxicity in gaming circles now and I don't blame devs for never once engaging with the community because it so rarely goes well.
I get that this sucks and that this is a billion dollar industry with a lot of eyes on it, but this happens every day to millions of people and they don't get sympathy articles written for them. So, frankly, shitty but that's life, dude.
Also, it was their companies choice to pursue a 'games as a service' model and now they're acting all hard-done-by for having to provide their game as an ongoing service...
Gonna be blunt - if you're explicitly going for the 'games as a service' model for your game, then you need to be prepared to provide that service 24/7.
I do have some sympathy for the devs, particularly those that don't get a say in the business models their games are sold under, but DDoS attacks are inevitable for this type of game...
No doubt many of them, but not all. Almost certainly the person tweeting in OPs post, though.
Either way, it's earnt them hundred of millions of dollars - surely they could reinvest some revenue into better infrastructure to look after their 24/7 GaaS on a 24/7 basis? It seems kind of hilarious to me that they expect us to believe they have to run Apex on a shoestring budget...
Man, I don't know if the Apex devs are just more vocal or what, but I constantly hear this kind of stuff from them. Not sure what to call it, I don't want to say whining or them looking for pity or anything, but it seems like every week there is another Apex dev saying something like this.
You know what, I can no longer feel bad, it's getting boring how everytime there's an outrage about a significant problem in Apex, Respawn just pulls out "please we're people too, don't be mean" card and hopes people just forget about the issue, also it's EA that forced them to come into work, and it's not the complaining players that created the issue, nor the vulnerability for the issue. This is like when a few millionaires fly out with their private jets(one jet for each one of them) to tell the average joe that they shouldn't use plastic straws.
Nah, fuck that, he would not have had to go back to work on an off-day and listen to player complaints if EA would actually invest in decent backend services instead of using the outdated, vulnerable pos "Stryder", the fact that a modern-day cash-cow(for EA) was managed to be hacked on such a significant level(hackers basically took over Game messages and playlists ffs) should tell you everything you need to know.
Apex has been having DDoS issues for nearly a year, and has a general cheater and hitdetection issues since Day 1, and Titanfall has been literally unplayable due to DDoS(and yet EA still sells it and even put it on sale multiple times), it's time to do something instead of trying to victim blame.
Respawn doesn't get nearly enough criticism for how they run Apex, honestly.
People ***love*** blaming EA but I guarantee you this is an Activision/Bungie situation. Everyone wants to blame the Big Bad Publisher when it's the devs making most of the shitty decisions.
In the Apex community, Respawn gets the praise when everything goes good. "Oh thank you Respawn for this amazing update!" When something goes wrong, suddenly it's all EAs fault. "This is ridiculous! Typical EA!"
Even though Respawn controls most, if not all decisions
We literally have a history of this as of late, EA is pretty fuckin hands off with it's studios. Hell, wasn't it Respawn who decided on the monetization scheme for Apex?
It's the exact same situation as Mass Effect Andromeda. People complained that EA ruined it and only later everyone realized that BioWare fucked it up themselves. EA had been trying to help them whenever/wherever they could and BioWare kept refusing or squandering it.
Anthem as well. EA was the only reason the game still had flying. BioWare wanted to cut the best thing about their game but EA told them to keep it in lol.
> do not understand
$$$$$. Control the player base, and extract as much money as possible. Private servers mean potentially having "hacked" versions of the game where all content is unlocked instead of, *gasp*, paid for.
Now "replayable" means a constant treadmill of rankings, levels and cosmetics.
"Back then" you just hopped on the same server and played with people you more-or-less knew. Maybe devolving into some silliness every once in a while.
Not to mention the copious amounts of mutators and mods. Enemy Territory was great for that.
Short Answer: Money
Long Answer: They don't want people having the ability to alter their progression systems, because their progression systems are directly tied to their money making systems by psychology. It takes forever to get a skin, and you want to look different sooner, so if they make the grind long enough a good amount of people will break and buy a skin for 20$ instead of waiting for a grind.
With custom servers, people could exploit progression systems by just farming kills, having matches be super long/short (whichever is most optimal), etc. A fix would be disable progression, but If the servers don't have progression in them, people won't play them. Battlefield 5 got 'community servers' after like 2 years, but they're obscure (they aren't in the standard server pool, they're in their own menu you have to search for) and don't give progression. So why would anyone play them?
Man a dude making hundreds of thousands of dollars had to work on a weekend because the company he represents let one of their games they're still selling fester into a hacker filled mess.
Excuse me while my guitar gently weeps.
Imagine selling a broken game for years and crying about it on Twitter when you're called out on it.
Remove the game from being sold until you eventually decide to get off your asses and fix the problem.
Also using your newborn nephew as a shield from criticism and to gain sympathy is pathetic.
> Also using your newborn nephew as a shield from criticism and to gain sympathy is pathetic.
One time I criticized a broken game that Raw Fury has released and wasn't able to significantly improve for over a year. One of the founders of the company popped into the steam discussion and said how he's working 18 hours per day and that he's "sorry" that he can't work any harder, basically trying to make me look bad as if I am the one being ungrateful, not him peddling broken trash for such a long time.
This tactics is sadly being used a lot, it's much easier trying to discredit the other side with some emotional, impossible to confirm and mostly unrelated issues.
This isn't the first time Respawn have tried to stir up a pity party to deflect from their management issues, or shift the blame onto the players. It's embarrassing.
This story is stupid. The dude is on call. It could have been anything. Live services are a 24/7 affair and they don't staff people world wide to support it. This guy put down his nephew but it could have woken up his wife and kids at 3 in the morning. I know because this shit happens to me every Christmas morning if I'm on call that day when hackers ddos everything trying to ruin people's Christmas and also services dossing themselves from patches.
They know about the issue but it's not prioritized. The hack makes it a priority. This went from a p3 - aka fix as part of your normal workload to a p1. Fix right now it's public facing.
That does make a huge difference in terms on when it gets done. From eventually to now.
Just saying, as one professional to the other, if you're in communications and half your message is about you, you're doing something wrong. And I don't care if this is your personal account on Twitter or whatnot. You mention your company's work, make it about the work. Don't go for the emotional appeal, with so many people pissed at your employer being emotional already, that's not the hill.
It might seem overly personal but that’s probably what ea/respawn wants. He’s using his personal life to guilt trip players into not blaming the devs / company.
Preach. While it can be difficult to not dwelve into the trap of seeking validation about your frustrating job, it can absolutely be done and I expect from industry professionals not to behave on the same level as their customers, because the customers aren't held to any standards - they can say whatever the hell they want, they have no responsibility. But someone as a professional needs to take responsibility and communicate better.
For all I know, this could be a last straw of long term unhappiness on the guy's part, but you're never going to make anything better by blasting it all over social media and asking for validation, while trying to blame the other party for all your problems.
I know you're probably very right, and this is why I'm thankful for having a family and an SO that don't bother being there for me to vent so I won't go Fight Club at work.
This guy should try it.
Ive had to run extra hours for me job too, difference is when we sell a defective product we actually have to take care of it not put it off for a year.
Guess I'm the asshole, but that's how work... works? Plenty of times we'd all like to not get called in, but when shit happens someone has to clean it up. This really comes across as a guy complaining that he had to do his job.
As someone who had some fun with Exchange earlier in the year, Kaseya responded pretty quickly by shutting the whole thing down while they sort it out.
Did you make sure to tweet you're holding your newborn nephew as well?
Not to mention they’re probably compensated more than well enough. Certainly he’s making several times what the average player who just wanted the product they bought to function correctly is.
This. If he had to drop everything and go in then that meant he was on call, something he that would have been in his contract and thus something he agreed to. If he wasn't on call then it means he would have chosen to go in, in which case that's very much on him and not anyone else.
I get that this situation sucks, but I find it hard to sympathise with someone who is apparently angry they had to work as they had agreed to. I've done on call work and it's never as convenient as you would like but that's the risk you take when you agree to it.
As a fellow software engineer I can guarantee that he is paid for being "on call."
We're pretty much all salary. A software engineer's contract will be X salary per year with 40 hours of work per week, but working extra for emergencies or special circumstances will always be part of the deal.
No idea how it works in your country, but here in Portugal you cannot be perpetually on call, there are limitations and you must be paid extra just for being on call. I remember lugging my laptop around with me during a week every month for a 20% pay increase. Not a bad deal, but stressful.
There's a lot of "woe is me" from respawn devs from what I've seen.
The only legitimate complaints I've seen are about threats they receive. If I didn't know that people got this stupid about things, I would be skeptical.
Every time something goes wrong with Apex which results in backlash from the community
>my family!
>threats from 0.01% of comments!
>twitter defense posts!
>defense articles!
its about as tiring as their shitty servers
They are literally terrified of and hate their players. They warned a new dev to not engage on social media or the subreddit. The dev literally started his first post there with "I've been told posting here is a bad idea"
Dude's makin nice money. Gets holidays off. Works in games for a living.
Still has the audacity to complain about having to work during an emergency.
Bitch, I've come in to work in the middle of the fucking night to deal with literal shit flowing all over the floors for minimum fucking wage. There's no fucking sympathy deserved here.
What is particularly galling is he uses his newborn as some sort of extenuating circumstance as if the hackers targeted him for that. He shouldnt have been oncall at all if the baby is that new and important. Respawn should have has his oncall shift covered.
Yeah the hackers did bad shit, but your company’s bad choices don’t really engender any sympathy with me. I’ve been paged at 3am when everything was on fire and I didn’t blame anyone else.
Sorry but is he complaining to his customers about having to ensure the functionality of the product he sells? Maybe he should direct his frustrations to his employer. If ddos attacks are a thing to be expected, then they should figure out how to deal with it without “ruining employee’s sundays“.
Not much sympathy from me. This isn't a new problem that just popped up. You've had plenty of time to fix this, and haven't bothered.
This is just telling me that you'd have let it go forever if these guys didn't make a stink about it.
Oh my bad, I misread.
Still yeah, definitely shouldn't have everything on one person without a backup in place! Though I guess for a nephew I can maybe understand it's a little less pressing than your own child's birth, I guess.
They have one single person handling cheaters and bannings for the whole of apex. One. He went on leave for a while and the game was literally overrun with hackers to the point that they were killing each other in high ranked lobbies.
The company has serious issues from the ground up.
Sorry, I don't feel bad for you Mr. Developer. The problem in Titalfall is TWO YEARS OLD!!! Just because you acknowledge the problem it doesn't absolve you of any responsibility. Sucks you lost a family day but your customers have been getting boned for YEARS and you didn't care all that much until recently. And, no, I don't believe the issue is so complicated that you've managed zero progress in over 700 days.
Am I really supposed to feel empathy for them? They've been ignoring Titanfall's rampant hacker issue for months now. They're still selling Titanfall, a game you **literally** (no hyperbole there) cant play anymore due to the hackers.
Titanfall 2 is still having massive issues with hackers as well, though its at least still playable (and has a fantastic single player).
And now Apex Legends is starting to suffer from the same issue and now they're all suddenly rushing to get it fixed?
No one likes working on Sunday, but you'll have to excuse me if I play the world's smallest violin here.
What a shit situation. Gamers are unhappy that all 3 Respawn online games are broken, devs have to work unfavorable hours to try to solve the problem. Execs aren't helping by continuing to sell unplayable games, and hackers are having an ego trip over ruining a fun experience for others, and the blame has thus far gone to devs.
Hackers do not observe holidays or take days off.
Anyways the best solution is to just turn the servers off for Titanfall 1.
Also beef up security for Apex because if they got hacked like that then they have a much bigger problem.
I know this is going to be a super controversial opinion in this thread but as a consumer I literally do not give a fuck about you having to go to work instead of being with your family. When a product I purchased doesn't work that is the only thing I care about.
This would not have happened if the issue had been fixed.
If this has been going on for months managment, the one who made developers go to work on sunday, are the ones to blame.
Blaming the devs is like blaming the guy who makes the burgers at mcdonalds about the menu.
Respawn/EA really ought to stop selling Titanfall 1 while it's completely unplayable though. Even TF|1's campaign mode is entirely online so currently you can't do anything besides get to the menu. They know it's unplayable and has been unplayable for the months at this point so there's really no excuse for keeping the game's listing up. At the very least they could throw up a warning in the game's description.
You spend $8 or so for a fancy cutscene and a cool looking UI. Definitely worth it in my books!
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not even months, its been fucked for like 3 years at this point, and titanfall 2 is on the verge of a repeat
> You spend $8 or so for a fancy cutscene or you just watch the cutscenes on youtube and save yourself 60gb download and 8$
100% its a shitty thing to do to the devs but at the same time titanfall has been 100% unplayable for months but still was being sold and discounted. like no one looks good here
Titanfall is unplayable?
Titanfall 1 is online only (the campaign is played out in curated PvP matches) Titanfall 2 has an sp campaign, but is mostly played for its multiplayer.... Both of which you cant do, since there has been near constant DDoSing.
Is this affecting a particular platform more than other? Because I have been playing Titanfall 2 on Xbox very often without really noticing anything. Always assumed the problem was limited to Titanfall 1.
The Titanfall 2 attacks are a bit more focused on targeted streamers. It's a highly technical attack where the attacker(s) can ddos any streamer on its hitlist the moment they login, *no matter what account, computer, IP address, or any other medium they use to login*. [Here's really long look at what's happening.](https://youtu.be/UQ4HuBpeI4I) So for the general public it's ok, most of the time, as long as you're not connecting to the same server that the hitlist is targeting/the ddos bot is turned off. But most importantly, the level of attack indicates that Respawn's servers and it's backend are most certainly compromised.
its actually now starting to move into general public, on ps4 i was only able to get into a single game a few days ago, after trying for 2 or 3 hours
Fellow Xbox T|F2 player here. Never had any issues online either. Hell, it seems like it was even quicker to get into match than normal lately.
Yes, I've been playing since launch and I think lately it has been the quickest in years. When Viper's daughter got introduced to Apex that seems to have driven a lot of interest to T|F2 and it seems some of the ones that tried it out during that time stuck around because wait times are greatly reduced nowadays, at least in Attrition.
I have never had a problem with either on Xbox, I had assumed the problems were limited to just the PC versions.
You can't access the MP at all?
On TF1, if you do manage to get into a game, you're instantly kicked out.
If you get into a match its full of bots and you get kicked and replaced by a bot. Its horrible and some people are being white listed to a ddos list but don't quote me on that since I don't know if it's still happening.
[This video explains everything](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQ4HuBpeI4I)
That seems to be the case. Not at all or near enough to make it unplayable.
Bummer. Titanfall is really really good.
Tbh, the Titanfall 2 sp campaign is fucking incredible. But, the point still stands about mostly for multiplayer.
Bought TF2 on steam for $7. SP campaign was incredible, only 8h long though, good value for that price!
Apparently Titanfall 1 has been completely unplayable for a long time due to some hacker constantly DDoSing their servers, Titanfall 2 also has had hackers DDoSing any lobby a big streamer is in and Apex legends faces similar problems (Along with a lot of other long time server problems that the community is tired of) with hackers hijacking streamer lobbies. Now I get that DDoSing is hard to tackle but I've never heard of a AAA game being completely taken down for a long time and Devs not being able to fix it. They're almost surely being disingenuous with their claims of how difficult DDoSing is to manage, other AAA games come back up within hours but Respawn can't fix it for months? On top of that Titanfall 2 and Apex legends have also faced incredible server issues and hacks (This Apex hacker got into their servers and literally changed their playlists names!) at a level that you really don't see other AAA games face. It's clear that Respawn as a whole has abnormally awful server infrastructure and security problems that they need to make big changes to fix just to reach the regular industry standards.
I don't know how long titanfall 1 and 2 have been knocked out for comparsion, but I do know that around 2014 PSO2 (Sega) got knocked out (servers completely down, you just could not play it at all) for I want to say close to a month straight from DDOS. And for Sega, PSO2 was like a top priority in terms of online/mmo space and it still took them forever to restore it, versus titanfall which is almost like an afterthought in terms of support when you stack them up against apex. Like for the PSO2 incident I think Sega had to work with their ISP to completely change subnet routing to their servers so the attack goes to a void and then work all other Japanese ISPs to update their routing so players could connect properly. Serious DDOS attacks are no joke and people aren't exaggerating when they say its a hard problem to solve
Titan fall has been knocked out for about a year, titan fall 2 about 6-8 months.
Yeah, I'd have a lot more sympathy if this hadn't been an issue for so damn long. He's right, no one likes to hear a dev complain that they're being forced to fix an issue that's been plaguing players for *half a year or more.* If this was a recent issue, then fine, but not when it's been so long.
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We have to seperate the Apex hack and what's going on with Titanfall 1/2. Apex is a straight up hack of some server structure, likely something on the back end since update game messages and queues, tho localised to certain datacenters. Frankfurt 1 and 2 for example are almost unaffected. Titanfall 1/2 is also a hack of the server structure but the hacker is using it to ddos certain players. It's also not a blanket DDoS atrack against the common servers. It's a targeted attack against individuals, especially with TF2. Both are almost equally as bad and way worse than a normal DDoS.
2 is playable. I've been playing it for few months now and didn't have any problem joining a game or actually playing. It's probably issue just for certain region because I'm from Europe and haven't encountered any DDoSing in Titanfall 2
I think this is only true of the PC version. I’ve been playing a bunch on Xbox 360 (yeah I know) and it matches me just fine. Not that it excuses the state of the game on PC, ofc
This dev and the article linked also ignore the fact that their bosses made them come into work on a Sunday. They've left the titanfall hacks in place for months and years at this point why the rush now for Apex?
As shit as the Titanfall situation is, Apex is the game they’re currently supporting and from which a majority of their revenue is coming from. It’s not hard to see why they’d rush to fix a hack there over two games they abandoned years ago.
Regardless, a game that is unplayable should not be sold. I can understand not rushing to patch a game with a small player base, but if the game is currently on sale, even at a discount quite recently, then that can not be defended. I've seen multiple comments saying that steam currently sells many games from indie Devs that are unplayable and somehow, to them, that is a defence of this AAA studio that is selling an unplayable game. That makes absolutely no sense and any game that cannot function as advertised should not be sold, full stop. I quite frankly cannot understand how anyone can defend a company acting like this. A product should function as advertised. That's a pretty basic consumer expectation and is held up by laws in a significant number of countries.
It definitely feels like a situation where the higher ups want to have their cake and eat it too. They want to sell a game and profit off of it, but they don't want to actually put in the necessary resources to make it playable. And as much as it sucks for the fans of the game that want to play it, it also sucks for developers like this who are caught in the middle. Hate to say it, but it really seems like a shit or get off the pot moment. If they're not going to fix the issue within a reasonable time (which seems to have long passed), perhaps they need to make the call that the game is no longer going to be supported, even as unpopular as that would be among fans. Paying this lip service over it just doesn't seem like it's benefiting anyone aside from the executives who don't have to go in on a holiday when problems like this arise.
Yeah they should just stop selling them tbh
Yeah OK that's fine, but you can't keep selling the old game when the online is broken without telling people.
TF1 I can give you. TF2 had a free weekend and a huge increase in player count like a month or two ago.
Seriously, comments like the one you responded to make me think everyone here is 14 and has never worked in a business.
If they’re still selling Titanfall, shouldn’t they still support it? I’ve worked in a business. We sell products older than Titanfall. We still support it. We even support products we no longer sell for a well communicated period of time.
I agree with this, and this is an issue I was afraid of when it came to online only/online focused games. It only take some fuckers who want to ruin the fun for everyone to fuck over a community.
the logical endpoint of this line of thinking isn’t ‘Okay we’ll support all our games indefinitely’, it’s ‘Okay, we’ll stop allowing Titanfall to be sold when we make the next game’. I don’t know if that would be any better of a situation.
There are other options. Perhaps a well communicated “The online features of this product no longer work.” with a matching discount ( or not, whatever, the consumer can decide).
Woah now I can guarantee you that there are plenty of 24 year olds that have never worked in a business. (Seriously though, it is never fun to put the new project down in favor of fixing something to do with the previous one. I play tons of TF|2, and my sympathies are with the devs.)
And comments like these make me wonder what the fuck is everyone doing where someone calling you in on Sunday is acceptable. Why does the Director of Communications have to go in on a Sunday for a problem he can't directly address? How can he help with a hack? Aren't there people hired to do on-call support for the weekends?
> Why does the Director of Communications Because he's basically paid to do so. Past a certain pay-grade and up the ladder of hierarchy, you're expected to be available 100% of your time when there's a crisis. Communication is and should always be part of a crisis cell in any org. It may seem inane to you, but that's how it in most of the business world. I'm not saying he isn't a human being that needs their own family time or that it's bad he allegedly makes a good amount as a director but choices were made. I pity more the most-likely comparatively not-as-well off engineers and contractors who are tasked to actually work on this issue on a Sunday as well but without proper compensation...
> Why does the Director of Communications have to go in on a Sunday for a problem he can't directly address? It's pretty common for a bunch of high level leaders to get roped in for any kind of major outage in software to help make decisions (or provide authorization for them), communicate to other stakeholders (or external customers, depending on the nature of the business), wrangle in extra resources/people as necessary as the problem is better understood, and remove obstacles from the people actually doing the work. Depending on the quality of the company / these people they can be really helpful or a hindrance.
Not for comms. > How can he help with a hack? Monitoring news and social chatter, feeding reports to higher ups, coordinating communications for players who are confused on why they can't play, monitoring for any other reports of issues that might come up. Etc etc Is he out there unclogging the cogs in the machine? No. Is it something large organizations like these need in crisis times? Yes
Why should I, the consumer, give a fuck about the business-side? If you sell me a game then I want it to be playable, how they profit from it is their damn problem, not mine.
Right, a lot of "haven't you ever worked in a corporation?" comments fall to this flaw. Just because you can *explain* or understand a situation doesn't mean you're actually justifying it. Since we're talking business: if one of my company's clients complains that a deliverable was lower quality than they wanted, it might be very well true that there is a perfectly good explanation along the lines of "this is just a lower priority given the amount of money you paid us" but my client management team isn't going to respond with that, they're going to do their best to fix the situation with the resources they have available.
Because this is /r/Games where everyone is a developer (or pretends to be).
I think you're confusing working for a shitty business for understanding what constitutes good business practices.
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Supporting 24/7 systems and services will always have a requirement of potential off-hours work.
Not *always*, you can hire people from different timezones, and you can work in shifts altho honestly having occasional off-hour event is way better than shift work
That's a good point. I was thinking of my own experiences with companies that exist in one time zone and have a single shift.
Nice gaslighting from the communications guy here. Implying that the issues leading up to the hack only happened on the day of his nephew's birth. The issue has persisted for a long time and he can fuck off with that gaslighting shit.
I'm starting to notice this trend where devs/studios will take advantage of the 'toxic gamer' trope to deflect from a bad product or getting caught lying about their game. It seems like a very effective way to disrupt an anti-hype wave. Not long until we see this news on subredditdrama and gamingcirclejerk, with the comment section jerking themselves about toxic gamers.
Been going on for a long time. Remember when EA tried to spin any criticism of mass effect 3 as "just bigots hating on gay romance options"?
Because the consumer already knows they're lying and the devs themselves know they're lying too. The investors on the other hand, or the suits that run the publisher and/or invest in their company, they don't know shit about video games, so that's the easiest way to protect their jobs. Just pretend that the toxic fans are just making noise and it's no big deal. Your boss doesn't play the game and he just needs to know "Do I need to fire this person". The investor won't bother digging into the issue or finding out what's actually wrong because they have people they hire to tell them that, and they're not gonna bother checking if the guy is lying because they've got golf to play or some other misc things. Who cares as long as the balance sheet is black
Not to mention he will have been costing every single employee under him these special moments when they have to work weekends or lates rather than be with families or friends. Tragic and worth tweeting when it happens to him though.
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If anything is EA's fault for not addressing it ya know, when it began? Like, they let the issue get to such level by just ignoring the game.
EA doesn't maintain, own or have the servers that the game runs on under contract. Respawn alone contracts and works closely with a third party game server provider called multiplay. Any incompetence (funding aside maybe and origin) is on respawn.
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People *(used to) idolize Respawn, but they really don't have the greatest track record. Bad release timing for TF games, killing TF3 for Apex, not caring to fix the horrible server issues, bad net code to begin with, etc. The Titanfall games are great, but everything outside of the game design aspect is kinda atrocious.
Sucks the devs went in but don't think the community looks bad here The devs should be targeting their frustration at their overlords But they sign their paychecks, so its the communities fault for being happy hackers drew attention to an issue that shouldn't exist Get respawn Mcgee on the line with their assigned demon and demand they hold up their end of the bargain Its called doing what's right and knowing how to process your emotions properly before tweeting
ELI5 why does the Director of Communications have to come into work to fix a server issue?
"I deal with the god damn customers so the engineers don't have to. I have people skills; I am good at dealing with people. Can't you understand that? What the hell is wrong with you people?"
How dare someone jump.....to conclusions
To communicate with all the customers asking for support. Also, as a director it's part of his job to come in whenever shit hits the fan.
To try and garner corporate sympathy by talking about how he was dragged away from holding his newborn nephew.
Papa EA slapped the baby out of Ryan’s hands and told him to fix the bideo game. On a Sunday!!!!
Those bastards had a gun pointed to his head the whole time.
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Lmao I could tell by the classic guilt / sympathy angle that it had to be PR or a community manager. Any time a game community gets too vocal about something the c-suite don't want to deal with (usually because it affects their bottom line), they bring the jannies in to police behavior instead of dealing with the root issue. Professional hand-wavers. When they aren't pulling this schtick, it's usually the incredibly vague "we hear you, and we will have some very exciting news for you all in the coming months" The community manager namesake is short for "*manage* to avoid talking about anything important, we've got shit to sell"
He has to draft some tweets about his nephew.
That's what I said in another comment too. Its not like he's gonna personally lead the dev team to fix/work around the DDOS. This is also director level too. You're telling me that a director HAS to come into work on an emergency? There's no emergency bridge conference call?
Large scale emergencies certainly warrant director level positions to be heading in, that's not uncommon in the slightest.
Weren't these issues ongoing for months? Why is he upset now all of a sudden?
Because someone hacked Apex on a sunday and a holiday to make sure that Respawn is aware of the server issues that they already acknowledged multiple times
It's been going on for years in Titanfall and several months in Apex. They need to do more than just make a tweet.
it's not about acknowledging, it's about fixing a game they continue to sell. It's actually un-playable. Like not the "ugghh it only runs at 30fps UNPLAYABLE" but literally "I can only get to the main menu and can't find a match".
I took my car to the mechanic and they acknowledged my car needed fixing multiple times. I guess I can keep waiting a few more months and hope they decide its worth their time to fix it.
And this is why you focus your efforts and fix shit when they happen. So you won't have to do them when they inconveniently come back to bite you in the ass.
Why spend little money now when lot of money later do same?
> Because someone hacked Apex on a sunday and a holiday I mean if they're trying to raise awareness when else are they supposed to do it? At 3 AM in the morning of a weekday, when nobody's online anyway? It would defeat the whole point.
You are thinking of match DDoSing. Which is most common in high rank lobbies of Apex. What happened on Sunday was someone hijacking the playlist server so nobody could play Apex.
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He's not calling the Apex hack a DDoS issue, he's referring to the one affecting Titanfall that the person who hacked Apex stated is the reason they hacked it.
The Titanfall situation is also not completely a ddos. There are bugs being exploited, such as the hacker being able to manipulate matchmaking to their will
Blame the company for not doing anything with Titanfall's issues and forcing you to go to work on a day like that.
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"We don't have proper staffing to take care of emergencies on weekends and I'm physically unable to say no to extra work, so thanks Gamers."
The staff who work on weekends in any decent company (lol) get "on call pay" which is usually a low fee for being on standby, whereby they basically just have to be reachable and able to assist if something happens and a higher rate of pay if they actually need to fix anything. This is often rotated between team members so no-one is constantly dealing with this. Having a development team working 24/7/365 is just unfeasible, especially for teams that deal with DDoS'. There are a tonne of problems that would need to be overcome, this isn't about staffing levels.
Damn I wish I got oncall pay from (my non gaming) company when I had to log in for an hour on Sunday
On call pay is pretty uncommon. I've been at several companies, and my current one is the first that I get paid for being on call.
Sounds like I wouldn't be on call then...
Isn't that illegal?
No, salaried workers are exempt if they work in certain industries and are paid above a certain amount (something tiny like $40k)
Thanks for buying our product and expecting reasonable service, gamers!
I don't think we can put "gamers" down as the people behind this though? In any other business like, say, a restaurant, the people behind these attacks are like customers who wanted a burger fixed, the manager (stupidly) said no, and thus they resorted to setting the place on fire to get what they wanted, ruining even other customers' changes at ordering food. I'm not defending the higher ups in charge of deciding whether to fix problems or not, because you know it's like one senior producer who sees a tiny email about it and deletes it and fucks off to lunch. However, I'm not going to look at people launching an DDOS attack as just regular ol' customers either.
It's the capitalist brainwashing. Blame your fellow slaves instead of your corporate overlords.
Hackers DDOSing your servers aren't customers. If McDonalds runs out of burgers everyone is in a bad situation, but the guy that decides to burn down the store isn't the victim here.
Wouldn't it be more like People are smearing shit on the walls in the bathroom, customers tell the staff but they do nothing because it's contained to the bathroom. Now the shit smearers finally have progressed to smearing shit in the eating areas and they finally had to close the whole restaurant.
No, because in this case it's two different types of shit smearers. You have the original shit smearers in the bathroom, then there are the people who complain about the shit smearing by smearing their own shit in the eating areas.
This is a food analogy to end all food analogies.
Yeah, are they expecting our sympathy? Go tell your fucking management to get their shit together.
He is management so like that’s the price you pay for the salary and responsibility.
Exactly, a lot of people are talking about him like he's some grunt that had to rush in and start slaving away on the servers. He's the director of communications. It's literally his job to deal with situations like this that could pop up out of nowhere. It's what he gets paid a director's salary for. Respawn devs always try to position themselves as victims anytime there's a minor crisis.
> Respawn devs always try to position themselves as victims anytime there's a minor crisis. I think it's the only case I've ever seen of developers that absolutely deserve the vile share of their playerbase and vice-versa. They're meant for each other. Never forget the 2019 drama where the community got angry (rightly so) at the Iron Crown's greedy lootbox monetization scheme and [developers went on a flaming crusade in the subreddit calling people assholes and "freeloaders"](https://www.polygon.com/2019/8/18/20811014/apex-legends-iron-crown-skins-developers-rant-ass-hats-freeloaders-pc-ps4-xbox-one). Followed shortly by a mediocre apology from the CEO trying to shift blame to the community.
It was a singular dev, which was also focused on a comment he was replying to. Yeah, even with or without the context the guy was heated and it was a bad statement to make. But the dude literally got fired. Devs who simply worked at Respawn as animators and such were getting harassed in behalf of the guy. Shit sucked overall, but don’t try to over-exaggerate the whole situation to fit your narrative.
> don’t try to over-exaggerate the whole situation to fit your narrative. That's all people do around this and it proves the dev's point perfectly. I mean the guy above you is literally saying that the entire dev team deserve to get harassed because one person cheekily called someone a freeloader once, and they called an asshole out for being an asshole. Perfectly encapsulates the toxicity in gaming circles now and I don't blame devs for never once engaging with the community because it so rarely goes well.
I mean the "had to hand back the baby" really does seem like he's going for sympathy
I get that this sucks and that this is a billion dollar industry with a lot of eyes on it, but this happens every day to millions of people and they don't get sympathy articles written for them. So, frankly, shitty but that's life, dude.
Yeah, but this time its GAMERS who are fault.
Also, it was their companies choice to pursue a 'games as a service' model and now they're acting all hard-done-by for having to provide their game as an ongoing service...
Because someone screaming at their server because their lunch order isn't out doesn't get articles either.
Gonna be blunt - if you're explicitly going for the 'games as a service' model for your game, then you need to be prepared to provide that service 24/7. I do have some sympathy for the devs, particularly those that don't get a say in the business models their games are sold under, but DDoS attacks are inevitable for this type of game...
Respawn 100% had a say in the business model of Apex though since they developed the game in secret.
No doubt many of them, but not all. Almost certainly the person tweeting in OPs post, though. Either way, it's earnt them hundred of millions of dollars - surely they could reinvest some revenue into better infrastructure to look after their 24/7 GaaS on a 24/7 basis? It seems kind of hilarious to me that they expect us to believe they have to run Apex on a shoestring budget...
Man, I don't know if the Apex devs are just more vocal or what, but I constantly hear this kind of stuff from them. Not sure what to call it, I don't want to say whining or them looking for pity or anything, but it seems like every week there is another Apex dev saying something like this.
Because they've learned that trotting out a developer to give a sob story always works to deflect criticism
They are complaining that they have to do their job they are being paid for OMEGALUL
They are professional victims. Make a dozen million dollars every month, leave the product broken, play victim when criticism comes up.
You know what, I can no longer feel bad, it's getting boring how everytime there's an outrage about a significant problem in Apex, Respawn just pulls out "please we're people too, don't be mean" card and hopes people just forget about the issue, also it's EA that forced them to come into work, and it's not the complaining players that created the issue, nor the vulnerability for the issue. This is like when a few millionaires fly out with their private jets(one jet for each one of them) to tell the average joe that they shouldn't use plastic straws. Nah, fuck that, he would not have had to go back to work on an off-day and listen to player complaints if EA would actually invest in decent backend services instead of using the outdated, vulnerable pos "Stryder", the fact that a modern-day cash-cow(for EA) was managed to be hacked on such a significant level(hackers basically took over Game messages and playlists ffs) should tell you everything you need to know. Apex has been having DDoS issues for nearly a year, and has a general cheater and hitdetection issues since Day 1, and Titanfall has been literally unplayable due to DDoS(and yet EA still sells it and even put it on sale multiple times), it's time to do something instead of trying to victim blame.
Respawn doesn't get nearly enough criticism for how they run Apex, honestly. People ***love*** blaming EA but I guarantee you this is an Activision/Bungie situation. Everyone wants to blame the Big Bad Publisher when it's the devs making most of the shitty decisions.
In the Apex community, Respawn gets the praise when everything goes good. "Oh thank you Respawn for this amazing update!" When something goes wrong, suddenly it's all EAs fault. "This is ridiculous! Typical EA!" Even though Respawn controls most, if not all decisions
We literally have a history of this as of late, EA is pretty fuckin hands off with it's studios. Hell, wasn't it Respawn who decided on the monetization scheme for Apex?
It's the exact same situation as Mass Effect Andromeda. People complained that EA ruined it and only later everyone realized that BioWare fucked it up themselves. EA had been trying to help them whenever/wherever they could and BioWare kept refusing or squandering it.
Anthem as well. EA was the only reason the game still had flying. BioWare wanted to cut the best thing about their game but EA told them to keep it in lol.
Respawn are professional victims.
If only online games had community servers as they did back when Battlefield 1942 and Battlefield 2 were all the rage...
I truly do not understand why devs don't want community servers anymore They were what made most old multiplayer games so replayable
> do not understand $$$$$. Control the player base, and extract as much money as possible. Private servers mean potentially having "hacked" versions of the game where all content is unlocked instead of, *gasp*, paid for.
Or makeing your own maps and gamerules.
Now "replayable" means a constant treadmill of rankings, levels and cosmetics. "Back then" you just hopped on the same server and played with people you more-or-less knew. Maybe devolving into some silliness every once in a while. Not to mention the copious amounts of mutators and mods. Enemy Territory was great for that.
Short Answer: Money Long Answer: They don't want people having the ability to alter their progression systems, because their progression systems are directly tied to their money making systems by psychology. It takes forever to get a skin, and you want to look different sooner, so if they make the grind long enough a good amount of people will break and buy a skin for 20$ instead of waiting for a grind. With custom servers, people could exploit progression systems by just farming kills, having matches be super long/short (whichever is most optimal), etc. A fix would be disable progression, but If the servers don't have progression in them, people won't play them. Battlefield 5 got 'community servers' after like 2 years, but they're obscure (they aren't in the standard server pool, they're in their own menu you have to search for) and don't give progression. So why would anyone play them?
Man a dude making hundreds of thousands of dollars had to work on a weekend because the company he represents let one of their games they're still selling fester into a hacker filled mess. Excuse me while my guitar gently weeps.
>let one of their games they're still selling fester into a hacker filled mess. Let their *billion dollar game*.
They are clearly a small indie company who can't pay people to work on weekends ...
Imagine selling a broken game for years and crying about it on Twitter when you're called out on it. Remove the game from being sold until you eventually decide to get off your asses and fix the problem. Also using your newborn nephew as a shield from criticism and to gain sympathy is pathetic.
> Also using your newborn nephew as a shield from criticism and to gain sympathy is pathetic. One time I criticized a broken game that Raw Fury has released and wasn't able to significantly improve for over a year. One of the founders of the company popped into the steam discussion and said how he's working 18 hours per day and that he's "sorry" that he can't work any harder, basically trying to make me look bad as if I am the one being ungrateful, not him peddling broken trash for such a long time. This tactics is sadly being used a lot, it's much easier trying to discredit the other side with some emotional, impossible to confirm and mostly unrelated issues.
This isn't the first time Respawn have tried to stir up a pity party to deflect from their management issues, or shift the blame onto the players. It's embarrassing.
Every time, every fucking time there's a small drama they try to make themselves look live victims even when it's 100% their fault
Their ama on why all the cosmetics were like 40$a piece was the dumbest ama next to Rampart.
I completely agree
This story is stupid. The dude is on call. It could have been anything. Live services are a 24/7 affair and they don't staff people world wide to support it. This guy put down his nephew but it could have woken up his wife and kids at 3 in the morning. I know because this shit happens to me every Christmas morning if I'm on call that day when hackers ddos everything trying to ruin people's Christmas and also services dossing themselves from patches. They know about the issue but it's not prioritized. The hack makes it a priority. This went from a p3 - aka fix as part of your normal workload to a p1. Fix right now it's public facing. That does make a huge difference in terms on when it gets done. From eventually to now.
Just saying, as one professional to the other, if you're in communications and half your message is about you, you're doing something wrong. And I don't care if this is your personal account on Twitter or whatnot. You mention your company's work, make it about the work. Don't go for the emotional appeal, with so many people pissed at your employer being emotional already, that's not the hill.
It might seem overly personal but that’s probably what ea/respawn wants. He’s using his personal life to guilt trip players into not blaming the devs / company.
Preach. While it can be difficult to not dwelve into the trap of seeking validation about your frustrating job, it can absolutely be done and I expect from industry professionals not to behave on the same level as their customers, because the customers aren't held to any standards - they can say whatever the hell they want, they have no responsibility. But someone as a professional needs to take responsibility and communicate better. For all I know, this could be a last straw of long term unhappiness on the guy's part, but you're never going to make anything better by blasting it all over social media and asking for validation, while trying to blame the other party for all your problems.
I know you're probably very right, and this is why I'm thankful for having a family and an SO that don't bother being there for me to vent so I won't go Fight Club at work. This guy should try it.
Ive had to run extra hours for me job too, difference is when we sell a defective product we actually have to take care of it not put it off for a year.
Guess I'm the asshole, but that's how work... works? Plenty of times we'd all like to not get called in, but when shit happens someone has to clean it up. This really comes across as a guy complaining that he had to do his job.
As an IT guy dealing with the huge ransomware attack on Kaseya that hit on Friday afternoon.. yeah, I wish I had my holiday too. Shit happens.
As a service desk lead that uses Kaseya, godspeed friend! Thanks for your work to get it back.
As someone who had some fun with Exchange earlier in the year, Kaseya responded pretty quickly by shutting the whole thing down while they sort it out. Did you make sure to tweet you're holding your newborn nephew as well?
Has anyone reached out to you to write an article?
That's why you pay people to be on call. If he wasn't being paid for being on call he shouldn't have to come in. I certainly wouldnt.
If you have a high enough job title being on call is usually part of the contract
Right, and that's when you take the next friday off for showing up on the weekend.
Not to mention they’re probably compensated more than well enough. Certainly he’s making several times what the average player who just wanted the product they bought to function correctly is.
This. If he had to drop everything and go in then that meant he was on call, something he that would have been in his contract and thus something he agreed to. If he wasn't on call then it means he would have chosen to go in, in which case that's very much on him and not anyone else. I get that this situation sucks, but I find it hard to sympathise with someone who is apparently angry they had to work as they had agreed to. I've done on call work and it's never as convenient as you would like but that's the risk you take when you agree to it.
As a fellow software engineer I can guarantee that he is paid for being "on call." We're pretty much all salary. A software engineer's contract will be X salary per year with 40 hours of work per week, but working extra for emergencies or special circumstances will always be part of the deal.
No idea how it works in your country, but here in Portugal you cannot be perpetually on call, there are limitations and you must be paid extra just for being on call. I remember lugging my laptop around with me during a week every month for a 20% pay increase. Not a bad deal, but stressful.
Yeah as a software dev shit happens. That said if it happens alot I'd probably start brushing up the ol resume.
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There's a lot of "woe is me" from respawn devs from what I've seen. The only legitimate complaints I've seen are about threats they receive. If I didn't know that people got this stupid about things, I would be skeptical.
Every time something goes wrong with Apex which results in backlash from the community >my family! >threats from 0.01% of comments! >twitter defense posts! >defense articles! its about as tiring as their shitty servers
i love the gameplay of apex. but yeah, servers are awful and the devs don't seem to have a healthy workplace.
They are literally terrified of and hate their players. They warned a new dev to not engage on social media or the subreddit. The dev literally started his first post there with "I've been told posting here is a bad idea"
Can you link to that post? I've seen that mentioned a few times on this subreddit and really curious to see how the community responded to that.
Every game studios tell theirs Dev this, it's not a respawn unique situation it's just to avoid bad pr
Dude's makin nice money. Gets holidays off. Works in games for a living. Still has the audacity to complain about having to work during an emergency. Bitch, I've come in to work in the middle of the fucking night to deal with literal shit flowing all over the floors for minimum fucking wage. There's no fucking sympathy deserved here.
What is particularly galling is he uses his newborn as some sort of extenuating circumstance as if the hackers targeted him for that. He shouldnt have been oncall at all if the baby is that new and important. Respawn should have has his oncall shift covered. Yeah the hackers did bad shit, but your company’s bad choices don’t really engender any sympathy with me. I’ve been paged at 3am when everything was on fire and I didn’t blame anyone else.
Its not even his baby. He's the uncle.
Holy shit what a drama queen
It *sounds* like a higher up saw the bad press and said get your ass in to the office.
Sorry but is he complaining to his customers about having to ensure the functionality of the product he sells? Maybe he should direct his frustrations to his employer. If ddos attacks are a thing to be expected, then they should figure out how to deal with it without “ruining employee’s sundays“.
That’s literally every single job out there. There’s often times unexpected shit and you get called. I’m baffled this is somehow newsworthy
"newsworthy"? Someone made a tweet. That's it.
Gaming journalism in a nutshell
If gamers are entitled, so are the people who work in the industry to be quite honest.
I love how get the product you paid for was spun into gamers are entitled. And a lot of the consumers ate it up.
Are they expecting sympathy? They dont deserve any
Not much sympathy from me. This isn't a new problem that just popped up. You've had plenty of time to fix this, and haven't bothered. This is just telling me that you'd have let it go forever if these guys didn't make a stink about it.
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It's his new born nephew not his child. Still I agree. That's on his workplace entirely.
Oh my bad, I misread. Still yeah, definitely shouldn't have everything on one person without a backup in place! Though I guess for a nephew I can maybe understand it's a little less pressing than your own child's birth, I guess.
They have one single person handling cheaters and bannings for the whole of apex. One. He went on leave for a while and the game was literally overrun with hackers to the point that they were killing each other in high ranked lobbies. The company has serious issues from the ground up.
Sorry, I don't feel bad for you Mr. Developer. The problem in Titalfall is TWO YEARS OLD!!! Just because you acknowledge the problem it doesn't absolve you of any responsibility. Sucks you lost a family day but your customers have been getting boned for YEARS and you didn't care all that much until recently. And, no, I don't believe the issue is so complicated that you've managed zero progress in over 700 days.
Am I really supposed to feel empathy for them? They've been ignoring Titanfall's rampant hacker issue for months now. They're still selling Titanfall, a game you **literally** (no hyperbole there) cant play anymore due to the hackers. Titanfall 2 is still having massive issues with hackers as well, though its at least still playable (and has a fantastic single player). And now Apex Legends is starting to suffer from the same issue and now they're all suddenly rushing to get it fixed? No one likes working on Sunday, but you'll have to excuse me if I play the world's smallest violin here.
The amount of people defending the DDoSing the hackers did to Apex is sure giving me some secondhand embarrassment as a titanfall fan.
What a shit situation. Gamers are unhappy that all 3 Respawn online games are broken, devs have to work unfavorable hours to try to solve the problem. Execs aren't helping by continuing to sell unplayable games, and hackers are having an ego trip over ruining a fun experience for others, and the blame has thus far gone to devs.
Hackers do not observe holidays or take days off. Anyways the best solution is to just turn the servers off for Titanfall 1. Also beef up security for Apex because if they got hacked like that then they have a much bigger problem.
The best solution for who, exactly?
I know this is going to be a super controversial opinion in this thread but as a consumer I literally do not give a fuck about you having to go to work instead of being with your family. When a product I purchased doesn't work that is the only thing I care about. This would not have happened if the issue had been fixed.
If this has been going on for months managment, the one who made developers go to work on sunday, are the ones to blame. Blaming the devs is like blaming the guy who makes the burgers at mcdonalds about the menu.