Process-Oriented Culture

Posted on June 10, 2025 by David K.

I recently sat in a zoom call with about 10 other people, talking about a project that will eventually steal a lot of my thunder by co-opting a big part of something I have been doing, quite successfully for 5 years, using a new database using a different technology. Specifically, we’re talking about recreating my SQL database holding a bunch of engineering data with a Graph database. And, sure, it looks like there might be some advantages, but right now it’s about a wash, though I admit it may make it easier to implement things we aren’t even talking about yet. Maybe. Even if it does, will we ever get to them before the heat death of the universe? I digress. Anyway, after all these years, my successful little project has finally caught the fancy of someone who wants to take over and own the concept, and who has enough connections and political capital to try to make it happen.

Hey! I’ve seen this one before!

Sigh.

We’ve already been talking about this for about a year, and my boss and I only got involved with this team after they had already been working on the idea for a year before that. Using contractors, it had taken them roughly a year to do a proof of concept. I created my own PoC by bootstrapping my own graph DB with a bunch of scripts to convert my existing data, and doing an initial rewrite to get my import scripts and existing web app to interface with it. For comparison, it took me about four man-weeks to validate that this could work, see some of the advantages, and discover, to my surprise, that I couldn’t really argue against the switch. There seemed to be no downsides.

Now that there are several other groups involved, and we’ve finally got a gatekeeper from the ivory tower of corporate IT to walk our project through all the different reviews and approvals and signoffs. In essence, we’re looking good to start bringing up development environments in, oh, I don’t know, maybe another year or something. Honestly, we’re probably 3 years away from a working product. And if and when we finally get all this put together, and successfully run through the IT gauntlet, this new database — which is being designed for any number of arbitrary applications to hook into it — will have become part of the machine, and every other application that may try to use it will become mired in the tar pit when they try to get access to it.

As I sat in the call, I struggled to express how to characterize why this achingly over-complicated structure and process exists. But then I stumbled on this tweet:

Process-Orientation (vs. Results Orientation)

This results in companies that are process-oriented, rather than result-oriented.

The purpose of a process-oriented culture is to dilute responsibility so no one can be held accountable for failure.

Now, I had understood the second part of the quote for a long time, but the first part was the expression I was looking for. Process oriented, as opposed to results oriented. The rigamarole I’m going through is process oriented. The “work” we are doing is for the process, not the end result. The end result is an after-thought. A by-product. It’s not the goal.

Out of 10 people on the call, there were just two of us who had the slightest concern about having the working product at the end of the process to serve the needs of the business. Everyone else was there to be a cog in the machine which we will be required to crank to get this done. Diagrams to make. Reviews to complete. Documentation to verify. Web forms to fill out. Spreadsheets to create. Approvals to be granted. Resources to be assigned. Meetings, meetings, and more meetings.

None of them understand what my application does, how it solves a business need, why it’s a critical part of the engineering process now (which is a whole post on its own), or why it’s architected the way it is. None of them care about swapping out the database layer with something else, why that is attractive, or what it may help us do in the future. No one is curious about any of this, because that’s not what they’re paid for. They’re paid to check boxes that some high-dollar consultants told the company had to be checked when doing this kind of work.

At every step in the journey, there are entire departments that exist only to add to the complexity of the final project. Middleware. My god, middleware. Middleware between the app servers and the database. Middleware between the application and other applications. Middleware between the database and other databases. And then, after everything is setup according to all the white papers, every change will need to be approved by committees, and moved through each environment in turn.

Everyone involved from IT can point to “security” as the reason for all the hoops we have to jump through, but I hardly think that’s a fair assessment. The data we’re storing is not sensitive. It is not financial. There is no need for separation of responsibilities. It is not personal. There’s no call for privacy. This isn’t real-time data. There is no need to make it highly available. It’s just historical engineering data. There are no particular “secrets” involved. It’s just data. Mountains of data. It reveals nothing about our IP. It is useless without the code which is tuned with it. And even if it weren’t, it’s also prescribed by our particular hardware and implementation, which someone else wouldn’t be using, and very likely can’t. All in all, it would take a competitor far less time to generate their own data for their own code and hardware from first principles than to figure out what ours means. But we’re going to treat it as though it were literally all of these things, and apply every system of control and management at our disposal to it, because that’s just how things are done.

This whole thing is the literal antithesis of Agile. Which is only appropriate, since this company wrote a whole book on waterfall 25 years ago — which I actually reviewed as part of a consultancy, in a life-is-strange kind of coincidence — and despite using some new lingo here and there, every reporting structure and process in IT is still organized around this methodology.

Everything hinges on having a project number so that all of this internal IT work can be assigned a cost, and the money making departments can be charged. As if this were a thing that needed to be done in order to help the business meet the needs of, you know, their customers. This pernicious, stupid practice of internal “cross charges” effectively ended US leadership in manufacturing decades ago, yet here we are, still not imagining doing it any other way. Corporate America has still never gotten the memo, and now this managerial malfeasance strangles IT right along with engineering.

If you want to adapt to the times — er, adapt to the times 15 years ago — you can’t just throw the word “agile” around occasionally, and call it good. And you can’t even just change process. You have to change organization. The thing that’s implied by the “process oriented culture” is that these systems become entrenched by organizational structures, which give people with no skills or ideas a “kingdom” to rule over.

They do not exist to help in any way. And, boy howdy, they don’t! They don’t look at your project as subject-matter experts and point out things that could be done to help. They only exist to go through their checklists, and force every part of your stack to adhere to every known buzzword, regardless of applicability. They don’t even know why! They can only say no. They can only slow down the process. They can only hinder the implementation of a good idea. Unless you break up this ossification to align with modern principles, every new idea will continue to get put through the same soul-crushing process, waste literal man-decades of time, and take years longer to implement than it should.

Posted in Programming | Tagged | Leave a comment

My New Guru

Posted on June 10, 2025 by David K.

Seeing as my old guru turned out to be a con artist, I’ve been looking for new ones. This is Rodney Norman. I’ve gotten a lot of mileage out of this message lately.

It’s Up To You

On a more serious note, there’s a lot stoicism in his videos, and I’m finding this is resonating with a lot of the stuff I’m absorbing these days. There’s also a Zen angle here, which is ironic, since I was getting pretty deep into Zen in college before veering hard back to Christianity. I had hundreds of pages of notes and observations I was thinking about turning into a book about the similarities and overlap when I abandoned the effort to focus on my life after school.

When my health troubles started 4.5 years ago, I told my wife that I wasn’t “that guy.” I’m not the guy who pumps his chest and declares he’s going to beat the odds and be a shining example of positivity and calmness in the face of betrayal, confusion, and pain. And I’m still not. But 4.5 years later, I’m learning some techniques to play that guy in my head, at least.

Posted in Personal | Tagged | Leave a comment

The “Dead Internet” Theory is not a Theory

Posted on June 9, 2025 by David K.

The Wikipedia page on the Dead Internet Theory covers the general idea: Basically, half the traffic of the internet is fake. But then Wikipedia employs FUD to discourage the idea and make it seem that it’s not as bad as all that. You’re not fooling anyone, Wikipedia. (At least, not any more.) That’s just part of the theory.

Bad AI Bots Everywhere

If you have a Twitter account, it won’t take long for you to see this for yourself in the wild. The problem is astronomical there. Right now, this is test and development of AI. I get that. It’s going to be bad, and “they” know that, but it’s a learning process. Once the bots get good enough to not stand out like this, then they can be used for actual manipulation and influence.

Some day, I hope we get to see behind the curtain, and it becomes public who was doing these things, and why. I mean, to be certain, the CIA and KGB and China’s MSS are all doing it. I wonder if various investment banks are involved, like Blackrock, State Street, et. al., pushing markets around. I also wonder how much companies like Palatir are doing. There are so many competing campaigns running now, and at such scale, I doubt the human mind could really comprehend the full scope of all that is happening.

UPDATE TWO DAYS LATER:

Well, well, well. What do you know? Reddit mods caught Palantir in the act of astroturfing their platform.

“Get out of here, Palantir! This is OUR astroturfing sandbox. Just who do you think you are, anyway?”

Posted in Technology | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Class-Action Jokes, Now Even Funnier

Posted on June 9, 2025 by David K.

So, today, I’m trying to actually use two prepaid credit cards that I’ve gotten from class action lawsuits. One for $12.15, and one for $12.60. (Something about the numbers being so close to each other is another sketchy detail about how all of this works, but I digress.) I tried to load them into Amazon, thinking they would get used up in order, but no. You can only specify one credit card in Amazon, and neither of them have enough money on them to even cover a pack of gum these days.

I briefly toyed with the idea of deleting the details, and forgetting they exist, but then determined I was going to find a way to use them out of sheer spite. However, this raised the question of what happens to the money that gets “awarded” from class-action lawsuits but which never gets spent, thanks to how difficult they make it to do so. According to Claude, the answer is yet another layer of scummy grifting on top of several existing layers: the “fintech” companies that issue the pre-paid cards keep it.

So they get paid twice.

Of course.

Consumer protection laws don’t prevent pre-paid card providers from charging carrying fees, so the pittance you get from the settlement can be clawed back in a matter of months after the fees kick in.

Apparently, the only “fix” here is to “buy” Amazon gift cards with the pre-paid credit cards as soon as you get them, and then use that money when making a purchase. And after doing just that, I now see that I can “recharge my balance” of gift money on Amazon directly, without having to buy a gift card and then redeem it. I feel a little silly, but hey, this is my first rodeo.

After filling in the claim forms, and then filling out the pre-paid card forms, and now dealing with Amazon — trying to resubmit the order in various ways before finally canceling the previous order and starting all over from scratch — and getting dozens of emails about all of this — it’s probably cost me several hours to get and spend this money, but at least I’ve made sure that the tiny bit of money that is supposed to address whatever grievance I supposedly had is actually used by me, and not vacuumed up by yet another scummy late-stage-capitalism parasite.

While going through this, I estimated that half the money awarded probably got lost in all of this (and wound up in the pre-paid card providers’ pockets), but the previously-linked Claude conversation says it’s more like 85%-99%.

Unreal.

Posted in Aggravation | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Even More on the Capabilities of Current-Gen “AI”

Posted on May 28, 2025 by David K.

Another Twitter post led me to this Reddit post:

Further down in the comments, OP had this to say:

I copy-paste all of this for full context, but I want to emphasize this paragraph:

It tried a bunch of things before it had the breakthrough, but as you probably know it always said: “I found it! This is finally the root case of the problem!” but every AI does that on almost every prompt, so it wasn’t anything special. It was just another thing it did that I tested and noticed it worked without also regressing other stuff, and then I looked at it and compared it, and then realized what it did. Then I had to go and delete a bunch of other unnecessary changes that Opus also did that it insisted was good to leave in and it didn’t want to remove, but wasn’t actually pertinent to the issue.

Now, I make this sentiment on various social media sites so often that I have it as a shortcut on Mac and iOS: when I type, “reddits”, it autocompletes to say, “Reddit is a CCP-funded deep state psyop against a very specific demographic, and nothing on it should be taken at face value.” But in this case, it rings authentic. I deal with this most every day at this point.

A few years ago, a few Google searches would dig up StackOverflow answers and personal blog posts that specifically dealt with whatever you were asking about. But within the span of a few years, Google has become almost worthless for searching on programming problems. It’s lucky that LLM’s have come along now, or this work would be that much harder. I’d suggest that Google let their search product slide into terribleness in order to push people to their AI product, but they don’t have one yet, so their awfulness can just be ascribed to basic late-stage capitalism and utterly-predictable monopolistic malfeasance.

Anyway, this last quote is so appropriate. AI can’t figure out if what it did actually worked, but it always says it does, and when you see a move in the right direction, you have to figure out what part made it work, and then delete all the other stuff that the AI broke in the process. In this regard, it is exactly like a guy I used to work with who would break half a dozen things on my servers before he got something working. He never cleaned up his failed attempts. Every time he told me he had done something, I’d ask a few questions about his process, and then just quietly go put things back in order.

I just went through this process over the last weekend. I’m trying to move a codebase from Rails 6 to Rails 8. There’s a lot of changes in the way Rails handles Javascript between these two versions, from the bundling to the running. I’ve gotten left behind on a lot of this. Even when I spun up this Rails 6 app six years ago, I was using the old asset bundling technique from Rails 3/4. I was happy to make the jump to “no-build” in 8 all at once, but my application servers needed upgrading from a version of Ubuntu which is no longer getting security updates. This upgrade forced me into upgrading NodeJS. This upgrade broke the asset building process in Rails because the dreaded SSL upgrade has moved to this part of the stack now. So I moved to Webpacker, which took way too long to work out. I tried to use AI throughout, but it was of almost no help at all.

After finally getting moved to Webpacker, just in time to move to ImportMap, I have had to tackle how Stimulus, Turbo, and Hotwire work. Rails 7 focused on Turbolinks, which utterly broke the Javascript datatable widget, AgGrid, which I use all over the site, so I removed Turbolinks from my Rails 6 app, and never upgraded to 7. Now I’m learning how to do things in the new “Rails way,” and AI has been helpful… in precisely the same way that this Reddit poster describes. I’ve had to run many prompts and tweak and cajole it’s “thinking,” but I finally got a really neat and tiny solution to a question… All while verifying the approach with videos from GoRails. (Which I subscribed to just to make this turn of learning.)

After I had a working function to a particular feature I wanted, I had an “aha!” moment. I could see what all this new tooling and plumbing was about. I felt a little foolish, because it winds up just being a way to move the Javascript you need out of the view code. That’s a Good Thing (TM), but I couldn’t see the forest for the trees until that moment.

And even after this success, I’m plagued with a more philosophical question. The way that Claude factored the feature I wanted was all Javascript. Meaning, once the view was loaded, it dealt with the interactivity without going back through a server-side render step. It relied on the browser doing the DOM manipulation. Which is the “old” way of doing things, right? I asked it to specifically use Turbo streams to render the HTML that the browser could use to simply replace the div, and it said, “Oh, yes, right, that’s the more idiomatic way to do this in Rails,” and gave me a partial that the Stimulus controller use to do the same thing. But now I have a clean, one-file, entirely-Stimulus approach, versus having extra calls to format_for in a controller, a turbo-stream ERB file, and a partial. Seems to me like too much extra to make things idiomatic.

Also, when I asked Claude for this refactor, it broke the feature. So now I have to figure out if I want to fix the turbo-stream approach to keep things “the Rails way,” or just let Stimulus handle the whole thing. I think I will be using turbo-streams to refresh data in my AgGrid tables, but I think I’ll let Stimulus do all the work when it can. It keeps things simpler, and it’s basically what I was doing before anyway.

I want to go back to what I was saying before about how you have to “clean up” after the AI. This is critically important, and it’s a problem in the making that I’m hoping corporate managers figure out before it becomes permanent. If you hire juniors and expect them to produce code like seniors with AI, you’re going to wind up with a bunch of instability because of extraneous code that AI leaves behind. I expect that this problem is too “viral” to survive. I don’t think an actual, useful, non-trivial application could last very long being vibe-coded. It would start to teeter, and people would hit it with more AI, and it would fall over and shatter, and then they’d get to keep all the pieces. I worry that current applications will be patched here and there by juniors who don’t clean up the mess left behind, and these errors will accumulate until the codebase is so broken that…

Oh, for Pete’s sake. What am I even saying!? The same thing will happen here that has been happening for 40 years of corporate IT development: systems get so wonky and unmaintainable and misaligned that new middle managers come in, pitch senior management into doing a massive system replacement, spend twice as much time and three times as much money as they said it would take, launch the system with dismal performance and terrible UI, piss everyone off, polish their resume, get a new job, and leave the company and everyone in it holding the bag with the accretion their terrible decisions made by committee over years.

AI will change absolutely nothing about this. The problem isn’t technology, or code, or languages, or databases, or API’s, or anything else. The problem is people. It’s always BEEN people. I’m not clear that it will ever NOT be about people.

Posted in Programming | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

More on the Capabilities of Current-Gen “AI”

Posted on May 28, 2025 by David K.

Eric Raymond, another bright star in the programming universe, weighed in on the actual capability of current-gen “AI.” He echoed DHH and Carmack, again reiterating my own opinion that LLM’s cannot replace humans at (non-trivial) programming. Yet. Sure, it can make a single function or a web page, but even then you’ll have to fix things so that it doesn’t accumulate error into the project.

Maybe better “meta-LLM’s,” with more specialist subsystems, will be able to do better, but we really already have them. It’s not a difference in degree, but of kind. We will need to come up with some other technology before AI supplants humans at programming. Maybe the next step is AGI, maybe there’s a couple more intermediate developments before that becomes a reality.

At this point, it should be becoming clear that people who are obsequiously bullish on how AI is going to replace all your programmers at your company are grifting. As the line in the Princess Bride says, “Anyone who says differently is selling something.”

Posted in Programming | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Crossplay Coming to ESO

Posted on May 23, 2025 by David K.

There’s an evergreen request from people who play Elder Scrolls Online (ESO) that Zenimax Online Services (ZOS) add crossplay to the game. ESO came out 11 years ago. I wasn’t there for it. While the combat system was designed for console controller limitations, it launched on PC first. When the console ports became available, ZOS offered a one-time migration of PC accounts to a console account.

Ever since, people have been asking for crossplay. It comes up month after month, year after year on the forums. Currently, people on the console EU “megaservers” are particularly animated about it, because the current, quite-miserable state of PVP mechanics, combined with widespread performance problems, is leading their instances of Cyrodill and Imperial City to be desolate of players. They want crossplay at least between Xbox and Playstation just to have enough people to make it worth the effort.

Every couple of years, some muckety-muck at ZOS will say, yes, we understand people want it, but, no, we’re not working on it. They try to blunt people’s fervor over it, but never quite shut the door on implementing it, and wind up contributing to this never-ending communal belly-ache as much as anyone else.

As someone who has been doing full-stack development for 30 years, it seems to me that it would be an absolute nightmare to go back into an 11-year-old code base and add something as architecturally fundamental as crossplay. I would imagine that literally everything would be impacted. Every database call would have to be re-thought in the light of merging all the databases together. The structure of the databases themselves might have to change. And they can’t just lump it ALL together. They still have to have US and EU “megaservers” because of connection latency. (But maybe combining PC, PS, and Xbox servers per region would enable them to finally make one in the PAC, which people have also been requesting for years.)

When I wade into these arguments on the forums, I always ask if anyone thinks ZOS could justify the investment in time and equipment to implement crossplay, in terms of addition revenue over time for the company. I remind people that it has to not just make more money that it would cost, but it also has to make them more money than other things they could be doing. I’ve asked what percentage of the current player base would be added by doing it: 100%? 50%? 25%? 10%? No one has been willing to state that they think it would be significant.

The last time I was banging around in one of these threads, someone said that many games have implemented crossplay after launch, and that it had been very successful for them. I was incredulous, so off to ChatGPT I went. Imagine my surprise when I discovered he was right! Several notable games have, in fact, done this, and it seems to have been quite successful: Destiny 2, Apex Legends, Overwatch, Borderlands 3, Dead by Daylight, No Man’s Sky, Minecraft, and Halo. And it wasn’t like these were all using Unreal Engine, which added the capability for “free” with some big release. Most of these games use custom engines, and still managed to pull it off. Further, I asked ChatGPT to summarize the effects in a graph.

Adding Crossplay to Existing Games

As you can see from the (somewhat poorly rendered) graph, player engagement jumped after implementing crossplay in all of these games. Not only that, but bump has been sustained. So it would seem that this is, in fact, a pretty solid idea, even from a business point of view. At this point, I can see a scenario where ZOS’s hedging about implementing it is less about playing a PR game has been not telling hard core fans, “NO!”, but rather more about internally waffling while trying to figure out how to pull it off, given the demands of the constant monetization game that is the core of ESO as a business.

But just like that, as I was writing this up, it’s become official! Matt Firor just said that they’re working on (the architectural elements needed to support) crossplay.

Crossplay Confirmed

This same request keeps coming up in ZOS’s sister company Bethesda’s game Fallout 76. Just sayin’…

Posted in Gaming | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Dead Reckoning • Damn Interesting

Posted on May 22, 2025 by David K.

During one such inspection in 1731, a British merchant captain named Robert Jenkins protested the intrusion, and in the ensuing scuffle the Spanish captain’s blade somehow separated Captain Jenkins from his left ear. This civilian injury was far from newsworthy back in Britain⁠—after all, smuggling was a rough business. Eight years later, however, when Great Britain sought a pretext for war, it became politically expedient for British politicians to suffer outrage over this unauthorized amputation. Legend has it that Captain Robert Jenkins himself held aloft the very ear in question at a Parliamentary hearing, as evidence for the grave insult to the crown⁠—though there is no historical proof that this exhibition actually occurred. Ear regardless, the outrage was successfully fabricated, and the resulting years of hostilities would come to be known as “The War of Jenkins’ Ear.”

Source: Dead Reckoning • Damn Interesting

Emphasis mine, and that may be the best turn of English I’ve ever read.

Posted in Humor | Tagged | Leave a comment

Book Review: From Oversight To Overkill

Posted on May 6, 2025 by David K.

This article from Astral Codex Ten is making rounds in my Twitter feed. It describes the lack of progress in society to the avoidance of — not just dangerous issues, or most danger issues — but all danger. That is, any danger that can possibly be quantified, lest lawyers get involved and sue.

I’ll go a step further. It’s probably not even important when or if lawsuits might happen. Rather, the really important thing to be avoided is the potential loss of face and embarrassment for not covering enough exposed buttocks to prevent it in the first place. More to the point: for not making every liability someone else’s problem.

When I worked in a psych ward, we used to use a short questionnaire to screen for bipolar disorder. I suspected the questionnaire didn’t work, and wanted to record how often the questionnaire’s opinion matched that of expert doctors. This didn’t require doing anything different – it just required keeping records of what we were already doing. “Of people who the questionnaire said had bipolar, 25%/50%/whatever later got full bipolar diagnoses” – that kind of thing. But because we were recording data, it qualified as a study; because it qualified as a study, we needed to go through the IRB. After about fifty hours of training, paperwork, and back and forth arguments – including one where the IRB demanded patients sign consent forms in pen (not pencil) but the psychiatric ward would only allow patients to have pencils (not pens) – what had originally been intended as a quick note-taking exercise had expanded into an additional part-time job for a team of ~4 doctors. We made a tiny bit of progress over a few months before the IRB decided to re-evaluate all projects including ours and told us to change twenty-seven things, including re-litigating the pen vs. pencil issue (they also told us that our project was unusually good; most got >27 demands). Our team of four doctors considered the hundreds of hours it would take to document compliance and agreed to give up. As far as I know that hospital is still using the same bipolar questionnaire. They still don’t know if it works.

Source: Book Review: From Oversight To Overkill

What I see here applies to IT departments in bluechip Fortune 250’s as well, and it makes working within them glacial. A half dozen different departments have to weigh in on every single project, no matter how large or small, and give their blessing on each aspect of the infrastructure. Every one of them has the institutional power to say, “Stop. We need to add X, Y, and Z to your project for ‘safety,'” and no one can say, “No, this is an acceptable risk for the data involved, the architecture of solution, and the benefit we can get from implementing it.”

I’ve watched this CYA-above-all-else attitude grow in society over the course of my career. All the way back in the early 90’s, even before Outlook, Microsoft implemented workflows in their email client. Someone at my company setup an automation to get capex proposals approved. There was a long-standing paper process that determined “how high” up the “food chain” a request had to go based on the value of the proposal. With the new system, you would write an email, select your department, give it the value of the proposal, and this automation would route it through the right chain of people for you. You could just sit back and wait for the green light to write the purchase order. Great, right?

Wrong.

Nothing moved through the system. Turns out, managers wouldn’t read the email. Approving that button meant a hard-and-fast commitment to put their name on something, and they all needed at least to have a conversation they could say they misunderstood or were lied to about, so the email would just sit. You’d have to go hunt them down, have that conversation, and then they’d hit the “approve” button in the email, and it would move to the next person in the chain. And then you’d have to go hunt them down, and repeat the process.

I asked a wise friend why this didn’t work as planned, and he pointed out that it took getting through a dozen people who could say “no,” when none of them could say, “yes,” and just be done with it. It was a light-bulb moment that has stuck with me ever since. It was the first time I would see an information system — not just support — but codify risk aversion in a company, but it surely wasn’t the last. Now the process of identifying risk and implementing a bunch of needless overhead to avoid it has become institutionalized, especially in IT.

Entire departments are separated by job function in a useless nod to the idea of “separation of duties” which external consultants tell upper management is required in IT departments. The problem is that none of these departments ever have enough operating knowledge about what the work they’re doing on behalf of other people, and just do what’s been requested. There’s no actual responsibility for that separation of duties; no understanding of what’s being asked in context. So no malfeasance would be prevented by it, making the whole thing a dog-and-pony show and a waste of time that slows down every single project in the company. No matter how small or focused a project might be, everyone in the organization has to get involved as if any problem or weakness in the effort would literally destroy the company. The bottom line is the process offers no improvement in delivered projects, but it makes them take at least an order of magnitude longer than they need to. 

Posted in Technology | Tagged , | Leave a comment

To ESO or Not to ESO

Posted on May 3, 2025 by David K.

Back at the first of the year, I “retired” from the Elder Scrolls Online. I let my ESO+ subscription lapse, and simply stopped playing. There were many reasons.

First, I really felt like the game was dying. The monthly user counts were as low as they had been in 7 years. People were complaining about the changes in the game in on their forums and on Reddit. There were many performance problems, crashes, and disconnects. There was a 9-month ongoing thread on their forums about it. Even if you weren’t affected (I wasn’t), you couldn’t play through a whole trial without several people dropping, and having to wait for them to rejoin. This was causing trial prog groups to give up, because you couldn’t satisfy the time requirement part of the trifecta. Also, ZOS canceled the American half of their big 10 year anniversary tour, after having had the one in Amsterdam, and they were being jerks about how streamers were covering them. Even though it came out a few weeks after I quit, the collective atmosphere around the game was such that the most prominent ESO streamer, NefasQS, quit as well, and made a whole video about why.

Second, running vet trials was pretty stressful. Thanks to the Oakensoul ring (for heavy attack builds) and the Arcanist class, I was able to put characters together to run vet content, and farm endgame gear. I got all geared up on 2 DPS characters, a tank, and a healer. But vet trials are 2 hours of sustained clicking, with very little break. I felt that it was hurting my health. It’s far too much to get into here, but I feel that part of my health problems stem from holding stress in my gut, and I started to realize that I was clenched and barely breathing for most of those 2 hours. Vet trials require everyone to be paying attention, or you will wipe the group. It also requires all the DPS you can manage, all the time, or you will wipe the group. And, most of the time, when the group wipes, you know who caused it. So there’s a lot of pressure to perform, and there’s a surprising amount of skill involved in playing the game at that level.

Third, I was running with a casual guild a couple times a week, and it felt like I wasn’t really clicking with the leader. One evening, I volunteered for a 4-man dungeon that the leader wanted to run, and even though I was vocal about wanting to run the dungeon, she ignored me and chose someone else to run who chimed in well after I did. It hurt my feelings. It was done in a way with plausible deniability, as only people who spend a lot of time on Discord can appreciate, but I had enough history to contextualize it, and I just couldn’t not see it as personal. She just didn’t want me to run with her. I mean, everyone is allowed to do what they want, but if I’m honest, it hurt my feelings quite a bit. Also, the guild leader had allowed another guild to merge with hers, and I didn’t really care for the people who had joined. Altogether, it was just another piece of the puzzle that was deflating my interest in playing.

Fourth, I had managed to knock out most of the achievements in the game, except the PVP stuff. The only major areas I had left to do were running the Infinite Archive and playing Tales of Tribute. IA is pure ESO combat, and I think ESO’s combat is the least likable thing about the game. And ToT is a card game. I didn’t start playing an MMORPG to play a digital form of Dominion. I hate any game that you can spend a bunch of time working on, and then lose suddenly. I didn’t want to do either of those things, so what was left?

So I quit.

I also retired from Fallout 76 at the same time, for the health reason. The FOMO about needing to log in every day and do the things that get you the rewards was anxiety inducing.

But then after several weeks, I got bored, and started playing 76 again.

Then 76 released a fantastic update that I have been loving.

And now ESO has announced an update which sounds like it will also be awesome.

So now I’m considering picking up ESO again, and the question is: To ESO or not to ESO?

First, I like the depth of the game. While I love the combat in 76, it’s very shallow. You can do everything there is to do in a day in the game in about an hour. That’s more like 3 hours in ESO, and that’s just one character. In ESO, you can have 20, while 76 is limited to 5. 76’s main quests will take at most a couple weeks to do. ESO’s takes at least months, if not years. There’s just a lot more to do in ESO.

Second, I like the look of the game. 76’s runs poorly on the PS5. The textures are mushy, the draw distance is clipped, and it rarely feels smooth. And it crashes. A lot. I mean, a lot. ESO runs flawlessly at 4K@60FPS in ultra mode on my modest PC, and it’s beautiful.

Third, I miss doing group content with real humans playing mechanics. I’ve become friends with many people in 76 through doing its one raid, but that’s really just cheesing the first (and maybe last) stage, and there’s really not much to talk about. So most of the time, people are just blathering on about nothing in comms, and I have nothing to add. ESO’s trials require comms, and talking about what’s going on, in order to get through them. I guess it’s all pretty impersonal, but on console, in 76, it’s REALLY impersonal. At least in ESO, there’s more camaraderie, and longer times in doing the content lead to closer relationships than in 76.

Fourth, this new update will make it easier to do damage, which will make all content easier. So trials should be less stressful, and Infinite Archive should be less tedious and grindy.

Unfortunately, that still leaves the “problem” of Tales of Tribute, and the fact that they “hid” a mythic lead behind doing it.

There’s also the issue of PVP. I’ve tried serious PVP with one of the big PVP guilds, and it was interesting. We were always getting beat, but I would do more if the game engine was more fair. Mechanically, PVP is in terrible shape in this game. It leads to nothing but gimmicks. I know — and ZOS knows — what the problem is, and they’re going to have to make a lot of people very mad to fix it, so the future is not great. Additionally, socially, the pressure brings out even more cringey behavior in guild comms, and there’s probably nothing to be done about that. So PVP is a negative regardless.

I don’t know what the answer is. At least, not yet.

Posted in Gaming | Tagged , | 1 Comment