The Fallout of Error 37: Tales from the Gaming Industry

Hate play stuff. Hate play stuff. Yeah, I think Gollum is exactly like, live through that experience as some who did a quote, hate playthrough of it. Yeah, I specifically didn’t play that because I saw the amount of hate online and I was like, I’m not gonna add anything to this conversation. There’s no point to this. Sure, this. It doesn’t. It’s not meaningful, you know, at that point, it’s like, everyone’s already hating on this. There’s nothing I can add. I also look at it and I go, I don’t know about that shit. Probably not gonna play that doesn’t make sense. Sure. Yeah, that’s also. That’s always heartbreaking as well. Sometimes the developers do know the game is bad. Oh, yeah, right. No, you’ve been working on this for two and a half years and you’re like a month from launch, you’re like, welp, you gotta put it out. I know. We launched Diablo 3. I was there, you know, like, I was there. We knew there were problems. We were speaking them from the rafters, telling everybody like, hey man, this is not ready. We need to cook more. And they launched it anyway. I remember the worst experience I ever had in the games industry was I was wearing a Diablo 3 shirt, cause I was. I was in QA at the time and I had a Diablo 3 dev shirt that they gave me. And I was walking through a target, and this dude Stopped me and he was red in the face and he screamed at me in the middle of a target because I ruined his favorite game. Damn. Because of error 37? Yeah, error 37. That was the worst I ever had to deal with, ever. I was like, dude, I’m. I was like. I was like, I’m. I’m in QA choices. We know. And he just stormed off and I was like, Jesus, dude. Then, like, I never wore another piece of, like, work merch again, ever again. Cause I was like, I don’t want to be associated with this cause, like, what’s gonna happen? And, like, that’s. That shit blows me away is like, how. How negative that can go and how bad it can go. Cause people get. They get, like, fighting mad. Sure, there’s a problem with the game. Cause some people, they’ll take time off from work, they’ll set up a whole event, they invite buddies over so they can do that kind of shit. Then the game doesn’t function and you’re like, yeah, we told him not to lodge, you know, like, what are you gonna do? Yeah, sorry, my. My brain is breaking a second. Cause people in chat are legitimately asking what error 37 is and that. Oh, man. Like that. Like, I don’t know. I’m like, you don’t. Well, ask your parents. That makes sense for people in chat to say that. It’s just like, oh, god, They’re so young that they don’t know what ERA 37 is. One of the largest failures in generic erroring that you could have. So generic error messages are always bad for the player. Like error 1,012 like player doesn’t know what the hell that means. It should say like this thing went wrong, right? Error 37 was authentication servers are down, you can’t connect. That’s what it was supposed to mean, but it just says error 37. Players like what the hell is error 37? I’m gonna try logging in again. Yeah, what happens when everybody gets logged out of the video game? They all try to log back in because your authentication servers are down, the one that handles the login. Well they start deducing it accidentally cause they’re all trying to log in at the same time. Now you get a whole bunch of people f fiving their way in, all getting error 37 and getting angrier and angrier while screaming at you on the forums. It’s great. That’s why you don’t do generic error messages. That needs to be descriptive every time.