mcc
Fascinating both for what it says about dev & what it says about statistics:
A gamedev realized Linux users were just 5.8% of their sales, but represented 38% of bug reports.
Then they looked at those numbers closer, and realized. Linux users were not experiencing more bugs. Almost none of the Linux-user bugs were Linux-related. Linux users were simply *more likely to file bugs*.
Their conclusion: A linux port pays for itself bc it nerdsnipes ppl into giving u free QA
mcc
This is the "what if lab rats just get cancer a lot" joke except real
Do you have a correlation in your data? Or is one of your sample groups simply more likely to generate *statistics*?
phii (local floofgirl cutie)
@mcc i might be wrong about this but isn't it actually even the other way round, with rats that were bred to be cute and pet-like having a higher cancer risk than lab rats due to being over-bread?
bc when me and my relatives had rats that were bread to be kept as pets they all died rlly quickly, but then we got lab rats instead (as pets, i mean) and they lived for wayy longer
mcc
@irenes Or they value their time less "lol"
Irenes (many)
@mcc Linux users are immersed in a culture that explicitly views software as a communal effort, working towards common purpose. Maybe that idea isn't explicit for everyone, but when people are steeped in it, of course they contribute bug reports! A bug report is an attempt to help the project! It may also feel like a complaint, but the material effect of it is helpful.
mcc
"A recent study performed on the University of Toronto campus with participants selected by responding to a flier offering $5 for participation, revealed that 92% of all Canadians are students at University of Toronto…"
(This is a joke; I suspect sociologists have some way of correcting for this already)
(EDIT: Note I am not saying I believe the way sociologists have of correcting for it *works*.)
Jason Petersen (he)
@mcc uh IIRC this is a “joke but not really” in psychology and social sciences.
The joke is “add ‘among mostly 18–22yos with the social status to be in college’ to every psychology paper”
Paul Bernhardt
@mcc People that participate in studies are WEIRD https://slate.com/technology/2013/05/weird-psychology-social-science-researchers-rely-too-much-on-western-college-students.html
🆘Bill Cole 🇺🇦
@mcc #RandomPedantry
Lab rats in fact DO get cancer more than normal. There are tightly-inbred strains of mouse and rat bred for higher cancer susceptibility. For exactly the reason the Linux users are valued...
Siderea, Sibylla Bostoniensis
@mcc This is a huge, huge, huge problem in personality science. If you want to get any sort of demographic information, about the distribution of traits through a population, you can't actually do it through voluntary testing, because the selection indexes of so many interesting things on "who is voluntarily willing to take a personality test" are kind of astronomical.
Robin
Smythe
@mcc automatic +1 for coining the term “nerdsnipe”! 👏🏼
wizzwizz4
@eythian @tsmyther Also https://xkcd.com/1053/ (for the unlikely circumstance that it's applicable to itself)
Smythe
@eythian Yeah! I’m one of today’s lucky 10,000!
Raptor :gamedev:
@mcc guilty, lol, definitely submitted my share, generally with a patch and debug info. Also i found long ago when reporting bugs in games to often lie about os (gen by omission) as most devs wouldnt take it seriously otherwise, even with it being a known complained about issue with actual windows users and absolute proof. Windows players in general are so used to bugs with no path to get them fixed they complain, but never report!
Tom Forsyth
@mcc I guess when you've filed 26 bugs against device drivers just last week, filing 3 bugs against a game is how you kick back and unwind.
stefanct
@mcc original source: https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/qeqn3b/despite_having_just_58_sales_over_38_of_bug/
Shockola!
@mcc we CANNOT let anyone in management hear the phrase "free QA"
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