: that to me was the surprise of the bulletin. a response to the uproar over
: his statements was unexpected. what did you guys think about what he had
: to say? I think they should have ignored the uproar honestly. Based on
: what he said and how the community reacted, I would have as 343I done what
: I could to address those issues through the game and retroactively said
: we'd been working on them already to address those concerns. Kinda
: interesting him addressing it at all in my opinion.

: - MacGyver10

And I was going to not post it. But since you bring it up, I'll describe the gist of it.

>>"What I did a poor job of articulating because of the nature of the intended audience"

This pisses me off. The thing is, Josh's GDC talk was a terrible postmortem. The language that he used to describe the issue that exploded across the internet was very external in tone, and described why the weapon was dropped using reasons that conflict with those given by David Ellis when he said that it was internal staffers who thought the weapon played like crap. When your "intended audience" is supposedly game developers, this kind of ambiguity and ignored conflict in your team's accounts of the problem does not make for a helpful description of the process. The problems with the talk had to do with vague and misleading language which had nothing to do with "the intended audience."

Normally this would be a minor thing, just some random guy who happens to work at a game development house being sloppy about defending himself on the internet, whatever... But what frustrates me about it is that 343i ALWAYS does this; every time they apologize for something, they make absolutely sure that everyone knows they're patting themselves on the back. Their method of dealing with perceived mistakes is to claim that they weren't actually mistakes and that their audience (though reacted understandably) just doesn't get it. It comes off as opaque and devoid of trust. They need to learn that when something does go wrong, the best thing is to laugh about it, make fun of themselves, and move on. Rather than say that there's a deficiency with their community and trust us™.
I had hoped that they would have figured this out after the "14 day buy and play" bullshit, but while they haven't had anything of that scale recently, it still seems to be their attitude.