One of the things I don’t think players necessarily see much of is how the type of work you’re doing changes as you get closer to release. You might have a serious bug that only affects 1 in every 1000 players. During development and internal testing that’s something you might hardly ever see. But once you have 50k people playing that’s potentially 50 people hitting it. At 100k it’s 100 and at 1m players it’s 1k people. Obviously you don’t just have one of those issues. You might have dozens of different things that only happen in very specific circumstances or on particular hardware or when a strange combination of things happens. Individually they’re all “rare” but at scale they start to become a meaningful part of how people experience the game. The complexity of hunger is why we’re doing larger and larger testing waves. Every time we increase the number of players it exposes another layer of stuff that was basically invisible at smaller numbers. It’s also part of the fear of each new testing wave. You’re basically waiting to see if something suddenly appears that nobody on the team has ever seen before. Then when it does you have to work out how serious it actually is. How many people are hitting it. What the knock-on effects are. ultimately - whether it’s serious enough that you need to find the time to fix it before release. It means that as you get closer to release a lot of development naturally shifts away from the big interesting headline gameplay stuff and towards fixing hundreds of these smaller issues. Different people on the team are obviously doing different things but a huge amount of work goes into things that most players will hopefully never even know existed. It’s not particularly exciting or visible work but it’s necessary. Too many 1 in 1k problems left in the game and at scale the end result is one that feels buggy and unpolished.