Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford's chronic tweeting syndrome strikes again, says 'less than 1% of 1%' of players are filing tickets about performance so clearly the internet's overblowing it

To what I assume is the eternal dismay of the Gearbox PR department, studio CEO Randy Pitchford has once again been tweeting. What's he up to now? Well, he's applying the ol' scientific method to people's Borderlands 4 performance complaints, pointing out that—if this game is really as stutter-prone as you horrible lot have been making it sound like—how come "less than one percent of one percent" of players are filing customer service tickets about performance woes?

Pitchford's maths minute goes as follows: "Customer Service reports for Borderlands 4 at roughly 1% or so of installs." That is to say, if 1,000,000 people had installed the game, a mere 10,000 of them would have filed tickets.

Pitchford does a little legerdemain here—classic magician behaviour—and transitions to talking about the tickets as a percentage of the game's overall customers (everyone who has it installed). So, rather than saying that 55% of customer service tickets are about people's SHiFT accounts, he says 0.55% of customers are having problems, and so on. Bearing that in mind, Pitchford goes on to say that "0.04% of customers [tickets] are PC performance related."

The number gets smaller. Of that 0.04% of customers, Gearbox customer service has flagged a mere 0.009% as "valid," and a fair chunk have been led to the sunlit uplands of good performance with "education" (settings coaching).

"That is less than one percent of one percent (0.01%) of customers using CS tickets for valid performance issues," says Pitchford.

The conclusion? "This reality is dramatically different than what you would expect if your only sources of information were, say, certain internet threads."

But let's be honest, when was the last time you filed a customer service ticket with a studio over bad performance in a game? For me, the answer is an easy 'never,' and I suspect it's the same for a lot of others, too. If a game runs badly, I'll curse and wait for a patch, and maybe leave a review warning others.

You know, exactly what so many players have already done in the game's Steam user reviews, where the game launched to Mostly Negative reviews and has since settled at 65% Mixed.

So trying to point at customer service tickets as evidence the performance complaints are overblown feels just a tad bizarre, and besides, what exactly does Pitchford expect to happen? I'm not sure anyone running into performance errors with the game is going to see this ticket breakdown and decide that there must have been no problem after all. It's only going to further agitate players who want their game to run well.

The good news is that, so far as I can tell, Gearbox has been putting out patches for Borderlands 4's performance issues and they are making a difference. So with any luck we'll all soon live in a world where the game runs much better out of the box. Still, I can't help but think the studio would be well-served if it hired a guy specifically to follow Pitchford around and stop him from tweeting. At least that way he wouldn't be out there calling Borderlands 4 "a premium game for premium players."