I wish the Devs Were More Proactive on Bug Reporting
Myrm
Sweden Join Date: 2015-08-16 Member: 207210Members
Sweden Join Date: 2015-08-16 Member: 207210Members
As much as I admire the devs for the hard work and great game they are producing, I really do wish they would be more proactive in the Bug Reporting board. By this I mean that it would go a long way if they just could simply post a "thank you for your report, we are looking into it". How long would that take? It took me but a few seconds to type that little sentence. I have put bug reports in that have not even been acknowledged by the devs despite the fact that the reports were made some months ago.
Come on Devs, how about showing us that you take our bug reports seriously and not leave us wondering whether you actually read them or not. A simple acknowledgement would go a long way.
Thank. you.
Come on Devs, how about showing us that you take our bug reports seriously and not leave us wondering whether you actually read them or not. A simple acknowledgement would go a long way.
Thank. you.
Comments
If they did this, there would not be time to actually develop.
"thank you for your report, we are looking into it" -> "bug fixed shown on patchlist and trello set to fixed"
Is there really a need for that talky bit if they fix bugs? I bet someone could write a trellobot to help you out
Nice saying. Some as well could say that after all, we are their bread and butter.
Absolutely there is. It's called good customer support - making your customer feel valued and listened to. Not ignored.
Fixing bugs is customer support.... Like I mentioned, what kind of additional value would be added if that entire entitled "thank me now" bit could be done by chatbot, and you'd be none the wiser if it was... Heck it could even be done when they move it into a RC candidate state, where Trello automatically posts a message saying:
"Many thanks, this bug report in particular was really close to my heart, I remember the time when the bug was still breaking the game. But with long and determined hours spent on fixing and having our playtesters test my fix. Only to have my hopes torn away, hearing it wasn't truly fixed. Having to spend more hours on it. And now we've finally done it, we now have a proper Start Game Button that does indeed do as advertised perfectly.
Thanks again, I will remember the day you've reported it. It's now a very special day marked on my calendar. Next year we're going to celebrate "Start Game Button Bug Fix Day" and party like there's no tomorrow. I'm looking forward to that day!
>insert dev name here<"
See, I'm just one of those guys who always looks at things, to see if they have actual added value. By fixing the bug, that in itself should be this "thanks", time is better spent on that more important fixing bit. Wouldn't you agree... Also my sarcasm bone was tickled because, if ya hadn't realized. I truly despise this non-content fluff stuff
Besides UWE talks all the time about how important their community is and how they love the drawings kids make and suggestions or just simple appreciations of the game that make them all warm and fuzzy. That stuff hits them where it tickles and those UWE responses are actually a lot more genuine, cause they are on a personal level. Bugfixing is work to them, so they tend to be a lot more disconnected after a fix...
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The sheer number of bug reports makes the non-content status of this even worse. I think you are quite unaware of how much work fixing and testing actually is
If you expect answers to every single bug reports you'll be dissapointed on every forums, not just this one. Of course, if they had a dedicated person whose main job was to roam the forums and answer posts, that would make players much happier. Sadly, community managers are usually peoples that are'nt paid for it, so you get the results you can expect from that. So one thing they could do is make a small contest and the winner gets to represent the devs on the forums, as an unpaid position. Such a CM would get to clean up the forums threads, answer posts with constructive/informational comments and relay infos to the devs.
Im not saying i like it, just that its how it works. Ive learned to lower my expectations when it comes to customer supoort, wether it be in real life or online. Like that when a company does better than the others im a bit more happily surprised lol
Its sad, but its like that
From Subnautica - SteamSpy
Alright, so maybe you're just talking about the forums alone, but seriously think about what you're asking here. let's go w/ the low-end potential of players in the last 2 weeks - 118,060 players. Average for these 2 weeks would be 59,030 unique players each week. Imagine each of these players experiences just ONE bug in the game just ONCE per week and submits feedback. 59K bug reports in one week from one source. Now sure, not everbody has bugs to submit feedback, but some people will submit more than one in a week. Maybe more than once a day. We're now looking at over 60K (probably well over) bug reports.
So you also want them to come and respond to each bug thread here on the forum? And ppl have some tech problems on the steam forums too. So how many bug reports are we at now... in a single week? Would you like them also to come feed you grapes and fan you?
Guess what. You purchased a game that's not even in beta. You knew this before you purchased it. You know this now. If you would now consider the amount of time it would take to read, organize/take note of each bug, AND reply to you to tell you they read it, you'd realize it's so outside the realms of feasible. It wouldnt be a quick "thanks, we got your info." and if it was, that's just lip service. The next best thing, which you also disagreed with, would be some kind of bot doing auto-replies. This is the same damn thing as lip service, except that it's computer-generated lip service. Do you really want lip service? from a human or a bot? Just to tell you they know your stupid bug exists which they've probably received hundreds of reports on already?
Imagine if they did respond to each one. Really respond. There would not be time to respond to 60k + bug reports in a week AND continue development AND FIX BUGS.
They know there's bugs. Your reports help them, whether they're acknowledged or not. You cant honestly say that you feel ignored when you are ONE person out of nearly 400,000 owners of the game. The fact that they're on the forums at all or have a public trello is astounding enough.
EDIT: I also want to point out to you, @Rainstorm, that people these days feel that they are entitled to EVERYTHING. This is a symptom of our over-privileged, 'i want it now' culture, and is not actually responsibility of any business out there on the free market. TBH, they honestly don't owe any of us anything beyond what we already have. They could stop right now if they wanted and there's no law to stop em from doing so.
https://trello.com/b/eLEWpq3P/subnautica-playtesting
We also keep an eye on our F8 feedback reports.
It's not possible to reply back to every bug report. Why? Because
1) We're a tiny studio. Most studios have QA companies with teams of 30-100 people looking for bugs. We have <20 total people working on Subnautica.
2) We receive a LOT of bug reports. When I say a lot, I mean we receive more then 1 bug report every minute of every day.
You can see some of them here: http://subnautica.unknownworlds.com/#/subnautica/feedback
3) Collating all feedback is more than a full-time job. Personally, I check F8 Feedback, Steam forums, our own forums, Twitter reports, our own Discord Chatroom (where we hang out with the public) my own email and other staff member's emails.
So apologies that you feel ignored. I assure you, this is not the case.
Edit: forgot to add I reply to steam reviews to try and help them with their issues. There is only so much bandwidth.
If i had one suggestion to make to yo guys, it would be to maybe ''hire'' such a said CM that would help you guys answer more on the forums. im sure that many persons playing this game would be interested to help you in such a way.
Grow up 2cough. I am simply pointing out the apparent lack of response to bug reports. There's no need to come here with that pathetic childish approach.
Hey there, Just want to let you know that I work as QA deputy lead volunteer position at UWE. I take a lot of my time and actively seek out discussions/reports about bugs. I have spent countless hours on bug-reporting within trello, F8 Feedback, steam/SN forums. You can see that I even reply here actively.
I know I don't have a fancy tag to indicate much like Obraxis and Max, but I am very much a part of the team. I can't get to them all, and a lot are duplicates, I try to answer as much as I can when I have the time, but there is noway I can respond to each and every thread. I am trying here!
Thank you for the feedback, it is greatly appreciated
So I can't really relate to what your saying.
Actually, we're working on a way so we CAN reply to the in-game feedback...going to get spooky!
Well well, color me baffled! =D i had no idea you were such a CM from UWE altho Ive seen you reply alot to all kinds of posts and thought to myself that you would do a good CM lol
the things you learn uh
Nothing to take personally, it's a silly refenece. I was simply making a point about out how similarily silly it is to think that bug reports need a response in general. Even after a dev has chimed in about why they're not able to, do you maintain this opinion?
I'm not trying to be rude, I'm just asking you to be reasonable.
From my several decades of gaming and bug reporting, and other software development and bug reporting, I can tell you that not responding individually to bug reports is the sensible norm. I've only seen individual responses when dealing with a very, very small userbase.
With games you've usually got MANY users and even if only a small percentage of them take the time to report bugs, individual bugs will be reported repeatedly. People in the development team taking time to respond individually to each report is wasteful. That time could be much better spent fixing the bugs and developing new features.
Customer service is a separate matter. If it's a complete product (i.e. not early access) and there's something wrong with it preventing you from using it properly then that probably requires individual response and attention. You could try bug reporting it first and hoping it's fixed in a timely fashion but it could require customer service attention if it isn't.
Especially interesting was the scant information about the proplem passed to you guys via F8.
The bottom two for example ...
This is why any game company still needs professional game testers. Some people think any damn thing is a bug. For the developers to fix a bug, it MUST be able to be duplicated. If something bad only happens once that's REALLY hard to track down in code. When you use F8, be clear and concise, give as much information as you have, and if the problem has occurred more than once.
Just because something doesn't work how you think it should doesn't make it a bug.
P.S. I'm a little surprised that the developers read the F8 reports themselves. I would have thought that there were SO MANY reports that they would hire one or two people just to wade through all the crap reports, in order to find the few that actually are bugs, and actually are helpful in solving the problem.
If I was the boss, I would NOT want my highly paid coders wasting their time wading through that nonsense. I would hire a couple 18 year old kids, pay them a little more than minimum wage, give them some training in what a "bug" actually is, then have them read and filter through the mounds of junk that people are sending in.
If you think it's quite easy to skim through them, perhaps they'll hire you. You won't complain when you read about seeing your stuff through the walls for the thousandth time, will you?
depends on the type of person
You might be surprised. I once did a job comparing leave applications from two different HR systems each with roughly 20,000 entries. Two months were allotted for the job. They'd had someone working on it already for two weeks and they got through less than a quarter of it. I ignored what they'd done and started over. Finished in 2.5 days.
Much of this kind of work can be done automatically with some properly executed queries. Eg. "see, through, wall, base" with min 3 matches would catch all of these:
Automatically mark them as probable duplicates and assign to that bug. It's much, much quicker to skim entries which are probably about the same thing and weed out an occasional exception than going through lots of unrelated entries.
What you call 'using lots of words' I call explaining. Most folk, as evidenced by comments in this thread, aren't aware of how easily this kind of task can be automated to eliminate a lot of work and streamline the remainder. I suppose I could have just said "No. Database sorcery!" but I think a brief explanation is more constructive.
Ah! he confesses! BURN DA WITCH ! =D