This isn’t just a gaming issue, but I feel like this community is the most adequate for this.
I professionally work in QA. I’m cursed with either a keen eye to find issues or my presence shifts the space-time continuum to create a mess only I may perceive - sometimes it’s very difficult to tell. Anything I touch has faults, so is it objectively faulty, or does my subjective perception create them in the eyes of other people? No answer can be found.
Anyhow, I really tire of broken stuff with no way to report it. I sometimes jump hoops through support choosing “Other” and “General” options only to get a generic answer saying they don’t understand my query and need to get more option to help me. I give them exhaustive information of what the issue is. But most places aren’t prepared for bug reporting.
I’m playing through BG3. It’s my who-knows-which attempt due to the amount of bugs ruining the experience. I still frequently report issues. Their bug report form is very bad, from my perspective anyway. The subject symbol limit makes it useless for giving a hint on what the issue may be without it being way too generic, there’s no extra fields which would demand more specific information, so they may actually find out what the issue is, where it happens and perhaps pass it onto QA to more easily find it, so they can then pass it to programmers.
I understand exhaustive testing is impossible, however, knowing you cannot find everything, you absolutely ought to make reporting issues easy. And it sadly isn’t the case.
Props to the devs who implement a systematic way to report issues and actually address them.
As a dev who hopes to eventually publish a game…
What would you recommend that the bug report for have as far as fields/instructions, to minimize player annoyance and maximize usefulness for the devs?
This heavily depends on a game, but I’d ask about:
- Affected map (with the possibility to choose multiple or all)
- Game version field with the option to pre-fill it with the current live version
- Affected element with drop-down list, multiple choice or all allowed, just in case, i.e. weapons, character model, map and so on
- Frequency of the bug occurence with the option to choose Unknown, for elements you only interact with once
- Most imporant imo: a field to rate how much disturbance this has caused to your game, which will allow you to pre-filter more important issues
- optional keywords field
Mind you, I’ve been working in QA for years. I’m not sure how annoyed players get, given how inspecific their reports are, but even if they get annoyed, if they don’t give you enough information, you may be unable to repro the bug and therefore it will remain unfixed anyway.
What do you think of the way Subnautica did it during development with the feedback button?
I think most devs do not bother with this despite being quite trivial to implement. This inspires me to create an Unreal Engine plugin that allows the devs to easily implement it and for the player to easily use it.
At least they have some form of bug reporting. I feel like most games I play the best I can do is go bitch in the steam discussions section, which feels like I’m just dumping into the void. Every once in a rare while I get a dev reply asking for more details, but that’s maybe 1% of the time. It’s similarly rare to have an actual reporting feature, and even then it usually is only a pop up after a full on crash. The one game I can think of with an in-game reporting feature is Subnautica.
I used to report bugs far less frequently, because indie devs are really ill prepared for handling this. No forms and also weird attitudes. I had devs respond saying I filled in their form differently than they wanted, so they won’t look at the bug or devs telling me to give more details when all the details were there and the bug was 100% blatantly visible repro with screenshots included, as if they didn’t know own game. I do wish there were more in-game reports, I cannot recall ever seeing it. Would be very welcome! I have BG3 bug reports bookmarked due to the sheer amount of bugs.
I tried to report to ATT that one of their junction boxes with thousands of splices had been obliterated at an intersection i was near. Somehow none of the wires were broken, just laying on the ground. I spent a good 15 minutes being transferred around only to be told if I didn’t have an account number they couldn’t do anything.
I googled for contact info for downed lines and the numbers had been changed to general support numbers.
Super frustrating
I usually just chance it by emailing something like contact@example.com
I agree with: “At least they have some form of bug reporting.” :-(
most of the time, your only recourse is the same method dealing with any other crap company – calling them out on social media – so many are far more concerned about 1-star reviews and public perception than they are about paying customers
Honestly, the best thing to do is just to stream your gameplay to your own private youtube or twitch.
Then when the bug happens you can “clip” out the video and send them a link in the bug report.
