Bug Reporting Tool

[jfn3000 10]

Some quotes from Rocket on Reddit:

 

99.99% of the time, someone has experienced the issue. Most of the time someone's messaged me about it, but only rarely do I get feedback tracker links :)

crashlogs included with a crash report on feedback tracker are almost certain of being able to be identified what the problem is, with a very high confidence in fixing within a short timeframe.

Without such things the chances of fixing a bug come down to random chance we will stumble across it.

 

Please provide link to the report filed on feedback tracker, without this (including dxdiag, driver, and hardware info) it is absolutely impossible to do anything at all. I have received many anecdotal reports of this, but none of the reports include a link to a feedback tracker ticket with all this info. I am absolutely positive they've been filed, but finding them is another matter...

 

As a programmer, I understand how important the context of a bug is, as well as how important it is to actually mention it!  If it doesn't delay actual game development too much, I would suggest adding in a bug reporting tool into the game.  It could directly output to the feedback tool, or it could produce an intermediate result to be manually added by the user or parsed by the team.

 

The tool could accept a title and description of the issue, automagically collect hardware and dxdiag information, and contain a dump of user game settings and other meta-data such as location, player status, etc.  With or without another step by a human, it would result in a Feedback Tracker entry with platform information and the required information to reproduce it right there.

 

Is a building shadow in a red house in Dolina jaggy when it rains?  Don't waste time recreating the conditions, let the player upload them! Game settings, player location, viewpoint, status, etc. could be programmatically uploaded from a bug dump, saving time.

 

Naturally, this wouldn't work for crashes, because the game is already dead by that point.  But I think it would greatly increase the quantity of feedback by letting players report it when it happens, and the usefulness of the feedback by including many of the things that people forget to add into bug reports.

 

 

[UnarmedCiv 54]

Youre hired!.. oh wait, i cant do that.   But I thought bug reporting devices would be a must in 2014.. Running off to the forums and pulling up all my info is annoying, thats why i dont do it.  But if there was a tool ingame that made it simple; i would of made atleast 5-10 reports already.

 

But Maybe they dont to make it easy.. maybe they dont want to get bombarded with thousands of frivolous reports from a bunch of children who are posting that they cant seem to spawn near their friend or getting KOS'd.

 

Idk, I digress.. your suggestion seems very common sense to me.  Im surprised its not implemented. 

[kichilron 8550]

Thing is, though: I don't think it will work in the context of a BI-game, as they neither have the server-power nor the manpower to implement it at the moment ( where it would be most important.)

 

Considering it hasn't happened by now I don't think there's a way to implement it before release.

 

 

Don't get me wrong - I do like the idea, I simply don't think it#s possible for them to achieve until the game even releases, as there's otehr things to worry baout at the moment.

Edited February 23, 2014 by kichilron

[jfn3000 10]

Manpower is definitely short, but I don't think it would require too much from the server.  I'm thinking the entirety of the data dump would probably fit inside a UDP packet, and it doesn't necessarily have to travel through the server.  The data could be sent directly from the client to the web server hosting the feedback site.  Or it could go via an internal route if there's many variables and stuff they don't want exposed like that.