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.

  • William@lemmy.world
    13·
    1 year ago

    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?

    • ᦓρɾiƚҽ@lemmy.mlOP
      131·
      1 year ago

      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.

      • ArmainAP@programming.dev
        1·
        1 year ago

        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.