Testing Incentives Program Suspension

I appreciate that, and I'm looking forward to understanding more about the design in the future. However...(see below)

This is a prefect example. I totally understand that you don't want to turn this thread into a conversation about staves, but if I'm the only person that understands the intended design then of course eventually you'll have more people reporting that staves are failing to take durability damage when casting spells. Because there's no "design document" or at least consistent communication on these very nuanced systems, it means players are forced to wonder if they should report something, if it's a bug or an exploit, if it's by design, or if it's just something that's not very high on the priority list.

I know Chris (for example) doesn't have time to build and maintain a design document explaining how combat works. But I also know that this lack of knowledge is the primary factor in duplicate bug reports. I've been here for every dev hangout, every dev post, every dev discussion, but even I don't know what's intended and what's not. That's a problem, and I believe it has to do with the fact that there's no archive of known bugs accessible to the player base, and there's no basic design communication to test against. I don't know if this situation is better internally or not, my guess is that it's not much better though and the QA relies almost entirely on first hand knowledge.

I think both the QA Team and the Development team are great, very hardworking and well intended folks. But the overall ability of bugs to get fixed and managed appropriately (I believe) is the real cause for duplicate reports. I think you guys should reexamine your processes and rethink how you communicate basic concepts for large systems like combat, permissions, pvp, housing, decorating, etc...(it's a long list)

Otherwise it's always going to be garbage in, garbage out.

 

Agreed! This pink thing was absolutely a pox on all of us!

Obviously you all have done the number crunching and have deemed that rewarding people who actually uncover bugs no longer need an incentive to report these unreported bugs. Bravo!! It is not a secret that these bug hunters never needed an incentive to begin with. It's what they do.

 

Whatever makes your jobs easier, is most efficient and gets the game finished!

 

The continued incentive, I would hope, is that we all want to make this a better game

 

One thing I noticed is that bugs get lost among the sub-categories, esp for blockers. Probably would have been better to have just one bug and feedback forum.

 

I think @Attenwood and @Lexie have done stellar jobs with working through all the bug reports, and the manual time working out the rewards is just an additional straw maybe thats not practical now qa is going to be available to all, people shouldnt be doing bugs for shineys they should be doing it to make the game better.

that being said we are human and maybe you were working for that next (or first) reward and you might feel you were a hair from it and now it will never be and it is sad, I had hoped the bug rewards would be something available till launch.

I think the team have real tough choices, we come to the forum look about and dont see our bug, so we post, but its not always black and white as to which category something goes in. the missing land bug atm could be argued its UI or world buildng, or critical, or POT.. then really how many of us searched every past release to check using many varients of words that our bugs werent there? few.. However, some would argue "well if we could see the internal bug db we could search easier" yes maybe we could, but, not all bugs need to be public and sharable.... if theres low risk but exploits you dont want to make those public now do you? then someone would need to make part of that public, but hide other parts, and much as theres a job on the board for a web d00d which Id love to apply for but cant move to the USA, I doubt they want them spending a couple of months on that.. Im sure they had better things in mind.

I was lucky, I maanged to find lots of bugs and get me the cloaks, a farm, pictures and a chair and the royal title.. however, Im not going to pretend that wasnt a lot of hours of hunting, i was fortuned by the may public holiday here in the UK and taking time off almost perfectly for qa week.. so I got to spend all day every day in qa looking at bugs..

Lets hope that. as has been said this is a suspension not full termination, that one day, this will return.

 

I always tried to search for existing bugs first but many times I wasn't able to find one.

 

Same here,

I do a search for the bug and usually come up with nothing. I guess I use different words to describe things than others.

 

The forum is not the best bug report system at all.
For example Life is Feudal MMO successfully uses the Mantis.
And it allows you to sort bugs before you need to confirm them.
In general, I do not understand how you coped with this for a year working through the forum.

 

What happened to the Bug Brigade? Weren't they supposed to help run interference?

Another option is to mark all Jira bugs as internal/hidden, and then open up a read-only copy to everyone. Ggo through and mark bugs with certain tags as public, if that tag is known to not have any exploit info. As we report things, mark known and new issues as public. Let us search directly on the DB so we don't have to use a tool that wasn't designed for this (the forums).

 

The forums are a nightmare to search. It's nearly impossible to find duplicates.

 

I loved how I contacted support asking them how far I was away from a bug testing reward and they kept telling me - we don't keep track. I never received any reward of my bugs and now they end the program.

Disappointed deeply.

I understand there will be duplicate bugs through different people wording things differently. I will continue to play test to get the 5 cotos during QA trying to find and report bugs.

 

I completely understand what the dev team has been going thru concerning the totality of reports, as I have spent a good amount of time over the past 3+ years just looking thru the Bug Forum to see what is being reported.
So many of the "bugs" have been very poorly submitted and duplicates should have been avoided by decent searches by submitter's and obviously were not.
I also feel sad for those people who did go to the trouble to avoid duplicates (knowing what the dev team assigned to bugs were going thru) and were good at giving precise, detailed information.
But, all that being said, we're all here for the same goal - to make Shroud as good as it can possibly be.
I will continue to submit my bugs towards that goal, and hope that most of you will as well.

Hey Port, how about you still give us the 5 COTO's for spending the 4hrs in QA with no demand to submit bugs. At least that will induce a few more people to test the QA, and for those of us simply interested in helping SotA we will still be letting you know when we see issues? Even if you do end the COTO's I'll still take the time to investigate QA, but maybe not a full 4 hrs.

 

Wasn't the 5 COTO's part of the now suspended program?

 

Good point.

 

That's the case study in why there should be a community-managed merge process, but it would really require a proper bug system, rather than misusing a forum for it.

 

I'll keep reporting anyway, and keep asking for a better system to do it in. As I went to bed last night I lamented that I couldn't easily search through previous releases, and wondered if any of last nights bugs were duplicates that had been reported long ago.

Almost always (I probably get lazy occasionally) I do a search in the sub-forum I'm posting in, and for those bugs that span two sub forums I sometimes search both. Using Search isn't enough, I have to look through the pages manually, using Find combined with different possible bug title names. In a crowded sub-forum this requires going through up to ten pages sometimes.

My point in this is, please take the bug posting system up a notch. If you want to reinstate the program after that, great, but lets get a solid reporting method. Please. I don't want to waste my time posting duplicates any more than you want to read them.

 

True. Discourse has an awesome forum feature that automatically searches for similar threads while you type in the first first. That is a feature all forums should have.

 

They probably should keep that in, if they want people to test the QA. Some would test the QA regardless, but for people with limited time who want to progress in the game, they would rather spend that time on the live server.

But once on the QA, players could then decide on their own to report bugs they find.

 

It sounds like this wasn't the major problem, but I have to admit that this release I reported a spade of bugs that I'd previously reported many releases back. I did that since I wasn't sure if you guys were catching everything, and I'd asked someone then on the bug team whether I should re-report a bug if it wasn't addressed over the course of several releases, and they said yes, if I really had a question if you guys saw it. Since then @Lexie started making sure we all have ticket numbers (thank you) and I figured I'd get ticket numbers for them as a personal confirmation that they were in the system.

Yea generally speaking, an improved the bug reporting system I think would help a lot of people. Just giving the ticket numbers helps. I don't know what else would help short of creating a full bug reporting system. Maybe making it easier to search the bug report archives for both the live and QA together with the current release, so you don't have to go subforum by subforum. Adding tags to bug reports might help with searching also... Though there's no search by tags option on the forums, is there?

In any case, whatever you guys think you can do to help us without requiring too much effort on your part.