Testing Incentives Program Suspension

cool

 

I have lost my incentive to report bugs.
Too bad the ones I have reported are still not fixed.

 

FYI for those that don't know I am being a smartass

 

My motivation for bug reporting is simply to make the game better for all of us.
It was nice to get a reward for the extra work, but I think I understand Portalarium's decision to stop the incentive program.
I would like to thank the Bug Brigade and many of the non-brigade bug hunters who reviewed my bug reports and let me know when I posted a duplicate or in the wrong section (doh!).
I will not offer unsolicited advice to Portalarium regarding bug reporting, but I would like to offer some observations:
1) I liked receiving feedback indicating that my bug report was acknowledged (e.g. telling me a bug ID given, or that it intended behavior, etc).
2) It is often difficult to find a previously reported bug. I am not sure how best to address this issue, but I think that it is much easier to find a previously reported bug when the complete location name and a brief, clear bug description are in the title of the post: e.g. "(Blood River) - Barrel floating in air".

Anywho,
I met new friends while bug hunting and while running around QA.
I'll keep reporting bugs...and hope to continue running into my bug hunting comrades

 

Lol. I hope they intend to hire a slew of testers to replace all of the ones who were helping due to this program. It used to keep me reporting bugs (many of which are still not resolved). I would imagine this will cause a further declined in the player base. What a shame.

 

Maybe I'm being petty... but I was a tester who left the program once Dev+ got enhanced rewards.. perhaps others like me will come and test again, because I DID enjoy making bug reports, until my work was less valued than Dev+ members.

 

I would like to offer a suggestion to keep the Bug Report Incentive program alive... @DarkStarr , take an enterprise approach with allowing users to submit request by not using the forums, but handle them like you would a helpdesk system. Have a standard form for which the users fills certain information that would allow the user to narrow down and be more specific in their submission (the more standard data you can present the better, but don't have a 10 page form to submit a bug). To limit the amount of request, at the top of the form allow the users to search for the possible bug that may have been submitted (date, type, etc..) Still allow the bug submission data to be posted in an additional comments field. To lesson the submissions, once a bug has been identified, you can have verified bug area link in the form for which the users can go check...

 

Well, my idea about keeping it for Dev+ Only is a stupid one. Dummy me forgot that QA is going to be open for *everyone* with game access. So yeah...let's all pretend I never suggested this.

 

Equality!

 

Egaleco!

 

It should be in the game, have dropdowns for catagorization, and autosearch titles of other submitted bugs as you type yours.

 

it's cool. however, I was looking forward to receiving the ant farm some day

qq

 

Maybe they can reskin the one they have and put it on the add-on store.

 

naked mole rat farm?

 

Well, this seems to be the pattern for, well, pretty much everything.

 

Given that the main motivation for cancelling this program was the fact that people were repeatedly filing bugs on existing issues, some of which had been reported many releases before (i.e., they were never fixed), it seems to me the real problem is that a real bug tracking system was never made available for reporting bugs. Going through months of archived forum posts to see if an issue was reported before is not a reasonable expectation to have on the player population. I've stopped reporting issues at this point because I don't want to have to deal with blowback from hearing that it was filed back in R32 or something.

 

Bugs being reported that had already been reported in previous releases was NOT the problem. They have said multiple times that's fair game.

What is a problem was people reporting the same bug multiple times in the SAME release. particularly frustrating when it's on the same page. To some degree that can be mitigated by a proper bug-tracking system, but ultimately even with the best bug-tracking system people have to check to make sure it's not a duplicate when they submit it.

 

I don't mind reporting bugs, and will probably continue reporting them with or without an incentive program.
However, as others have mentioned (does this count as a duplicate report?) the lack of tracking is really demotivating.
It's nice and all to get a BugId on something you have submitted, but you cannot follow the life cycle of that bug, neither can you see what severity it's been given by the dev team.

We're more than 40 releases out and some issues are bound to live still, either because of being difficult to reliably reproduce or simple because of low priority.
This means that you'd have to search through heaps of posts in many many different forums to determine if your bug has been reported already.
Most of which are named slightly different that you'd imagine and especially if they are not location related.
I will however agree with @Lexie that reporting something that's only a few posts down is simply moronic.


TL: DR
With or without an incentives program, I think it's about time that a decent bug tracking system was made available.
Jira (I think you know this tool already) has some nice features in this regard, and all I ask for is a read only, bugs only view, so we can do a proper search and track the progress (or lack thereof)