1 - I still to see anywhere in which people speak openly about the problems with their games. You would never see Bethesda or Ubisoft in a dev stream saying âwe are aware of this issue but to this day we are not able to find a satisfactory solution that will not break other thingsâ.
A big reason for this request is that, of all the games Iâve played, which is not a small number, Conan seems to have, by far, the worst quality control. For other games, Iâm not constantly needing to scour the forums to try to figure out if a bug has been reported and to see if it might be fixed soon. This is mostly because most of the bugs I encounter in other games just donât give rise to the level of frustration I feel with Conan.
Also software, software quality, and software engineering practices are the kinds of things I help others with for a living so I know it is fixable given the right investment.
2 - Again, there is N number of places to know these ⊠Again, once more, maybe it is a matter of looking for what you want to know instead of hoping it falls on your lap.
First, there shouldnât be N number unless N=1. There should be a single source of truth. Anything other than that leads to wasted effort, higher confusion, and higher costs.
Second, I wasnât aware of anything other than the Forums and that is not from a lack of looking. I spend far too much time as it is trying to figure out if something has been reported and acknowledged as a bug. It shouldnât have to be that hard. The right tool and process would fix that.
Also, as someone that works with bug tracking software often, I know how bugs reported from a while ago are viewed internally with suspicion. You wonder if it even still exists and is worth looking into when the reported date is old. A public tracker would allow me to retest after new releases and reconfirm the bugs existence to remove any suspicion.
3,4,5,6,7 - Do you want them to work on the issues or keep maintaining a system for people to satisfy idle curiosity yet they CANT HELP IN ANYWAY ?
Again, it has not been clear to me that they have a healthy process for tracking and resolving bugs. Based on the quality of the releases, my money is on there being a lot of improvement opportunities.
It seems to me that the really bad bugs that cause a lot of yelling right after a release gets somewhat fixed but thatâs about it. For example, the inventory issues that happened during AoW were bad. They said they fixed it. But do they know all the different remaining bugs they didnât fix with inventory. I think I counted 7 different bugged behaviors related to inventory just the other day. Where is that on the priority list?
Also, I disagree that we canât help. We can report, we can document, we can test and confirm. We could also vote on bugs we think are the most important. This is all very helpful information for a dev team to have.
A team on Funcom, they are working on an issue, then one of them screams âwe found an anomalous array, update the boardâ
I donât believe they should make every comment public nor do I believe they should make bugs of non released versions public. We donât care about internal releases. And there are systems that can handle this. So, this is not what Iâm suggesting.
The level of information we have is pretty clear and enough for PLAYERS to understand. If some do not, it is not Funcom that is at fault.
It has not been enough for me to understand. Not fully. I can only gauge what players seem to be yelling about loudly at the moment. When we get a response to an issue, it is because it is one of the major game stopping issues. Only then do we get much communication. And for that communication, Iâm grateful. But I cannot gauge accurately if they are aware of all the different permutations of inventory issues. Nor do I know if they have any intent on fixing them.
8 - The tags are there, people use them, or dont, in their reports. Again, we dont need internal communication from Funcom to know what is being done and what we can âexpectâ. It would be crazy to require that.
My point is that this forum is not the right tool to track bugs. And, Iâd like to be able to see and search a single list of bugs. Currently this forum is divided up into 3 separate bug lists. I donât believe that is smart. Not easily searchable, filterable, or conducive to checking for duplicates or cross platform issues.
Whos paying for that ? I sure would not.
Iâm a firm believer that, in software, paying down technical debt for a product that you want to continue to support and extend is almost always worth it. If they need to refactor their code to make it more stable, they should do so. If they do not have the right tools to gather and communicate bug information, they should create them. Because not doing so, is actually more expensive in the long run - unless they just hope to abandon the game soon. So, if youâre worried about cost, you should want an efficient process for gathering and communicating about bugs. Good tooling can allow that.