Better bug tracking

Can we get a better bug tracker? The information in this forum is highly fragmented, difficult to search, filter, and determine the status.

A proper system should:

  • Be open to the community
  • Have a clear status for each bug (open, under investigation, confirmed, in development, in testing, in beta, closed)
  • Have a filterable list view to see all bugs at once
  • Support advanced queries
  • Support comments per bug
  • Have a build number for when it is confirmed
  • Have a build number for when it is fixed
  • Support tags like Xbox, PC, PlayStation - not be in separate lists

Also, while we are waiting, can we get a better understanding of what system you use internally (ex Jira) and how bugs make it from here to there and how the statuses here are updated? I cannot imagine you can use this forum effectively internally and I cannot imagine a process that would keep us as informed as we should be if you use a different system internally. So, I believe a single system with an external view and ability to create and comment on bugs is ideal.

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Putting forth my support for this suggestion.

Well done, thorough and addresses my limited understanding of what and how I communicate the bugs I have been reporting.

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And I appreciate the work you have done. Thank you.

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I, too, would support this. However - I believe that Funcom has operated more “openly” in the past. And as a result were burned by it. Once bitten, twice shy kind of thing. At least - that is the perception that I am getting.

The more windows we have into their processes, the more accountable we can hold them. But that’s a double edge sword. Especially for them. If suddenly their leadership makes some kind of a decision to cut and run - suddenly they now have to answer to their player community too. Since they had windows open for us to see under the hood.

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I’m sure there will always be people complaining. But that happens regardless, and sometimes because of, the lack of transparency.

An alternative way to look at this is, the more windows we have into their process, the more opportunities they have to build trust and gratitude in the community. And the more opportunities they have to benefit from our help for free.

Funcom used to have a publicly viewable Trello board with bugs categorized neatly under headers based on importance and progress. But that was years ago when we lived in simpler times.

I’m afraid that the game has bloated so much, with layers of new code duct taped over old core nobody understands anymore, that they can no longer easily predict potential issues, nor can they fix those issues when they arise because that would mean poking the old code, and they’re afraid if they dig too deep they’ll release a Balrog or something.

I’m not saying the situation has gotten out of hand; I’m sure they still have a process for dealing with bugs. But it might not be something they’d be willing to show publicly, because it probably won’t make a pretty picture.

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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 “we are aware of this issue but to this day we are not able to find a satisfactory solution that will not break other things”. All you see is people in those Ubisofts and Bethesdas telling you to get a better PC. Maybe you should watch the streams and search for the topics in which funcom is open and clear.
2 - Again, there is N number of places to know these. I had until a few months ago the mirror of the discord in which updates are given, and in them you have the link for the tracker of what is being done, and what is found or being looked at. Again, once more, maybe it is a matter of looking for what you want to know instead of hoping it falls on your lap.
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 ? Picture this: A team on Funcom, they are working on an issue, then one of them screams “we found an anomalous array, update the board”. And then a guy goes there to update the public board. Then another says “hey, we must comment this for now to see how it goes”, again, someone goes update the board. Really ? Is that what you want Funcom to spend WORKTIME in ?
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.
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 “expect”. It would be crazy to require that. It is like you requiring the city to hire a cop to be in front of every door in every street so “there is no crime”. Whos paying for that ? I sure would not.

I haven’t played any Bethesda or Ubisoft games that are being actively developed at a pace Funcom does with Conan Exiles. I did play Amazon’s New World, and I can tell you that the difference in release quality is striking. Their releases are not bug-free, of course, but they’re much less buggy than what we get in Conan Exiles.

It’s not just about bugs, either. The studios whose games I play are also a lot better at communicating about their roadmap. In my library of games that I actually play – as opposed to gifts or impulse purchases – Funcom is pretty much the worst across the board when it comes to quality and communication.

That said, you’re right that a bug tracker is not the optimal solution to these problems. But hey, any port in a storm. They might as well try that. It’s not as horribly difficult and costly as you’re trying to scare people into believing.

The right tool for the right job. Discord is not a bug tracker, and if you actually use it for that, then you have my condolences.

What you’re really trying to say here is that they shouldn’t let us track bugs. And I respect your opinion, but don’t dress it as some failing on the players’ part, because it’s not. Telling people they’re lazy because they don’t want to manually track bugs by digging around Discord is ridiculous.

Automation exists. Lean processes exist. If they use the right tools, spend some time and effort into configuring them properly, and establish some reasonable processes, there’s no reason why maintaining this system would be the time sink you’re making it out to be.

The problem is that “if” in my previous sentence. “If” they use the right tools, “if” they invest into configuring them, “if” they establish reasonable processes. There are plenty of reasons why they wouldn’t want to do that, but most of them boil down to “We don’t think the initial investment would be worth it.” :man_shrugging:

Nice strawman there. Nobody asked for Funcom to share the internal, technical details. No one asked them to have to manually synchronize two different boards, for that matter.

I know at least one fairly known company that maintains their JIRA board open to the public and the users of their software can submit bug reports and track them. The devs use that same board and can even mark their comments as “internal only”.

Another route would be to have two separate bug trackers – one public, one internal – with lean processes that govern how to relate issues between the two and automation to keep the public tracker updated based on the updates on the internal tracker.

All of this is already solved. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel to make it work. If you haven’t kept abreast of the industry, there’s plenty of learning resources out there. And if you have, then you don’t have any excuse trying to intimidate people into thinking these are insurmountable problems.

There are 3 separate bug report forums for Conan Exiles, one for each supported platform. In essence, there are 3 separate public-facing bug trackers, if you want to deign calling a freaking forum software a “bug tracker”. @DrownedInNoobRiver clearly asked for the bug tracking to be unified in one tracker, rather than 3 separate trackers, and the filtering to be done via tags.

I happen to disagree, mostly on account of forums being a poor medium for bug tracking and bug reporting, and tags being to easy to omit and too hard to enforce, but let’s not misrepresent what @DrownedInNoobRiver asked for.

Actually, you are, whether you like it or not. By your own admission, you buy everything in the Bazaar. Part of that pricing comes from their financial goals, and those financial goals are getting harder and harder to hit with each release being buggier and lower quality than the previous.

So yeah, you’re the one actually paying for not having proper bug tracking :wink:

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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 “we are aware of this issue but to this day we are not able to find a satisfactory solution that will not break other things”.

A big reason for this request is that, of all the games I’ve played, which is not a small number, Conan seems to have, by far, the worst quality control. For other games, I’m 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 don’t 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 shouldn’t 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 wasn’t 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 shouldn’t 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 that’s 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 didn’t 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 can’t 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 “we found an anomalous array, update the board”

I don’t believe they should make every comment public nor do I believe they should make bugs of non released versions public. We don’t care about internal releases. And there are systems that can handle this. So, this is not what I’m 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, I’m 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 “expect”. It would be crazy to require that.

My point is that this forum is not the right tool to track bugs. And, I’d 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 don’t 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.

I’m 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 you’re worried about cost, you should want an efficient process for gathering and communicating about bugs. Good tooling can allow that.

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Thank you @CodeMage for typing pretty much everything I was thinking - but probably more efficiently.

I happen to disagree, mostly on account of forums being a poor medium for bug tracking and bug reporting, and tags being to easy to omit and too hard to enforce, but let’s not misrepresent what @DrownedInNoobRiver asked for.

To clarify, I’m not suggesting we continue to use the forums. I fully agree it is the wrong tool. I’m imagining something like a single Jira board for all issues where we can do advanced searching and filtering.

Also, I just used the word ‘tag’ because it was a word people were familiar with in these forums. In Jira, as I’m sure you know, you could create a custom field for the platforms and require that at least one platform be selected.

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It’s been a while since I’ve used Trello. It was pretty simplistic when I last used it. But it would be miles better than what we have here.

I’m afraid that the game has bloated so much, with layers of new code duct taped over old core nobody understands anymore, that they can no longer easily predict potential issues, nor can they fix those issues when they arise

I’ve wondered how much, if any, refactoring to the old code they are doing on each release. I’d be more tolerant of these bugs if I thought that they were slowly eating the elephant on each release by refactoring old code with the goal of having a clean code base to maintain and extend.

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From what I remember of Funcom’s public Trello, it wasn’t really a bug tracker as such, it was more of a way of having limited input from the playerbase and offering a limited insight into what they were doing.

I was left with an impression that it was updated manually to keep in sync with whatever (if any) internal tracking solution they used. That impression was not based on any hard data, though. It was just an educated guess, based on: 1) the contrast between the level of detail available in that Trello board and the level of detail required for large-scale software development, and 2) the fact that Trello really isn’t a substitute for an issue tracker, especially for a project that large and complex.

This is pure speculation on my part, but I’m deeply convinced that the switch from their old release cadence of “whenever we have something worth releasing” to “a new chapter every 3 months” did the opposite of what you’re hoping to be the case. I’m betting that shifting a lot of resources to Dune didn’t help, either.

I believe that rather than methodically chipping away at the tech debt, they cut corners and adopted “whatever gets us to release date” approach. If you consider that Conan Exiles is using a heavily customized version of UE 4.15, and add 7 years of tech debt on top of that, the situation looks pretty grim.

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Tried it. Installed the public version. The forms are great, but the processing sucks. I didn’t have the enterprise version, so it was legit only for open source. This (jira) here at Funcom is not open source. I asked, but I doubt FC is using a public github. :slightly_smiling_face: I mean it’s now public by default (being merges atm).

Oh well, I have fangs to hunt, and possible merges to keep me busy.

At this point I’m fairly convinced that the primary reason Funcom doesn’t provide a more detailed/organised bug system is because they don’t have one. It’s starting to look far more likely that bugs are fixed a) by the ‘loudest most recent shouting method’ @DrownedInNoobRiver suggested above and/or b) by pinning bits of paper to a dartboard, spinning round a few times and then throwing the dart out the window. They don’t provide more insight into how it is organised because it isn’t


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Hey. Do you have, like, a digest verion? Or a TL;DR: version? :rofl:

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Let me summarize:

Hope that helps. :wink:

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It does. :rofl:

I am now realizing that it was the correct choice to just tune it out all together. :joy: :rofl:

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