Its against my better judgement, but I will give you the benefit of the doubt with your request. But if you blow this off, then its going to be viewed by everyone else, and I cannot guarantee you getting a civil response afterwards.
So let’s talk about a bug that is ticking me off. Oh yes. There are things about this game that I don’t like. That I want fixed yesterday. And even sometimes wonder how the frick they happened. This one is the elevator/maproom thing.
Just to get everyone on the same page on what this is. This is where certain non-container objects cannot be used by people outside a clan. This means elevators and maprooms placed in the world by one clan or individual cannot be used by others outside the clan.
Now… this one is admittedly a minor bug. But I play and admin on a modded server on Siptah. This means I have to add things to the world on an admin character in an admin clan so players have access to some of the modded functions. This is a debilitating bug for us.
This one wasn’t caught by Funcom’s coders.
It wasn’t caught by volunteer QA
It wasn’t caught on testlive. (actually I think it was, but there wasn’t alot of information)
It was caught on live on patch day.
Why wasn’t it caught earlier? Well if I didn’t have an understanding on how testing works. I might be pretty miffed right now too.
But I do. In all cases there wasn’t a sufficient multiplayer environment in testing to catch this one. I didn’t catch it on testlive for that same reason. Yes I do have testlive installed, I do help with testing here and there along with others who opt in to have the separate install (anyone can do this). But I didn’t catch it.
Why? Because I play testlive in singleplayer. But even when I did used to play testlive in multiplayer (a few years ago) I likely wouldn’t have seen a bug like this. This requires me to be playing with others who have open use elevators and maprooms.
In an internal testing environment (like in the devkit). Its a chore to do multiplayer and even then you’re testing specific things. In their QA thing, its a limited number of people. The best place to have caught it would have been testlive. Which quite honestly, you could participate in too if you wished.
Now as I said I think it was caught towards the end of testlive. But it was slated as low priority. Sometimes you need a live player environment to get more info on other things. Which they did. They didn’t fix this game breaking (for my community and I) bug since it was low priority. For unmodded Exiled Lands content, people not able to use each other’s things isn’t game breaking (some might even think its a feature, not a bug).
And this bug isn’t because they modified maprooms or elevators. It was a class or method involving permissions. With an unintended effect on those two structures (and any other modded content that calls on those blueprints).
This is one bug out of many. Fortunately I believe this one will be fixed in the next hotfix. Since it was brought up and with a ton of information on what causes it, when, why, and where. It was easy to identify.
And this is why SirBowen suggested you become a Bug Hunter. If you’ve got knowledge on a ton of bugs. Head over to the PC Discussion - Funcom Forums section and make a thread for each one, that doesn’t have a thread already.
List what the bug is.
What you do to make it happen (the exact steps).
Where you are when it happens (map and location on map, and whether you’re in your base, someone elses, in the world, or in a camp area)
What actions that cause it not to happen (if there is a step that when altered causes the bug to not happen).
What your PC specs are (if on PC)
And any other unique information regarding the bug
If there is already a thread, post all that information in the thread. This is especially important because if you have a bug, and someone else doesn’t. But both of you are in the same map, location, and trying to do the same thing, but your PC specs are different, there could be something wonky going with specific hardware. They can’t fix such a bug unless they can reproduce it on that hardware and they can’t do that if they don’t know what hardware that is. Or if its a specific location causing weird things, it helps to know if that bug happens everywhere, or specific locations.
If you only expect the coders/devs to do all this on their own. It will take them years to fix individual bugs. And with the number of players who play on Testlive, it can take months for the devs to track down a bug. They’re not mind readers.