Many threads are created in the “[Platform] Updates and Bugs” categories, in some cases they are a red herring, in others they elicit a response from @Hugo or @Ignasi that they “will pass the information to the dev team to find out if it is intended or not”. While this is an acceptable response, there is one problem.
We never find out what the dev team said.
For example, a while ago I opened a bug report that the Hyperborian Slaver armor had less armor value than other heavy armies. This was true, and I got the “pass to the dev team” response. I waited patiently for it to be fixed, but several patches later there was no change. I was about to open another one, when in a separate thread I mentioned the problem and another forum user pointed out that both it and the varnir heavy had a higher durability, and as such received lower armor.
Personal feelings about this discrepancy aside, I at least understood what was going on, and that another bug report was not warranted.
Is no response ever received from the dev team on these issues? Could you not have a pinned thread that let us know what they said about them? Like one thread, where you just updated us on the dev team said ■■■ about yyy? It would really help to know that reported bugs were either being fixed or were working as intended.
Yes, in fact. The Community team often posts it on the same bug report thread where they said they’d “pass the information to the dev team”.
Often, the reply is “this is not a bug, it’s intentionally that way”. It’s not always the answer we would’ve wanted, but that’s life. I was sad to hear the Debaucheries DLC wasn’t going to get a right-sided curtain piece to match the left-sided one, but its exclusion wasn’t a bug.
Well I have a suggestion, we ask questions, they go find out, they come back and answer said questions before they close the comment and then it just gets asked again and it gets closed again with no answer, its frustrating.
Funcom wants to be more open well answer questions, fully not just with : " we are sorry, we will pass it on, then walks over to throw it in waste can and moves on to next canned answer. I am sorry but this is what it feels like when I ask a question and never get a full answer. Like if you do not know ok, go find out and come back and answer it and if its a bug fix do not close it till you fixed and then told us " Hey we fixed this, YAY does dance of happy.
I have received responses back on my questions where the answer was ‘this was done on purpose’.
When reporting thigs that turn out to be not on purpose I assume they expect us to watch the patch notes after they say it will be looked into.
Even on pushier posts with multiple responses it’s ‘we’ll look into it’ and ‘we’re working on it’.
I’ve played more than a few games where the developers never even bother to respond so I feel like Funcom is doing what they can even if it’s not on any one of our timelines.
So have I, and I am obviously not talking about these occasions. I am referring to bug reports that are opened and receive the “pass that along” response and are then closed without knowing what the response was. Maybe you only ask questions to which the answer is already known, but there are many other bug reports where we don’t find out if it was intended behavior or the fix is in progress.
Did you read the first post? Did you?
I even gave a personal example of where this happens. I am not saying that they don’t ever respond to anyone, but in a situation such as this one it would have been nice to have a pinned thread so that if a response along these lines came back from the dev team it could be mentioned.
i’m not sure what exactly is expected here? a potential problem is reported, a community manager takes care of the issue, can answer it immediately or forwards it. so far so good. and now? should a developer immediately drop everything to check if it’s a bug or intended? so for every single request a developer is torn from his current work… is that what is expected and required here? i hate to disappoint you, but that will definitely never happen. if the reported problem is not a potential exploit/game breaker, the question just ends up at the bottom of the list with all the other questions. maybe it gets a priority and that’s it. then it will be there for the time being and will be processed when there is time. today, tomorrow, next week, next year… whenever. to search for the post at the time of processing to provide the answer is simply overhead that does not have to be and should be avoided if you don’t want to hire additional staff just for the feedback loop.
to the concrete example with the armor value. this is definitely a problem with the absolute lowest priority you can imagine. no game breaker and definitely no exploit. unpleasant, yes, but guaranteed not really super important and high prioritized. so you can imagine where such requests end up in the list. place 1 is it probably not
There’s a trello board, issues are to be registered and addressed there, and there hasn’t been any updates there since some times. I’m not placing blame, just give you prospect on the issue.
the trello board was introduced for the community to place the bigger issues there and give us the opportunity to vote for one thing or another. it was never the tool the developers work with
and for me it is actually more quality assurance to let the developer work and not to rip him out of his work for unimportant armor values
believe it or not but there is a process how such questions are handled. this process is optimized for efficiency and not for community feedback. we don’t have to like it but it should be clear that nothing will change at the expense of efficiency and if we’re smart we wouldn’t want that either
Your question, verbatim, was "Is no response ever received from the dev team on these issues? "
This is the question I answered, so please tone down your sarcasm. Unless your original post was not intended to ask a question, but to be sarcastic, in which case I misunderstood.
Threads that don’t get a response may not get a response because there is no (easy) answer. People don’t like silence, but they don’t like “we’re still working on it” replies, either. It’s a no-win situation for the devs.
Too often people who demand “better communication” aren’t in fact demanding better communication, they’re demanding faster fixes to their problems, so basically they’re asking for miracles. That’s why they’re doomed to get disappointed.
To clarify, I am not asking for immediate responses. I am not asking for minor problems to go directly to the top of a queue. What I am asking for is a single pinned topic, left open, in which the community managers who send issues to the dev team to check on can reply in the instances that the dev team responds but the original bug report is closed.
That response could be “it is intended behavior” in which case the matter is closed and users are not left wondering if it will be fixed in the next patch, or it could be “it has been added to the known issues list and will be taken care of when the bandwidth becomes available” in which case users can watch the patch notes for a fix.
This would help alleviate some (but not all) duplicate posts for things which are not issues. It would help alleviate the black hole of “we’ll check into it” that, in my experience, is not satisfying to customers.
If the dev team takes the questions but does not respond, which is the scenario I was questioning in the original post, then it’s not a suggestion that can be done. If they do eventually answer the inquiry, it gives the community managers a thread in which to update interested parties without having to search for the original (often closed) thread.
