First post here and a diehard fan of Elite: Dangerous but the feeling of abandonment on issues is beginning to set in for me. I'm all for new features and content, but with every new implementation, Fdev tends to break stuff on the way, just about every time. Now as bug reports pile up everyday and bug fixing apparently not the priority, I am losing confidence in this game, and this is coming from someone who absolutely loves this game. I just want to know if Fdev is planning on fixing all the valid issues and they are not just sweeping them under the rug.
Seriously the Issue tracker and bugs
- Thread starter KitKatz
- Start date
Well, the issues are in the public bug tracker, so hardly being swept under a rug. Fdev have a pretty well known dev process, so I expect we'll see some addressed in the next update. I do wish they would get rid of the many "issues" where people don't understand the game, but I guess that would swamp their qa bandwidth.
If there are 20 'legacy' bugs and 40 bugs from the last three updates they'll fix 10 of the old and 30 of the current. They'll also introduce 40 new bugs, so we end up with with 20/40 again. 5 of the fixed bugs will return in a later update.
As much as I'd like a bug free game, unless Frontier seriously buffs their own AX weapons it's not going to happen anytime soon.
As much as I'd like a bug free game, unless Frontier seriously buffs their own AX weapons it's not going to happen anytime soon.
This - if they cleaned up all the duplicates, and gave "not a bug, here's why" answers to the relevant ones, and moved a few others to being support tickets, then it would look a lot better (and be better customer service too - given the choice between explaining a bit of game behaviour to someone or letting them think it's a bug forever)
On the old forums, other players would often do the "not a bug, this is what happened" bit before QA got to it, but the new bug tracker isn't really suited for that even if people are feeling helpful.
As with any software development company FDEV have to prioritise game breaking (not necessarily what the bug reporter claims to be game breaking) and bugs that they can fix easily for the minor patches and updates.
They do this because every change they make to this version has to then be incorporated into the next version and that leads to (further) delays down the line. In a lot of cases they may have already fixed the bug in their in house copy of the next major release, provided this bug isn't actually "game breaking" it's likely that rather than waste time modifying the current version they'll hold off until the next major release is ready.
Of course, there are bugs where the "fix" for them would be worse for the community than actually leaving the bug in place and living with it. A good example of this is bugs with the stellar forge, most of these would require a full reset of the galaxy or the game itself. This could mean that every player would lose some or all of their own progress, for an issue that does not effect most of the community.
Of course, there are some bugs that are limited to individual systems that most other players will never see. This could be caused by certain software/hardware configs that few, if any players actually use. These may take a back burner especially if the player can do something about it on their end (such as remove the offending hardware/software from the equation) or there are no other reports.
Basically, no, not every bug reported on the bug tracker will be fixed during the games lifetime. Quite frankly, if there was any software house that can eliminate every single bug on every single system that their product will work on I'd call them a liar, it is quite literally impossible.
They do this because every change they make to this version has to then be incorporated into the next version and that leads to (further) delays down the line. In a lot of cases they may have already fixed the bug in their in house copy of the next major release, provided this bug isn't actually "game breaking" it's likely that rather than waste time modifying the current version they'll hold off until the next major release is ready.
Of course, there are bugs where the "fix" for them would be worse for the community than actually leaving the bug in place and living with it. A good example of this is bugs with the stellar forge, most of these would require a full reset of the galaxy or the game itself. This could mean that every player would lose some or all of their own progress, for an issue that does not effect most of the community.
Of course, there are some bugs that are limited to individual systems that most other players will never see. This could be caused by certain software/hardware configs that few, if any players actually use. These may take a back burner especially if the player can do something about it on their end (such as remove the offending hardware/software from the equation) or there are no other reports.
Basically, no, not every bug reported on the bug tracker will be fixed during the games lifetime. Quite frankly, if there was any software house that can eliminate every single bug on every single system that their product will work on I'd call them a liar, it is quite literally impossible.
It's not impossible - there are various techniques which can be used to mathematically prove that programs are bug-free, and to write code in ways which make those proofs possible, for certain types of program.
The catch is that at the moment it costs tens (and maybe hundreds) of times more money per line of code to do it, and as you pointed out, generally requires very tight hardware control as well. There are some interesting bits of research in theoretical computer science to try to make programming languages which are both capable and more easily provably correct, but they're a long way off most real-world applications.
Real reliability depends on control of the hardware the s/w runs on - plus the environment (in this case mostly network). So even if you had a provably 'correct' game it would still fail on out of spec hardware / old os / old drivers / bad network. Which you can see in the bug reports.
The big fails I see in the bug tracker at the moment is the inability to help people out, the inability to flag (and action) duplicates, and the lack of clarity of Issue vs Support Ticket. Plus the fact it seems to need more regular logins than any other fdev site - I used to try and help by commenting on issues, but having to log in each time dissuaded me.
When it was released it got regular (seemed weekly) updates, but as with a lot of home-grown solutions it seems to have stagnated for a while, sadly still below MVP IMHO.
You never get all the bugs out of a system ...
... until the very last user is dead!
... until the very last user is dead!