An Effective Bug Solution

[tigris115]

It should come as no surprise to anyone here that Planet Zoo is riddled with bugs and glitches that can be irritating at best and game breaking at worst. Often, these bugs go unnoticed by Frontier and continue to blight players.

My solution for this is simple yet brutally effective: A volunteer bug fighting team. Simply have frequent Planet Zoo players (especially Youtubers) volunteer to report to Frontier in an expedient fashion about any bugs or glitches they encounter.

I also think that for this volunteer army, you can give them a special bug themed cosmetic in a similar fashion to the video game Team Fortress 2.

 

[tigris115]

This is the TF2 hat for reference btw.

 

[LN]

I think its also just a simple but effective idea to make a link to the issuetracker mandatory when placing a thread in the feedback forum when its considered a bug.

Its way easier if we just all file on 1 report.

I think its always a hard job no matter the options.

Yours sounds good but as bugs can also be player specific there is a chance nobody in that team is experiencing what other players outside that team are experiencing.

 

[Dr4gon]

They have paying customers as beta testers. Can't e better than that.

 

[Leopard Lobbyist]

From what I've seen the issuetracker doesn't seem to be updated as frequently as it should be, so that wouldn't really help unless Frontier makes a more concerted effort to keep it up to date.

Another option would be for them to actually write up and release a public roadmap, and communicate more clearly with their userbase. They need to acknowledge, in an announcement, that they're aware of how broken the game has been update-after-update and instead of forcing out quick patches that tend to break more than they fix, they need to take a step back and take their time getting the game into a usable state.

Companies Frontier's size and above can't continue to get away with releasing spaghetti-coded, half-finished games like this. The "we'll patch it later" attitude that has been plaguing the game industry the past decade needs to be wiped out.

 

[tigris115]

From what I've seen the issuetracker doesn't seem to be updated as frequently as it should be, so that wouldn't really help unless Frontier makes a more concerted effort to keep it up to date.

Another option would be for them to actually write up and release a public roadmap, and communicate more clearly with their userbase. They need to acknowledge, in an announcement, that they're aware of how broken the game has been update-after-update and instead of forcing out quick patches that tend to break more than they fix, they need to take a step back and take their time getting the game into a usable state.

Companies Frontier's size and above can't continue to get away with releasing spaghetti-coded, half-finished games like this. The "we'll patch it later" attitude that has been plaguing the game industry the past decade needs to be wiped out.

As much as I love Frontier, I do think they have a problem with being kinda laissez-faire with things like communication and patching.
In fact, the main reason I proposed this is because I'm a firm believer in the phrase "If you want something done right, do it yourself."

 

[Leopard Lobbyist]

As much as I love Frontier, I do think they have a problem with being kinda laissez-faire with things like communication and patching.
In fact, the main reason I proposed this is because I'm a firm believer in the phrase "If you want something done right, do it yourself."

The JWE mod community has taken that saying to heart, for sure. They're making incredible strides on changes and features that the userbase has been begging Frontier for.

I do think your idea of a volunteer bug-hunting team could help a lot. Frontier would be wise to consider it.

 

[Chris Simon]

Often, these bugs go unnoticed by Frontier and continue to blight players.

Unfair and incorrect statement and premise.
All bugs reported via issue tracker get reviewed, put on the list and dealt with in order of severity and ease of fix.
Some bugs are so intertwined with multiple features in the code that fixing them as quickly as possible is either impossible or at least doesn't make sense unless the fix is bundled with deeper change in the code, otherwise it would break more things than it would fix. That's re reality of it.
Complaining about bugs and glitches here has little to no effect other than venting frustration and dividing community. Community managers may pick them up and forward them to the team, but most of the time they will simply point you to the issue tracker anyway.

In other words:
1) Moaning, complaining and reporting here makes no sense
2) We all are already a part of your suggested "team of bug hunters". At least those who use issue tracker.

 

[Leopard Lobbyist]

Unfair and incorrect statement and premise.
All bugs reported via issue tracker get reviewed, put on the list and dealt with in order of severity and ease of fix.
Complaining about them here has little to no effect. Community managers may pick them up and forward them to the team, but most of the time they will simply point you to the issue tracker anyway.

In other words:
1) Moaning, complaining and reporting here makes no sense
2) We all are already a part of your suggested "team of bug hunters". At least those who use issue tracker.

Again, the issue tracker is basically useless if it's not consistently updated to give the playerbase a sense of their problems being seen and addressed. Folks can report all they want, but if they don't get any feedback showing that said reports are being looked at they're going to wonder what the point is. Even if those reports have been looked at or even resolved, it won't mean much to the average player if they're not told as much.

 

[Sclurp]

The appropriate solution, in my opinion, is to release fixes when they’re ready and increase the size of their QA team.

 

[Chris Simon]

Again, the issue tracker is basically useless if it's not consistently updated to give the playerbase a sense of their problems being seen and addressed. Folks can report all they want, but if they don't get any feedback showing that said reports are being looked at they're going to wonder what the point is. Even if those reports have been looked at or even resolved, it won't mean much to the average player if they're not told as much.

So this thread is just a suggestion to improve the issue tracker to give players more feedback then.
With which I agree. More comms is always good.

What I don't agree with is the "If we yell louder, they will work faster" mentality, because that doesn't help (and demostrably hasn't ever helped) anyone

 

[tigris115]

@Chris Simon

I understand your concerns of mob mentality. That's why there'd be somewhat of a process to become a bug hunter. Not 100% sure on the framework yet but it'd allow people who play the game a lot (YouTubers would be perfect for this) that could communicate directly with Frontier if they can demonstrate maturity.

 

[Chris Simon]

@Chris Simon

I understand your concerns of mob mentality. That's why there'd be somewhat of a process to become a bug hunter. Not 100% sure on the framework yet but it'd allow people who play the game a lot (YouTubers would be perfect for this) that could communicate directly with Frontier if they can demonstrate maturity.

While it seems like a good idea on the surface, I still don't think that it would be able to help.
One of the reasons is the different a various nature of the bugs.
Some bugs or glitches are pretty general and affect everybody. For those, yeah, it doesn't matter who finds and reports them first and having a group of focused "bug hunters" could speed up the process a little. Well, it would speed up the process of reporting the bugs at least. There is still the issue I mentioned earlier that the bugs can only be fixed in an order that makes sense from coding perspective. The People's idea that "small bugs are easy to fix and should be prioritized" is very misleading. Design oversights can be sometimes easily fixed, but when comes to bugs and bad coding, nothing is really easy to fix.

But the majority of the bugs are user-specific. Or group-specific (for example a certain model of a graphics card). Those are very hard to pinpoint in QA and require a wide player base and multiple reports as accurate as possible to be properly replicated and eventually squashed.

What you are suggesting would in a broad sense divide the "bug reporting platform" and could be in fact counter-productive.

Like I said, I agree that the bug reporting system could be improved to give players more feedback when comes to bugs being investigated, for instance. On the other hand, that just means extra manpower squandered on a service that isn't directly helping the game. It would help the community for sure, but one has to draw the line somewhere on a limited budget.

By and large, like I said, I still think the most efficient way of doing this is simply to convince everybody to use the issue tracker as much as possible. And maybe if circumstance allows - improve the communication of debugging process to the playerbase.
Because that's ultimately what it's about. Players need to feel they are heard. That's usually enough and the bug fixes come when they are ready.

 

[Kai]

Again, the issue tracker is basically useless if it's not consistently updated to give the playerbase a sense of their problems being seen and addressed. Folks can report all they want, but if they don't get any feedback showing that said reports are being looked at they're going to wonder what the point is. Even if those reports have been looked at or even resolved, it won't mean much to the average player if they're not told as much.

This. I considered posting a bug today but when I looked at their issue tracker I'm seeing things that have been fixed but are still listed confirming. Like THIS or THIS, for example. That is a really bad first impression. Do they not have someone whos only job is to assign the issues and keep the issue tracker clean? 771 issues in confirming seems like quite the backlog.

Completely put me off reporting an issue when similar previous issues were apparently just left unassigned - feels like they don't care about keeping the issue tracker up to date.

And just what are 'expired' issues? Does your issue get ignored if you don't beg someone on this forum to go confirm your bug report? That seems pretty bad form.

 

[Ashen Shugar]

How do i report a bug with the bug reporter, I have logged in previously and posted there but now I login and I'm not logged in a massive what...

 

[Jaggid Edje]

Folks can report all they want, but if they don't get any feedback showing that said reports are being looked at they're going to wonder what the point is. Even if those reports have been looked at or even resolved, it won't mean much to the average player if they're not told as much.

The problem with what you're surmising here is that people have absolutely no qualms about posting on forums what their bugs are, moaning about them, and having tantrums about the developers failing to fix issue x, y and z. NONE of those things have an actual point at all, yet people do it.

So....obviously when it comes to bugs, wondering "what the point is" doesn't stop anyone from doing the one thing, why exactly is it you think it matters for the official place the bugs should be posted? Because people are contrary and stubborn and just want to vent, but not actually do something effectively constructive about it?

 

[Mkau]

And just what are 'expired' issues? Does your issue get ignored if you don't beg someone on this forum to go confirm your bug report? That seems pretty bad form.

Yea,an issue expires within 30 days if it hasn't been "confirmed".