Issue Tracker now live!

[Pixelated Sparkster]

Hello! I hope you are all doing well and are staying safe during this time.

I wish to ask for help on this, and please forgive me if I am overstepping my boundaries, but how come the JWE section of the issue tracker rarely had any issues that are labelled as confirmed in the 2020 new year? There are pages upon pages of issues that have been left to expire, and some of them are genuine issues players have in the game. It would make sense if these were yet to be identified or worked on, it's understandable, but it is hard to support any legitimate bugs and/or issues if they keep getting expired as we could not contribute our new findings to them anymore.

Just recently, I had an audio issue of mine be labeled as a duplicate and I was linked to a previous audio issue I made, which in itself was a repost because the first issue was left to expire, to which it expired itself in a few days later and I had to report it for a third time to include new data I got. I have about 25 issues I submitted that have been left to be expired and the JWE issue tracker has been full of them lately that it has become concerning. I love the game and how it grew over the 2 years it has been released, but I am very unmotivated to report in issues if they are just going to be left to be expired as I have no frame if these issues have yet to be identified or unimportant. I understand times are tough right now, but could I please get some clarification on what's happening with JWE's support? Thank you for hearing me out.

 

[Chante Goodman]

Hello! I hope you are all doing well and are staying safe during this time.

I wish to ask for help on this, and please forgive me if I am overstepping my boundaries, but how come the JWE section of the issue tracker rarely had any issues that are labelled as confirmed in the 2020 new year? There are pages upon pages of issues that have been left to expire, and some of them are genuine issues players have in the game. It would make sense if these were yet to be identified or worked on, it's understandable, but it is hard to support any legitimate bugs and/or issues if they keep getting expired as we could not contribute our new findings to them anymore.

Just recently, I had an audio issue of mine be labeled as a duplicate and I was linked to a previous audio issue I made, which in itself was a repost because the first issue was left to expire, to which it expired itself in a few days later and I had to report it for a third time to include new data I got. I have about 25 issues I submitted that have been left to be expired and the JWE issue tracker has been full of them lately that it has become concerning. I love the game and how it grew over the 2 years it has been released, but I am very unmotivated to report in issues if they are just going to be left to be expired as I have no frame if these issues have yet to be identified or unimportant. I understand times are tough right now, but could I please get some clarification on what's happening with JWE's support? Thank you for hearing me out.

Hey @Pixelated Sparkster. It's not up to us at Frontier whether the issues are confirmed, as explained in the Issue Tracker FAQ:

What does it mean when an issue is “Confirming”?
When an issue is first submitted, it is placed in the “Confirming” category. Players need to confirm they can also reproduce the issue being reported. This is done by leaving a comment explaining the steps they used to reproduce the issue and ticking the “Can Reproduce” tick box. If the “Can Reproduce” box is not ticked, the comment will not be counted as reproduction.

What does it mean when an issue is “Confirmed”?

When the number of contributions on a “Confirming” issue reaches a certain threshold, an issue is then marked as “Confirmed”. This issue can then be voted on to assign priority to individual issues this is how the community can tell us that an issue is important and affecting a number of people.

Why do some issues expire?

To help keep the Issue Tracker concise and allow players to easily find issues affecting a number of people, reports will expire after an allocated time frame. This allows all reports a set amount of time to be confirmed by the player base before expiring. This ensures that important issues float to the top, and are not hidden by noise and duplicate reports of confirmed or fixed issues. This does not mean we are ignoring issues – we still monitor the Issue Tracker daily and will pick up any critical issues along the way.

You can read the FAQ here. If you're experiencing an issue and you make a thread about them, or you comment in a thread to talk about it, you should link to your Issue Tracker report so other people can contribute and can confirm the issue.

As it says, just because your issue expires doesn't mean the team haven't seen it or aren't working on a fix. The method we use is to help work out which bugs are the most critical to fix. The most critical bugs will have either lots of Issue Tracker reports describing the same issue, or, if used correctly, will have one or two Issue Tracker reports which many people have helped confirm.

Please let me/us know if you have any further questions

 

[Alshain]

Lets be honest, expecting players to go in and confirm these things is unrealistic. There are a lot of valid bugs that get archived with no attention because this issue tracker has been such a failure. If it's not a complete game breaking bug and your lucky you might get 1 to mark it, but you need like 20 to consider it confirmed. The threshold is too high.

 

[Lucifera Danzig]

Lets be honest, expecting players to go in and confirm these things is unrealistic. There are a lot of valid bugs that get archived with no attention because this issue tracker has been such a failure. If it's not a complete game breaking bug and your lucky you might get 1 to mark it, but you need like 20 to consider it confirmed. The threshold is too high.

Dunno what you're talking about. An issue I added my report to got confirmed after about 10 or so people contributed to that bug report.

webapp

issues.frontierstore.net

 

[Pixelated Sparkster]

Hey @Pixelated Sparkster. It's not up to us at Frontier whether the issues are confirmed, as explained in the Issue Tracker FAQ:

What does it mean when an issue is “Confirming”?
When an issue is first submitted, it is placed in the “Confirming” category. Players need to confirm they can also reproduce the issue being reported. This is done by leaving a comment explaining the steps they used to reproduce the issue and ticking the “Can Reproduce” tick box. If the “Can Reproduce” box is not ticked, the comment will not be counted as reproduction.

What does it mean when an issue is “Confirmed”?

When the number of contributions on a “Confirming” issue reaches a certain threshold, an issue is then marked as “Confirmed”. This issue can then be voted on to assign priority to individual issues this is how the community can tell us that an issue is important and affecting a number of people.

Why do some issues expire?

To help keep the Issue Tracker concise and allow players to easily find issues affecting a number of people, reports will expire after an allocated time frame. This allows all reports a set amount of time to be confirmed by the player base before expiring. This ensures that important issues float to the top, and are not hidden by noise and duplicate reports of confirmed or fixed issues. This does not mean we are ignoring issues – we still monitor the Issue Tracker daily and will pick up any critical issues along the way.

You can read the FAQ here. If you're experiencing an issue and you make a thread about them, or you comment in a thread to talk about it, you should link to your Issue Tracker report so other people can contribute and can confirm the issue.

As it says, just because your issue expires doesn't mean the team haven't seen it or aren't working on a fix. The method we use is to help work out which bugs are the most critical to fix. The most critical bugs will have either lots of Issue Tracker reports describing the same issue, or, if used correctly, will have one or two Issue Tracker reports which many people have helped confirm.

Please let me/us know if you have any further questions

Ah.. this makes sense. Thank you for letting me know, I think I will be posting on the subreddit and thread for players to update and check on any issues they have so more players could contribute. Thanks!

 

[Chante Goodman]

Lets be honest, expecting players to go in and confirm these things is unrealistic. There are a lot of valid bugs that get archived with no attention because this issue tracker has been such a failure. If it's not a complete game breaking bug and your lucky you might get 1 to mark it, but you need like 20 to consider it confirmed. The threshold is too high.

These are what we ask for:
The thresholds are:

• Three independent reproductions on Planet Coaster, Planet Zoo, and Jurassic World: Evolution.
• Ten independent reproductions on Elite: Dangerous.

 

[Alshain]

Yeah, as I said. The threshold is too high for ED. It's a more niche game than your builders, you are less likely to get that many people. It's almost like you have it backward.

Expecting to crowd source this is ridiculous in either case. While the game industry is capable of doing such a thing for beta testing and bug reporting, someone at Frontier needs to go through and filter and confirm them. I spent a decade working in software testing and I can tell you from experience, your users aren't going to evaluate bug reports unless it's a game breaking bug that everyone is upset about, and in that case you are likely to end up with a lot more indicators than a bug tracker, such as your forums and massive outcries. This makes the whole venture of the bug tracker pointless and real bugs are going unfixed because of it.

 

[Kenjiro]

Hey @Pixelated Sparkster. It's not up to us at Frontier whether the issues are confirmed, as explained in the Issue Tracker FAQ:

What does it mean when an issue is “Confirming”?
When an issue is first submitted, it is placed in the “Confirming” category. Players need to confirm they can also reproduce the issue being reported. This is done by leaving a comment explaining the steps they used to reproduce the issue and ticking the “Can Reproduce” tick box. If the “Can Reproduce” box is not ticked, the comment will not be counted as reproduction.

What does it mean when an issue is “Confirmed”?

When the number of contributions on a “Confirming” issue reaches a certain threshold, an issue is then marked as “Confirmed”. This issue can then be voted on to assign priority to individual issues this is how the community can tell us that an issue is important and affecting a number of people.

Why do some issues expire?

To help keep the Issue Tracker concise and allow players to easily find issues affecting a number of people, reports will expire after an allocated time frame. This allows all reports a set amount of time to be confirmed by the player base before expiring. This ensures that important issues float to the top, and are not hidden by noise and duplicate reports of confirmed or fixed issues. This does not mean we are ignoring issues – we still monitor the Issue Tracker daily and will pick up any critical issues along the way.

You can read the FAQ here. If you're experiencing an issue and you make a thread about them, or you comment in a thread to talk about it, you should link to your Issue Tracker report so other people can contribute and can confirm the issue.

As it says, just because your issue expires doesn't mean the team haven't seen it or aren't working on a fix. The method we use is to help work out which bugs are the most critical to fix. The most critical bugs will have either lots of Issue Tracker reports describing the same issue, or, if used correctly, will have one or two Issue Tracker reports which many people have helped confirm.

Please let me/us know if you have any further questions

So... FDev expects one of two things (or even both at the same time):
1- Players will check the Issue tracker to see if there are any new problems to test and confirm, DAILY?
2- Players who report an issue should SPAM as much as they can on forums, Facebook, twitter, etc. so to try and get the attention of other players, who then will confirm what was reported?

I guess those are true, because there are VERY OLD ISSUES I reported and their status are still "CONFIRMING".

What leads me to think that the issue tracker is useless unless players confirm what others reported, right? Oh my... all this time I was so naive, thinking the support team would receive an email from the Issue Tracker system, then would jump into the game to check if what was reported can be reproduced.

Note to self: Kenjiro, you should spend more time checking the issue tracker than actually playing the game.

 

[Tkael]

This was previously reported as an issue using the issue tracker (https://issues.frontierstore.net/issue-detail/8120) though of course it failed to achieve 10 replication before the system automatically expired it. So frustrating!

 

[Tkael]

FDev... your players do not feel heard. We shout issues into the void, watch those issues languish until they expire, and then eventually turn away in frustration.

 

[Alshain]

To further my earlier point:

My Issue:

webapp

issues.frontierstore.net

The one that expired before I found it:

webapp

issues.frontierstore.net

Neither confirmed.
This bug is SO EASY to reproduce, it's not one of those that one person has it and another does not. Literally everyone is likely having this issue, and just haven't realized it, and it would take 2 minutes for someone at FDev to see it for themselves. Further you've added new states since pirate attack and they are on the filter, so it can't be that difficult to add this one, right? This should have been fixed ages ago! Why wasn't it? Because you are relying on the users to confirm something in a menu system somewhere. It's not going to happen.

 

[Assimilator1]

I don't suppose it's been fixed in the FC beta? [update] (could only find beta 2 patch notes, and I don't know if it's inclusive of all fixes, so who knows!).
If not, I'll add to the report & see if I can get some squad mates to add to the report.

[edit] At least the tracker search function seems to work now! (on a very quick test)

 

[Ozric]

These are what we ask for:
The thresholds are:

• Three independent reproductions on Planet Coaster, Planet Zoo, and Jurassic World: Evolution.
• Ten independent reproductions on Elite: Dangerous.

Now this is interesting. Why is that the case? Has it always been the case? We were told when this launched that it was 10 reproductions were needed to confirm an issue so why does Elite, which is a vastly bigger game, require more reproductions? Especially when a lot of the issues are textual or other display issues that don't need 11 people to report it to be confirmed.

Neither confirmed.
This bug is SO EASY to reproduce, it's not one of those that one person has it and another does not. Literally everyone is likely having this issue, and just haven't realized it, and it would take 2 minutes for someone at FDev to see it for themselves. Further you've added new states since pirate attack and they are on the filter, so it can't be that difficult to add this one, right? This should have been fixed ages ago! Why wasn't it? Because you are relying on the users to confirm something in a menu system somewhere. It's not going to happen.

I have 12 issues I've made myself on the issue tracker, 8 of them have expired, 3 of them are 'confirming' (which is interesting because they all were made last year, all have other users confirming them, but haven't been auto expired after the apparent 30 day period). Some of them are incorrectly labelled stars in the System Map or Galaxy Map, it would take 2 minutes for someone to port themselves to the system to check.

Then we have one that is actually acknowledged, despite only having 2 other people confirm it, and that is from November of last year...

Take this issue.

https://issues.frontierstore.net/issue-detail/13233

Mutliple reports of NSPs not appearing when they should do. That's not going to get 10 separate people to confirm it, I tried to get people to add to it during the last Buckyball race and only managed to get two others. And yet this is a huge issue, because if you are looking for something (let's say Raxxla) and it is in a system, but because it bugs out the system looks empty to you you just keep moving on.



I currently work as a Software Tester, and there's no way a system like this would ever be used internally in any of the companies I've worked in. Or at Frontier itself.

 

[Banger_uk]

this system is terrible... on most occasions you seem to side with xbox users, pc users seems to get expired very quickly. I reported on one only 2 days ago and already they label it "duplicate" and closed.why the xbox versions remain open.
and you want people to use this. huh? if you want people to use this rotten system then leave it open longer so people can confirm it.

 

[Flyinspaghetti]

What does it mean when an issue is “Confirmed”?

When the number of contributions on a “Confirming” issue reaches a certain threshold, an issue is then marked as “Confirmed”. This issue can then be voted on to assign priority to individual issues this is how the community can tell us that an issue is important and affecting a number of people.

Maybe that threshold is too high when NINE people confirm they are having the same problem and it still lists an issue as "confirming":

webapp

issues.frontierstore.net

Also why isn't severity a factor in how quick these issues get looked at? I mean the bug above is more than just a minor inconvenience, it's literally game breaking for explorers who expect when they cash in they'll get their tags and data.

 

[ShadowLilly]

The most critical bugs will have either lots of Issue Tracker reports describing the same issue,

Then why do most reports gets closed because of 'duplicate'?

Also i hate the fact that everything gets expired, so no one can contribute to it i have so many reports that are expired, but not fixed.. And i read with most of them that other people also have those issues.

I realy think that you should have an in game report system for bugs, because lots of people don't even know about the issue tracker (of your forum)

 

[FoxyDee]

Hi, I am trying to log in into the issue tracker via Frontier account, it should be the same as this forum account right? But when I enter my forum name and password, it is not possible to log in, any idea where is the problem?

I tried severel times in case I typed something wrong, but same result, yet when I try to log into forums with same Username and password, it logs in with no problem.

 

[Joël]

Hi, I am trying to log in into the issue tracker via Frontier account, it should be the same as this forum account right? But when I enter my forum name and password, it is not possible to log in, any idea where is the problem?

I tried severel times in case I typed something wrong, but same result, yet when I try to log into forums with same Username and password, it logs in with no problem.

Can you try to login on the Issue Tracker with the help provided on this page?

I cannot log into the issue tracker with my steam account. :: Frontier Customer Support

How to connect your Steam account to a Frontier account.

support.frontier.co.uk

Perhaps that your Forum account is not correctly linked to your Frontier Account. If this doesn't work, then please contact Frontier Support for further assistance.

 

[FoxyDee]

Can you try to login on the Issue Tracker with the help provided on this page?

I cannot log into the issue tracker with my steam account. :: Frontier Customer Support

How to connect your Steam account to a Frontier account.

support.frontier.co.uk

Perhaps that your Forum account is not correctly linked to your Frontier Account. If this doesn't work, then please contact Frontier Support for further assistance.

Thank you, will try that.

 

[Bravo17]

In looking at the issue tracker it seems that a large number of issues would be better suited to being sorted in the forums, since they involve either a mis-understanding of how the game works or a mis-configuration of the game settings.

If the Submission page had a link at the top of it to the forums with a suitable message it might cause a player who is not aware of the forums to ask there rather than post an issue that will inevitably get marked as "Invalid" or "As Intended". This would have a three-fold advantage - there would be less issues for Frontier staff to have to go through, real bugs would have a better chance of standing out for solving, and the player could get a faster resolution to their issue if it wasn't really a bug.