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Ozric

Volunteer Moderator
Ozric
Glad to see the ground textures are still completely broken after ordering an Apex taxi. 8 months after I initially reported it.

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https://issues.frontierstore.net/issue-detail/46755
Obviously the issue expired, which must mean it's no longer a problem...

Things have gone very quiet on the Issue Tracker front, I was just wondering what happened to the revamp we were told was on the cards? Last year.
 

Northpin

Northpin
Im noticing stuff in the latest patch that (iirc) were fixed in previous patches.
Like badly desyncs for clerks in stations (apex, pioneer supply clerks etc) - as in you interact with them, you see the voice animation kicking it, but no sound, which sound usually comes seconds later.

So fixed bugs that keep coming back in new patches are not helping either
 

Arioch

Arioch
Ozric said:
Things have gone very quiet on the Issue Tracker front, I was just wondering what happened to the revamp we were told was on the cards? Last year.
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I’m not sure if it’s intentional or not, but ED issues stopped expiring about 10 weeks ago - the last one was popped off around 13th July.

Now the only obstacle is to convince 10 other players to add a confirmation, which tends to feel a bit like trying to eat soup with a fork.
 

Ozric

Volunteer Moderator
Ozric
Arioch said:
I’m not sure if it’s intentional or not, but ED issues stopped expiring about 10 weeks ago - the last one was popped off around 13th July.

Now the only obstacle is to convince 10 other players to add a confirmation, which tends to feel a bit like trying to eat soup with a fork.
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I didn't realise you can see when an issue was marked as expired (I know someone used to run the metrics but gave up a year or two ago). I thought the last cull was just after Update 13, but they could have done it just before.

Issues are supposed to expire automatically after 30 days if they haven't reached 10 confirmations. But they don't. They are manually done in one lump around the time of a major update. You can watch the numbers of confirming issues plummet from thousands down to dozens.

The time that we invest into finding, cataloguing and submitting these issues, having to fight the Issue Tracker interface along the way, is being completely disregarded. Especially when we're directed there as soon as a problem is mentioned. I already have 71 expired issues that I have created, some of which are the same issue having been created 3 or 4 times.
 

Brrokk

Brrokk
I just don't use the issue tracker. I don't believe any company who are serious about fixing bugs would allow reports of bugs to "expire", or allow previously fixed bugs to come back in updates. And if FD don't want to fix bugs, there's no way I can make them do it. All I can do is enjoy the bug-free parts of the game and work around problems (or, ultimately, find another game).
 

Arioch

Arioch
Ozric said:
I didn't realise you can see when an issue was marked as expired (I know someone used to run the metrics but gave up a year or two ago). I thought the last cull was just after Update 13, but they could have done it just before.

Issues are supposed to expire automatically after 30 days if they haven't reached 10 confirmations. But they don't. They are manually done in one lump around the time of a major update. You can watch the numbers of confirming issues plummet from thousands down to dozens.
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I’ve only noticed because I look at Issue Tracker every day for my VR bug thread which I’ve been maintaining since May last year - all the issues I’ve been monitoring that didn’t make the grade have all expired after 30 days, occasionally a day or two after the expected deadline.

If they get flagged after 30 days and then are manually Expired, I don’t know - but whoever’s job it is to press the bye-bye button has had finger trouble for over two months 😁
 

Ian Doncaster

Ian Doncaster
Brrokk said:
I just don't use the issue tracker. I don't believe any company who are serious about fixing bugs would allow reports of bugs to "expire", or allow previously fixed bugs to come back in updates. And if FD don't want to fix bugs, there's no way I can make them do it. All I can do is enjoy the bug-free parts of the game and work around problems (or, ultimately, find another game).
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Expiring really old reports is fairly common and I don't see it as being a problem in itself - a lot of the really minor bugs will go away as a consequence of that bit of code having been rewritten anyway at some point in the last few years, and might well be something which happened to one person once through some unusual combination of circumstances. So throwing out reports which haven't had some minimum activity level after a year or two I could understand, and I know plenty of software organisations that clean out really old reports from time to time for that reason - though they of course are using commercial or open source bug trackers whose purpose is to track bugs, so the submitter will get an emailed warning a month or so before expiry, and a simple "yes, still happening" response will restart the clock.

A one month expiry when there hasn't even been a client patch in that month, blanket-affecting all bugs which haven't been so serious to so many people that it's both overcome the obstacles to be reported at all and obtained ten separate confirmations before that time? That's the ridiculous bit.

And agreed, there are only two types of bug:
1) Bugs so serious that the community managers will find out about them instantly anyway because of the forum complaint threads. These don't need reporting because Frontier already knows.
2) Bugs which won't survive the bug tracker process. These don't need reporting because Frontier doesn't want to know.
So far I've been lucky that none of the type 2 bugs have been ones which seriously break the game for me. I'm sure that luck will run out eventually.
 

Factabulous

Factabulous
As Ian says - expiry is fine if it is done sensibly. For example the 5+ per day being raised over the last 3 months about broken AMD drivers don't add anything (arguably they highlight how bad the 'similar issues' display is in the issue tracker), as I'm sure every variant of that issue has been raised by now and yet still they come.

In the fdev tracker Expiry is mostly pointless - fdev should be picking the highest voted / most active bugs to fix and those that are expiring are not in that category. Forcing ppl to re-raise them every few months is doing fdev no good, and dissuading users from reporting.

Then again this is the company that thinks the best way to tell people there is a solution to their issue is to mark it INVALID and add a comment, so they seem to have had different experiences with bug trackers than I have :)
 

Arioch

Arioch
Ozric said:
The process is not automatic.
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The last issue to expire was submitted approximately 4 hours before the one you’ve just linked - and if I remember correctly that report expired just before mid July (I was keeping an eye on this VR bug which was due to expire around the 15th.

Something has definitely changed and the month-long confirming period is no longer in effect as it once was.
 

Ozric

Volunteer Moderator
Ozric
Factabulous said:
I'm confused - what process?
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If a certain number of players have been able to reproduce an issue within 30 days, the issue will become “Confirmed” – if the required number of reproductions is not met in this time, the report will expire.
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I'm fairly certain that an issue moving from Confirming to Confirmed is the only thing that is actually automated. Though it doesn't happen straight away, I think that it does a check at the start of the day.

I know that issues often aren't marked as fixed, but that's part of the issue with the tracker :) That's sat in the top 10 most voted issues. Not only should something else be in it's place, but that is one of the precious 6 votes people have tied up until someone makes it fixed.

Arioch said:
Something has definitely changed and the month-long confirming period is no longer in effect as it once was.
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I honestly don't ever remember a time they did.
1612355555180.jpg
 

Factabulous

Factabulous
Ozric said:
I'm fairly certain that an issue moving from Confirming to Confirmed is the only thing that is actually automated. Though it doesn't happen straight away, I think that it does a check at the start of the day.
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But that issue is confirmed. So the 30 days doesn't apply, and I still don't see why you mentioned it.

And that FAQ is ... wrong. Fdev can make any issue acknowledged at any time (and they have), I have seen issues go confirmed on the initial report (though that is usually issues with a fair amount of forum brouhaha).
 

Arioch

Arioch
Ozric said:
I honestly don't ever remember a time they did.
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That’s an interesting looking graph - but I’m not entirely sure I’m reading it correctly. Are those big negative spikes a large number of issues all expiring at the same time?

As I said earlier, I’ve only been monitoring VR related bugs daily since May 2021 and in that time I’ve watched 108 reports expire after 30 days, sometimes with a day or two extra.

The non-VR issue thread I’ve been helping out with has 42 reports that have expired after 30 days.

All reports that I’ve submitted that didn’t get Confirmed have all expired after a month.

Stuff stopped expiring after a month in mid-July 🤷‍♂️
 

Ozric

Volunteer Moderator
Ozric
Arioch said:
That’s an interesting looking graph - but I’m not entirely sure I’m reading it correctly. Are those big negative spikes a large number of issues all expiring at the same time?

As I said earlier, I’ve only been monitoring VR related bugs daily since May 2021 and in that time I’ve watched 108 reports expire after 30 days, sometimes with a day or two extra.

The non-VR issue thread I’ve been helping out with has 42 reports that have expired after 30 days.

All reports that I’ve submitted that didn’t get Confirmed have all expired after a month.

Stuff stopped expiring after a month in mid-July 🤷‍♂️
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Yes it was posted by someone in this thread, it shows + or - for the amount of issues of that type compared to the previous day. The biggest spike was 1,016 removed from confirming in one day, that was when they stopped tracking.

I made a thread that had bugs at the time that were 7 months old, still confirming. Interestingly I made that thread in Feb 2021, maybe it did have a bit of an impact... But I've had ones I've created since them that have gone past 30 days.

I guess all we can say is it's consistently inconsistent :)
 

Arioch

Arioch
Ozric said:
I made a thread that had bugs at the time that were 7 months old, still confirming. Interestingly I made that thread in Feb 2021, maybe it did have a bit of an impact... But I've had ones I've created since them that have gone past 30 days.
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It’s interesting that the 7-month-old issue was eventually marked as Fixed - perhaps it was given a stay of execution because it was due to be sorted out?

This makes it look like you’re correct in that human intervention is required. If unconfirmed issues get automatically flagged after 30 days and then an actual person has to give it the final yay/nay, it’d make sense of the times I’ve watched issue reports last a couple of days extra - they tended to be at weekends 😁
 
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