So F.D... Are we customers or beta testers?

[Rafe Zetter]

Everybody in every MMO that gets regular updates is a passive "beta tester". You can never expect to not find a single bug - that's unrealistic. I find them in games all the time without even looking and I report them every time. Not because I want to be a tester but because I want the games I play to be as good as they can be.

Moral of the story: Find a bug? Report it and make the game better! It takes a moment and you're helping everyone else by doing it. You're also making the devs lives easier.

I'd love this to be true, but often times it isn't. In my 15+ years as an MMO player I've witnessed untold number of game bugs /exploits both major and minor that have been left to languish, sometimes for years despite many bug reports being submitted, and forum complaints threads being started.

Only the other day I submitted a bug report in Rift, for a really obvious minor bug - that has, in all likelihood, been there since that part of the games expansion was launched 3 years ago (Storm Legion), so I doubt I was the first in all that time, yet there it sits.

There is of course the possibility that I was, because everyone else knows that Trion seemingly ignores such reports.

The moral isn't so much you should report all bugs, but that players have faith that ALL the bugs that get reported get "fixed" - to date FDev hasn't done this, there's a backlog of bugs still evident today that existed in early beta. Threads have been made, discussed and closed, yet the bugs still exist and have been deliberately ignored in favor of making the content to pull in the new players, who will then get to experience those same bugs and report... and round and round we go...