To Elite Dangerous Validation Team: All 29 bugs I've reported are still in "Confirming" stage except one.

Happy Daze

Happy Daze
Do you update the bugs reported by players? The one marked fixed was back in May.
Either you need to hire someone to monitor the bug database or hire more people to fix these things. It certainly looks like you don't have enough Validation Engineers.
Having been a Validation Engineer for over 20 years I can tell you that if you don't have enough VEs you will burn out many of them out. You apparently have Validation Engineers, I chatted with one.

To the VEs: Hang in there!
 

Ian Doncaster

Ian Doncaster
Factabulous said:
Someone needs to tell you how the bug reporting system works around here
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"Very badly". But they'd already figured that out.

Happy Daze said:
Either you need to hire someone to monitor the bug database or hire more people to fix these things. It certainly looks like you don't have enough Validation Engineers.
Click to expand...
Unfortunately, the way they avoid burning out their staff is to not expect them to proactively check more than a tiny handful of Confirming bugs.
If you don't want to rely on extreme luck of one of them checking it, you'll have to get it to Confirmed yourself by getting ten [1] other accounts to add "can reproduce" comments.

Note that this means that duplicate reports are very bad - in a normal bug reporting system, duplicate reports would be at worst a mild annoyance and at best improve the chances of a bug being noticed. In this system, duplicate reports substantially decrease the odds of the bug being spotted by diluting the confirmations.

Feel free to post the links here - I don't generally report bugs any more because this system is silly, but I'm happy to confirm other reports, and other people will too.


[1] If you were playing a different Frontier game, you'd only need three. But Elite Dangerous has enough players that three would be too easy, and too many bugs might make it through the net. So ten.
 

The Roofus

The Roofus
Happy Daze said:
Do you update the bugs reported by players? The one marked fixed was back in May.
Either you need to hire someone to monitor the bug database or hire more people to fix these things. It certainly looks like you don't have enough Validation Engineers.
Having been a Validation Engineer for over 20 years I can tell you that if you don't have enough VEs you will burn out many of them out. You apparently have Validation Engineers, I chatted with one.

To the VEs: Hang in there!
Click to expand...

I'm sure the multi-million dollar company will take on the advice of "some rando on the internet"
 

Drelthar

Drelthar
Ian Doncaster said:
"Very badly". But they'd already figured that out.


Unfortunately, the way they avoid burning out their staff is to not expect them to proactively check more than a tiny handful of Confirming bugs.
If you don't want to rely on extreme luck of one of them checking it, you'll have to get it to Confirmed yourself by getting ten [1] other accounts to add "can reproduce" comments.

Note that this means that duplicate reports are very bad - in a normal bug reporting system, duplicate reports would be at worst a mild annoyance and at best improve the chances of a bug being noticed. In this system, duplicate reports substantially decrease the odds of the bug being spotted by diluting the confirmations.

Feel free to post the links here - I don't generally report bugs any more because this system is silly, but I'm happy to confirm other reports, and other people will too.


[1] If you were playing a different Frontier game, you'd only need three. But Elite Dangerous has enough players that three would be too easy, and too many bugs might make it through the net. So ten.
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We need to form a coalition of people with enough accounts to confirm any bug, then set up a "bug splats" organisation similar to the fuel rats.

Someone goes to a discord and posts a link, the team then confirm it.

Another team just goes through and confirms ten bugs a day.
 

CMDR Ylion

C
Ian Doncaster said:
[1] If you were playing a different Frontier game, you'd only need three. But Elite Dangerous has enough players that three would be too easy, and too many bugs might make it through the net. So ten.
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for real?
somehow reminds me of a child shutting their eyes because it doesn´t want to be seen.
if-i-cant-see-them-they-cant-see-me.jpg
 

Ian Doncaster

Ian Doncaster
Drelthar said:
We need to form a coalition of people with enough accounts to confirm any bug
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I have considered that at times. It'd be technically straightforward enough - there's probably someone with ten free Epic accounts out there already.

The problem is that unless you just confirmed everything out of spite - duplicates, misunderstandings, intended features, etc. - which would be a good way to get your account banned, I expect ... you'd end up having to do a fair bit of work checking that you were confirming the "best" version of a bug, making sure it was at least a plausible report, explaining to Discord visitors why you didn't think that was actually a bug, etc. Nothing particularly difficult - five minutes per report would be more than enough for 90% of them for someone with a good working knowledge of the game - but it'd add up.

And at that point you're doing, unpaid, work that a multi-million company should be hiring someone to do if it cares about the bug reports in the first place. They don't get that many bug reports. Two people full-time would be more than enough for basic first-line management.

CMDR Ylion said:
for real?
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Well, maybe. They've never said why Elite Dangerous needs ten but their other games need three, but I can't think of any other explanation but "to keep the number of confirmed bugs down". If it wasn't the intent it's certainly been the effect.

They seem, post-Odyssey, to have realised that "not finding out about bugs" has major disadvantages, but this hasn't yet gone to a change of policy.
 

Drelthar

Drelthar
Ian Doncaster said:
I have considered that at times. It'd be technically straightforward enough - there's probably someone with ten free Epic accounts out there already.

The problem is that unless you just confirmed everything out of spite - duplicates, misunderstandings, intended features, etc. - which would be a good way to get your account banned, I expect ... you'd end up having to do a fair bit of work checking that you were confirming the "best" version of a bug, making sure it was at least a plausible report, explaining to Discord visitors why you didn't think that was actually a bug, etc. Nothing particularly difficult - five minutes per report would be more than enough for 90% of them for someone with a good working knowledge of the game - but it'd add up.

And at that point you're doing, unpaid, work that a multi-million company should be hiring someone to do if it cares about the bug reports in the first place. They don't get that many bug reports. Two people full-time would be more than enough for basic first-line management.


Well, maybe. They've never said why Elite Dangerous needs ten but their other games need three, but I can't think of any other explanation but "to keep the number of confirmed bugs down". If it wasn't the intent it's certainly been the effect.

They seem, post-Odyssey, to have realised that "not finding out about bugs" has major disadvantages, but this hasn't yet gone to a change of policy.
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Oh yes. I wasn't even considering checking the bugs for a microsecond.

It would just be a stunt really, entirely impractical.
 

gooddoc

gooddoc
Ian Doncaster said:
"Very badly". But they'd already figured that out.


Unfortunately, the way they avoid burning out their staff is to not expect them to proactively check more than a tiny handful of Confirming bugs.
If you don't want to rely on extreme luck of one of them checking it, you'll have to get it to Confirmed yourself by getting ten [1] other accounts to add "can reproduce" comments.

Note that this means that duplicate reports are very bad - in a normal bug reporting system, duplicate reports would be at worst a mild annoyance and at best improve the chances of a bug being noticed. In this system, duplicate reports substantially decrease the odds of the bug being spotted by diluting the confirmations.

Feel free to post the links here - I don't generally report bugs any more because this system is silly, but I'm happy to confirm other reports, and other people will too.


[1] If you were playing a different Frontier game, you'd only need three. But Elite Dangerous has enough players that three would be too easy, and too many bugs might make it through the net. So ten.
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Can't disagree with your post Ian.

Not been happy with this system since it was introduced.........spending time to report a bug properly on the Issue Tracker & then having to produce a 'lobbying thread' on the Forum to get support to get it noticed by FD.......does not make me want to join in & contribute to the system.
 

Ian Doncaster

Ian Doncaster
Happy Daze said:
@Ian, how do you know all this? Did you work for them? Not questioning your info, just curious.
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Most of it is written down in the official documentation at https://issues.frontierstore.net/faqs or can be deduced from thinking about the logical consequences of those statements.

A few of the discrepancies between the official documentation and what actually happens I picked up from reporting bugs and from observations when trying to get them to Confirmed.

Anything about their motivations is just a guess based on the above [1]. I have no connection whatsoever to Frontier.

[1] And probably somewhat unfair. I don't think Frontier don't care about bug reports, I think they're just making numerous really bad decisions around their public bug tracker that have equivalent effect to not caring about bug reports. I've described it as "the Powerplay of bug trackers" before and there are a lot of analogous mistakes in both.
 
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