When is the Issue Tracker going to be looked at?

[Ozric]

To bring it back on track (in my arrogant opinion and more in line with what @Ozric intended if I get it right), is that it's all about that all of us ED players want ED and Odyssey by extension to be a smashing success since we love the game so much, and for that to happen, we need a more serious approach to bug squashing and reporting with prompt and visible feedback than an "issue tracker" that looks like a popularity contest and, at any rate, has absolutely not feedback which makes players, those who care and those who don't, ultimately not want to waste their time with using it.

I fully realize that the devs can't give us all we want when we want it (usually four days ago), but we need a feedback mechanism, something visible, instead of "we'll look into it" and then silence for years.

Feedback is a two way street. You can't improve without it, and you won't get it without acknowledgement, some sort of acknowledgement. I'd rather have "sorry, can't do it" than silence, because the former at least lets me know that somebody saw it.

And yes, that IS my field. It's not an easy one, and I've failed too, but at least I know how it works. I've been doing it for 13 years.

Yes you are correct. And the Alpha and Beta for Odyssey are the most critical time, and we are only around 2 months away from the Alpha.

 

[Pigletslastand]

Wow I have never been able to agree more with a post than OP, even navigating the issue tracker is an absolute nightmare. Look we know that everyone at frontier is under immense pressure because of extenuating circumstances but this issue predates that and when you raise a problem only to be told “have you put it in the issue tracker” you feel like crying and tearing your hair out! That thing is a an abyss or dumping ground and most have long since given up with it to the extent that players are often just left feeling a mixture of bitterness and blind hope that one day the bugs will get fixed. But realistically with so many delays it just shows how squeezed Fdev are for either resources or manpower. We love you Fdev, we love this game. But please don’t hide from the fact that you can’t handle this game in current form without additional resources!

 

[MDHansen]

I just wanted to add my voice to this plea. I'm usually a very conscientious and patient person and I've spent years telling people that (like it or loathe it) it's important we report issues using the tracker because that's the only way they have a hope of getting fixed (i.e. neither A: simply waiting in the vain hope that Frontier will surely spot and fix the issue themselves, or B: complaining about it on the forum loudly enough to rally a mob, are the proper way to go about getting things noticed and fixed).

This is no longer true tho.

I think what finally broke me was the automatic EXPIRY of issues I'd spent a lot of time either reporting or contributing to, issues which were unequivocally bugs, easily repeatable by any dev' with a desire to check.

For example:

These are separate reports, both expired, on a bug which still exists in the game right now and is easy to confirm.

Frankly that EXPIRED is just a brutal slap in the face.

After the 4th or 5th such expiry I'm afraid I finally gave up.

My current attitude is that there's almost no point reporting bugs. Frontier may spot and fix the odd thing that's either very serious or affects credits (sad but true) but otherwise I've currently come to terms with the fact that I just have to live with all the many many little bugs that I spot in this game.

That seems like a pretty damn sad situation to me.

If Im not mistaken these are mine (slap me if they aren't), and yes, fist to the face indeed getting that expire stamp. And this bug ("unintended feature") is so easy to replicate, simply because it happens 99/100 times.
I gave up about a year ago making or contributing to the abomination called the issue tracker.
Shame really, they need to go back to the think.box and redo it from scratch, and actually assign people to follow up the issues.


MDH

 

[Jack Schitt]

My current attitude is that there's almost no point reporting bugs. Frontier may spot and fix the odd thing that's either very serious or affects credits (sad but true) but otherwise I've currently come to terms with the fact that I just have to live with all the many many little bugs that I spot in this game.

Sadly that's also the position I reached some time ago. I was never the most prolific bug report poster under the legacy system, but when I did report something -- or contribute additional info or video to another player's report -- at least I had immediate feedback from the community if not necessarily from Support or Development.

Using the current Issue Tracker is like sending letters to Santa up the chimney. If you're lucky the present you eventually get might coincide with what you asked for, but the evidence for any causal link will require a lot of unsubstantiated belief.

PS I had no idea the runaway mission POI thing had been around since April of 2019. I've not played as frequently in the last couple of years as I did previously, and I only returned to planetary scan missions in the second half of last year. I assumed it was a relatively new bug, so to find it's been around for the better part of two years is very disheartening, and perfectly demonstrates just what a complete waste of time the Issue Tracker is.

Of course, if folk, rather than making up their own issue boosted up an already existing one of the same thing with a "me too" they might actually be able to get to a specific issue rather than have to wade through loads of chaff, guff and bluster. (Sorry, instilled into me by my career choice).

Search is next to useless. I just checked to make sure things hadn't improved since May 2019 when I first commented on this, but they haven't:

• Search only works on subject lines, not body text. So if someone's used an overly generic title and put specific details in the report, a search will not find it.
• Search only works on contiguous words. A report entitled Mining Laser Bug will be found by searching "mining laser" or "laser bug" but not "mining bug".
• If you widen the search by using more generic terms you will have to manually scroll through a lot of hits before you find something that might match your specific issue. If you click on a report halfway down the fifth page, then hit the Back button, it takes you back to the first page and you have to start manually scrolling again.

While that last one can be mitigated by opening links in new tabs, you should neither have to know this nor remember to do it in order to have a smooth experience. Search is simply not fit for purpose, and the Tracker as a whole isn't too far behind IMO.

 

[angusmadmac1]

I've now stopped reporting on the bug tracker , you go to all the time to put in screenshots and videos and because its not confirmed it get expired the bug is still there . I now put a tickets to FDEV support who then tell me to use the bugged tracker . And i was assured that someone looks into it.
No more , I've had enough I'm a long term player (4 years) on console and speccie and amiga before that . I truly believe that the bugged tracker is a front since and Odyssey has had all the manpower for months . If fdev said look we are working on Odyssey and the bugs arent going to looked at then fine i can wait 10 months till i get it . but please just be truthful .

 

[dekot]

Agreed.

The major problem to me with the issue tracker itself is the Confirmation requirement: requiring 10 confirmations all on the same bug report (as opposed to on a duplicate or near-duplicate) is virtually impossible except for:

• really obvious bugs, which when it comes down to it the yelling on the forums an hour after the release goes live probably gives away first anyway
• ones with an organised group pushing them (which doesn't guarantee it's really a bug - there's a BGS-related misunderstanding sitting in Confirmed at the moment)
• extreme luck that the 2nd to 11th people with the bug check for an existing one with the same keywords and language that you used

Worse, once the duplicates start dropping in, the Confirmations just get spread out further: I've compared it to Powerplay before, where well-meaning and apparently encouraged actions (e.g. reporting a bug) end up making things worse (e.g. spreading out confirmations so none of them get confirmed)

It's basically not worth my time reporting bugs unless they're both serious enough that I could organise ten confirmations and niche enough that the forum moderators haven't already had to ban six people for too-colourful insults about it.



The underlying issue of course is that Frontier's QA team monitoring the tracker is far too small for the number of bugs being reported. It needs proactive daily monitoring to merge unconfirmed reports, close things which aren't actually bugs with some sort of useful explanation [1], etc.

They seem to have tried to work around this by reducing the set of bugs to consider to just the rare Confirmed ones ... but that set is also growing faster than it can be dealt with.


[1] Which would just be helpful customer service. If someone reports "can't request docking permission" because their sensors are broken/off, which comes up quite a bit, or doesn't realise that you have to scan the beacon not just visit the location for a passenger mission, explaining the situation might help a lot ... as well as giving some hints to Frontier for where the interface needs improvement.

I don't think the problem is the issue tracker itself, the problem is that FD doesn't spend enough resources on fixing bugs.

 

[dekot]

As I see it, Issue Tracker was a way for FD to appear as they're doing something to fix bugs, while in reality they've probably moved most of the staff to other (hopefully Odyssey related) tasks. They've made players do all the work in researching and prioritising bugs, introducing ways for some of them to "expire". I see it as just a smoke screen, hiding the fact that fixing bugs is not a priority for them. Maybe it will change with Odyssey reloease, but now using that tracker is a waste of time for me. I only vote for bugs other people submitted and made public here on forums not counting much on that achieving anything - searching whether bug I found was already submitted is a pain in the back I don't intend to suffer, not to mention submitting something that will be ignored and will "expire" later.

FD's horrible track record on bug fixes existed long before Odyssey was a thing. They moved most personnel from elite to other FD games a long time ago.

The alternative is that FD is either extremely incompetent or they just don't care.

 

[T'kael]

The very poor health of the issue tracker is perhaps the single greatest contributor towards my Odyssey-related anxiety.

 

[Ozric]

FD's horrible track record on bug fixes existed long before Odyssey was a thing. They moved most personnel from elite to other FD games a long time ago.

The alternative is that FD is either extremely incompetent or they just don't care.

Your first sentence is the only one that's right there. They didn't move most of the personnel, though they did move some mid/high level people to other franchises to help start and build them. You could easily have an entire different discussion, and there have been many, about mismanagement and how the removal of the core team behind the game has led to a confusion about what the game itself wants to be.

But this isn't the place.

None of us can change what has happened in the past, but what we can do is take the point of view that the company itself is in a much better position than it was in the first few years and they have more people working on Elite. Nearly all of those people have been focused on getting Odyssey finished, I think it's fair to assume given the recent Galent/CGs that a small group have been able to shift their focus. Soon™ there will be a lot more freed up and there will need to be time dedicated to fixing bugs. From Alpha going forwards we cannot realistically be using the Issue Tracker to report and communicate bugs to the team. In my opinion things need to start on the right foot, even if that means effectively another wipe of the bugs (from our side), like when we have moved systems before.

 

[dekot]

Your first sentence is the only one that's right there. They didn't move most of the personnel, though they did move some mid/high level people to other franchises to help start and build them. You could easily have an entire different discussion, and there have been many, about mismanagement and how the removal of the core team behind the game has led to a confusion about what the game itself wants to be.

But this isn't the place.

None of us can change what has happened in the past, but what we can do is take the point of view that the company itself is in a much better position than it was in the first few years and they have more people working on Elite. Nearly all of those people have been focused on getting Odyssey finished, I think it's fair to assume given the recent Galent/CGs that a small group have been able to shift their focus. Soon™ there will be a lot more freed up and there will need to be time dedicated to fixing bugs. From Alpha going forwards we cannot realistically be using the Issue Tracker to report and communicate bugs to the team. In my opinion things need to start on the right foot, even if that means effectively another wipe of the bugs (from our side), like when we have moved systems before.

Do you play other games? Elite updates maybe once a year. That is extremely uncommon for online games. And it has always been this way, long before Odyssey.

I'm sorry but your optimism seems really naive right now. It remains to be seen but let's face it, Odyssey is just a FPS addon. Kids in college can make a decent FPS game, they're easy to develop and FD already has most of the assets. There isn't some crack team working on it and that crack team isn't isn't going to stick around and fix all the bugs that have been hounding this game for years.

I've played on and off for years and this is the only game where I'm always confident that I don't have to download a patch before returning to it. Even old Russian games are updated more frequently than this game.

 

[Ozric]

Do you play other games? Elite updates maybe once a year. That is extremely uncommon for online games. And it has always been this way, long before Odyssey.

No what are these "other games" you speak of? I mean there were at least 10 updates last year but you know

 

[CMDR Exorcist]

I wish that the Issue Tracker was looked at harder than it is. Like you guys have already pointed out, many things aren't even looked at because they don't get enough upvotes. That's a terrible way to go about doing bug reports, imho. Right now on the Xbox Series X, there's a terrible FLASHING on any video recorded using the console's capture feature. I tried to submit a bug report and it shows up on my list of issues, but you cannot open the report to have anyone upvote it... :/ I've opened a ticket with Frontier, but as much as I love this game and the people working on it...I don't hold out much hope.

webapp

issues.frontierstore.net

And by the way...the night/day cycle for planets is STILL inverted. Daytime sides shown in the system map are actually nighttime in game. :/

 

[Pug]

So this is a question that I and others have raised quite a few times. In December of last year in the second AMA I asked:

Can I ask when the Issue Tracker will be addressed? There are many bugs within the tracker itself and also there is no way to get reliable feedback on what is going on. This issue I linked last week was raised in January 2020 and it is still just 'confirmed'. I have had bugs that have "expired" just because 10 Cmdrs didn't confirm the bug, but it is still present in the game. Some issues expire after 30 days, others persist for over a year without being confirmed. The confirmation/voting system is heavily weighted to those who can amass enough people to push their own agenda, which we were told it would not be used for when it was introduced, but were later told that's how it's intended to be used.

Also in April of this year 1,016 issues were wiped off the tracker in one day. If you assume a conservative 5 minutes per issue created, then that's around 85 hours of player time spent creating issues, just gone.

Unfortunately this doesn't create an environment where people feel as though they should raise bugs on the issue tracker, a lot of people do see it as a waste of time. This is a big problem now, but when we get to Odyssey it will become a huge problem. I really think we need some good strong feedback on the tracker itself and that changes need to be made by the time Odyssey is released in order to make it a success.


Arthur did reply to me


I had planned on asking a couple of weeks ago in another AMA, but the AMAs were stopped so I left it a few more. We're now in February and the release of Odyssey has been pushed back, which gives more time to sort out the issue tracker and either replace it or overhaul the way it is worked. So I was wondering @Arthur Tolmie if you had made any progress into this?

The issue tracker in it's current state is not fit for purpose. Currently there are 3,411 Confirming, 125 Confirmed, and 122 Acknowledged! Those figures alone show that there's a problem. When was the last time we had an update that put multiple fixes into the game? September?

There used to be a user who kept an eye on the changes in totals for the issue tracker, but after a year doing it and having grown demoralised they stopped. Looking at the last image they produced you can see why
View attachment 206809

Issues build up and then are just wiped off of the tracker in swathes. There is no communication, no feedback as to why your issues have been removed or expired. This issue I made in July 2020 that's 7 months ago, and it's still not expired even though it doesn't have 10 confirmations and has gone past the 30 day limit.

It is still an issue.

This is an issue expired because it didn't get 10 confirmations

It is still an issue. Also note how the Expired message doesn't suggest I create another issue if I am still experiencing the problem. I am only to contact CS if the issue is "heavily impacting" my account/game. And just to end on a lighter note, there's the problems with the issue tracker itself.

I seem to have -8 votes left... So not only do I not know how many of my precious votes I have left, I have no idea which ones I have currently voted on as the list only shows 12.

12 seems to be a recurring theme because if I look at the issues I have contributed to, I have apparently also contributed to 12... even though it only shows 4... and even though those are all issues I created, not contributed to.

I've worked in QA for 9 years, and I am sorry to say I've never seen a system as bad as this. We've had it for almost 2 years now and if we're going to make a decent attempt of reporting bugs and trying to work to get them fixed throughout the Alpha and Beta of Odyssey, then something needs to be done!

They Don't listen to us, I sincerely hope they listen to you.
Pug

 

[robbyp]

For EDCD, the people who bring you your favourite player tools, the issue tracker is useless. We see bugs in the API that normal users dont see, and because they dont get any votes they never get confirmed.

I've given up reporting any bugs to Frontier. Sorry it's just not worth the effort.

 

[Winterwalker]

I'm not quite as despondent. The livestream with Dr Kay the other night made it clear there's been a fundamental rework of the stellar forge ready for Odyssey and I wouldn't at all be surprised if there wasn't consolidation of the BGS, missions and such too, to make them operable across all the game modes, including now on foot as well as from ships, for Odyssey.

Not saying a notice to say as much - as regards the issue tracker - wouldn't be welcome but equally Frontier aren't really able to say anything from the tracker is fixed until it's actually applied to a live build. Bug fixing on a build of the stellar forge - at least - you know is becoming obsolete in the first quarter of 2021 isn't necessarily a high priority either, so reserving judgement myself.

 

[T'kael]

I'm hopeful that Odyssey will come with a lot of bug fixes but it will likely also come with a lot of new bugs. As such, the state of the Issue Tracker remains a significant concern as we lead up to Odyssey's release.

 

[Ozric]

Bug fixing on a build of the stellar forge - at least - you know is becoming obsolete in the first quarter of 2021 isn't necessarily a high priority either, so reserving judgement myself.

First Quarter is a bit optimistic, as apart from anything it won't become obsolete until Odyssey is pushed live But this is exactly the reason why I brought this up again. I have raised concerns about the issue tracker 3 times officially before this, each time I'm told that it's going to be looked into, but I have no idea if it has been. Even when there's improvements to the issue tracker, which there have been, we have no idea unless you are still creating tickets and happen to notice yourself.

It's been obvious that Odyssey is going to be huge for a while now, and the hints we had around the end of the year did make a lot of people think there was going to be a fundamental rework. Which is why I raised this again in December. I was already prepared to put up with another entire wipe of all our bug reporting efforts to get a robust/working system in place, but what better time to do it than a time when it appears as though everything will need to be "reset" anyway?

 

[sgurr]

And by the way...the night/day cycle for planets is STILL inverted. Daytime sides shown in the system map are actually nighttime in game. :/

I always knew there was something wrong with this but couldn't put my finger it.
It wasn't until I started a circumnavigation recently I realised exactly what was going on.

 

[Angelpichu]

Issue tracker nonfunctional. Infinite loading issue when attempting to submit a report.

 

[Kenneth McGrew]

Issue tracker nonfunctional. Infinite loading issue when attempting to submit a report.

if its any consolation, even when it is working its pointless and fixes nothing.