Bugs and ZOS

Billium813 · February 2023

@ZOS_Kevin

I believe a great strength of ESO is that we have a passionate community of players willing to take massive amounts of time out of their schedule to test, reproduce, and report bugs; both in PTS and Live. However, I find the bug reporting system in ESO extremely lacking and one sided. There are many, many threads of players reproducing bugs and discussions on how these bugs effect the game ad nauseam. Yet, it seems like many of these bugs, which are entirely reproducible and known by the community, are never commented on or discussed by the development team; some for years. We players, who take the time to do the preliminary investigation, feel ignored and rely heavily on you to communicate that the development team is now investigating.

Q3 has been announced to be "Bug Fixes and Quality of Life improvements"; which is great. I submit that it would be in the development teams best interest to revamp how bugs are reported and communicated through the forums. To acknowledge known bugs/issues, publicly confirm that the development team knows they exist, and is prioritizing them. I think the forums is a poor UI for communicating to players that they are being heard by the development team; requiring your personal comments as the go-between. I would rather have a UI, similar to GitHub or Bugzilla; where known issues are easily searchable by players, development work and release targets communicated, release content can be easily collated, and most importantly, players can know the development team is listening.

ZOS_Kevin · February 2023

Thanks for the feedback here. This is something we will look into regarding having a better pipeline to communicate bug fixes and the like. We do have two key things players should do to help here currently:

1. When posting bugs on the forum, especially if someone deems it reproducible, please make sure to include detailed steps on the repro and include video if you can. While it seems like things should be pretty reproducible, sometimes there are specific conditions present that we are not aware, which can make it difficult to repro. As much information provided is helpful.
2. Using the in-game bug report function is very helpful. It gives our team far more specific information regarding your player character, location of the issue, and the conditions set.

Having said all of that, we do have a note to look over this process to have updated info to assist with the Q3 QoL improvements.

Dr_Con · February 2023

They could consider working beta monkey pet variants into being a reward for testers who provide feedback, and some other reward for people who are first to catch and report major bugs.

The_Titan_Tim · February 2023

Dr_Con wrote: »

They could consider working the monkey into being a reward for testers who provide feedback, and some other reward for people who are first to catch and report major bugs.

Where’s my Monkey? 😉

Kidding of course, I wasn’t the first person to reproduce the Ash Cloud exploit, but I was more than happy to help get it addressed.

Helping to make the game a more diverse and balanced experience is more than reward enough in my opinion.

Dr_Con · February 2023

The_Titan_Tim wrote: »

Dr_Con wrote: »

They could consider working the monkey into being a reward for testers who provide feedback, and some other reward for people who are first to catch and report major bugs.

Where’s my Monkey? 😉

Kidding of course, I wasn’t the first person to reproduce the Ash Cloud exploit, but I was more than happy to help get it addressed.

Helping to make the game a more diverse and balanced experience is more than reward enough in my opinion.

A big part of bug reporting is raising awareness, the people who raise awareness of a bug in a constructive manner should be the ones to receive some sort of benefit, so I would agree that you raised awareness of the issue in a constructive way.

The_Titan_Tim wrote: »

Dr_Con wrote: »

They could consider working the monkey into being a reward for testers who provide feedback, and some other reward for people who are first to catch and report major bugs.

Where’s my Monkey? 😉

Kidding of course, I wasn’t the first person to reproduce the Ash Cloud exploit, but I was more than happy to help get it addressed.

Helping to make the game a more diverse and balanced experience is more than reward enough in my opinion.

you kinda pointed out why they probably a reason why they shouldn't do a reward system (lol).

still, a message on a bug report that says something like "we have attempted to replicate this bug but were unable to, could you provide more information" would be helpful. each bug report that is not responded to and closed is technically an unanswered ticket

Lebkuchen · February 2023

Most of the info we are trying to give them is filtered out and dismissed before anyone who could do anything about it ever read it. Maybe someone could try to think about looking into working on starting to look into something like that sometime in the future maybe. Next year is always a good time to start thinking about looking into something like that, or working on thinking about looking into it. I am not sure how this works, just trying to help.

The_Titan_Tim · February 2023

Speaking of bugs getting addressed, @ZOS_Kevin from what I’m hearing, Tri-Focus is broken, granting 100% damage from Empowered heavy attacks against NPCs to nearby players, this includes player pets.

Billium813 · February 2023

Dr_Con wrote: »

The_Titan_Tim wrote: »

Dr_Con wrote: »

They could consider working the monkey into being a reward for testers who provide feedback, and some other reward for people who are first to catch and report major bugs.

Where’s my Monkey? 😉

Kidding of course, I wasn’t the first person to reproduce the Ash Cloud exploit, but I was more than happy to help get it addressed.

Helping to make the game a more diverse and balanced experience is more than reward enough in my opinion.

A big part of bug reporting is raising awareness, the people who raise awareness of a bug in a constructive manner should be the ones to receive some sort of benefit, so I would agree that you raised awareness of the issue in a constructive way.

The_Titan_Tim wrote: »

Dr_Con wrote: »

They could consider working the monkey into being a reward for testers who provide feedback, and some other reward for people who are first to catch and report major bugs.

Where’s my Monkey? 😉

Kidding of course, I wasn’t the first person to reproduce the Ash Cloud exploit, but I was more than happy to help get it addressed.

Helping to make the game a more diverse and balanced experience is more than reward enough in my opinion.

you kinda pointed out why they probably a reason why they shouldn't do a reward system (lol).

still, a message on a bug report that says something like "we have attempted to replicate this bug but were unable to, could you provide more information" would be helpful. each bug report that is not responded to and closed is technically an unanswered ticket

Personally, I couldn't care less about rewards. I'm sure that will get most of the focus from players, but plenty of reporters aren't getting anything atm and they are still doing it. Let the rewards come later after you have a well established process.

As far as recognition goes (which is the smallest, easiest form of reward) with a UI similar to something like GitHub, it would be totally obvious. Players open Issues to report problems. When developers work on the issues, they mark them as "In Progress". When they complete an issue, it becomes targeted for a future release. When ZOS collates the release notes, all they have to do is link the reported issues against the release notes, based on the targeted release. EzPz, if someone wants to find who reported it, it's as easy as clicking a link. If that wants to be expanded later for achievements or rewards or whatever, fine. But that data and how its all linked wont vanish so it can be done later.

The problem is, the current method of doing all this is done manually when it really doesn't need to be. I know that the source code isn't open source, but if you want thorough testing and reporting, you need to have a decent UI. Handling bugs and release docs in forums is so 2008.

Destai · February 2023

ZOS_Kevin wrote: »

Thanks for the feedback here. This is something we will look into regarding having a better pipeline to communicate bug fixes and the like. We do have two key things players should do to help here currently:

1. When posting bugs on the forum, especially if someone deems it reproducible, please make sure to include detailed steps on the repro and include video if you can. While it seems like things should be pretty reproducible, sometimes there are specific conditions present that we are not aware, which can make it difficult to repro. As much information provided is helpful.
2. Using the in-game bug report function is very helpful. It gives our team far more specific information regarding your player character, location of the issue, and the conditions set.

Having said all of that, we do have a note to look over this process to have updated info to assist with the Q3 QoL improvements.

@ZOS_Kevin I think the core problem is the (perceived) lack of follow up on these forums. Case in point, this bug. It's been going on for like 8+ months, was slated to be fixed in U36, and still is an issue. Steps-to-reproduce were amply provided, and no follow up has occurred in months. Check the bugs section for other threads where you've been tagged for some additional examples.

The expectation is with a dedicated forum manager and other CMs, there'd be some more back-and-forth responses consistently across issues. I realize you guys might have some constraints, but those constraints aren't communicated and bugs go unaddressed, so it creates a bit of frustration. I don't think it's unreasonable to get such follow-up, especially given with how frequently our words are monitored otherwise.

Furthermore, the in-game bug report isn't intuitive, especially for console players. I can't type up well-organized bug-reproduction notes there, but I can here. So having back-and-forth feedback here is really helpful, for bugs and general feedback. The hope is someone sees it and asks clarifying questions. In fairness, it does happen at times, but it seems focused on a select few items.

Regarding your pipeline - can we get better framing of what that endeavor will look like? You guys have made similar comments before and I'm just curious what the milestones are for that endeavor, especially since those improvements haven't been realized yet. Hopefully that topic isn't treated like the Q&A was and our feedback isn't just read but actively engaged.