Anyone else feel the 'known issues' list is really lacking?

[Bellbirds.1679]

I'd like a bit more transparency from Anet about the size/workload of their bug fixing team. It's easier to be patient when you know the team working on the issue a) knows it's an issue, b) the size of that team and c) their workload. That way if it's taking a while and you know the team is small with a high workload a player can be understanding and confident that since the issue is flagged on the known issues list that eventually the team will get to it. If you have no idea about the size of this team and no accurate way to know/find out if a bug is known about it is extremely frustrating to play with the bug and very easy to become impatient.

[Inculpatus cedo.9234]

Probably aren't going to offer the size of the QA Team or Devs that might work on a particular bug.The Known Issue Tracker automation broke some time ago; doesn't seem like there's anyone available to hand-curate it presently.Bugs are prioritized, and only so much resource to go around. What you might find important may not be to others.Also, some bugs will never be fixed as fixing them only creates more bugs.

It would be nice if it worked and was accurate, but it's certainly not game-breaking for me. Can learn mostly what's going on from the Support forums.

[Bellbirds.1679]

@Inculpatus cedo.9234 said:Probably aren't going to offer the size of the QA Team or Devs that might work on a particular bug.The Known Issue Tracker automation broke some time ago; doesn't seem like there's anyone available to hand-curate it presently.Bugs are prioritized, and only so much resource to go around. What you might find important may not be to others.Also, some bugs will never be fixed as fixing them only creates more bugs.

It would be nice if it worked and was accurate, but it's certainly not game-breaking for me. Can learn mostly what's going on from the Support forums.

In that case I really think they should assign someone to hand-curate it. It would be a great improvement imo.

[Bellbirds.1679]

@Inculpatus cedo.9234 said:Probably aren't going to offer the size of the QA Team or Devs that might work on a particular bug.The Known Issue Tracker automation broke some time ago; doesn't seem like there's anyone available to hand-curate it presently.Bugs are prioritized, and only so much resource to go around. What you might find important may not be to others.Also, some bugs will never be fixed as fixing them only creates more bugs.

It would be nice if it worked and was accurate, but it's certainly not game-breaking for me. Can learn mostly what's going on from the Support forums.

Also I definitely hope there's some limit to the prioritisation of bugs. You should only push sorting an issue out back for so long, regardless of the size.

[Inculpatus cedo.9234]

Personally, I'd rather they work on the upcoming expansion. /shrug

Lots of things aren't as often as they used to be since the pandemic and the work on the expansion.

[Bellbirds.1679]

@Inculpatus cedo.9234 said:Personally, I'd rather they work on the upcoming expansion. /shrug

Lots of things aren't as often as they used to be since the pandemic and the work on the expansion.

But if you don't sort out the bugs, even slowly, they WILL mount up. That's why separate depeartments exist anyway. The group of devs fixing bugs aren't the devs making the new expac.

[Inculpatus cedo.9234]

Why should there be some limit? If there's always a more important bug, why should a less important one take priority?Is this about the armor bugs you've posted about several times? The Art Team is probably really busy with the expansion right now.

[Bellbirds.1679]

@Inculpatus cedo.9234 said:Personally, I'd rather they work on the upcoming expansion. /shrug

Lots of things aren't as often as they used to be since the pandemic and the work on the expansion.

And hey, if you feel that way, that's fine! But I don't, and we are both equally important as players. That's why we have the forums: to voice what we'd prefer as individuals :)

[Inculpatus cedo.9234]

Best of luck on your suggestions!

[Bellbirds.1679]

@Inculpatus cedo.9234 said:Why should there be some limit? If there's always a more important bug, why should a less important one take priority?Is this about the armor bugs you've posted about several times? The Art Team is probably really busy with the expansion right now.

Just seems like common sense. If you're working on fixing the roof of your house you should still take some time during the process of that to vacuum the floor and wipe down the kitchen counters. Both big bugs and small bug affect the player experience, and what seems important to once person may not be so much to another, and vice versa. That's why it's smart to get to everything eventually, obvously bigger bugs faster and smaller ones smaller.

[Inculpatus cedo.9234]

Then, they will get to it when they feel it is appropriate.Patience is a virtue, they say.

Again, good luck!

[Bellbirds.1679]

@Inculpatus cedo.9234 said:Why should there be some limit? If there's always a more important bug, why should a less important one take priority?Is this about the armor bugs you've posted about several times? The Art Team is probably really busy with the expansion right now.

Haha! I'm actually so adamant about those just because I've seen how much an issue it caused not just for me but for a lot of people in my rp guilds (Charr rp guilds, we use the cultural armors and charr themed armors a lot so this hit us hard) but this suggestion is more all-encompassing. There's people feeling frustrated about yet-unfixed bugs all the time. I feel like being more transparent and communicative would sort out a lot of that.

[Bellbirds.1679]

@Inculpatus cedo.9234 said:Then, they will get to it when they feel it is appropriate.Patience is a virtue, they say.

Again, good luck!

Of course! I have no issues with /waiting/, I have an issue with the uncertainty/not knowing, hence my suggestion ^^

[Astyrah.4015]

i do believe they have someone to look at and skim through each and every forum topic (not every Anet employee ofcourse) and also on reddit (to a limited extent) so the bugs we mention or report here whether they are valid or not (and not part of the known issues list) do get seen and passed to the appropriate teams. it's also why when we have a big patch out, and many people post threads about something silly to laugh about (visually or mechanically or game breaking) because of a bug introduced by the new update, it gets hotfixed usually within 24hrs

now there are also bugs that they haven't fixed since forever like the bowstrings magically disappearing bug:https://en-forum.guildwars2.com/discussion/29618/bow-string-issues-with-weapon-swap-and-mounts-merged/p1it's a very very trivial/minor issue but they never got around to doing anything about it. but i'd like to believe it's on their to-do list somewhere just way way down in the "non-priority" part of the list. lol

[Mungo Zen.9364]

@Bellbirds.1679 said:I'd like a bit more transparency from Anet about the size/workload of their bug fixing team. It's easier to be patient when you know the team working on the issue a) knows it's an issue, b) the size of that team and c) their workload. That way if it's taking a while and you know the team is small with a high workload a player can be understanding and confident that since the issue is flagged on the known issues list that eventually the team will get to it. If you have no idea about the size of this team and no accurate way to know/find out if a bug is known about it is extremely frustrating to play with the bug and very easy to become impatient.

To be fair, most software development teams I have worked with don't have the clarity internally that you are asking for. They likely have a list of issues and bugs in the hundreds that is always shifting in priority, and outside of the project managers or team leads, most of the team doesn't actually know what most of the issues are. In fact, most bugs or problems rot until they have time to investigate the issue to determine can it be fixed, how long to fix it, impact of fixing it to define the scope of work required. Once the scope has been assigned it will be given a priority and queued for someone to actually work on it, but, that could be never if the priority is low enough.

Those fixes are usually competing with new updates to the software (such as the LW stories) and the updates are usually assigned a timeline to be completed within as part of their scope, whereas bug fixes are not. Given that there is always more work than developers, they will work through Priority 1 requests, new updates and then fix requests. Unless a fix becomes a priority 1 request, it can, unfortunately, wait a long time to be looked at.

That doesn't mean the bug that bugs you won't ever be looked at, it does mean it would be very hard to say it will be looked at until, well, it has been fixed and released.

...and I say that having had this experience working within software development companies, not even as a customer of one.

[Khisanth.2948]

There are probably some catch-22 bugs as well if they are only queued for fixing after QA provides a way to reproduce but some types of bugs can be very difficult to figure out without first digging through the code.

[Inculpatus cedo.9234]

@Bellbirds.1679 said:

@Inculpatus cedo.9234 said:Personally, I'd rather they work on the upcoming expansion. /shrug

Lots of things aren't as often as they used to be since the pandemic and the work on the expansion.

But if you don't sort out the bugs, even slowly, they WILL mount up. That's why separate depeartments exist anyway. The group of devs fixing bugs aren't the devs making the new expac.

You think there aren't expansion bugs encountered whilst working on the expansion? You may be interested to watch Guild Chat and hear about some of the bugs that never made it to releases. Some quite comical, some very vexing.

[Ailuro.2780]

This is a fantastic idea. Transparency and communication is what GW2 really needs right now.

In my opinion, if at the very least there were weekly dev streams that pointed out the noteworthy bugs and issues talked about by the Community would give some level of baseline to knowing that hey they're really paying attention and while they might not be fixing it ASAP, they care.

If we take a look at a game like Ashes of Creation, which is the current no.1 hyped up upcoming MMORPG, we see this is coming from that great level of interaction with the community and constant weekly back and forth communication and transparency on the issues they're dealing with and what they've noted from us.

[Bellbirds.1679]

@Inculpatus cedo.9234 said:

@Bellbirds.1679 said:

@Inculpatus cedo.9234 said:Personally, I'd rather they work on the upcoming expansion. /shrug

Lots of things aren't as often as they used to be since the pandemic and the work on the expansion.

But if you don't sort out the bugs, even slowly, they WILL mount up. That's why separate depeartments exist anyway. The group of devs fixing bugs aren't the devs making the new expac.

You think there aren't expansion bugs encountered whilst working on the expansion? You may be interested to watch Guild Chat and hear about some of the bugs that never made it to releases. Some quite comical, some very vexing.

Sure. But it would be outright irresponsible to neglect the existing content while you work on the expac. What kind of taste would that leave in the mouths of potential buyers of the new expac? And as I said, I don't mind waiting, what I mind is the lack of transparency.

[Svarty.8019]

Ehm... What if they're trying to fix exploitable issues? Do they tell us there are 20 exploitable issues to encourage nefarious people to look for them, especially if they've previously revealed that the team is extremely small?

On the other hand, what if they've got a BIG team, and aren't fixing bugs to your expectations? What then? It seems silly to be transparent on this issue.

[Pacificterror.7805]

I'll speak from a general perspective in this post - this is not talking about GW2 specifically:

Realistically with any game, there's typically a team to deal with existing content and a team to deal with yet-to-be-released content. The trouble with stuff that's broken, not working as intended or not working the way a player would like is fixing or tweaking it in a way that doesn't cause a million other problems in the process.

There's also the issue that from a dev perspective, fixing stuff tends to be pretty frustrating, boring, and above all unfulfilling. That doesn't mean it shouldn't get done, but it does usually lead to what gets fixed being cherry picked.....the stuff that's easier to fix, the interesting/fun challenge, etc etc - on top of stuff that's seen as an "urgent issue", obviously.

It's really not more complex than that in my opinion. There'll always be people making random excuses like "They're busy working on new content" (even though that kind of stuff has a dedicated team) or "They know what's important and are dealing with stuff in the order that needs to be done" (which can be true in a way....but it's usually more about addressing stuff that you can either get out of the way with less effort or doesn't make you want to quit your job)...and there'll be people on the opposite end of the spectrum thinking absolutely nothing gets done (which is why you ask for transparency, of course).

Next time you look at a particular bug you hate, instead of thinking it's getting ignored, picture a guy that has set aside time for the last x amount of weeks trying to sort it out for you but every fix just causes 1000 worse bugs in that 1 bug's place.

[Omega.6801]

At this point, I doubt that we can get transparency from ANet. Should they decide to ever comunicate with the community again it will most likely be shallow marketing speak. For that I don't need an ANet official. I can create my own marketing speak.

"[enter your desired content] is definitely on the table and we're looking into it.""we might not bring [whatever floats your boat] to GW2 this year, but we're not writing it off either.""we've been working hard on [the next big thing] and we're sure it will bring something new to the game.""we are working on [whatever you feel is missing] but there are issues that we want to fix before going into the details."

[Danikat.8537]

@Bellbirds.1679 said:

@Inculpatus cedo.9234 said:Probably aren't going to offer the size of the QA Team or Devs that might work on a particular bug.The Known Issue Tracker automation broke some time ago; doesn't seem like there's anyone available to hand-curate it presently.Bugs are prioritized, and only so much resource to go around. What you might find important may not be to others.Also, some bugs will never be fixed as fixing them only creates more bugs.

It would be nice if it worked and was accurate, but it's certainly not game-breaking for me. Can learn mostly what's going on from the Support forums.

In that case I really think they should assign someone to hand-curate it. It would be a great improvement imo.

I was assigned an almost identical tasks as part of my work not that long ago. It lasted less than a month before being dropped for being a huge waste of time. There's no one person who is involved in identifying and fixing all the problems, so I was constantly having to ask around to find out who was working on it and then chase them for updates so I could update the tracker. After a few weeks (when it was never completely up to date) we agreed it would be better to spend that time on actually fixing things instead of trying to record what was being fixed. (It was another few months after that before most of the people I was doing this for noticed it wasn't being updated any more, so it clearly wasn't that important for them either.)

It's possible Anet have a better internal system for keeping track of who is doing what than my employer (it certainly wouldn't be difficult), but if not I suspect they're in a similar situation - having to weigh up the benefits of dedicating a chunk of someone's time to keeping track of what work is being done vs. using it to actually do the work.

[Bellbirds.1679]

@Danikat.8537 said:

@Bellbirds.1679 said:

@Inculpatus cedo.9234 said:Probably aren't going to offer the size of the QA Team or Devs that might work on a particular bug.The Known Issue Tracker automation broke some time ago; doesn't seem like there's anyone available to hand-curate it presently.Bugs are prioritized, and only so much resource to go around. What you might find important may not be to others.Also, some bugs will never be fixed as fixing them only creates more bugs.

It would be nice if it worked and was accurate, but it's certainly not game-breaking for me. Can learn mostly what's going on from the Support forums.

In that case I really think they should assign someone to hand-curate it. It would be a great improvement imo.

I was assigned an almost identical tasks as part of my work not that long ago. It lasted less than a month before being dropped for being a huge waste of time. There's no one person who is involved in identifying and fixing all the problems, so I was constantly having to ask around to find out who was working on it and then chase them for updates so I could update the tracker. After a few weeks (when it was never completely up to date) we agreed it would be better to spend that time on actually fixing things instead of trying to record what was being fixed. (It was another few months after that before most of the people I was doing this for noticed it wasn't being updated any more, so it clearly wasn't that important for them either.)

It's possible Anet have a better internal system for keeping track of who is doing what than my employer (it certainly wouldn't be difficult), but if not I suspect they're in a similar situation - having to weigh up the benefits of dedicating a chunk of someone's time to keeping track of what work is being done vs. using it to actually do the work.

I think the issue there is with the inefficient system you used. Why not have an online dev hub where devs can quickly note down the bugs they're aware of/fixing and then one individual can be in charge with checking it for accuracy and updating the playerbase. This would also perhaps make use of a search feature so devs can quickly search for bugs to see if another dev has seen it/the status of it/info.

I take issue with you considering this wasted time/not doing 'actual' work. Communication with your playerbase is essential to harbour trust in the service and some sense of 'connection' between dev/company and player, as this will make someone more likely to want to support the company monentarily.

[Bellbirds.1679]

@"lokh.2695" said:At this point, I doubt that we can get transparency from ANet. Should they decide to ever comunicate with the community again it will most likely be shallow marketing speak. For that I don't need an ANet official. I can create my own marketing speak.

"[enter your desired content] is definitely on the table and we're looking into it.""we might not bring [whatever floats your boat] to GW2 this year, but we're not writing it off either.""we've been working hard on [the next big thing] and we're sure it will bring something new to the game.""we are working on [whatever you feel is missing] but there are issues that we want to fix before going into the details."

Yeah...the thing is, Anet needs to realise literally everyone sees right through this.