I’m enthusiastic about the uptick in positive communication we’ve gotten recently, and I’d like to address a pain point that we sort of missed: the bugs subforum.
Most bugs posted on there just get an “acknowledged” sticker slapped on them and never elaborated on further until they are maybe fixed in a future update. This keeps players in the dark on which problems are being worked on and which ones aren’t - @FatsharkCatfish has stated previously that bugs are triaged based on severity, but we don’t get to see this, so we can’t tell which are considered major or minor by the developers.
I believe it’d be prudent to start listing known issues that are currently being worked on in future patch notes, to give players a better idea of what is being worked on and what isn’t. Bugs that we feel are a major detriment to gameplay that aren’t being addressed can be singled out and brought up, instead of having to shoot wildly into the dark, hoping that Fatshark is listening and working on it.
Severity and ease of fixing. Some are very severe but very difficult to fix. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. With the community not really a fan of how FS handles vacations and how volatile reactions can be, a triage board that’s public, while a good idea, I feel can fall flat very very fast because players will assume something’s not moving fast enough. Or maybe not even like the bugs up for fixing, no matter how much the board will explain it. I actually tried something similar post-launch and it didn’t last very long, unfortunately.
I really, really do not think this is a good idea (in practice; in theory, it’s great). Fatshark is Fatshark and not a company where this would help either party (yes, I know other studios do this to an extent, but that’s my point. Fatshark needs to get there first before they even consider making a triage board public). I’d rather FS fix the bugs then spend the time making a board that someone has to add as part of their job. Save that for an annual or quarterly wrap up.
Also, tickets are not linear. While yes in theory they can be closed and done, inevitably code breaks some other code and they gotta go back to square one. See V2’s: “We fixed bots dying in the Skittergate!” that keeps recurring for years.
Side note: Community support works their a** off; it’s another layer that would take away time from them already being quite busy. There’s a reason they have a 24 hour support response turnaround time!
Side note 2: You can see all known bugs by filtering with the acknowledged tag. Known != “we’re working on it.” Just that it’s in triage.
Edit 3: Fall “flat”, not “fast.” Not enough coffee today.
The overall advantage is that it stops people re-raising same bugs already mentioned and shows Devs already aware and provides information on progress from investigation, fix ready and when implemented in next update.
As someone with a dev role in a different industry and thousands of users creating tickets for me (and others) to work on you DO NOT want to crowdsource triage. Things are more complicated than end users want them to be and most users only raise one ticket so it is ofc their top priority.