Bug reporting, Improving the system

In my time in WoW, I have reported… several hundred bugs, and as of today, only a couple have been fixed, and this has been the experience with others I have talked to as well :frowning:

Recently, I encountered a few bugs in the one other MMORPG I play, and my experience with reporting them has been night and day, and while their system most likely wouldnt work if tried 1 to 1 in WoW, its success is something that I think WoW could learn from

their system:
-Player creates thread (in this case a discord thread)
-Player adds various tags to thread to help with sorting
-Other players can add more info, etc, also just upvote the problem to signal they have it as well
-“Trusted” community members can combine duplicate reports, help classify or clarify the report, and can tag specific devs who work on the system the bug relates too, additionally just close reports that arent real bugs
-Devs can request more info, or just tag a report as Fixed-live, fixed but not live, etc

This seems to all be working very well, I think the primary points here WoW could learn from,
-Letting the community help, having those few community members who have a decent understanding of how the game works, seems to help a ton with refining what they devs see, just by removing false, duplicate and helping refine threads.

-Devs communicating back, most of the time and replies from devs are only a couple words such as “fixed in latest build”, “Working as intended” etc, but that info is extremely important.

Adapting this to fit WoW:
copying that system exactly wouldnt be practical, its to big of a change, BUT, I think there is ways this could be adapted,
-Open the Bug ticket board to viewing, other games like Minecraft have done this, with fairly decent results, in this case, It would probably be best to not allow commenting etc, just viewing
-Add a forum role for trusted community members to help manage the bug report section
-Divide the bug report section into 3 sub forums, Submissions, Pending and Confirmed,

-Submissions would be where reports are posted initally, They would then be sorted through by the trusted community members, and either closed, Merged into an existing Pending report, or moved to Pending if no ticket is already open in the Dev’s ticket system, (
-Pending would be where the devs look to find the significantly smaller list of reports, after the duplicates, known to dev, and false reports had already been removed,
-Confirmed, Once a dev sees the thread in the Pending section and creates and internal ticket to be claimed by a dev to fix, the threads would be moved to confirmed and the Ticket ID added to the title for players to watch for changes.

Something like this could really help with both transparency on bugs being fixed, as well more easily allow the devs to understand reports :slight_smile: also, if people can see bugs being actively fixed, they will be less likely to go “eh not going to bother reporting something that since the report wont help”

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Bug report systems cannot be fully open either. A certain game from a company named after a river in Brazil had that and it went haywire with exploitation. Your suggestions are great though. Totally agree with your last point. To hear something is way better than hearing nothing at all.

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I’ve changed my strategy for reporting game bugs in WoW. After creating a thread in the Report Bugs section of the forum, i add the link to the bug thread in the comments of the quest on the Wowhead (website) so that others can contribute their reports on that link.

I’ve also created a YouTube channel dedicated to reporting some of the bugs I encounter in various games to make it easier for developers to resolve the issues.

The bug in the video below has been preventing my hunter from completing the initial quests in Pandaria for many years because the character gets stuck in a loop in the starting area. I always try to provide as much information as possible so that they can resolve the problem, and the number of views on the video shows that even after adding the video link to the reports, they haven’t been seen.