Okay so I’d like to ask a question here, sorry if this forum isn’t the right play for this, but idk where else to post this.
When you report something as a bug, there’s no feedback on whether it was indeed a bug or something they’d like to look into, or if the odd behaviour encountered by the player is intended.
Why isn’t there a ‘confirmed list of bugs / features’ somewhere on this forum? There’s a lot of things in the game that seem like bugs, that had been reported for years, but that had not been fixed. It would be nice to have some sort of publically accessable resource to confirm whether something is indeed a bug, or something the devs consider fine.
An example of a minor but irritating thing like this would be the old Stratholme dungeon dropping an item called ‘key to the city’ that gets mailed to the player upon exit from the dungeon despite having no use now that no door requires a key, no sell value, and being ‘unique’ meaning you can’t have more than one. Is it a bug that it still drops, or is it left in the game for sentimental value? It would be nice to know these things.
A very minor bug that’s low on the list of their bugs.
It’s often better to try not to make a list like this as denoted in 2, sometimes folks misunderstand what is and isn’t a bug about something. Sometimes it’s just an event that’s happening the player think is a bug, like with the zombie event going on as of this post.
Along with that, sometimes there’s just a lot of things that players want fix and think their bug, or what seems to be a bug, should be fix. The devs often need fix bugs that’s stopping folks from playing, rather than trying to fix an once in a blue moon bug that doesn’t really affect players.
I understand this, but that’s exactly where the confusion comes from. If they just came out and said 'Yes, this minor thing is an issue, we know of it and we’ll fix it when there’s no more pressing issues", as opposed to just ominous silence.
Or, in case it’s intended-- “Yes, this is how we want this to work.”
A simple ‘yes, it’s an issue’ or ‘no it’s not’ will go a long way in making player feel like reporting issues is not a waste of time.
There’s a degree of irony in suggesting using a forum that never gets attention from the devs to tell them we’d like our feedback to have more visible attention.
Not receiving a reply is not the same as not getting attention, Shyllia. These forums are reviewed constantly by various staff, including Community Management and Development for feedback/suggestions as well as QA for Bugs.
As for why there isn’t a comprehensive list? It takes QA folks to do that, to gather the data, go through the various reports and bugs to maintain and update the list. My guess is that they may feel their time is better spent actually investigating and resolving possible bugs.
Still, that is good feedback and something that I would recommend submitting either through the forums or through the option located in the Game Menu under Support.
Tagging things like you describe can be its own can of worms. For one, they’d need the personnel to comb through each post, analyze it as to whether its a bug or not, and then tag it as such (or post a pre-canned response). To note, the personnel that they hire to manage the forums are different from the personnel they hire to actually develop the game / fix the bugs. I can vouch from working on a development team for my dayjob that those managing the user expectations / business / community don’t always know what is and isn’t a bug. Their job is simply to report it on up to the leaders who coordinate the developers, so those leaders can prioritize it and assign it back down to their individual devs. Thus, in order to effectively tag something as “Bug” or “Working as Intended”, there would need to be at least one round of back-and-forth communication between devs and forum managers, possibly more. And that probably needs to happen per post.
The other issue is for things that aren’t bugs, tagging them as such can feel like an outright dismissal of an issue, or a “sweeping under the rug” of a problem. It’s a potential community “trigger” these days to be told you’re wrong, in any form, especially from an official source. So tagging a specific post as “not a bug” could lead to that community backlash that we all tend to kick off when something doesn’t go our way.
“Bug! I got a crappy trinket drop that’s sub-optimal for my current spec! It’s stats should be X, Y, Z!”
“Not a bug. Working as intended.”
“WTF, BLIZZ? You stupid devs don’t know what you’re doing! This is horrible programming!” “I agree!” “Yeah, fix yer game!” “Yup.”
A couple of the Early Access games I play have communities that have reacted similarly when a reported bug has been tagged as “Will Not Fix” or something similar. That tag usually leads into a tirade of why the user is right and the developer is wrong. And these are for relatively small indie game communities.
Finally, if an issue gets mistakenly identified as a bug, but isn’t one, or gets mistakenly identified as not a bug, but is one, it can also lead to community confusion and misunderstanding. This is when people start to assume that the devs changed their intent, or that some massive conspiracy is in the works when information changes like that. It’s another layer of information verification that needs to happen, and, as such, also becomes another source of potential misinformation if a mistake is made. They probably have enough trouble wrangling the information given out during their semi-regular interview blitzes for upcoming content. Having to verify that the tags on every post in the bug forums is correct could get… unwieldy.
Basically, it’s probably just less of a community hassle to be silent on the issues, fix the prioritized stuff and report those in patch notes, and leave the rest obfuscated from the community. Do the work that needs to be done first, then communicate the changes that are successful.
At least, that’s my guess. But I’m just a dude who enjoys playing the game.
It is simply my conjecture but more than likely it is the sentimental value and flavor. Honestly something like that probably wouldn’t have merited a note on the bug report when it did exist. It’s not game-breaking or impeding play, it’s just there.
If you think it should be removed, make a post on the GD forums or use the in-game suggestion tool. Those are the only avenues open to you to make your voice heard as GMs and Devs do not come to this forum.
That’s true; I think Ghostcrawler was a good example of a dev who communicated a lot of bad things that he had no control over, and got a lot of personal backlash for them.
You make a lot of good points in your post, – but I’d like to counter one:
Just because the community doesn’t like the answer doesn’t mean they should go out of their way to appease everyone who complains with instant changes, or just ignore the issue. Let’s be real here, at this point community outrage over a crybaby not getting their trinket will not do anything to WoW, as compared to an indie game where any such drama might drive away potentially their only players. I think if any company can actually afford to just be brutally honest with their players, it’s blizzard.
One example of this is the covenants. Remember #PullTheRipcord? A lot of people still don’t like covenants, but Blizzard is sticking to their guns; Time will tell who was right, but Watcher explained a lot of his reasoning for why he wants to at least try to make them work, and I think him doing so was a very good gesture – putting aside whether or not someone personally will agree or disagree.
I just want more things like that. The devs explaining their reasoning for why something does or does not change.
That still wouldn’t be something you would find here on this forum. Customer Support is a forum for players to assist other players. Customer Service is something else entirely. As I said above, if you want to offer your suggestions and your feedback, you have to use the appropriate channels because the ones who need to hear it do not come to this particular forum. The SFAs who are here cannot pass it along.
In a game as big as WoW is now it is an unrealistic expectation. It would require too much time and manpower to compile and report that information. As well, the information reported could be really out of date already at the time of the report.
All good! That said, if you have a question and you cannot find the answer? You are of course welcome to post here and one of us frequent flyers or SFAs will be more than happy to try and find the answer as best we can. That is why this forum exists.
