In game bug reporting

[Klapaucius]

The bug reporting for KSP 1 is not great.

 

I'd like to suggest a model from Subnautica in which you can report  a bug simply by pressing a hotkey. It will even screenshot the event and leaves you a place to type a description of the problem.  No game is ever bug free, but making the reporting process simple will do a lot to help squash them quickly.  It will also encourage more bug reporting because it will not require exiting the game.

 

Edited May 22, 2022 by Klapaucius
grammar correction

[Zozaf Kerman]

Yes please. This will help to ‘kill the kraken’ as mentioned in feature vid 5.

[MechBFP]

The main goal of such a feature isn't actually to fix bugs but to simply appease the player.

You have no idea the amount of complete and total garbage a system like that creates. Maybe 1 in every 100 reports is even worth looking at, as the other 99 reports are either user created problems, unrelated problems,  or user ignorance. You have to understand that if a system like that exists, the vast majority of reports will never even get looked at by a human. It can, at best, find an obvious problem that a lot of people report through text analytics of the pool of reports. Generally you as a developer are probably going to know about those issues anyway.

Edited May 21, 2022 by MechBFP

[intelliCom]

17 hours ago, MechBFP said:

The main goal of such a feature isn't actually to fix bugs but to simply appease the player.

You have no idea the amount of complete and total garbage a system like that creates. Maybe 1 in every 100 reports is even worth looking at, as the other 99 reports are either user created problems, unrelated problems,  or user ignorance. You have to understand that if a system like that exists, the vast majority of reports will never even get looked at by a human. It can, at best, find an obvious problem that a lot of people report through text analytics of the pool of reports. Generally you as a developer are probably going to know about those issues anyway.

So what do you propose? Make KSP2's bug reporting the same as KSP1?

[The Aziz]

Why not? Is it that complicated? Dedicated site with clear instructions (log file, screenshot/recording, detailed description) is easy to use. Plus account requirement ensures they don't get tons of trash instead of bug reports.

[MechBFP]

5 hours ago, intelliCom said:

So what do you propose? Make KSP2's bug reporting the same as KSP1?

Similar yes, something that at least requires the user to create a new account/profile/whatever outside of the game before making a report.  You’ll still get some garbage, just like the KSP1 bug tracker does, but it greatly reduces the amount of trash as most users have to be confident enough in their report that they will actually spend the extra time required to report it. 

[darthgently]

3 hours ago, The Aziz said:

Why not? Is it that complicated? Dedicated site with clear instructions (log file, screenshot/recording, detailed description) is easy to use. Plus account requirement ensures they don't get tons of trash instead of bug reports.

A hybrid approach might be nice.  Like a built in hot key a user can press when an error occurs that would gather logs, screenshot, etc, and put them in a named subdir or similar.  Maybe even a mechanism that would trigger the hot key code upon certain conditions (same exception repeated N times... idk, guessing).

Then the player could nav to the bug reporting site and simply upload/attach the directory contents with the bug report.  Additionally, bot software could scan the uploaded bug report files doing factor analysis based on OS, mods installed, versions, errors in logs etc and possibly give mod devs advance notice of a developing issue as well as new incompatibilities between mods etc

[Bej Kerman]

On 5/21/2022 at 3:57 PM, MechBFP said:

The main goal of such a feature isn't actually to fix bugs but to simply appease the player.

You have no idea the amount of complete and total garbage a system like that creates. Maybe 1 in every 100 reports is even worth looking at, as the other 99 reports are either user created problems, unrelated problems,  or user ignorance. You have to understand that if a system like that exists, the vast majority of reports will never even get looked at by a human. It can, at best, find an obvious problem that a lot of people report through text analytics of the pool of reports. Generally you as a developer are probably going to know about those issues anyway.

Why don't we find a solution to this that doesn't hinder well-meaning reporters?

[MechBFP]

3 hours ago, Bej Kerman said:

Why don't we find a solution to this that doesn't hinder well-meaning reporters?

That’s the problem though, everyone thinks they are well meaning.

[Gargamel]

@MechBFPisnt far off from the truth here. We get erroneous reports all the time on the forums, either people think it’s the reply button, or they don’t fill out the form to let us know what’s going on.   Having a hot key to create a bug report is a bad idea.   
 

For a deeper look at why this is a bad idea, I’d recommend @Snark’s op-Ed in the recent open Beta thread up in the KSP2 discussion sub.  
 

Now, it might be convenient to have some sort of option, buried in a menu, that will bundle all the needed info into a single package.   That way when you do go to the official bug tracker site, you can easily upload the correct info. 
 

This bundled package would also be very very helpful when asking for tech support.   Our biggest problem in the tech support subs , and in mod threads, is getting users to provide the log files so we can help them.   Having an easily uploadable package would Go a long way to fixing this.  

Edited May 24, 2022 by Gargamel
Added link

[Klapaucius]

31 minutes ago, Gargamel said:

Now, it might be convenient to have some sort of option, buried in a menu, that will bundle all the needed info into a single package.   That way when you do go to the official bug tracker site, you can easily upload the correct info. 
 

This bundled package would also be very very helpful when asking for tech support.   Our biggest problem in the tech support subs , and in mod threads, is getting users to provide the log files so we can help them.   Having an easily uploadable package would Go a long way to fixing this.  

This sounds like a great idea. 

And surely we can make a homepage better than this:

The first time I arrived here, I had no clue what to do.  I do not want to be sent to a wiki. I don't want to use a searchbox when I don't even know what the standard keywords are--it would be better to at least be able to see the list of current bugs and see if mine is similar (I realize you can get there eventually, but it is not intuitive).  Most importantly,  I just want to report my bug and get back to my game. I understand you get a lot of false reports, but conversely, I think a lot of people, me included, usually just look at that page and think, "Not worth it..."

[Gotmachine]

Automatic bug reporting is bad.
As other have mentioned, all it does is swarming the developer with useless reports.

However, automatic bug report creation vastly improve the feedback quality for users that are actually willing to properly support their request.
An in-game button that grab the log files, current save and game database dump and put all that in a zip file on the user desktop, ready for being uploaded is something that would have saved thousands of user and developer (both for Squad and mod developpers) man-hours in KSP1.

Additionally, I would argue that automatic background error collection and statistics is very useful for the developer (ie, automatic upload of errors/exceptions and basic associated info like a stacktrace which are then automatically analyzed on the server to produce statistics).
But people are usually loosing their temper as soon as any application tries to automatically collect and upload some data, so from a PR perspective this is usually a bad move.