Bug Bounty Program

Aliandor

I submitted a very short idea (#519) that I wanted to also open up to discussion to see other's thoughts on it.

The basic premise is that you create a scaling reward system for bug reporting.  In my experience with such things in the past rewards are given:

• Scaled based on the impact of the bug, usually categorized by Trivial, Minor, and Major.
• Are based on the bug actually being acted upon/accepted as a bug
• Generally rewarded to the first person to report said bug

The benefit to a system that rewards bug reports is:

• More incentive to not abuse bugs (you shouldn't anyway!)
• More incentive for better written, fully formed bug reports.
• More incentive for good bug hunters to really dig deep and find things.

Thoughts?  Votes?

Thanks!

Iocun

Do we currently have a problem with bugs not being reported, or bugs in general being reported badly?

Cooper

No, there's always a massive backlog because of how many people report things. 

Aliandor

@Iocun

Good question, and I'm not entirely sure.  

Speaking for myself, it won't change whether or not I write up a bug report whenever I find something - but I wouldn't say no to earning a credit or two when I do what I would already be doing

Phaestus

Iocun said:

Do we currently have a problem with bugs not being reported, or bugs in general being reported badly?

Cooper said:

No, there's always a massive backlog because of how many people report things. 

This is an incredibly common and somewhat frustrating complaint that keeps popping up (multiple times a week, on a good week), so I'm going to go ahead and address it here before this thread becomes more of the same.

Achaea's bug system is somewhat notorious for years and years of bugs piling up, simply because we didn't have the people to handle the influx of new bugs. Bugs that were high priority were usually fixed because they were brought to the direct attention of whoever was in charge at the time, via message or ACC or what have you, or because they were complained about enough (or abused enough) to be noticed by the administration. Other bugs were fixed after a time, but because they'd been in the system long enough to be bugged a number of times, they lingered in the system as duplicates. Some were just never fixed, because of the sheer number of very low-impact bugs that were submitted. This was the case on and off for a long time.

However, over the past year (if not a little more) this has changed radically. Over the past six months, the team has fixed a total of 4,276 bugs, clearing the bug list in its entirety at least three times, possibly four (those sweet, blissful moments with zero bugs are better than crack). The few bugs that managed to expire in that time were (for the most part) very low-impact, very hard to pin down, and very obscure bugs that didn't really affect gameplay (there may have been exceptions, but by and large this is the case). No bugs have been allowed to expire since the beginning of the year (mid-December was the last, I believe, barring a bug that caused some players in late December to receive an expiry message after their bug was already deleted as fixed or not a bug).

Those bugs that still get complained about as going unfixed for extended periods of time (like some recent Ashaxei complaints) are typically those that are just not brought to our attention at all via the bug system (again, there are exceptions, but for the most part this is the case, especially regarding bugs that aren't quest related). Others tend to be things that aren't bugs, but aren't exactly intended behaviour either, so they require discussion and thought at length. Some are just very low impact and very hard to pin down bugs, but we do our best to devote time to these when we can, and most of these are found and fixed within a month or two. Complaining on forums may have been the way to get these things fixed in the past, but the bug system is 100% your best bet for getting something fixed in a timely manner these days. That's not to say that there's not place for discussing these things, and potential solutions, but posting a rant every few weeks about something not working properly or negatively affecting your gameplay likely isn't going to get to the coder team in a timely manner, if at all.

Syrennia

Phaestus said:

No bugs have been allowed to expire since the beginning of the year (mid-December was the last, I believe, barring a bug that caused some players in late December to receive an expiry message after their bug was already deleted as fixed or not a bug).

I had a bug expire twice. The third time I got a generic message akin to "lol that doesn't happen" despite me showing that yes, it does actually happen. It was to do with certain doors (there's actually quite a lot) not being opened by CONFIG AUTOOPENDOORS when you're using WALKTO, so it just sits there trying to spam walk into the door multiple times per second until you either a) manually open the door, or b) stop the walkto.

Pretty certain one of the times, I even provided a rather clear log as to what was happening. As well as what I perceived to be the cause of it, given there was only one thing in common with all of those doors (and the ones it did walk through, didn't have that).

(no, they weren't locked doors. I move through them just fine walking ordinarily)

Phaestus

Syrennia said:

Phaestus said:

No bugs have been allowed to expire since the beginning of the year (mid-December was the last, I believe, barring a bug that caused some players in late December to receive an expiry message after their bug was already deleted as fixed or not a bug).

I had a bug expire twice. The third time I got a generic message akin to "lol that doesn't happen" despite me showing that yes, it does actually happen. It was to do with certain doors (there's actually quite a lot) not being opened by CONFIG AUTOOPENDOORS when you're using WALKTO, so it just sits there trying to spam walk into the door multiple times per second until you either a) manually open the door, or b) stop the walkto.

Pretty certain one of the times, I even provided a rather clear log as to what was happening. As well as what I perceived to be the cause of it, given there was only one thing in common with all of those doors (and the ones it did walk through, didn't have that).

(no, they weren't locked doors. I move through them just fine walking ordinarily)

The bug in question was a single-sentence bug filed without a log, thoroughly investigated, and manually deleted, as testing showed there were no issues with either autowalking or the doors config in a number of cases. If you would like to file a bug with a log of the issue occuring, please feel free, and we'll look into it as soon as time allows. Doing this helps us pinpoint edge cases for those low-impact and hard to pin down bugs mentioned above.