"Report" button

[Amorphis]

This was slightly touched on discord yesterday and as far as I know, this was a suggestion some time ago, but I think this would benefit us quite a lot.

Make this as a way to report bugs / incomplete things.
With addition to this, I'd like to see a trusted moderator manage the reported things, so Palidino wouldn't have to go through repetitive reports or just troll stuff. If anyone wants to argue about that some mods have abused bugs themselves in the past, maybe one of the senior mods are down to do this, but in the end, the bugs that could benefit an individual occur quite rarely, so I don't see a problem in trusting this with a newer staff member that actually wants to take initiative and help the server, because in the end the managing staff member would only be able to view the report list and not edit it.

As we all know, the forums is not used as much as it could (i'm guilty at this too) be and this could be an easier way for people to quickly report bugs. If it's possible, an additional interface could be added with some options that people could select when reporting a bug, so they don't get confused and don't just dump every bug report, player report, etc. in there.

[Banned 42]

Make the report button open up the report section with a dialogue.

1. Click the report button
2. Dialogue appears with two options "report a player" and "report a bug"
3. Both of the dialogues would open-up correspond section link in the browser.

Creating interface ingame wouldn't support as much information (gifs, videos etc.) as forum do.

[Amorphis]

Creating interface ingame wouldn't support as much information (gifs, videos etc.) as forum do.

Battlescape isn't a spaceship, almost every single bug can be explained in one sentence and if needed, tested by staff. Most importantly, this would make people stop being lazy in terms of reporting stuff on forums.

[London]

It's not a case of moderators/senior moderators being untrustworthy.

Administrators have access to the Bug Report forum - but what can they do about it? It's like asking senior mods for name changes... Their attitude to this would be "what's the point". You may answer "so it can be monitored and found out who is abusing it". It's a good answer, but in practicality, it's not on their priority list. They do the job voluntarily and to go out of their way just to find specific users abusing a bug - it isn't a reality. This isn't my opinion, this is fact; backed up by my experience on the team.

I really do like the idea of a Report feature working in-game. Maybe even if the button, for now, links a user to the respective reporting forum (bug/player) as suggested by Zeik, above.


Edit:

Battlescape isn't a spaceship, almost every single bug can be explained in one sentence and if needed, tested by staff. Most importantly, this would make people stop being lazy in terms of reporting stuff on forums.

There was a discussion that Tim initiated, for staff and potentially donators to be beta testers before an update comes out. It's not the worst idea in the world but there's some downsides like extra server hosting, stay on top of it, who would actually bug test it. A prime example I can think of as to why it's a waste of time though is: about 2 updates ago, there was absolutely 0 change log on Zulrah... next thing you see is 50 people running into Zulrah because it didn't attack back. Like gmaul bug in the most recent update. Yes there was a special attack bug with the gmaul because of changes to the special attack feature - but out of all the weapons to try, who would test the gmaul specifically to find it? Not only that, the update was to hit instead of pause animation when the special was meant to hit if the energy was low enough. If someone tested with dds and it worked the way it's intended to, they would think it's fine and just move on.

[Amorphis]

It's not a case of moderators/senior moderators being untrustworthy.

Administrators have access to the Bug Report forum - but what can they do about it? It's like asking senior mods for name changes... Their attitude to this would be "what's the point". You may answer "so it can be monitored and found out who is abusing it". It's a good answer, but in practicality, it's not on their priority list. They do the job voluntarily and to go out of their way just to find specific users abusing a bug - it isn't a reality. This isn't my opinion, this is fact; backed up by my experience on the team.

I really do like the idea of a Report feature working in-game. Maybe even if the button, for now, links a user to the respective reporting forum (bug/player) as suggested by Zeik, above.

This suggestion has nothing to do with knowing who's abusing what and about untrustworthy staff members. I touched on that only because it was your main argument yesterday.
Main reason for this suggestion is more frequent bug reports, because you can encounter a small bug, but it's usually not a reason to make a full thread on about for the average player. Also, I'm pretty sure nobody keeps a notepad file on their desktop listing all the bugs they've encountered and post the list at the end of the month.
This is meant as a method how to quickly report small bugs.

[London]

This suggestion has nothing to do with knowing who's abusing what and about untrustworthy staff members. I touched on that only because it was your main argument yesterday.
Main reason for this suggestion is more frequent bug reports, because you can encounter a small bug, but it's usually not a reason to make a full thread on about for the average player. Also, I'm pretty sure nobody keeps a notepad file on their desktop listing all the bugs they've encountered and post the list at the end of the month.
This is meant as a method how to quickly report small bugs.

I guess you didn't even read what I said because I didn't say it has something to do with untrustworthy members of staff anyway

[Amorphis]

There was a discussion that Tim initiated, for staff and potentially donators to be beta testers before an update comes out. It's not the worst idea in the world but there's some downsides like extra server hosting, stay on top of it, who would actually bug test it. A prime example I can think of as to why it's a waste of time though is: about 2 updates ago, there was absolutely 0 change log on Zulrah... next thing you see is 50 people running into Zulrah because it didn't attack back. Like gmaul bug in the most recent update. Yes there was a special attack bug with the gmaul because of changes to the special attack feature - but out of all the weapons to try, who would test the gmaul specifically to find it? Not only that, the update was to hit instead of pause animation when the special was meant to hit if the energy was low enough. If someone tested with dds and it worked the way it's intended to, they would think it's fine and just move on.

You really like to overcomplicate things, do you?
A test server with current staff team is a terrible idea, because as you said, stuff like zulrah can get 0 changes, but still get bugged, which means someone would need to test absolutely everything after every update, which means immense time consumption, server hosting, community splitting and it just would be a waste of recourses.

I'm not targeting this towards obvious game breaking bugs, but more about stuff like wine making on wrong tiles, dark core not spawning, some random "make all" option not working and stuff like that. As I said before, people don't tend to make report threads about this stuff and it doesn't get looked at for ages, which is why the report button would be helpful.

Please stay on topic, I want this suggestion to get implemented, not to start an argument about something that has nothing to with this and the thread getting closed because of it.

[Tim]

Make the report button open up the report section with a dialogue.

1. Click the report button
2. Dialogue appears with two options "report a player" and "report a bug"
3. Both of the dialogues would open-up correspond section link in the browser.

Creating interface ingame wouldn't support as much information (gifs, videos etc.) as forum do.

Add this, best option IMO

[Banned 42]

Battlescape isn't a spaceship, almost every single bug can be explained in one sentence and if needed, tested by staff. Most importantly, this would make people stop being lazy in terms of reporting stuff on forums.

Most of the reports would be like "Fix the combat system it's shit" and nothing specific. There would be too much bullshit coming from doors and the windows that the administrators wouldn't be able to determine which report to take seriously. In nutshell, it would waste their time.

Anyone who would be smart enough to give a good report in short terms could really use their "time" to write actual report on the forums.

[Amorphis]

Most of the reports would be like "Fix the combat system it's shit" and nothing specific. There would be too much bullshit coming from doors and the windows that the administrators wouldn't be able to determine which report to take seriously. In nutshell, it would waste their time.

Anyone who would be smart enough to give a good report in short terms could really use their "time" to write actual report on the forums.

Then just make the report button link to reports sub-forum. Don't care how it's done, but as long as it increases the positive activity coming from the players, it's fine with me.