[Suggestion]How about a ticketing system

[bleader]

In the German speaking forums certain bugs are getting reported over and over again, and some people feel frustrated about the lack of feedback the German community gets in that regard from a German company - the devs are German, yet they are not speaking to us (often). That feels strange, especially when you reported a bug here and just would love to know if the devs even saw that. The English speaking community is getting more feedback. This is not a complaint and it's not by me, but it is what I hear and read repeatedly not just in this forum. I think it is totally fine to communicate mainly in English since that is how devs will reach the most people with their messages. I am just saying that not giving enough feedback to some player bases may make them prone to frustration and quitting the game if something serious happens, or something does not get fixed over time. But of course, there is widespread consensus on Egosoft doing a really good job with their update policy and the speed at which bugs are getting fixed.

However, it is also the case that the team of devs is rather small. So a playerbase of several thousand people that are frequently asking and sometimes even demanding for new features and fixes is a big, big pile of community work that can hardly be managed by that small team.

So I asked myself, why not installing a bug ticketing system?

Here is why:
- bugs don't have to get reported in the forums, so people will stop spamming some recurring bugs in the forums.
- the technical support section will likely become a place where people start to talk about the bugs and not just link to other threads where a bug has been mentioned before.
- by installing a fill out form save games can become uploadable easily and people will be forced to upload in order to report at all (right now it's always repeatedly asking for a savegame by the devs).
- also the dxdiag could be added as well (it feels like the majority of players is still not able to understand that Windows Update is very unlikely to download the truly latest patch for your graphics card and that they might actually not have the latest patch; and just that people tend to not specify anything about their system or game versions in their bug reports)
- gamebreaking bugs will likely be reported more often than "just" annoying bugs -> devs can finally see how often a bug occurs, whereas in the forums one can get the impression that those peeps calling for a bugfix repeatedly may get served first. We can actually see some bug spamming in some cases.
- an ingame link/button to the ticketing system will allow players to report bugs without having to look for a place like the egosoft page first. I believe that this might hold some people back from reporting minor bugs that may be fixed pretty easily and enhance the overall immersiveness of the game.
- if you want to report a bug right now, you are basically forced to upload your save to a gdrive or dropbox or something else to link that here in the forums in plain text. Yeah. Cookies and parsers love that stuff. Would be awesome if I could have the ability to upload the saves directly for only the devs to see, and not give away all that information that easily.


I think that this might be a helpful addition to the great community work that is done by Egosoft (of course you will always find someone who is complaining about something). It will make Egosoft more accountable for how important certain bug fixes are to the community. And it will allow them - and us - to answer to some people that the tiny bug they are complaining about repeatedly will be fixed, but is pretty way down the line. To even make it better, you could allow people to check a box if they want to receive a notification via email when the update will be rolled out that fixes their reported bug.

Thanks! o7

[Drakuel]

This belongs in general forum, I would go nuts as a forum moderator, so many improper posts in technical forum...

[Alan Phipps]

The idea is great in principle (maybe even something that could be done for future major updates or DLCs) but there are a few things to note for the current situation:

1. The Tech Sp forum already has had from day one a 'read before posting' Announcement (the first thread on that forum) that very few posters there bother to read, so any ticketing system instruction would probably also be largely overlooked or ignored.

2. We are where we are; a change of system now would be most difficult to resource and maintain. The existing multitude of reports could not be retrofitted into a new system and yes, many of those in the EN forum are indeed duplications of other earlier reports; a situation made worse by the poor forum response speeds shortly after release. In fact we actively encourage use of new threads in most cases as issues with similar symptoms often have widely differing causes across different systems, system set-ups and game set-ups. What we do discourage though is the prevalent habit of posting of 'Me too' posts in existing report threads giving little or no additional useful information about the issue.

3. The current Tech Sp forums are mainly monitored by player-volunteers who may flag up important new issues to devs by other means - but this is not a guaranteed procedure and is additional to dev monitoring of Tech Sp rather than instead of.

4. Different issue areas need different devs to address them. Thus it is often the case for specific threads that dev feedback and progress only appears to be made when a particular dev is free to address that issue - and their internal tasking priorities are not visible to us and widely differ.

5. Almost every poster thinks that their issue is the most important one of all and needs addressing straight away. That is human nature.

6. Where devs have made some progress, need further information or believe that they have fixed it within a future build, we will try to say so in the thread title. By implication, we are unaware of progress in threads not so annotated even if they may be near duplicates of annotated threads.

Moving this from Tech Sp to the main X4 forum as it is a suggestion and not a bug/issue thread

[ApoxNM]

5. Almost every poster thinks that their issue is the most important one of all and needs addressing straight away. That is human nature.

NO, my issues are the most importantest of all!


*sarcasm

[sebast076]

The idea is great in principle (maybe even something that could be done for future major updates or DLCs) but there are a few things to note for the current situation:

1. The Tech Sp forum already has had from day one a 'read before posting' Announcement (the first thread on that forum) that very few posters there bother to read, so any ticketing system instruction would probably also be largely overlooked or ignored.

2. We are where we are; a change of system now would be most difficult to resource and maintain. The existing multitude of reports could not be retrofitted into a new system and yes, many of those in the EN forum are indeed duplications of other earlier reports; a situation made worse by the poor forum response speeds shortly after release. In fact we actively encourage use of new threads in most cases as issues with similar symptoms often have widely differing causes across different systems, system set-ups and game set-ups. What we do discourage though is the prevalent habit of posting of 'Me too' posts in existing report threads giving little or no additional useful information about the issue.

3. The current Tech Sp forums are mainly monitored by player-volunteers who may flag up important new issues to devs by other means - but this is not a guaranteed procedure and is additional to dev monitoring of Tech Sp rather than instead of.

4. Different issue areas need different devs to address them. Thus it is often the case for specific threads that dev feedback and progress only appears to be made when a particular dev is free to address that issue - and their internal tasking priorities are not visible to us and widely differ.

5. Almost every poster thinks that their issue is the most important one of all and needs addressing straight away. That is human nature.

6. Where devs have made some progress, need further information or believe that they have fixed it within a future build, we will try to say so in the thread title. By implication, we are unaware of progress in threads not so annotated even if they may be near duplicates of annotated threads.

Moving this from Tech Sp to the main X4 forum as it is a suggestion and not a bug/issue thread

Can't you code a thing for the forum to show the content of this sticked thread before the form when posting a new thread ?

[AdmiralTigerclaw]

If 20+ years of watching the internet work has taught me anything, it's that the vast majority of people having problems don't read the Readme, don't check the stickies, and don't do any digging when they have a problem.

Thus, a vast majority of people will completely ignore any kind of ticket system if they find themselves unable to actually post their complaint, and would find a platform to complain that allows them to do so. See the threads over on Steam. I can more or less rank the intelligence of conversation based on the difficulty of accessing it. Steam is two clicks to making a thread, so that's where you'll get the wall of whining. I honestly pity the guys doing the moderating there. The random complaints here I rank only a bit higher. The complaints/reports that actually make it to the technical support section from the start are where things start to get into the realm of 'people can into instructions'... With the people actually following support instructions having the most valuable posts.

A ticketing system would only be useful if you have a group of volunteers filtering out the information from the data. And they would have to be good at filtering PEBDAC: CIB-C errors. (Example of this, a person complaining about something that I was working on 'not working'. After holding their hand for a week, turns out they were a textbook 'Problem Exists Between Desk And Chair: Cannot Into Basic-Computing' case. Didn't understand zip or rar files... at all. Like, how to unpack them. Let alone get to the instructions file packed in them.) You need either some serious fanatics to put up with that, or be cutting them a paycheck.




PEBDAC: CIB-C errors are very irritating to work with. People expect you to treat them like competent beings, but PEBDAC: CIB-C cases need the kindergarten approach. But you can only assume very loosely that they might be a PEBDAC case until you manage to DRAG enough details out of them to verify. Assume from a programmer or tech support standpoint, for those of us who know our stuff, that we're already annoyed because if we WANTED to work with kindergartners, we'd have signed up to be Kindergarten teachers. But we can't even utilize that as a general approach because it offends people.

[CaptainX4]

If 20+ years of watching the internet work has taught me anything, it's that the vast majority of people having problems don't read the Readme, don't check the stickies, and don't do any digging when they have a problem.

Thus, a vast majority of people will completely ignore any kind of ticket system

you would be surprised how much this is not true. just jump over to KSP, they had it and worked wonderful. by the way, its not a customers job to "dig" into the problems, in normal situations thay we have testers

[Requiemfang]

Plain and simple fact that people are absolutely lazy gits when it comes to forums in general and when it comes to readme's, rules, FAQ and the use of the forum Search bar. I know this frustration well as a former forum moderator and admin. I've had to lock or merge multiple threads about the same exact thing when all those new forum users needed to do was a simple search to look for the exact same thing they just made that thread for. Comes down the laziness and complete lack of common sense!

[radcapricorn]

Plain and simple fact that people are absolutely lazy gits when it comes to forums in general and when it comes to readme's, rules, FAQ and the use of the forum Search bar...
...when all those new forum users needed to do was a simple search...

...except people are also absolutely lazy gits when it comes to thread naming and actually expressing their issues. Look at Tech Sp. forum. A good deal of threads are named "<XYZ> bugged". Try picking search terms for that mess

[Requiemfang]

Plain and simple fact that people are absolutely lazy gits when it comes to forums in general and when it comes to readme's, rules, FAQ and the use of the forum Search bar...
...when all those new forum users needed to do was a simple search...

...except people are also absolutely lazy gits when it comes to thread naming and actually expressing their issues. Look at Tech Sp. forum. A good deal of threads are named "<XYZ> bugged". Try picking search terms for that mess

Yep that as well.

[bleader]

Thanks for moving the topic. I was thinking that since this only concerned technical support this would fit there best. But of course it is a suggestion.

@Alan Phipps

1. The Tech Sp forum already has had from day one a 'read before posting' Announcement (the first thread on that forum) that very few posters there bother to read, so any ticketing system instruction would probably also be largely overlooked or ignored.

As someone has already pointed out, this is the internet. There will always be someone who doesn't seem to be able to read the simplest instructions, even though they don't mean evil. However, the playerbase and community is very different and way more considerate than many, many other communities. And I think that a button (just like the workshop button in main menu) will be the easiest way to report a bug. I'd say the majority of people would use this system.

We are where we are; a change of system now would be most difficult to resource and maintain. The existing multitude of reports could not be retrofitted into a new system

That's true, but I guess the still existing bugs that were reported here will automatically be reported in a ticketing system in just a few minutes. People want their bugs taken care of.

Different issue areas need different devs to address them. Thus it is often the case for specific threads that dev feedback and progress only appears to be made when a particular dev is free to address that issue - and their internal tasking priorities are not visible to us and widely differ.

Yeah, they have got enough work to do! That's why I specifically stated that I do not want to complain about the lack of dev communication, but am merely assessing that some (very few) people complain about it. Just wanted to mention it, since this could become some problem in the future. (which I hope will not be happening)

Almost every poster thinks that their issue is the most important one of all and needs addressing straight away. That is human nature.

Yeah, and I know that we won't shut those few people up that will eventually start to complain nonetheless. But I'd like to add that a ticketing system at least offers some feedback from Egosoft - even if it is just an automated message - that the forums just don't offer.

The idea is great in principle (maybe even something that could be done for future major updates or DLCs)

Thanks. Of course a ticketing system is nothing that can be set up by just clicking around in some wordpress page for five minutes. Or can it? But a standardized form will only require one singular work effort and may be a help to the devs to understand a problem faster than by having to scroll through some thread here, on steam or on reddit.

@sebast076

Can't you code a thing for the forum to show the content of this sticked thread before the form when posting a new thread ?

It's one of the worst things you can do: overload a web page with additional information that the reader/visitor really, really, really needs to read. People will just look for the accept button so they can get on with what they wanted to do.

@AdmiralTigerclaw

If 20+ years of watching the internet work has taught me anything, it's that the vast majority of people having problems don't read the Readme, don't check the stickies, and don't do any digging when they have a problem.

I would usually support that to 100 %! But, as mentioned before, the X4 community is pretty mature. I haven't followed the discussions on steam, but here and on reddit, people have been discussing the game and its bugs pretty civilized.



You know I can write in very tiny letters, too, right? hehe But because this means of communication is apparently very suited to discuss matters that certain people on the internet are not supposed to hear, I will just give the supportive argument of my last point here, rephrased so that it becomes clear what I meant: We are not the community from Fortnite. I think you may trust us to behave differently.