Board Game Arena

You're absolutely right. Once you've submitted reports and not received feedback, this approach makes sense.

JoysJoy wrote: ↑15 December 2024, 16:38

nik592 wrote: ↑15 December 2024, 02:55 It would probably be useful to link the bugs as nccc has, so that users who find this thread might go vote on them. I don't play a lot of Isle of Cats, but I've never had an issue and wasn't aware of any game-breaking bug (and probably haven't voted to get it fixed).

You may have missed the message where I say I already did all that? I already found and updated the bug as well as reached out to the developer to find out that there is no time available to fix this. It is not enough. This has been going on for many years for the same game for the same problems. What good did it do for me to waste that much time? And that much effort? Hence the topic being posted.

I feel like Reporting or up voting bugs does no do anything at all. Several bugs I have found go back longer than 2021 without being touched, despite many upvotes! I feel bug reporting is just a way to be placated, when nothing is going to happen anyway. We don't pay enough for programers to get paid to keep up the games. it is entirely volunteer driven and if the programmer doesn't have time? We just wasted all of ours trying on games that are known to have to be abandoned, to create a bug report in the first place, or to find a no bug report and upload it. All for no good reason because nothing happens.

You said you'd already voted on the bugs, but others have not necessarily voted on them, or are not aware of them (as I mentioned for myself with Isle of Cats). If you're trying to create awareness so people don't waste their time, then the whole story is good to have - if nothing else, then a player can decide if they want to risk the bug or not.

Bug reporting does get bugs fixed, but it depends on the game. I experienced some bugs in a game in the last few weeks and the dev is active and fixes them. Moreover, you don't know when someone might decide to take up volunteering to work on a game - so if bugs aren't reported and/or upvoted, this new dev isn't going to know about them, or realise how much of a problem they are (ie. know what the priorities are to fix). There are a lot of bugs and you're correct, only so many resources (ie. devs). This is also true in the case where developers ARE paid - I am a software developer, and we have a huge queue of bugs to fix in our software as well, some dating back years. Some things just never become a priority. Here it is different, as devs can basically choose their own priorities, but there's still some benefit in indicating what bugs are present (reporting) and how prevalent/important they are (voting).

nik592 wrote: ↑15 December 2024, 23:47
You said you'd already voted on the bugs, but others have not necessarily voted on them, or are not aware of them (as I mentioned for myself with Isle of Cats). If you're trying to create awareness so people don't waste their time, then the whole story is good to have - if nothing else, then a player can decide if they want to risk the bug or not.

Bug reporting does get bugs fixed, but it depends on the game. I experienced some bugs in a game in the last few weeks and the dev is active and fixes them. Moreover, you don't know when someone might decide to take up volunteering to work on a game - so if bugs aren't reported and/or upvoted, this new dev isn't going to know about them, or realise how much of a problem they are (ie. know what the priorities are to fix). There are a lot of bugs and you're correct, only so many resources (ie. devs). This is also true in the case where developers ARE paid - I am a software developer, and we have a huge queue of bugs to fix in our software as well, some dating back years. Some things just never become a priority. Here it is different, as devs can basically choose their own priorities, but there's still some benefit in indicating what bugs are present (reporting) and how prevalent/important they are (voting).

You are thinking there is only one problem. That is not true! I know for Dice Forge, there are multiple bugs reported that break the game so you can't continue to play it. This post allows anybody to go look at what bugs are out there for these games, and see if they want to deal with them.

JoysJoy wrote: ↑16 December 2024, 02:47 You are thinking there is only one problem. That is not true! I know for Dice Forge, there are multiple bugs reported that break the game so you can't continue to play it. This post allows anybody to go look at what bugs are out there for these games, and see if they want to deal with them.

I don't play Dice Forge, so I can't comment there. But I do play Isle of Cats - not a huge amount, but in my 17 games, I've never reached a point where I couldn't continue. A look at the list of bugs for Isle of Cats shows 3 with the "block" type (that have more than 1 vote) - all of these have minimal info, and at least one is probably just a BGA server error (so not user fault, but also not a problem with that game specifically). So I don't know which of these (if any) is the game-breaking bug you're talking about. If I look at the top five bugs, two are suggestions so not bugs, another is complaining about a BGA server error, and the other two seem to be about the same thing, where a player is ending their turn without taking the treasure they should have gotten from covering a map with a cat (and several players acknowledge it is them making a mistake, but request that the mistake be made more obvious before the player makes it). So I'm still not sure which bug you think makes the game unplayable.

I generally only vote for bugs I've experienced myself, but occasionally, someone in the forums has explained their bug, possibly shared the table, or even just shared the bug report (which includes a clear description and/or table) and requested upvotes so I can see it clearly without having to play the game. In those cases, I'll happily support their bug. But I'm not going to go through every bug and look for the good reports to investigate. I just spent some time doing it on Isle of Cats, and didn't find any bugs I thought were worth voting for. There's a lot of noise in there, which also causes issues with identifying which bugs need fixing.