This has irked me for a long time now, and I really would like to talk about it. The way bugs and the like work right now is horrible, and it is almost unbelievable how little support you get, not 5 seconds of conversation and 90% of the time your written off with little more then a read through about your problem. Infact as far as customer service goes it is the single worse experience I've had at least off shore they will thank you after you've wasted your time, trying to help them fix problems and are blown off.

Good to see your eloquent voice on the forums once again, Krin.

Even at the apex of my customer support raging, I don't think these were among my list of problems. Hmm.

I've never had any problems with my bugs when I submit them.

If people could understand what you say, maybe they'd be more interested in listening.

I lol'd.

The bug system here is leagues above - simpler, faster, cleaner - than most of the bug systems you will see. I've never had any negative experience with it.

The issue I have with the bugs system is just one:
If it's a quest bug, it's almost guaranteed to not get fixed for months. Ex: Rikenfriez. (Took away my honours because I had the temerity to bug it, and I still can't even earn it back *grump*). It has been broken since the village was released, and disabled since I reported it.

Beyond quest bugs though, things usually move through it pretty quickly.

For quests though, we have:
Rikenfriez
Poisoning the Kepheran Hives
Maeve's Scepter
Flame Warriors
Torture side of Asylum
Amana side of Figurines
etc.

It's pretty widespread.

A few tips when submitting bugs - firstly, file a concise statement of what is going on. "When I conglute, I'm hit by xyz room affect at my nexus." This is a bug report. The following is poor, and 90% of the time will be dismissed out of hand:



This is not a bug report. This is an example of someone copy/pasting what happens with no clear cut reason for why this might be a bug. In fact, looking at this, there's a room affect that triggers any time someone enters the room - which is precisely what Conglute does, it restores you to life and moves you to a particular room.

Similarly, if you file a bug like this, and it is resolved with "Resolution: Your bug report has been reviewed and is not
considered a bug. If you feel it is a game balance concern, you should speak to your guild envoy." <- This is a very generic response. Due to the massive size of the bug system, we try to use the pre-written responses because if we wrote custom responses to everything when it isn't actually necessary or needed it'd take up room. Mind, a hundred here and there is fine - but tens of thousands of strings that aren't needed is just bloat.

Certainly, if your bug is resolved as 'not a bug', the best solution is not to immediately re-bug it and say 'This bug is clearly not resolved, it's still happening.' or 'You're wrong, this is broken and is making xyz class OP, you need to fix it', but rather to speak to your guild envoy. Is this an actual balance problem? Is it a bug? If your envoy really feels like it's a bug, they can bring it up - but if we've said it's not a bug, chances are it's something they should envoy if they want to see a change.

And of course, when that is resolved as not being a bug and you are directed to read the resolution, re-filing a bug asking how they do not think it is a bug (a room effect fired on movement, presumably into a room), and then stating something that cannot, at all, be discerned from any of the previous bugs (that apparently something is stopping conglutinate from happening at all) and that you doubt someone is on 'that much crack'.

Of course, at the end of the day, there's a pretty simple resolution to this thread:

If you have an issue, complaint or problem regarding the administration, you need to e-mail support@lusternia.com, not go to the forums. Certainly, for the administrator, it's not fair - we can't really defend ourselves, particularly when the urge to just copy and paste examples of what has the individual upset (even if we just change the name, time stamps and identifying marks like the nexus) to show how baseless the complaint is.

Secondly, it won't resolve the issue - it will just cause ill-will, displeasure and unhappiness. Certainly, the problem won't be resolved any faster (and likely more slowly) than if you were to re-file a bug explaining what happened (and not just a vague copy/paste that doesn't show much of anything) or, alternately, e-mail support@lusternia.com explaining the situation, and the bug. And, since it's an e-mail, you can even attach a full log of what happened, to better help us resolve the situation when it's forwarded to admins who do handle bugs.

I suggest, in the future, 'bug smart, not sloppy' for a mantra at approaching bugs. Unnecessarily long bugs, bugs that don't actually state a problem but rather display something that does not actually show the full effects (or any of them, really) of the bug, or hostile bugs ('you're on crack') tend to be the last ones someone wants to address.

Taking it to the forums, however, just gets the thread closed and a warning level increase.

Maeve's Sceptre is not bugged, I've done it myself, and nothing about it has changed since then - but I'll go look at it here, since I am familiar with it.

There's no bugs in the queue re the Figurines quest.

The rest of them were written by people who are no longer with us, or haven't been around to address them. Unfortunately, this means someone is going to have to sit down and spend huge amounts of time learning the quest to understand what broke (quests are spread across dozens or more pages of scripting, and everyone has their own style of writing - and it can get very difficult to read). It's very difficult to get volunteers for this.

(However, we'll be taking volunteers at the next ephemeral call..... It's a great learning opportunity! )