Feedback regarding in-game bug reporting on the forums

[Songen]

Platform: Irrelevant, no longer exists
ISP: Irrelevant. They cannot possibly use your ISP to verify your bug.
Type of Internet Connection: Irrelevant. No way shape or form can dsl vs cable make any distinguishable change.
Internet Connection Speed: Irrelevant. Game is designed for 56k speed won't change anything.
Date & Time: Matters for the Log.
Frequency: Matters if it's intermittent or not*
Character Name: (mostly irrelevant as your avatar is your character. but mules etc)
Race: Irrelevant. If you don't know that T means your mithra can't wear wonder clomps: Uninstall.
World: Again mostly irrelevant your avatar shows your server.
Main Job: What I'm on is Irrelevant.
Support Job: My sub job is 100% irrelevant.
Area and Coordinates: Important
Party or Solo: Irrelevant.
NPC Name: Important
Monster Name: See NPC name
Steps: Important
<*Add more steps if necessary.>

Platform: Windowers or linux or mac, quite possible one of these aren't responding correctly since the software made by microsoft is altered between them

ISP: Not all service providers provide the same quality of server, and some are banned or limited between connecting to certain countrys

Type of Internet Connection: dsl runs slower and adsl runs faster however with current content requiring so much information the lag can cause npcs (Happened to me), items (Happened to me), actually gear (Happened to me), zone (Happened to me) etc etc from loading, one will load faster and other will load slower, so if it lags your computer may think its retrieve all the information it needs however it could be incomplete

Internet Connection Speed: as above

Date & Time: is it during peak hour for US, EU, JP which means it could be during a time (Such as back in the day when beseiged caused hell for everyone or even now when mhaura is fulled to the brim with afk'ers or people trying to get into ambuscade.) when theres overly too much to load and your system can't keep up (Refer to internet type for more information)

Frequency: Odvious that if something is happening alot then there is a problem however the "Date & Time" also becomes relivent due to the fact you only play during peak hour or non peak hour.

Character Name: This is not odvious to the developers since you can have 16 charactors on one account however if you own more than one account and registered only one of the accounts for the forum then you need to be specific.

Race: as above with "character name" however also someone else might have your name on a different world.

World: as above with "character name" however this narrows down the search (Yes the race and a few things below give a hint however why should they do a million scans when you can say it.

Main Job: It is quite possible being on a certain job is one of the key factors in the error such as being on a certain AF quest causes the system to not register your current event (This is relivent, you just don't don't give a crap) people change jobs frequently so the team doesn't know what job you were on at the time

Support Job:same as "Main job"

Area and Coordinates: Important

Party or Solo: As stated in "Main job", you being in a party or solo makes a difference, such as when they made trusts a partyable thing, they found a error that when you first make a party then summon the trusts imediently it could cause a error, such a thing isn't limited to a one time only thing and they won't know if or if not you were in a party.

NPC Name: Important

Monster Name: See NPC name
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Now then, if you didn't know, there are people who are stupid enough to delete their character since the complaint gets added to a list of maybe 100-1000 other things they are trying to fix, could take weeks if not months sometimes to get to the problem. since all the above information atleast tells them where to start looking.

For those of you who think its a easy thing to get all the information relating to everything above, think again, in regards to who you are, just being on this forum says nothing, the forum is linked to your account yes, but the problem could be on a different account, or a different server with same job/name, or different job /name, or a whole raft of things. you have to narrow it down or they will rubbish the complaint right from the start. why in the world should they go thru 16 different charators (trolling-OMG i only have 1 character, how can they get it wrong) doesn't matter how many charactors you have whether its 1 or 16 or 78 depending on how many accounts you have and mules you have, if you don't specify, its not won't be looked into.

WHY you ask they won't look into it?

Because they have another 100-10000 or more things to do and they don't need to go thru a trillion lines of packet data sent to them from your computer to them and find out when and where you were when it happened and which account you were on and which time etc etc,

If you want to see a extremely small glimps of what the data is like. unequip all your chat filters. stand in a major active party location with atleast 3-6 partys (Its hard to find but its possible) then let your entire screen fill to the maximum and let it run for 3 weeks (Which may be the actual time it takes to get to your complaint looked at) and somewhere in the middle look for when someone used a /emote and log it, however since for us the game doesn't save all the chat so you wouldn't beable to see it at all however if you can atleast picture the relivent example, its that type of data they have to plow thru, then have to pin point the time and place, which charater, which world, if being in a party did anything, did you have trusts or npcs out at the time, were you in town or in the field, etc etc etc, then have to see what your data sent to them was and what was the responce was that lead to the problem.

By the end of it, could be a computer problem on your side or you failed to flag a quest which happens to alot of people, i seen atleast 3 people in the past month that made the complaint then we answered it for them then they said that fixed the problem.

What you think is irrelivent isn't for a IT team, they don't have time to search thru a million things because you can't answer 16-20 questions

[Dragoy]

Songen,

As a Linux user, I feel like pointing out that Wine, which is used to play FFXI on Linux (and some probably do it on macOS as well) does not alter the software in any way. One of the main points of the Wine project is to not modify how the software is being run (nor is it an emulator, but a compatibility layer).

If something isn't running via Wine as it runs in a native Windows environment, it's a bug in Wine, and it would not belong here at all. :]

While I do not believe the template should be an issue in any way (though I know some people find it bothersome to say the least), I do agree that the 'platform' part isn't relevant any longer since the only supported platform is Windows. If any third-party software is being used while experiencing an issue, said software should be excluded from the test set-up before reporting anything here at all (or at least be mentioned in the report so other players can try to reproduce the issue).

[Songen]

Songen,

As a Linux user, I feel like pointing out that Wine, which is used to play FFXI on Linux (and some probably do it on macOS as well) does not alter the software in any way. One of the main points of the Wine project is to not modify how the software is being run (nor is it an emulator, but a compatibility layer).

If something isn't running via Wine as it runs in a native Windows environment, it's a bug in Wine, and it would not belong here at all. :]

While I do not believe the template should be an issue in any way (though I know some people find it bothersome to say the least), I do agree that the 'platform' part isn't relevant any longer since the only supported platform is Windows. If any third-party software is being used while experiencing an issue, said software should be excluded from the test set-up before reporting anything here at all (or at least be mentioned in the report so other players can try to reproduce the issue).

To those who didn't get what he said or why he agree'd (I presume you agree'd)

Imagine the person trying to find out why someones FF11 isn't running on his linux PC (Without the wine program), imagine removing the system platform category, would that solve the question as to why he had no clue in the beginning that he needed wine attached since he didn't read the box/forums/other things etc?
Everyone see it that its the developers fault who should have known from the beginning that he was using linux in the first place and that shouldn't have assumed he was using a different platform from the beginning (There is sarcasm in there for those who didn't know, and this is one possible problem out of a larger scale).

Whether you agree with me or not on the topic at hand is what's truely irrelevent for everyone. what i should have wrote before is that everyone seems to think the IT/developers can read their minds, that the developers know your using a computer, laptop, or some modified computer/tablet. everyone thinks that the IT/developers know what programs your using or they know what hardware your using. this stuff makes all the difference,

how something that is encoded won't work for everything and can actually malfunction. its the reason why they added certain tweeks to the keyboard setup for those who use a laptop, however that doesn't mean it'll cover everyone.

The template is standard, not everything is relivent, however who am i (Since i'm not the one trying to fix the hundreds of problems that are currently available since they have system detected problems) to say what is or isn't relivent to fix the problem. they made the template, even if its old they maintain it as such so thats what we use.

[Nyarlko]

"Platform" also includes Windows version. Do try to remember that this game still works great with WinXP after all. XD It most definitely matters if you are using: XP/Vista/8.x/10 and the devs have no way of ruling out certain causes (driver versions for example,) if they are not told by the bug reporter.

All the ISP related stuff is important as well. I know for a fact that certain ISPs routinely throttle traffic, and sometimes have issues dealing w/ international traffic (blocking based on country, breaking connections by shuffling your IP, etc.) As was mentioned, even dial-up ISPs are still permitted, plus several flavors of DSL, cable, FttH, etc. are all out there and are possibilities. The type of connection you use can influence/affect any game's performance.

I already gave an example where "Race" matters, so it is not something 100% irrelevant. There are issues that can be connected to character race other than not being able to cram your generous Galka posterior into your undersized Taru pants. XD

Everything on the list of the template has a place/reason it's there. There are probably millions of lines of code for this game, which means that there are millions of bugs that could possibly show up, and the template is asking for everything they can think of to narrow down potential causes of unwanted behavior. It's highly likely that the template also helps convey the proper information after translation as well.

You know, if you call a computer manufacturer for tech support because your computer won't work, one of the first questions you'll probably hear would be "Is it plugged in?" >.> Troubleshooting always starts by eliminating any of the obvious possibilities.

[Dragoy]

To those who didn't get what he said or why he agree'd (I presume you agree'd)

Imagine the person trying to find out why someones FF11 isn't running on his linux PC (Without the wine program), imagine removing the system platform category, would that solve the question as to why he had no clue in the beginning that he needed wine attached since he didn't read the box/forums/other things etc?

To some degree, I guess I agreed. My main point was just the fact that using Wine does not alter the software that is being run.

As a side point I agreed to that the 'Platform' is irrelevant in the sense it was introduced in the form: “Specify which platform was in use to play the game.(“PlayStation2”, Windows, and/or Xbox 360)”.

It's not their bug if the product doesn't work on an unsupported operating system (unless they want to make it work). That said, it's a good idea to have at least a spot for something like “operating system version” to make sure the user is using a supported one.

"Platform" also includes Windows version. Do try to remember that this game still works great with WinXP after all. XD It most definitely matters if you are using: XP/Vista/8.x/10 and the devs have no way of ruling out certain causes (driver versions for example,) if they are not told by the bug reporter.

I do feel that 'platform' is describing a broad range of versions, more like the operating system or environment itself (see for example Wikipedia/Wiktionary). As such, I'd probably rename it to something like 'Windows Version', because indeed, the version used can make a big difference (though Windows XP is no longer supported (since March 26th, 2013), so strictly speaking that would be a 'WONTFIX' or 'NOTABUG' :]).

Somewhat interestingly, they never really seemed to care for the version of Windows being used, just if it was Windows (according to the template).


To not just be completely about the template here (which really shouldn't be an issue), I do definitely agree with the first post in that there should be more feedback from those processing the reports. There was a time we actually got some feedback from their techies, but unfortunately, it does seem like the management simply doesn't want to pay people for doing that any longer (or maybe they did it in secret, for free, but can not do so any longer!).

As such, I don't have high hopes (or hopes at all) for this to change. :\

I can wish for it to happen, though!