The Disconnect between Players and Developers: Bug Reports Not Taken Seriously?

[Kitfox]

Hello,

Lynn Nuvestrahl, the Machinist theorycrafter, here again. I'd like to talk about improving the bug report workflow, especially for bugs regarding game balance.

TL;DR: Bug Reports for game balance issues require excessive documentation to be properly investigated and the investigations that do happen are sloppy.

I recently made a couple of bug reports about such issues that were marked as "Unable to Verify" along with today's patch:
-Tornado Kick: http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...in-the-tooltip
-Upheaval: http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...e-is-incorrect

I find this disturbing because I went to great lengths in both of my reports to very clearly indicate how to reproduce and observe the effects of the bugs. For those unfamiliar with the "Unable To Verify" category, this is the description:

Bugs that have been reported but cannot be replicated even though they have been investigated and tested will be moved here.

These are bugs that have been confirmed independently by multiple players. Furthermore, the Upheaval bug is not even the first time it has been reported, the first time being almost a year ago (details: http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...en-in-Defiance). When the bugs can be confirmed even by untrained people simply by observing the game, it shouldn't be that hard for devs to catch them.

Especially in the case of the Tornado Kick bug, with current rotations MNKs can gain hundreds of potency per minute by properly utilizing the skill. If it has the wrong potency, it's a bug that actually breaks the job balance, as most buffs and nerfs are within the 1-2% dps adjustment range and this is most certainly well within that. Upheaval is a less severe example since most of the time tank stances are not heavily utilized in endgame, but nonetheless, the difference of hundreds of potency should be easily observable.

It's important for game balance bugs like these to be tested carefully because there's only a handful of people who even notice these things, and without proper investigation they never get fixed. A good example of this is the MCH Flamethrower bug. The skill was bugged since Stormblood launch, presumable for about 10 months. It was fixed but only after it was reported multiple times through different channels. Here's a couple of them:
-http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...or-Direct-Hits
-http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...-not-Crit-Dhit
-http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...tisch-Treffen.
The bug report was not accepted until this particular report that stacked up excessive proof about its existence:
-http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...-normal-damage

Now, I can think of a few explanations for the problems:

1. SE is too busy to deal with the bugs because of the expansion and they were pushed aside. Fair enough. Why weren't they moved to "Confirmed" or kept in "Accepted" category until solved?
2. The Bug Report team is ill-equipped to deal with these sort of bugs or there's a disconnection in the report pipeline that doesn't allow these bugs to be properly checked. Can the workflow be improved to better account for this bug type?
3. The operational team working on bug fixes actually doesn't know how their own code works or is supposed to work.

I truly hope it isn't the 3rd option, but it wouldn't be unheard of as we've seen a couple of times players coming up with more efficient skill rotations than the dev team has expected, here for example:

In my previous answer I mentioned that we check DPS against unmoving targets and balance jobs while considering the ideal action rotation. However, everyone has put in great effort studying ninja and has come up with a rotation that is slightly more effective than what we had imagined allowing for a slightly higher percentage of DPS.

Please Square-Enix, it takes hours to document bugs properly like this and seeing them go to the pile of unsolved issues without proper investigation is such a slap in the face. Is there a problem in the bug report processes to deal with these sort of balance bugs? What can we do to make it easier for you address these issues? Do we really need to mobilize dozens of people every time to be taken seriously?

I'm honestly running out of ideas at this point when spreadsheets and graphs no longer work for you. Especially in the light of the recent Ungarmax scandal I find this very depressing.