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

[Raldo]

Since your concerns mainly focus on tooltips being incorrect, you could try posting in the localization forums. It's definitely not the right place for it, but bark up enough trees and maybe someone will actually give you a proper response. The localization crew, at least sometimes, actually responds (though they tend to reply in bursts, and we haven't seen one of those bursts since September).

I'm sure the language gap between English and the dev team doesn't help.

[Emiin]

Since your concerns mainly focus on tooltips being incorrect, you could try posting in the localization forums. Bark up enough trees and maybe someone will actually give you a proper response. The localization crew, at least sometimes, actually responds.

I'm sure the language gap between English and the dev team doesn't help.

In regards to this - in most cases it's not a localization issue that is the problem - it's a simple making sure the numbers on the tooltip are correct. the 330/300 listed on the tooltips is incorrect, not the wording.

[Raldo]

In regards to this - in most cases it's not a localization issue that is the problem - it's a simple making sure the numbers on the tooltip are correct. the 330/300 listed on the tooltips is incorrect, not the wording.

Oh, I'm fully aware of that. That's why I said, "Bark up enough trees and maybe someone will respond". If you're not having luck in one place, try another. It may not be the right department, but it can't hurt.

[Kitfox]

Since your concerns mainly focus on tooltips being incorrect, you could try posting in the localization forums. It's definitely not the right place for it, but bark up enough trees and maybe someone will actually give you a proper response. The localization crew, at least sometimes, actually responds (though they tend to reply in bursts, and we haven't seen one of those bursts since September).

I'm sure the language gap between English and the dev team doesn't help.

The concerns are actually not mainly focused on tooltips. They're just our only official source of information how things should work and that's why they're framed that way. When the tooltip and in-game mechanics don't match, something is wrong somewhere. Both can't be right in these situations. Obviously there are some more underhanded ways to find out about things under the hood, there are limits though, but those are not methods we can use within the Terms-of-Service. However, those methods should be available for Square-Enix and they have the source code, so it should be much easier for the devs to spot the bugs. But alas...

It's good to know about more venues for reporting. We already try to do reports in multiple languages but it's quite hard to find people interested enough in all languages for all jobs. I do think there very well might be a translation issue going on somewhere in the reporting process because the responses from the different language forums are quite different. For example, the German forums are very personal and active in their replies, sometimes even reaching out to you in game to tell you about the process. The English performance in comparison is appalling. The volume of reports for the English side is also much bigger, however, so they probably have less time to be personal. I do wonder if we need to look for our own private translators and do our reports in Japanese, because many of these more obscure bugs can be technical and the finer details could be getting lost in the translation process.

There's absolutely no excuse for the devs to be unable to reproduce steps that any player can, in most cases in just a few minutes, if the reproduction steps are conveyed properly. Often times it seems like the responsible team didn't even try, which is the main issue. It's fine if the bugs are deemed too minor to be fixed or if takes a while for them to get around to it. But it just sucks when you put hours of work into gathering data and documenting it clearly, only to be dismissed by a sloppy process and left wondering if they actually tried it out properly. Do they need more information? Is it not important enough? Do they even know what they're doing? Where's the problem?