EVE General Discussion

I'm redoing a Tutorial Mission, Balancing the Books.

One Mission asks to mine some Veldspar, and tells you to fit a mining laser.

So off to the market to buy a mining laser, except they don't exist. Miner 1s do.

Sent in a bug report and the Bughunter Team say it's meant to be this way, that Miner 1 is a Mining Laser and falls under that category of the market.

This is incorrect.

Search for "Mining Laser", the market won't list Miner 1.

I tried to reply to the email the Bughunter team sent, but obviously they don't believe in dialogue as my reply was undeliverable.

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Which brings me to an old bugbear, bug reporting systems.

Way back in the mists of time a group of men sat around a fire at their weekly Bug Meeting.

The wisest man, Ceo, remarked that hardly anyone was reporting bugs so the game was doing good.

The other men nodded and took the hint.

Ever since then Bug Reporting systems have been painful beasts to tame.

Usually players go to the relevant forums, and then get a lock or a smiley faced reminder to report the issue as a bug. Usually without instructions or a link to the bug reporting system. The smiley face is important, it helps annoy customers and stop them reporting the bug. Because bugs mean more workload.

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Bug reporting is unpaid work the player does because they are well intentioned. They have to fight through the worst layouts and things like pedantic categorisations, usually involving acronyms, to get their message across to the company.

Without any thanks, apart from the usual impersonal...

"Thanks from the EVE Blob of Extreme Happy Familyness!", or Blizzard Mind Collective or what-have-you.

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In any game it is usually of more short term benefit to the player not to report a bug. Especially those that give some advantage.

Long term of course it means games get full of crud and workarounds and players have to go to fansites to find out that a mining laser is a Miner 1. Or have to be an experienced player, which shouldn't usually apply in newbie missions.

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Perhaps it would be an idea to think of rewarding good bug reports. Perhaps some ISK or even a Plex for truly awesome bug reporting.

And making bug reports a little easier from the player side, for example I have no idea what category my bug was so I slapped it into Game Mechanics. My guess is that this categorisation is usually wrong and that CCP has to redo it later on their side.

So why make players do it?


Bug report system is buggy, please cast your eye over it CCP.

You should probably fill out a bug report

The key word you missed was category ... Miner 1s fall under the category Mining Lasers in the market, just like they said.

"Not now", obviously.

The single most fitting category for everything not related to the present.

There is no way this is a serious post.

Your post?

Things like this don't occur to an experienced player.

They see Mining Laser and automatically translate it to Miner 1 or Miner 2 or whatever.

Search for Mining Laser, see what the search returns.

That's what I did as a new player, twice now.

Then multiply that by every new player coming into the mission, those that do missions.

It is needless confusion for new players. That's why it's a bug.

I want to buy a car. I'm thinking about buying a 2000 model autumn green Monaro. I'm sure I'll find the exact car I'm looking for if I search for "Car". If that exact car doesn't appears in the search, then it's obviously a bug that needs reporting.

The catagory is still 'car' or 'automotive'. If I search for the catagory only I'm not going to find what I'm looking for. The same applies in EVE.

How are new players meant to know how EVE categorises things?

If EVE tutorial mission says fit mining laser, the first thing I thought of was not, "Oh, they mean Miner 1, in the category of Mining Laser, which of course isn't the same list of items a search for Mining Laser would produce."

CCP has got back to me saying it's all good, their system is fine. And blocked any ability to reply to that message. Hence my visit to the forums.

So it's not just about a minor miner mishap.

I think bug reporting systems in general are awkward and could be tweaked.

To me it looks like the system is designed from CCP's perspective, not the players'.

There is a reason players report bugs on the forums instead of the systems that are built for bug reporting. Or don't report at all.

It's easier, it means you don't have a bug report dialogue box filling up your game screen for a few minutes while it sends off the data to CCP. Plus all the other stuff, like pick the right category and so on.

If players are going to that effort then Game devs should think about showing thanks in some form.

They might get more bug reports and better ones then as players grow accustomed to using the system and helping CCP design it better.