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There's a lot of text only bug reports around, but it could be much more useful if there was always a save, or a screen shot.

If you want to help bug hunt, don't play iron man. Play normal. Save every turn, every event. Don't cheat, using mods or modding files.

Create a bogus email account and a drop box account, it's free and easy.

Make the dev's life's easier...

I've been going through some of the stuff in here, and i'd be pulling my hair out if i had to guess what's going on :(

I pull what's left anyways, but when head hair is gone, what will i be pulling? Woulld be hard to pull a polished Xenonauts, probably...

Edited by Xenomorph
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It's such a global change it is not an easy task to do. Also there are newcomers unfamiliar with the forum "rules".

Most people are not here for testing the game but to enjoy it. If they take a break and report a bug we have to respect them for taking the time for reporting the issue.

I have a lot of respect toward people hunting bugs with me, but also toward people reporting bugs they find during their playtrough.

You can't force a community to play a game in a certain way. In some ways, if people play around with their playstyles can help the game even more, because they can cover a lot more ground that way than all the people would play normal game normal difficulty.

I understand you are frustrated, imagine how frustrated some times the devs are :).

Save files are often required because something really specific happens, like 4 ground combats eariler and that affects the gameplay later, or something happens on the geoscape with an undiscovered UFO and it affects the gameplay later as well. These are rough examples I know but we had some stuff like this. When I ask for a save file, I'll try and reproduce it myself, buy you might have the save file we need, so you can help us and free up some time for me and for the devs as well we can spend on other bug reports.

Screen shots are often required as well, because it's had to locate the "blue barrel on the industrial map" when you get like 3-4 submaps with the blue barrel.

TLDR;

Save games and screen shots are important for the devs, so you can save time for us so we can work on more issues, it's hard and nearly impossible to force the community to play the game only on normal mode, and respect the others :).

I didn't mean to offend anyone, these are just my thoughts, and my apologies if i hurt anyone.

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I understand you are frustrated, imagine how frustrated some times the devs are :).

Pulling hair is more about keeping discipline, the peak of frustration is breaking things with a sledgehammer :)

I can only imagine how it feels trying to recreate a problem, with nothing more then a basic explanation of what happened, not knowing if there are any mods or changes involved. Some problems are quite easy to duplicate, some require very specific circumstances, like you mentioned.

That's what lead me to post this. But in no way i'm trying to force anyone to play in a specific way, it's might quite reasonable thinking a specific problem may only occur only in a specific difficulty setting - imagine a (ficticious) bug that causes a CTD when we kill 2 ceasans with a single bullet from the ballistic sniper; very likely that could only happen playing on easy :)

You're missing a sticky with some guidelines about properly posting bugs for the Exp builds. Newcomers may ignore it the first time they drop in, but will get there eventually. For some community active bug hunters, it would be really useful knowing exactly how the dev team would like the reports. I know I, and some others, would be happy to follow your guidelines :)

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The forums I've been before just had a sticky where they explained how to best report bugs, like how to format the title and post, what to write, what sort of files to include (usually just dxdiag).

Chances are many bug reporters will adopt that because after all they're here to be helpful to begin with.

Example.

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you can't force average players to provide video\savegame\screenshots, all this actions require additional skills, not available to users who come just to play.

CTD at random moment very frustrating, average player will come to forum just to curse devs and share pain.

ps.

experemental bugs subsection shoud be moved to experemental discussion, this is only usefull thing that can be done to bugreports at this moment.

pps.

as for random rules, i dont see any reason to waste time on dxdiag and listing of version for every driver i installed if i know that issue not machine related and will happen on any configuration.

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To Xenomorph:

I'm really happy about the amount of bug hunters on the forum, I really appreciate any help I can get and they in nearly any case attach a save file or a screenshot or at least give a very detailed description about what is going on. In these cases if the issue is valid I just copy-pasty the address of the thread to the bug tracker and give the coders a few words of advice about what is going on. Basically the people hunting bugs are always provide me the information they can, and the newcomers or just the regular players on the forum always try to do their best to give all the details.

To jejuni:

It's almost the same thing going on with this forum, there is a sticky on the bug report thread with the "required" standars.

To RawCode:

You are right. About a year ago I was working as a Product Manager and I was ask to force some customers to do stuff with a newly released product. About 80% percentage of the people didn't even bother to reply to my email or give a reasonable answer to my phone call. When my boss asked me this I told him it's stupid we should get the information some other way. He told me I'm not experienced enough so shut up and do it. After this of course I was blamed because no one give us feedback and a few weeks later I told them I'm outa here :). I have no intention to ask force anyone to attach stuff, I was on both sides of the table, and as a user it bothered me so much when the developers kept asking for additional stuff (note that it was before I had any experience in the software industry - aka.: as a student). Now sometimes I get this feeling when I have to ask for stuff to reproduce or just to even verify an issue because I know it can be bothersome but sometimes there is just no other way to reproduce something. And it was one of the very first lessons I learned in the game industry.

ps.:

(Bonus story from the product manager times)

As a product owner I had to call an american man from Hungary to ask for feedback. I known it doesn't sound too horrible, but my boss didn't calculate with the time difference so it was 2 AM in the USA. Just imagine how sleepy he was, and you could hear his wife yelling and going mad in the background. Well the next day he started blaming about the late call, so my boss and I had a very interesting chat, and that was the point when I decided to leave the company. (Part of me couldn't stop laughing about how stupid sometimes the leaders can be, my other half was screaming about how sad it is)

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