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Ticket # 928,018 or why you almost always get a form letter for your tickets.

SystemSystem Member, NoReporting Posts: 178,019 Arc User
I got into an argument with someone on CO recently about bug reporting. You see, he was using the suicide command to go from the end of a mission to the entrance for a quick exit. When you use that command, it sends a bug report. He just pounds jibberish into it to get it to let him do it. So I lambasted the hell out of him for wasting the dev's time. His position was that the devs never respond to his tickets so they never read them in the first place. He said that maybe if they bothered fixing things he reported and responding with something other than a form letter to let him know they read it, he'd be less frivolous about it.

I tried to explain that they receive entirely too many tickets to respond to every single one of them personally and he's not important enough to single out to respond to. No one is.

I just submitted a bug report on Tribble regarding a mob that you need to deal with that failed to spawn for one of the new Klingon episodes. It said "Submitting Ticket ID #928,018. I realized just how right I was. You know that that number means? It means that in the last year there have been almost a million tickets filed. That's a lot of tickets.

How many people do you suppose Cryptic has to read the tickets? I'll be generous and ascribe a number that's likely way higher than what it actually is, say 25 people (I seriously doubt it's anywhere near that much). And I'll be generous and assume that both games have a unified ticket counter that goes all the way back to Closed Beta for CO, so suppose July of 2009, a year ago.

928,000 tickets in 365 days. That's toughly 5,000 tickets per day. Divided by 25 people, that means that each person has to read roughly 100 tickets per day.

Alright, now lets say that they have to respond to each and every single individual equally. Say 2 minutes to read over every ticket. 10 minutes to both get the story about the bug from the devs and punch out a non-form letter reply per ticket. That comes out to 12 minutes per ticket. That's about 1200 minutes, or 20 hours a day per person. 20 hours a day, 7 days a week, that's a 140 hour work week. Anything over 40 hours a week is over time. I just looked up the wage laws in California. Anyone going over 12 hours a day must be paid double the wage. So we're talking a total of 40 hours of wage work a day. Are you starting to see how expensive this can get?

All of this is fine and dandy, increasing the number of people reading them can increase response time. But you still end up with Cryptic paying entirely too much money just to respond to tickets. My guess is that the money from the subscription fee supports the server. The box sales and CStore supports the development and bug fixing.

But there's one more logistical problem we're looking at here.

Now, mind you, if we go on the assumption of 10 minutes per ticket to make sure the devs know about it and to respond with a personalized (non-form) letter, and I'm assuming they are delegating the task to people whose job is to go over tickets. At 10 minutes per ticket... Suppose we have 4 departments. Client code, character graphics, server code, and database/account management. That's 5000 tickets, 10 minutes per ticket of dev time wasted, 50,000 total dev-minutes per day. Divide by 4 (assuming the tickets are evenly distributed) and we get 12,500 minutes per department.

Since not every dev knows what the others are doing, but the supervisor or dev lead for each team keeps tabs, we're going to assume they go to the supervisor for each section of development to get it, that's 12,500 minutes per day of a single person's time wasted because they're responding to each and every single little ticket personally and without a form letter.

12,500 minutes, by the way equates to about 208 hours. That's 8 1/2 days. So each development team lead has 8 1/2 days of their time wasted every day. Yes, I know there aren't that many days in a day. Doesn't make sense does it? So think twice before you complain about form letters.

THIS DOES NOT ADD UP. They can NOT respond to EVERY single ticket PERSONALLY.
Post edited by Unknown User on

Comments

  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited July 2010
    I would so posrep your post if I could. :D
    Yes, I know there aren't that many days in a day.
    Are you sure? Have you verified that?

    As we say here in Germany were we are known for our hard-working and orderly ... workers - if the 24 hours of the day are not enough, we add the 12 hours of the night!
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited July 2010
    Imo, if the devs aren't going try make some sort of personal response, they shouldn't have an autoreply telling me I've got a reply.

    Especially one so idiotically annoying.

    To recap:
    -Personal replies are the best
    -No replies are meh
    -autoreplying with the same message over and over is very bad and frustrating.

    I get that the devs have no time, but autoreplies are even worse than no replies.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited July 2010
    Honeymane wrote:
    Imo, if the devs aren't going try make some sort of personal response, they shouldn't have an autoreply telling me I've got a reply.

    Especially one so idiotically annoying.

    To recap:
    -Personal replies are the best
    -No replies are meh
    -autoreplying with the same message over and over is very bad and frustrating.

    I get that the devs have no time, but autoreplies are even worse than no replies.

    The auto reply is to let you know that the ticket went through and therefore you don't need to resubmit it. Personal replies are cool, but they can't do it. The logistics of it make it impossible.

    If you want personal replies for everything, why not suggest a method of doing it that doesn't require using up many times the number of hours in a day than there is actually availible?

    You realize of course that if they gave personal replies to every single ticket, they'd actually never get any work done, right? You do know that right? There would be no patches. There would be no new content. For every day that goes by, using my math, they'd have another 8 days of backlogs of tickets to go over, one at a time, to reply to them all personally.

    Let me put this another way.

    In one day, 8 days of time gets used up just trying to get the proper, personalized response together. At the end of one week, that 7 * 8 or 54 days. That's right, inorder to personally respond to one week's worth of tickets, they would need to spend almost 2 months. In a month's time, or four weeks, that's 216 days. That's 7 months. In two months time, it would take a year to respond to all of the tickets. A year has gone by since CO alone has come out. In order to respond to every single ticket that's been had in the last year, it would take about 8 years to respond personally to every single one.

    The 8 years figure assumes that they're working 24/7 without sleep. Suppose they work exactly 12 hours a day every day without a day off. It would take 16 years. But the 7th day is overtime in California, so they need a day off. So increase that by 1/7th to make up for the day off. Suddenly we've got 18 1/4 years. OVER EIGHTEEN YEARS to REALISTICALLY go through all of the tickets from the last year and personally respond to each one in the system at this very moment. And they still wouldn't get any new content done or patches made because their time would be taken up answering the stupid tickets.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited July 2010
    I'd do the kill exit without hesitation as well.

    it's not the players fault, it's the games for making it possible.

    .
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited July 2010
    That's toughly 5,000 tickets per day. Divided by 25 people, that means that each person has to read roughly 100 tickets per day

    I think thats roughly 200 per day.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited July 2010
    I don't know why anyone should expect a personal response on a ticket. Tickets are basically bug reports. There is NOTHING anyone can do at that moment to fix it.

    if it's a glitch, it's a glitch...if a bug keeps popping up, then so be it. The tickets will be categorized, sorted, and prioritized. The most common bugs will be addressed first, and so on. The fixes come in later releases.

    End of story. I submit a bug report...why do I need someone to respond and say, hey we recieved it...thanks for letting us know. It's pointless. The bug is submitted, move on.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited July 2010
    Most of those tickets are submitted are BUG reports. In addition to the field you field in /bug reports also include a data dump about the status of your character, powers, location, which map you're on, which Boffs you have with you, their powers, equipment etc, and a screenshot from your PC.

    Most of the bug are handled by automation and data reduction. If they see a spike in reports about a certain power or a certain map. It's one indicator that a human needs to be look into it. Stuff that the automation can't handle is probably givem the once over by a human. A bulk of the bug reports aren't given any individual attention. And they will almost never have an individual reply from a human. (QA folks might want to get in contact with you if they are wanting more information about what you submitted).

    GM tickers are an entirely diffrent matter. I doubt hey have the same volume that /bug tickets do. But they do receive the attention of a human (a GM). Most of the GM's I've met are couteous and nice people. Most of them really don't like to play the tough guy. But some people force them to in order to make games fun for everyone.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited July 2010
    dunno it took mythic 3 days to respond to a stuck message. basically the servers were flooded and so i couldnt leave the capital so in frustration i filed a stuck report.

    Three days later i get a message from a CSR with the view "so i hear your stuck in altdorf" at this time i was roaming around pvping with my guildys i responded. "erm your a bit late, that was over three days ago"

    he was quite profesional and said "is there anything more i can help you with" i responded "yeah can you make me rr80 and full sovereign"

    and thanked for the responce.

    i think the moral of the story is either be prompt with a reply OR dont bother fullstop
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited July 2010
    The auto reply is to let you know that the ticket went through and therefore you don't need to resubmit it. Personal replies are cool, but they can't do it. The logistics of it make it impossible.

    I'm not suggesting that we should have personal replies, rather that I'd prefer to have either no-replies (and having the ticket open, maybe marked as investigated) or personal ones. Since the latter is impossible, I'm saying I just don't want autoreplies.
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