Submitting a bug report, getting a reponse that makes me wonder if the dev's actually read report

haunted101 · August 2017

I submitted a bug report stating a piece of equipment (temporal shield) isn't performing as per game description. The reponse I get "we are unable to provide hints to missions" blah blah blah.....Um, what? Where does it state I am asking for a hint? Last time I checked, I was talking about a shield not performing as per game description. Then on another ticket, they couldn't come up with a answer that even touched the issue so the closed the ticket without addressing the issue that the ticket was about. There customer service needs a overhaul if this is how it's going to be. Anyone else experience this? Also, when they do come up with a reasonable answer. It seems like a excuse. I do want to point out that they have helped in the past resolving a issue. Who ever it was that responded (customer service rep), I greatly appreciated it. As for the others............

mustrumridcully0 · August 2017

Well, whatever it was, the devs definitely did not read your ticket. Customer Support is not done by developers.

When dealing with customer support:
- Stay friendly
- Try to explain the issue as clearly as possible, possibly with a short summary and the relevant details. (Figuring out what is relevant can be a challenge on its own, admittedly*).
- When you're not happy with the response, state that you're not happy with the response and why you're not happy, again as clearly as possible, too.

*) For an item that doesn't work as expected, explain what your expectations are (and why), and then what it actually does and how that fails the expectation.

seaofsorrows · August 2017

The issue you are having falls under the umbrella of a game play bug.

If an item is not performing correctly, then it's a game bug which is not something support handles. I'm not saying you're in the wrong here, you're not.. and you deserved a proper reply from support telling you how to go about getting your problem rectified.

The best way to get the problem addressed is to post exactly what the issue is in the Game Play Bugs Section of the forum. Select the one that is appropriate to the system you're playing on (PC,XBox. Playstation) and try to give as much information as possible on what exactly is wrong with the item.

It's unlikely that support will assist you with this issue, they deal more with purchase issues, compromised accounts, and stuff like that. You might have better luck filing a bug report.

Good luck, I hope you get your issue resolved.

lopequil · August 2017

seaofsorrows wrote: »

The best way to get the problem addressed is to post exactly what the issue is in the Game Play Bugs Section of the forum.

Lately the "best" way has been to complain on reddit, or so it seems, but the gossip at the moment is that too many people have started doing this and posts there are falling by the wayside as well. I wasn't about to join Reddit just for this.

I honestly don't expect it to be adopted* but I'd dearly like to see a proper bug tracker for STO. No doubt the devs have one of their own (I hope!) but there needs to be something that players can interact with too. Raising tickets in-game seems to be broken and too many forum posts get buried under newer bugs without ever seeing an official answer.

Bugs that do get reported in the forum might be looked at, or they might not be; there's no way for players to tell. It would be a huge QoL improvement if we could actually search for a bug in a tracker (which has never worked in-game AFAICT), see how/if it's progressing and easily add our names/experiences to it if we're having the same issue.

Having bug reports in a forum isn't working well at all. Don't get me wrong, I've reported a couple of things that were fixed (but only because a bug tester read the thread and fed it up the chain), but I've also reported a much larger number of things that as far as I know went completely under the radar, and I've reached the point where a lot of the issues I see don't get reported because I think to myself "what's the point?".

*Because if it were then people would be able to easily see both how many bugs there are and how old some of them are.

arionisa · August 2017

Without some way of parsing it I have no way of knowing exactly how well the drain resistance does or doesn't work. All I can say is that, from experience, toons that I have invested drain resistance efforts into seem to take almost a full second before their shields are gone in a Borg RA, compared to almost instantly on the ones I didn't invest drain resistance on.

Shield regeneration nowadays is almost a joke. Whether a lowly 200 something per second or 400-600 something per second doesn't really matter when most space encounters now involve facing entire fleets of NPCs throwing a combined total DPS at you numbered in the thousands from all directions. Even a 100% increase in regen rate means nothing when incoming damage is anywhere from 5-50 times higher than your regen capacity.

For the older missions, where you would usually face, at most, three small ships at a time, or one larger ship and one or two smaller ones, or just a single large ship, the higher shield regen came/comes in handy. Defeat the first group and you had less wait time to regain full shields before going after the second, or, one shield facing was running low so you just turn a different shield towards the enemy, with the "fast" regen, by the time the next shield was low, the first was recovered so you just turn again. Which is how regenerative shields help to withstand protracted battles, by allowing you switch which shield is taking damage while depleted ones regenerate quickly. This actually does still work, but only after you thin out the enemy numbers enough so that they aren't draining every shield facing way faster than they can regenerate.

warpangel · August 2017

haunted101#2485 wrote: »

mustrumridcully0 wrote: »

Well, whatever it was, the devs definitely did not read your ticket. Customer Support is not done by developers.

When dealing with customer support:
- Stay friendly
- Try to explain the issue as clearly as possible, possibly with a short summary and the relevant details. (Figuring out what is relevant can be a challenge on its own, admittedly*).
- When you're not happy with the response, state that you're not happy with the response and why you're not happy, again as clearly as possible, too.

*) For an item that doesn't work as expected, explain what your expectations are (and why), and then what it actually does and how that fails the expectation.

I stand corrected. You are right, the dev's don't read the report. Customer service does. And customer service should send the problem to the dev's so they can read it.
Maybe someone here can explain why something doesn't work. Take the Temporal Shield for example. As per the game it states "Passive Shield Regeneration increases as your shields are damaged, up to a 100% increase
Reduces All Energy Damage to Shields by 10%. Highly resistant to shield drain with a 30% shield drain resistance"
My 1st issue, when does the Passive Shield Regeneration kick in? From my experience, it doesn't even when skilled into regeneration. 2nd issue, The shield drain resistance. Again experience has showed that doesn't work. Again when you are skilled into drain/resistance to same. No matter what shield mod my ship has, the shield gets drain to nothing. I know it's a regenerative shield. Has lower capacity, but when the game and wiki state that the shield has a certain ability, it needs to work. If not, then that part of the description needs to be removed. Because it is totally misleading. I also forgot to add, as per game description, it is supposed to withstand protracted battles. When does this happen?

Nothing in that is indicative of a bug, just you not knowing how stuff works. Getting told CS doesn't give gameplay advice is exactly the correct response.

alcaatraz · August 2017

haunted101#2485 wrote: »

mustrumridcully0 wrote: »

Well, whatever it was, the devs definitely did not read your ticket. Customer Support is not done by developers.

When dealing with customer support:
- Stay friendly
- Try to explain the issue as clearly as possible, possibly with a short summary and the relevant details. (Figuring out what is relevant can be a challenge on its own, admittedly*).
- When you're not happy with the response, state that you're not happy with the response and why you're not happy, again as clearly as possible, too.

*) For an item that doesn't work as expected, explain what your expectations are (and why), and then what it actually does and how that fails the expectation.

I stand corrected. You are right, the dev's don't read the report. Customer service does. And customer service should send the problem to the dev's so they can read it.
Maybe someone here can explain why something doesn't work. Take the Temporal Shield for example. As per the game it states "Passive Shield Regeneration increases as your shields are damaged, up to a 100% increase
Reduces All Energy Damage to Shields by 10%. Highly resistant to shield drain with a 30% shield drain resistance"
My 1st issue, when does the Passive Shield Regeneration kick in? From my experience, it doesn't even when skilled into regeneration. 2nd issue, The shield drain resistance. Again experience has showed that doesn't work. Again when you are skilled into drain/resistance to same. No matter what shield mod my ship has, the shield gets drain to nothing. I know it's a regenerative shield. Has lower capacity, but when the game and wiki state that the shield has a certain ability, it needs to work. If not, then that part of the description needs to be removed. Because it is totally misleading. I also forgot to add, as per game description, it is supposed to withstand protracted battles. When does this happen?

This is...complicated to answer.

Mechanics generally fall into one of two categories:

Effective = [Value] x (1+Σ%)

Effective = [Value] / (1+Σ%)

This first makes numbers bigger, the second makes numbers smaller. While I am a huge proponent of making formulas and exact values more available to players, but I also know that if everything was plastered in math then very few of the current players may want to continue to play (even more so now that S13 has reduced players).

So, just knowing what form of bonus the above is in helps.

I'm going to try and explain how both parts of the temporal shield that make it stand out work here.

Bonus Shield Regeneration

This is a direct modifier of the shield regeneration. In common notation, this would best be described as a Final Shield Regeneration Buff.

Lets say you had, at 100% Shield Health, 400 Shield regen. As your shield facing value is reduced, then this regen would increase at a rate of 2-[Shield Health]. At 0% Shield HP, you have 2-0, or a 2x modifier (for exactly +100%).

100% HP: 400*(2-1) = 400*(1) = 400
75% HP: 400*(2-0.75) = 400*(1.25) = 500
50% HP: 400*(2-1) = 400*(1.5) = 600
25% HP: 400*(2-1) = 400*(1.75) = 700
100% HP: 400*(2-1) = 400*(2) = 800

Starship Drain Expertise (AKA DrainX)

This is an inherent addition to the skill, it is Not only an additional +30% Shield Drain Resistance. As such if you increase this value, then the resulting effect of shield drain resistance will change depending on the values you already have.

Using relative terms, we can find out how much +30 DrainX will actually affect 'drains'.

+30 to an initial of 0 : 1-(1+30*0.1)/(1+0*01) = 1-(1.3)/(1) = 1-1.3 = 0.3 = 30%
+30 to an initial of 50 : 1-(1+(30+50)*0.1)/(1+50*01) = 1-(1.8)/(1.5) = 1-1.2 = 0.2 = 20%
+30 to an initial of 100 : 1-(1+(30+100)*0.1)/(1+100*01) = 1-(2.3)/(2) = 1-1.15 = 0.15 = 15%
+30 to an initial of 200 : 1-(1+(30+200)*0.1)/(1+200*01) = 1-(3.3)/(3) = 1-1.1 = 0.1 = 10%

So we see that the effective result of adding+30 Starship DrainX changes depending on how much you already have.

DrainX as it affects incoming Shield Drains

Shield Drains and Shield Drain Resistance would fall into the second form of effect:

Effective Shield Drain = [Incoming Shield Drain] / (1+Σ(Shield Drain Resistance))

So lets say that you are hit with a borg tachyon beam (In HSE, or ISA, or KSA, or so on) for an outgoing tick of 5,000 (because this is actually a realistic value, they actually hit this much sometimes) shield drain per second. At only 30% Resistance (or 30 DrainX), it would drop to:

5000 / (1 + 30*0.1) = 5000 / (1 + 0.3) = 5000 / (1.3) = 3,846 shield drain per second.

This is an effective 23% decrease. (1 - 3,846/5,000)

At 130 DrainX (30 From the shield and 100 from both DrainX Skill Nodes)

5000 / (1 + 130*0.1) = 5000 / (1 + 1.3) = 5000 / (2.3) = 2,174 shield drain per second.

This is an effective 56% decrease. (1 - 2,174/5,000)

Even at only 2,000 shield drain per tick, after 10 ticks its drained 20,000 shield HP. This is a ridiculous amount, and basically forces you to only be reliant on your hull.

Hopefully this helps you understand the mechanics so you can better frame your issue your finding.

spiritborn · August 2017

lopequil wrote: »

I honestly don't expect it to be adopted* but I'd dearly like to see a proper bug tracker for STO. No doubt the devs have one of their own (I hope!) but there needs to be something that players can interact with too. Raising tickets in-game seems to be broken and too many forum posts get buried under newer bugs without ever seeing an official answer.

Bugs that do get reported in the forum might be looked at, or they might not be; there's no way for players to tell. It would be a huge QoL improvement if we could actually search for a bug in a tracker (which has never worked in-game AFAICT), see how/if it's progressing and easily add our names/experiences to it if we're having the same issue.

Having bug reports in a forum isn't working well at all. Don't get me wrong, I've reported a couple of things that were fixed (but only because a bug tester read the thread and fed it up the chain), but I've also reported a much larger number of things that as far as I know went completely under the radar, and I've reached the point where a lot of the issues I see don't get reported because I think to myself "what's the point?".

*Because if it were then people would be able to easily see both how many bugs there are and how old some of them are.

Actually I'd say an official list of bugs would be worse then useless as majority of the player base most likely don't have the programing skills to theoretically know what is causing the bugs or how fix them and even those that do have the kills don't have access to the code or tools Cryptic uses, posting a list of problems without the context that tells you how easy those problems are to fix just gives a false sense of incompetence or laziness that serves no practical or constructive purpose.

lopequil · August 2017

I know it wouldn't be terribly helpful; I said as much. And it's not about getting the players to fix things, it's about having a reliable way to search for existing issues, to know that someone has acknowledged the problem and the post hasn't been lost in the rest of the forum threads.

warpangel · August 2017

haunted101#2485 wrote: »

warpangel wrote: »

haunted101#2485 wrote: »

mustrumridcully0 wrote: »

Well, whatever it was, the devs definitely did not read your ticket. Customer Support is not done by developers.

When dealing with customer support:
- Stay friendly
- Try to explain the issue as clearly as possible, possibly with a short summary and the relevant details. (Figuring out what is relevant can be a challenge on its own, admittedly*).
- When you're not happy with the response, state that you're not happy with the response and why you're not happy, again as clearly as possible, too.

*) For an item that doesn't work as expected, explain what your expectations are (and why), and then what it actually does and how that fails the expectation.

I stand corrected. You are right, the dev's don't read the report. Customer service does. And customer service should send the problem to the dev's so they can read it.
Maybe someone here can explain why something doesn't work. Take the Temporal Shield for example. As per the game it states "Passive Shield Regeneration increases as your shields are damaged, up to a 100% increase
Reduces All Energy Damage to Shields by 10%. Highly resistant to shield drain with a 30% shield drain resistance"
My 1st issue, when does the Passive Shield Regeneration kick in? From my experience, it doesn't even when skilled into regeneration. 2nd issue, The shield drain resistance. Again experience has showed that doesn't work. Again when you are skilled into drain/resistance to same. No matter what shield mod my ship has, the shield gets drain to nothing. I know it's a regenerative shield. Has lower capacity, but when the game and wiki state that the shield has a certain ability, it needs to work. If not, then that part of the description needs to be removed. Because it is totally misleading. I also forgot to add, as per game description, it is supposed to withstand protracted battles. When does this happen?

Nothing in that is indicative of a bug, just you not knowing how stuff works. Getting told CS doesn't give gameplay advice is exactly the correct response.

When a piece of equipment says it has a shield drain resistance to a certain point (30%, 50% ect.) That tells me it is supposed to RESIST shield drains to that certain point. How does that qualify as me not knowing how stuff works? On a ship that has a 1.1 shield mod and above, the shields should not be reduced to 0 from 100%.

No, what resistance means it slows down the drain...so instead of shields getting drained to 0 in 3 seconds it takes 4 seconds or something like that (I don't have any actual numbers for it, but that's the principle).

If it were supposed to stop drains completely, it would say drain IMMUNITY.

warpangel · August 2017

haunted101#2485 wrote: »

warpangel wrote: »

haunted101#2485 wrote: »

warpangel wrote: »

haunted101#2485 wrote: »

mustrumridcully0 wrote: »

Well, whatever it was, the devs definitely did not read your ticket. Customer Support is not done by developers.

When dealing with customer support:
- Stay friendly
- Try to explain the issue as clearly as possible, possibly with a short summary and the relevant details. (Figuring out what is relevant can be a challenge on its own, admittedly*).
- When you're not happy with the response, state that you're not happy with the response and why you're not happy, again as clearly as possible, too.

*) For an item that doesn't work as expected, explain what your expectations are (and why), and then what it actually does and how that fails the expectation.

I stand corrected. You are right, the dev's don't read the report. Customer service does. And customer service should send the problem to the dev's so they can read it.
Maybe someone here can explain why something doesn't work. Take the Temporal Shield for example. As per the game it states "Passive Shield Regeneration increases as your shields are damaged, up to a 100% increase
Reduces All Energy Damage to Shields by 10%. Highly resistant to shield drain with a 30% shield drain resistance"
My 1st issue, when does the Passive Shield Regeneration kick in? From my experience, it doesn't even when skilled into regeneration. 2nd issue, The shield drain resistance. Again experience has showed that doesn't work. Again when you are skilled into drain/resistance to same. No matter what shield mod my ship has, the shield gets drain to nothing. I know it's a regenerative shield. Has lower capacity, but when the game and wiki state that the shield has a certain ability, it needs to work. If not, then that part of the description needs to be removed. Because it is totally misleading. I also forgot to add, as per game description, it is supposed to withstand protracted battles. When does this happen?

Nothing in that is indicative of a bug, just you not knowing how stuff works. Getting told CS doesn't give gameplay advice is exactly the correct response.

When a piece of equipment says it has a shield drain resistance to a certain point (30%, 50% ect.) That tells me it is supposed to RESIST shield drains to that certain point. How does that qualify as me not knowing how stuff works? On a ship that has a 1.1 shield mod and above, the shields should not be reduced to 0 from 100%.

No, what resistance means it slows down the drain...so instead of shields getting drained to 0 in 3 seconds it takes 4 seconds or something like that (I don't have any actual numbers for it, but that's the principle).

If it were supposed to stop drains completely, it would say drain IMMUNITY.

From my experience, a shield with drain resistance gets drain just as fast as a shield that doesn't. So there is no point in using a shield that has drain resistance. From why I have learned, the Unimatrix shield that has 50% shield drain resistance is completely useless. Correct me if I am wrong, but a shield that has a 50% drain resistance should cut down the effect of a drain by half. I am looking at it as 1/2 of a 100 for simplicity.
I don't expect any shield that has drain resistance to completely stop the drain. Just make the shield drain hurt less. Hence why I feel that a shield that is at 100% should not be drained to 0 equally as fast as a shield that has no resistance.
But thanks to the poster that did the math. I now know it isn't that plain and simple.

It probably does cut it down. But since NPC drain is so fast to begin with, in practice you still end up with no shields in seconds even if it is reduced 50%.

rattler2 · August 2017

I'll just leave this here to lighten the mood.

Also... STO is serious business too.

meimeitoo · August 2017

haunted101#2485 wrote: »

I submitted a bug report stating a piece of equipment (temporal shield) isn't performing as per game description. The reponse I get "we are unable to provide hints to missions" blah blah blah.....Um, what?

That's a typical Customer Support reply. "We are unable to provide hints to missions" is just their way of saying they're utterly incompetent, and have the reading comprehension of a 5-year-old. The best way to deal with them, is to simply consider CS non-existent for this game, as actually approaching them means you're sure to get upset and fobbed off with some lame, totally irrelevant, lazy reply.

Fortunately, both bug reports and questions about how things work are best asked on this forum. Only ever contact CS for some financial issue (they do take those seriously), or when you got h-a-c-k-ed, or lost Epic items, and some such. Otherwise, they're a waste of space (and, for a space game, that's actually not good :P).

meimeitoo · August 2017

spiritborn wrote: »

Actually I'd say an official list of bugs would be worse then useless as majority of the player base most likely don't have the programing skills to theoretically know what is causing the bugs or how fix them and even those that do have the kills don't have access to the code or tools Cryptic uses, posting a list of problems without the context that tells you how easy those problems are to fix just gives a false sense of incompetence or laziness that serves no practical or constructive purpose.

I think I've actually seen that list once.

Or lists, rather: they were hanging on a wall behind Bort, in a vid, where I think he was talking about why certain abilities caused server lag. There were hundreds, if not thousand, items listed on there, row after row. Personally, I would probably ere get depressed reading them all, rather than anything else. "Ignorance is bliss!"

legendarylycan · August 2017

meimeitoo wrote: »

spiritborn wrote: »

Actually I'd say an official list of bugs would be worse then useless as majority of the player base most likely don't have the programing skills to theoretically know what is causing the bugs or how fix them and even those that do have the kills don't have access to the code or tools Cryptic uses, posting a list of problems without the context that tells you how easy those problems are to fix just gives a false sense of incompetence or laziness that serves no practical or constructive purpose.

I think I've actually seen that list once. Or lists, rather: they were hanging on a wall behind Bort, in a vid, where I think he was talking about why certain abilities caused server lag. There were hundreds, if not thousand, items listed on there, row after row. Personally, I would probably ere get depressed reading them all, rather than anything else. "Ignorance is bliss!"

how do you know those weren't lists of the bugs that have been FIXED over the past 7+ years?

meimeitoo · August 2017

shadowfang240 wrote: »

meimeitoo wrote: »

spiritborn wrote: »

Actually I'd say an official list of bugs would be worse then useless as majority of the player base most likely don't have the programing skills to theoretically know what is causing the bugs or how fix them and even those that do have the kills don't have access to the code or tools Cryptic uses, posting a list of problems without the context that tells you how easy those problems are to fix just gives a false sense of incompetence or laziness that serves no practical or constructive purpose.

I think I've actually seen that list once. Or lists, rather: they were hanging on a wall behind Bort, in a vid, where I think he was talking about why certain abilities caused server lag. There were hundreds, if not thousand, items listed on there, row after row. Personally, I would probably ere get depressed reading them all, rather than anything else. "Ignorance is bliss!"

how do you know those weren't lists of the bugs that have been FIXED over the past 7+ years?

Have you *played* this game at all?! :P The list of things fixed would fit in a Trump tweet.

spiritborn · August 2017

meimeitoo wrote: »

shadowfang240 wrote: »

meimeitoo wrote: »

spiritborn wrote: »

Actually I'd say an official list of bugs would be worse then useless as majority of the player base most likely don't have the programing skills to theoretically know what is causing the bugs or how fix them and even those that do have the kills don't have access to the code or tools Cryptic uses, posting a list of problems without the context that tells you how easy those problems are to fix just gives a false sense of incompetence or laziness that serves no practical or constructive purpose.

I think I've actually seen that list once. Or lists, rather: they were hanging on a wall behind Bort, in a vid, where I think he was talking about why certain abilities caused server lag. There were hundreds, if not thousand, items listed on there, row after row. Personally, I would probably ere get depressed reading them all, rather than anything else. "Ignorance is bliss!"

how do you know those weren't lists of the bugs that have been FIXED over the past 7+ years?

Have you *played* this game at all?! :P The list of things fixed would fit in a Trump tweet.

You sure about that? STO's code isn't static where you could in theory be "bug free" and MMOs by their very nature are really, really complex so when you fix 1 thing it doesn't mean you're even close to fixing all the bugs. That said we had annoying but not game breaking animation bug fixed even though said fix wasn't in the patch notes, so things aren't gleefully ignored as you imply.

Like I said such a list openly displayed to the public would be worse then useless as without context it's just a list of things without saying how hard or easy something is to fix, it's not like Cryptic knows the fix for every bug in game but is just doing them out of malice, rather some "simple" bugs might not be as simple to fix as people think.

Submitting a bug report, getting a reponse that makes me wonder if the dev's actually read report

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