What's the best way to ask the Devs for a bug fix issue?

Keep in mind that 90% of the bugs one person thinks is mission critical must fix right this second the person standing next to them could careless about and they are worried about some bug that the first person doesn't think worth wasting any time to fix because their bug is so important.

Only 5 - 10% of any reported bugs are system critical. And that kind of bug gets immediate programmer attention. The rest of the bugs tend to be categorized by a variety of factors including how annoying it might be in general, not in specifiic, and how easy it is to track down and fix.

Just because you can fairly easily tell that X is happening because system Y does something doesn't mean you can fix it without completely rewriting system Y. And depending on how critical to the functioning of the program system Y is their may be very good reasons not to touch it until that entire system is being reworked. A lot of bugs fall into that category. Because it requires tearing apart a subsystem and rebuilding it often such bugs get set aside until the system is reworked again. That kind of bug can persist for years if the core system that has the flaw causing it isn't being redesigned.

In specific I suspect this is the nature of the Pet AI. To fix it would probably require a major rewrite of the pet AI and until there is more things to fix or new features to add they aren't touching the system. Instead the bug sits in a folder of bugs to be fixed when the pet AI gets its next overhaul. Keep in mind that anyone digging into that system for something will probably keep the bug list in mind to see if they spot a quick easy fix but unless they find such the bug will persist until the core problem can be addressed.

Doesn't matter how you ask, it isn't going to happen.

There are 65 threads over on the Beta test board that deal with all the fixes and changes they have done and want tested and feedback from for Issue 21.5. Issue 21.5 is a lot more than a couple of iTrials and Titan Weapons.

Every bug reported first needs to be duplicated in house so at the very least they can use the same steps that currently causes the bug to appear, to test that the bug is fixed. Once it's duplicated only then can it be prioritized, scheduled and then assigned to someone. The more information you can supply when you /bug something such as steps to duplicate, the quicker it moves along the process.

Games are art asset heavy. I'm not saying they don't have enough programmers at Paragon Studios but not everyone who's working on CoH are programmers. Artists and level designers aren't the people who fix problems in the animation sequencer or the market UI and those working on the game client aren't the same as those working on the server side software.

If you want the devs to fix something, pretend it's fun or you get some advantage out of it (say, avoiding what otherwise is a tedious grind.) They'll get right on it. Report it as a bug or a problem and it could be *years* before they even look at it.

/nonotcynicalat*all*amI

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I don't quite understand how people think bug fixes are something you can stop and focus on, like balancing your checkbook. A closer analogy might be altering your lifestyle.

We've all got bad habits, and some might be obvious; take smoking, for instance. You can identify exactly what the problem is, and fixing it might seem a small change. But there are ripple changes as a result: anxiety, overeating, irritability. Those are other, smaller "bugs" that require other actions to accommodate. Then, there's more subtle "bugs" in your life, like shopping without a list. You might not realize it's an issue until someone else (i.e. friendly advice, reading an article somewhere) points out that changing that could be beneficial. And then, of course, there's "bugs" that cause major issues but have no obvious cause. These might be deep lying problems that take years of work with a psychologist to uncover, and even more time to completely work through. Let's not forget that it's a life, and so "content" is always being added. A seemingly unrelated change can bring up old bugs; for example, losing a parent may drive a recovering alcoholic back off the wagon.

Relative to our game, this could be a simple difference of "{" instead of "[" buried in 4 GB of code, and pretty much the only way you'll find that is by accident. Of course, your issue could also be caused by something more like the infamous "Y2K" bug, which required that miles and miles of code be rewritten in order to change the listing for a year from "xx" to "xxxx". Rewriting older areas of the game could bring back old bugs, as we've seen examples of with the release of Freedom, because the bug fix was in the rewritten area and the undiscovered, actual cause of the bug may have been somewhere entirely different. Occasionally, bugs are found and fixed by the creation of new content, as the unseen cause is wiped out in a rewrite, or the dev who happens to be working on the code sees the original error while checking their own work.

I know, this analogy isn't a perfect example. But it might be a little bit better to visualize the game, especially its code, as more of a living entity, always changing and growing in different ways, instead of a book that needs editing. It seems to me that in recent years the devs have done quite well finding and clearing some VERY old and major bugs, and have been fixing more and more issues all the time. If you don't believe me, just take a look at the patch notes for the past year; a majority of patches are bug fixes for this and that. Assuming Paragon Studios is built with some level of logic, they have a QA team who regularly checks new patches for stability, and is also searching through the old code troubleshooting the longer running problems.

It seems like it's a matter of allocating man-hours.

Perhaps not.