The development updates have been performing a great job in informing the community of the ongoing development process, particularly in cataloguing and organizing the bugs and wishlist voiced by the player base here on the forum. I just wish other game developers were this open an straight to us.
The problem is I don’t see the same behavior toward the Zendesk tickets, which should be the main bug reporting tool. I’d like to see these tickets catalogued and organized as well on the development updates. The experience in using the Zendesk mechanism gives us the impression that it does nothing and throws our tickets in a bottomless garbage chute. There should be any kind of feedback or the service should be discontinued, making the forum the default bug reporting tool, as it already seems to be.
Yep, Zendesk is a black hole. Here we can get feedback from fellow simmers and somethings resolve the matter already. If it’s a real bug, more people can chime in and provide detail / steps to reproduce.
The zendesk service collects the right data to try and resolve issues. Most of the bug/issue posts on the forum don’t have the required details such as the version of Windows, which community add-ons you have etc and often turn into general rants.
I did finally see where I could at least follow my own tickets (never knew that before…duhhh), but I believe that yes, it would be extremely helpful to have ZenDesk tickets automatically listed as what we vote on, because it would eliminate (or at least reduce) duplicate error reporting which overpopulates the forums.
Up until about October 2020 (I think), I would agree with you. But today, the forum has implemented a questionnaire very similar to the one on Zendesk for every new thread on the Bugs and Issues forum. It would be a non issue to update that questionnaire if it is not thorough enough.
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It works well in the bug forum but lots of fliers bring up issues in general discussions and provide little detail.
I like the zendesk as they can at least ask you for more details without it getting lost in a thread.
It’s all about people providing the right level of detail regardless of the platform used to report it.
My past experience was that they never asked for any feedback. All my Zendesk tickets (50+ ATM) where closed after a while with a “thank you”. I can also say that more than two thirds have not been resolved as of today, so they likely ended up in an internal bug tracker or backlog. There is no way to re-test the issue or add updated information. Currently, Zendesk is a one-shot only solution. That leads to countless people filing the same bug unaware of each other’s filings. It’s also hard to update a bug or mark it as fixed. All the confusion and extra work that this creates in the community happens again internal to Asobo/MS when they do the triaging. Finally, the development team has no way to ask for further detail as the issues where copied, potentially multiple times. The original poster (aka you and me) can simply not be reached any more.
That’s why I assume many Zendesk tickets never end up as actionable internal tickets. They just get closed.
My ideal solution would both replace Zendesk (basically useless) and the forum (deteriorates quickly into a rant-spree). A public bug tracker would do.
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Have you tried to post a bug in the Bugs and Issues forum recently? Give it a try, start a new thread, just don’t finish it if you are only testing. Nowadays it instructs us to offer a great deal of information, much like Zendesk does.
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I know. As I’ve said the info in the bugs forum is useful just like that in zendesk, it’s just that many complaining of issues don’t use either.
I agree with most of your post, although I still believe the forums are working great as a feedback tool for the developers, specifically by the voting feature, which has been extensively used by the development updates. I just would like to see the same done to Zendesk or simply shut it down.
Now I think you are getting my point: ASOBO says that it takes both the forum and Zendesk as feedback channels, but only shows tangible proof of the forum being actually taken into account, they say absolutely nothing about Zendesk tickets, like how many are there, how many were addressed, how many are submitted every week, how many categories of tickets are there and how many tickets each category contains and so on.
To me its obvious that both channels are managed by different teams. I’d guess that Zendesk is run by the development team while the forum is run by the public relations team. It seems to me there is a great opportunity to improve (even more) the communication between the developers and the gaming community.
Look at how they answer to me…!
