r/truegaming • u/brotherwoogames • 2d ago
I make games solo, and one thing keeps surprising me
When something in a game is broken or just annoying (a menu that eats a click, an item that sometimes doesn't stack, a door you have to open twice), most players don't report it. They learn it. They invent a workaround, pass it on to friends as a "tip", and treat it like part of the world's physics. Some even defend it when it finally gets fixed.
My half-serious theory: it's learned helplessness from real life. Outside games we live with rules we can't change all the time: bureaucracy, terrible apps, "that's just how the system works". Don Norman wrote about something similar with everyday tech: when a device keeps failing us, we blame ourselves instead of the design. So when a game behaves weirdly, the reflex isn't "someone made a mistake and could fix it", it's "this is how this world works, adapt".
The other theory is more boring: in games, friction is often intentional. Difficulty, odd controls, hidden mechanics. Players genuinely can't tell a bug from a design choice, so they assume it's on purpose.
Which one is it for you? Do you report stuff, or just adapt? And have you ever found out that a "mechanic" you'd mastered was actually a bug?
33
u/FMarkassa 2d ago
I would add that most people will not report because someone else will, or already had, to avoid the hassle of making the report themselves.
I also don't report because i got tired of being ignored, my bug reports only worked like 2 or 3 times in my entire life. And I only did them because they were very small/niche games and there were "nobody else" to report if I didn't
7
u/Senthe 2d ago
I also don't report because i got tired of being ignored, my bug reports only worked like 2 or 3 times in my entire life. And I only did them because they were very small/niche games and there were "nobody else" to report if I didn't
I'm often happy to go out of my way to help out an indie dev fix something, and in my experience it only ends in two different ways:
a) I never ever hear from them back.
b) The dev replies, apologizes profusely (even though there's no need), and deploys the fix within two hours.
No in-between lol. For me, the second kind of devs really makes it worthwhile to try anyway. Worst case nothing happens, best case it'll turn out I was actually helpful to some cool person and their cool game.
3
u/Nestar47 2d ago
There's a 3rd option (which I find far more often than option b) is that they say its not a bug even if it's completely backwards to any documentation.
1
u/brotherwoogames 1d ago
"Working as intended" might be the fastest way to lose a reporter for good. Even a "no, and here's why" would land completely differently. :)
1
u/Nestar47 1d ago
Yup, and the last example of it I had was egregious too.
It was a "Button that says x does Y instead"
and the response was basically "we have a second button that goes to x further down so we're okay with this one going to Y"
absolutely zero logic to it. Even if that was what they wanted it to do, the label is wrong. So its either fix the label or fix the button end result and they refused to do either.
10
u/brotherwoogames 2d ago
That's basically the bystander effect: everyone assumes the report already exists. And your second point kind of proves the learned helplessness theory. You didn't start out not reporting, you got trained out of it by being ignored. As a solo dev that one stings a bit, because for a small game that "nobody else will" report is exactly the one you're hoping someone sends. Out of curiosity, what made those 2–3 times work? Did the dev actually reply, or did you just notice it fixed in a patch?
0
u/FMarkassa 2d ago
If the dev doesn't reply I will assume my report wasn't read, so yeah they replied all of the times.
Also as I'm reporting only for small/niche games, I normally try to reach for a developer on a DM like a Discord to do the reporting and avoid the formal bug reporting methods. I think that helps being heard
3
u/Curious_Bar_3615 2d ago
Yeah as a Linux user I've reported one bug in my life. It still isn't fixed years later and I continue to get updates on the mailing list thread of more people discovering the bug and I can't be assed to figure out how to unsubscribe. It's just not worth it.
2
1
u/Nestar47 2d ago
I've had more fixes blatantly refused (basically a "we prefer it broken" or "I'm not wasting time on this") than I have had responses/fixes for things I've reported.
Any time I come across a dev like this, I write them off as a lost cause. I'm not wasting my time submitting reports to someone who won't even take them into consideration.
13
u/RampantDurandal 1d ago
You have to remember that while the game you made is very important to YOU, it probably ISN'T to your average fan.
Sure, all games and devs have their super fanboys and super haters, but I think we can all agree that the average player just doesn't care enough to spend the time to make a report.
We live in an era where there's thousands of indie games waiting to be played. I want to PLAY them, not make bug reports. Maybe if it fully stops progress I'll take the time to refund (if still possible), leave a negative review, and move on. Otherwise I'm not stopping to make a bug report. Even if I did, who's to say it'll even get looked at/resolved?
So, no, I think it's less about learned helplessness and more about folks just not caring as much as you want them to. Your customers are not your beta testers.
•
u/arremessar_ausente 8h ago
Your customers are not your beta testers.
I wish this was actually true. Most of current releases customers are actual free beta testers.
•
u/RampantDurandal 6h ago
Indeed.
As consumers, the best we can do is to just not participate in the practice. Avoid pre-orders like the plague, and always give a shiny new game 2-3 days after release to let some reviews come in. For early access games, only purchase when you know and trust the developer, and/or they have a realistic roadmap with an end in sight.
One thing I've noticed lately is that demos seem to be on the rise, which is excellent. They can really help make a determination on if the game will run and play the way you want.
1
u/brotherwoogames 1d ago
Probably the most grounded take here. The game matters way more to me than to anyone playing it, and players don't owe anyone QA. If anything, the lesson for devs is that the ask has to be tiny, one click and no typing, or it just won't happen.
11
u/Witty_Milk4671 2d ago
But items don't stacking or a door that can't be opened yet are staples in games. We literally have no idea if things are supposed to work like that.
3
u/garghlrl 2d ago
They said "sometimes", so I presume they're talking about cases where it's obviously broken: you've got 25 bullets, you pick up 3 more, and when you check the inventory you've got a stack of 27 and a stack of 1.
10
u/theClanMcMutton 2d ago
Do you make it easy for people to report bugs? And do you make sure they know that it's easy?
If not, you don't need to look any further for the reason that you don't get reports.
But also, you're describing something pretty strange: a very minor but recurring bug that you have to "learn" to deal with. I can't even come up with an example of this in a modern game.
3
u/jeo123911 1d ago
a very minor but recurring bug that you have to "learn" to deal with
Fallout 76 (yes, that dumpster fire) on PC does not register mouse clicks on the other item list (when transfering loot from storage to inventory, etc.) and you need to mouse over the top of the screen then back onto the items for it to start registering clicks again.
The whole user interface is a mess. Depending on random developer choice, in different menus to go right/left you press right/left arrow, A/D, W/S, Z/C or there is no button and you need to use the mouse. And the mouse works on some menus and on some you're expected to use the keyboard.
2
u/brotherwoogames 1d ago
The mouse-off-the-list trick is the perfect example of what I meant. After a week it stops being a bug and turns into a ritual your hand just does. I bet half the players wouldn't even notice if they fixed it, they'd keep doing the wiggle out of habit.
1
u/theClanMcMutton 1d ago
Oh man, I didn't think about Bethesda games. No one would bother reporting bugs in those, though. You know what you're getting into.
0
u/jeo123911 1d ago
I kinda did not. A friend kept badgering me about how it's all good and fixed now and I gave it a try. Jesus christ, if this is fixed then at release it must have been even worse than what all the reviews and people said.
1
u/theClanMcMutton 1d ago
Lol your friend put one over on you. You probably can't even mod that one into a better state, right? That's the normal thing to do with Bethesda stuff, but since that one's multiplayer...
1
u/jeo123911 1d ago
Yep. Mods are only for how the list looks, not how it works. I'm stumped because he's clearly enjoying this and I'm frustrated by the piss-poor level of polish on every corner.
2
u/brotherwoogames 1d ago
Fair challenge. I ended up putting "Bug report" right in my game's menu, with a checkbox that attaches the save and a log, so nobody has to describe anything. Whether people will actually use it is the real test, and after reading this thread I'm a lot less sure they will.
1
u/Amadan 1d ago
Noice! This reportedly worked very well for Subnautica, where “Press F8 for feedback” in Early Access within minutes of starting the game was (and still is) a major piece of the development process. Also notably they called it “feedback” on purpose, happily receiving both sticky parts and awesome ones, guiding future development based on both.
9
u/aanzeijar 2d ago
Eh, I've been making software for decades. Most users are just apathetic. They know there's something wrong, but reporting it is just too much hassle. Every once in a while you get someone overzealous who reports everything they see, and those usually burn out if you can't match their reporting rate with fixing. It's just the way it is.
2
u/Senthe 2d ago
That being said, it would still be nice if users felt encouraged to report things. We're not omnipotent, it's annoying to think that some bug in my game could be there for years because it only happens in very specific circumstances that noone reported. I really love it that some people do bother to report things like that, and try to do it too when I think it would be useful.
7
u/Bad_Doto_Playa 2d ago
I adapt because I think it's more interesting to adapt. For example, some games (like Marvel Rivals) reloads on some characters actually fill your ammo before the animation ends. So there's a skill in animation cancelling those animations early ultimately letting you reload faster.
3
u/brotherwoogames 2d ago
Ha, that's a third theory I hadn't really considered: it's not helplessness, it's play. A quirk turns into a skill check, and mastering it feels better than having it patched out. Fighting games are basically built on this: combos in Street Fighter II reportedly started as an unintended timing quirk the devs decided to keep, and wavedashing in Melee is a physics exploit that became a core technique.
0
1
u/OliveBranchMLP 2d ago
tbf, animation cancelling isn't a bug anymore, it's a feature, and considered an aspect of shooter mastery.
5
u/Fairwhetherfriend 2d ago
It's certainly not just games.
I work in IT ops. A little while ago, our service experienced some degradation. I announced it, told people what was up, got to work on fixing it - you know, the usual. Mostly I heard back from users confirming that they were experiencing the exact sort of degradation I told them to expect, and I mostly worked with them to make sure the mitigation work was helping.
And then the next day, I got yanked into a meeting with a bunch of very high-level clients who all yelled at me about how their service had experienced a full outage for the entire day yesterday. Turns out, they had made some design decisions that we told their predecessors would cause this exact kind of problem - what would be degradation to everyone else would be a full outage for them. They elected not to fix it, and also apparently not to tell their replacements about the problem.
But what really caught me off-guard was walking into the meeting and having to say "I don't know what you're talking about" because not a single one of the apparently hundreds of people who spent the entire day completely unable to work ever said a single word about it to us. And clearly it wasn't a problem of them being unaware of who to contact, because they sure as hell figured out who to invite to this meeting to yell at, lol.
Frankly, I'm not sure if there was anything I could have done to help them anyway, even if I had known, because none of the mitigation work I was doing to keep everyone else chugging away would have helped them. But even so, they didn't know that. And who the fuck spends a whole day completely unable to do anything without once wondering if maybe they should call the help desk or something? Wild.
1
u/brotherwoogames 1d ago
Wild story. They clearly knew exactly who to contact, they just didn't see it as something to report, only something to be angry about later. Feels like the outage had already become "how things are" for them.
5
u/Prooteus 2d ago
A big thing is how quickly you can do something about it. Reporting a bug may eventually one day fix the issue, just learning a work around gets you past it right away. As a dev you can start work on that bug right away so that feels like the easiest/best course of action.
Also im a big fan of adapting to bugs because sometimes they add a lot of enjoyment. Bunny hopping, combos in fighting games, animation canceling, gaurd point (in ds1 you could attack behind the other players shield if you did it right), most of the crazy movement in ghostrunner.
3
u/Zeothalen 2d ago
In my experience it has more to do with the reporting process if it is quick and easy and we know it's going to the right place than we are far more likely to use it
3
u/mooseman3 2d ago
If you want user reports, make sure you're providing an easy way for them to report and detailed changelogs to show the feedback you're incorporating. You want the barrier to providing feedback to be as small as possible, and the reward to be as obvious as possible.
1
u/brotherwoogames 1d ago
The changelog part is underrated: it's the only proof a report went anywhere. I'm tempted to copy what PM_ME_ZED_BARA described Amplitude doing and thank reporters by name in patch notes.
3
u/TacoTaconoMi 2d ago edited 2d ago
Its not really learned helplessness in real life. Bug reporting, if the user is even aware of how to, ends up in one of these categories.
it gets acknowledged and fixed in a timely manner
get ignored and is never fixed
its actually not a bug.
so 2/3 it ends up remaining in game.
But to get to that point it has to go through the user filter.
is it game breaking enough to ruin the experience?
Is it obvious enough for the user to even realize its a bug?
You can have every type of potion stack except for one. and 99/100 users will think that potion is extra special and intended to be limited in inventory. and its not game breaking so people will manage with it. There have been many patch notes I have read that said "fixed XX bug" and I thought to myself "that was a bug? i though it was a design decision that they realized was a bit too annoying"
2
u/brotherwoogames 1d ago
The potion example is exactly the grey zone I meant. Maybe "consistent" is the key: a bug that happens every time reads as a rule, one that happens only sometimes reads as a bug.
1
u/TacoTaconoMi 1d ago
It also depends on the the game and community. Something like world of warcraft and you'll have players taking a magnifying glass to the game and will write an essay on how incompetent blizzards developers are are for every misplaced pixel.
Smaller indie games, unless it's actually preventing progress will let it slide. But more often you'll see the bug reports in the steam review comment section and its may even still have a thumbs up. Honestly unless it's a dedicated beta/EA with a "click here to report bug" in game,, people won't really care to report because it's often more effort to do so than to work around the bug.
6
u/No-Bat6181 2d ago
Something interesting to consider is that linux users report way more bugs, and most of them effect all platforms (so its not that the Linux version is just way more buggy).
I think this supports your first theory: the minority that has unlearned their helplessness when it comes to tech doesn't rationalize is away as a game mechanic.
2
u/adhocflamingo 2d ago
Linux-users are opting into a very hands-on, technical, troubleshooting-heavy computing experience. Whatever their motivation for using Linux, it’s worth having to build (or just exercise) the expertise to get things to run how they want. So of course they report more bugs—they’re getting in there and tinkering, and they have more technical know-how to actually give a useful bug report. A more typical computer-user is not there to grapple directly with the operating system, they just want to use their software and have it Just Work.
I would guess that game modders report bugs at a much higher rate than the general player population, too.
3
u/OliveBranchMLP 2d ago edited 2d ago
there's a third option: they know something is annoying but they don't have the critical literacy to identify or articulate what it is. so they just get the overall vibe that "this game is mid" and that's the end of it. like someone at a restaurant, saying "this tastes fishy" instead of "so the umami is overwhelming and i think you also may have used too much basil and did you forget to use an acid?"
then there's the metasocial options, like "i didn't know i could report", or "i know i could report, but what difference would it even make" or "someone else has prolly already reported it anyway" (diffusion of responsibility) or "it's not my job to report because it's not my game" and whatnot
3
u/Dunge 2d ago
I keep telling myself the same thing in a (not game) software I worked on for over 15 years. Sometimes I get a bug report, look at it and I'm like "people used it like that since it's inception and never even told us about it? It was clearly not the desired behavior".
1
u/brotherwoogames 1d ago
Ha, years of people politely suffering in silence. Did any of those turn out to be load-bearing, where the fix actually upset users who'd built habits around it?
2
u/sleepingonmoon 2d ago
I grew up with moddable games so if something bothers me too much I'll try to mod it away. If it's obviously a bug then I'll report it if I can perceive that the devs are listening.
2
u/Remarkable-Fail-4734 2d ago edited 2d ago
I think your second guess is correct. Generally speaking players seem to be somewhat confused about what counts as a "bug" in video games. a bug should ideally be always fixed as soon as possible, as it is undesired behaviour in the software.
However, awkward controls or mechanics are not "bugs", and usually can't be fixed, as easily as finding a software error.
For example, Devil May Cry games in my opinion have terrible controls, but I also don't know how else could you make better controls for a game as complicated as DMC, that could work on controllers. In this case because there isn't really a solution the the problem the only way to enjoy the game is to adapt
2
u/vizard0 2d ago
I did with Rogue Trader because that shouldn't have been out of beta when it was released. It's a fantastic game now, but it took then time . For all I knew, I was the first person finding that bug.
They also had a really easy to use reporting system.
Beyond that game, I haven't. I think ease of reporting bugs back makes a huge difference.
2
u/tomkatt 2d ago
I report bugs if there's an in-game option or for mods, a discord to do so. If I have to chase down emails or send a message to a generic support@blah.email I'm not going to bother.
3
u/adhocflamingo 2d ago
I’m a bug-reporter, but I’m a software developer myself. When I hit something that doesn’t make sense, my natural inclination is to investigate to try to figure out why it’s happening, or at least under what circumstances it’s happening. So I may as well tell the game devs
I do also work around the bugs, though, because I want to play the game now, not wait for a patch
2
u/42LSx 1d ago edited 1d ago
I never report those things (*outside of Alpha/Beta tests), because nobody in charge gives a shit unless it's something really egregious that turns players away.
Also it is often better for the players to not report bugs if they provide a workaround, because you can bet that if a bug works for the consumer, it will be fixed immediately.
See:Frontier and their next-day nerfing of bugged income in E:D, yet other small bugs stays for half a year or longer.
Or they are like Eugen, who responded to a visual bug notice with "We don't care, buy our next game" (where the bug is still present)
2
u/DrQuint 1d ago edited 1d ago
it's learned helplessness from
real lifeother games
And how uncommunicative most developers are.
It's incredibly rare to have someone say "looking into it" or even aknowledging where they got the idea to fix something from. There is no standard nor expectation for that type of thing.
I play a LOT of slay the spire 2. I submitted quite abit of feedback too. I would not know if they read any of it. Even in the extremes where card numbers changes may have matched exactly my suggestions (which I only did once). And that's a game that DOES have an easy and blatant place to send feedback to, and a game that DOES get frequent updates.
Almost none do. The only exceptions I've had were titles like Dwarf Fortress.
A friend of mine recently complained the Dota 2 icon on desktop had a weird square border detached from the logo that made it look bad. They made a reddit thread pointing it out, that was unhelpfully downvoted. But it was visible for like, what, 20 minutes maybe, at like, night time seattle? That may have been the most lucky they could get with the timing because, 48 hours, the icon was fixed.
But was it fixed because a developer saw the thread, or because a developer randomly saw the same issue independently. The odds are really bad on the former. Because the icon being fucked up was a DECADE OLD ISSUE that many people before my friend had complained about as well. With way more community attention and support. Did no good for them all those years.
Had they asked me "should I make a thread". I'd have been wrong to tell them "No." But I had a DECADE of witnessed helplessness with it.
You, friend, OP, are what's called an exception.
You are suffering your peers.
And even now, if someone were to ask me, should I make a thread. I'd still answer No, likely. One odd exception does not convince me it wasn't a coincidence, helpness still reigns supreme.
•
u/arremessar_ausente 8h ago edited 8h ago
I think you're simply overthinking. If some game mechanic isn't working as intended, and players find a workaround that's simply because players want to immediately continue playing. Even if they report the bug, could take days till their ticket gets reviewed, then could take weeks or months till a patch comes out.
If it's a current game where everybody is playing and you want to enjoy the hype, nobody is waiting for a patch, people will always do the things they can to work around the problems.
There's also some games that have so many minor inconvenient bugs, that if I were to stop to report all of them I would not play the game at all.
You're thinking way too deep about real life bureaucracy
•
u/sturmeh 6h ago
We assume you play the game, so any common annoyance is either an overlooked aspect of the game design that might not be apparent to the creator, or it's something they haven't got around to fixing.
I'm not going to report obvious failures on the developers part, if you play the game and you don't notice the characters head is a missing texture then I'm not sure what good a report will do.
Do you play your games?
1
u/PM_ME_ZED_BARA 2d ago
I usually report bugs and issues but will stop doing so if they are not acknowledged or fixed.
I was in Endless Legend 2 early access and reported around 10 bugs, which were all fixed before launch. This encourages me to continue reporting bugs even now that the game has been released.
Developers of the game (Amplitude) were also thanking specific players who reported some outstanding bugs. On their websites, we could also see bug reports from all players and upvote them rather than making a new report. This helps the devs prioritize bug fixing.
On the other hand I no longer report bugs in any Bethesda Game Studio’s titles.
1
u/Due-Arachnid-309 1d ago
Big budget game? Bitch about it online.
Small/indie game? Report it.
Who the hell thinks menus not responding is a game fearure?
1
u/Blacky-Noir 1d ago
My hypothesis is that gamers have learned over the years and decades that reporting is like pissing in the wind. Useless, waste of time, and so on.
So they mostly don't bother.
It takes a lot of consistent work and communication to reverse that for part of the audience, for a single studio. See Wuze for example.
2
u/voidfillproduct 1d ago edited 1d ago
I recommend that you read "The Design of Everyday Things" if you haven't already - it describes very accurately what you observe, and how it reflects on you as someone who designs a product.
You are probably looking at this with the bias of a developer, for whom reporting an issue is completely normal. However, for regular people it isn't; it either doesn't occur to them, is perceived as fruitless, or requires too much effort. Most importantly, it is not their job.
Out of curiosity, how exactly should someone report a bug in a game of yours? What does that process entail, what's your expectation?
•
u/Sigma7 22h ago
For a long time, there's nothing that can be done about bugs. If the game ships with them, it's there forever.
I've encountered bugs, but there's no guarantee that reporting them gets fixed. Twilight Struggle for example seems to have five years since the last update, and there's a guide that lists a few bugs that remain. The game also incorrectly describes one of the rules, which causes new players to get confused about why they lost but get told the correct result rather quickly.
It's a matter of luck if they get fixed.
And have you ever found out that a "mechanic" you'd mastered was actually a bug?
From Tachyon: The Fringe, using afterburner for a speed boost, then slide to maintain the extra speed. I did get called out about being rather fast with the heavy bomber.
It felt like a bug, but was also working exactly as designed because slide is supposed to maintain the current velocity.
60
u/Azhrei_Vep 2d ago
It never occurs to me that reporting is an option.
Probably because I started gaming in the late 80s. Back then, what you got was what you got. You could write a letter to the developers about a problem in the game, but they're not going to reach into your cartridge and change things.
So, basically the learned helplessness (aka practiced resourcefulness) theory, but from a different angle. Didn't learn it from real life, learned it from gaming.