I’m going to do my best to answer the original question of the thread here, but with a caveat: we don’t usually talk much about the development process for a bunch of reasons. A relevant reason here is that we’re unable (this can be anything from resources to finance to individuals schedules to privileged information etc) to talk about half the things folks would need to know in order to have an informed discussion on changing approaches or the practicalities of solutions to issues or perceived issues.
So, “what happens to 2/3 of the bug reports (the ones without visible response)”?
First thing’s first, we have an internal tracking database. It’s used for bugs, tasks, suggestions etc. The bug report forum and our internal database are not automatically connected (and shouldn’t be; you’ll see why shortly).
Both the internal database and forum have issues logged stretching back to the launch of the game and (internally) beyond.
Internally, we have quite a strict system for bug reports that requires detailed repro steps, save files, version numbering, disciplines, specialisms etc. you see some of that also in the bug report forum, but you’ll also notice just by browsing that those fields (especially repro steps and save files) are often omitted.
That’s ok! Not everyone will have time to do those things, we don’t really expect every forum report to be super actionable, but on the other hand it creates orders of magnitude more verification work for someone to reproduce and log an issue if there are no steps to reproduce or a save to load and see the problem. This is because we don’t just assume that reported bugs are true. And that’s because the reality is that they’re not. As an informed guess, I’d say about half of them are misunderstandings over mechanics (this decision didn’t do what I expected/the war started a few weeks earlier than historically), opinions (this historical general isn’t represented properly/this mechanic should be made X way instead), or mod-related (a large number of issues that state no mods were active did, in fact, have mods active.
So given limited time and resources (reality is a thing), these are usually not given more than a cursory glance.
Then there’s old stuff. Acting on reported issues for older versions of the game is difficult - save files won’t load, the issue might be gone or different, and adjacent stuff has likely changed making it hard to verify. This affects our internal database too, and yep, there are a whole bunch of similarly ‘abandoned’ issues there that are difficult to justify tackling when the likelihood is that most of them aren’t even still there at all. Still, we try to keep the cupboards clean from time to time.
And that, honestly, accounts for most of the problem you’re seeing I think. Our problem is more one of visibility than ignored problems; you don’t see our internal database, and the issues resolved or handled in it don’t get reflected onto the forum - that’s twice the work for no gain. Nearly every part of connecting the forum and our internal database is redundant work with little gain; issues are duplicated, the end user receives no game-benefit, etc. We can assign QA (as we do) to leave comments on forum issues, but really every part of the process of handling an issue is relevant here, not just the reporting and verification. Design needs to step in and prioritize it or even close it as WAD, someone needs to fix it, and that is all balanced against other tasks. But here I’m not trying to defend the process - I think the visibility challenge is real, and is something I want to find a way to solve. I have some ideas, but this project turns like a battleship not a dinghy. Some of you have noticed I pop in and do some fixing in the forum, but that’s not really something everyone can do. By virtue of my role I’m able to perform all those steps: decide if it’s a bug that should be addressed, prioritize it, fix it, and communicate outwardly about it. But it isn’t scalable.
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