GENERAL DO'S AND DON'T'S
DO:
- Be polite.
- Include as much information as you can about the bug and the circumstances surrounding it.
- Use the English language (except obviously for those playing in other countries with a different language) and type out all your words. If you need a spellchecker, use an offline editor like Notepad and paste the bug report into the bug interface.
DON'T:
- Be rude, inflammatory, or nasty.
- Demand that the problem be fixed.
- Threaten to quit the game (if you're doing that, you really should just quit now).
- Use "l33t" or shortened words- "4" instead of "for", "u" instead of "you", "ur" instead of "your"/"you're". Just. Don't. Do. This. Seriously.
THE COMPONENTS OF A GOOD BUG REPORT
Every system is different, and the requirements for reporting bugs on those systems will be different. Here's my assessment of what's needed for a good bug report in SWG; the five "W"s: Who, What, When, Where, and Why, along with Repro Steps (more on this later).
Who Are You?
Your character name is important. Even though you're filing this bug in-game, which means your character and account are attached to it, include your character name in the bug report. If you have multiple characters, be sure you mention the one that you encountered the bug on! Also, which Galaxy are you on? Include that as well.
What Happened?
Describe, in detail, the bug. "In detail" means IN DETAIL. Provide all the info you possibly can, even if you think it's not necessary or the developers already know. You would be amazed at how often it's a tiny, totally unrelated detail that actually provides the answer or a hint to the developer as to what the problem might be. In summary: More Information Is Good (tm).
When Did it Happen?
Even if you're filing the bug report at the time or right after you ran across a bug, include the date and time, make it down to the minute if you can- and include your time zone, please! "Around 11 PM last night" is useless to someone reviewing the bug report two days later in a different time zone; they've probably got about a thousand more to get through, and I can promise you the ones that require additional work to figure out exactly when it happened are not going to get the attention. Time zone is important, because this game is played by people all over the world, and the developers probably don't live in
your time zone. "12/05/2004 at 10:53 PM PST" is much, much more useful.
Remember also that quite often, the process of hunting down bugs means going through system logs, which on this game, are probably quite large. So if the best you can give the poor sod that's trying to figure out what happened is a 30-minute window, that's a lot of logs to go through. If you can narrow that down to a one or two-minute window (or even 5-10 minutes), you've just saved the person hunting the bug a lot of work.
Where Did it Happen?
Be as specific as possible, and include the planet and waypoint if you can. If it's something that's happening on an entire planet, say so, but mention where you first encountered the problem if applicable. Remember- more detail cannot hurt, and just might be the thing that solves the puzzle. If it happened in space, be sure to include the system and the full coordinates (there's three for space waypoints!) of where it happened.
Don't say things like "My house" without saying where your house is. Why make them figure out where your house is located? And if it did happen in your house, tell them which room!
Why Did it Happen?
This one's tricky- you may not always know exactly why a bug happened to you. But this is where you get to describe what you were doing or what was going on when the bug was found. But provide as much detail as you can- include what you were doing, what you had done recently, and any other details you can come up with- even what you were wearing, if you were buffed, what food you'd eaten, whether you had wounds or BF, etc. Remember, even seemingly unrelated details can be important when
tracking down what caused the bug.
Repro Steps
This, to a developer, is arguably the most important part of a bug report. How do you make it happen? Unfortunately, we can't always reliably reproduce a bug. In other cases, we could reproduce it reliably but don't want to (imagine a crafting bug with RIS Armor; I'm not gonna lose a bunch of GDK scales just to prove I can make it happen more than once! ).
When you do know what is required to make the bug happen, verify (if possible) that you can reliably reproduce it, and then put the steps that are required, in order, in your bug report. Be sure to include any basic assumptions that may not be implied by the steps- if the bug occurs only when you're wearing a particular piece of clothing, be sure to include that.
Don't be afraid to be pedantic here; making the steps as clear and concise as possible will help and can't hurt. Not every person that sees your bug report will be a developer, and not every developer that does see it will be familiar with every system in the game. Also, it is quite likely that internal testers receive the bug reports and need to validate them in some manner before they get to the dev team. That means that if you can make sure someone can repro your bug by simply following directions, your bug report gets handled sooner.
BUG REPORT TEMPLATE
Here's a basic layout for submitting bug reports. This isn't required or anything, but it does provide a nice framework for getting all the relevant bits in one place. If you're submitting a bug report and something isn't applicable, then just leave that part out. For example, a bug report about a word being misspelled on the Character Skills screen probably doesn't require as much detail as one that involves a complex combat or crafting bug.
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Character Name: [Your character name here. This is NOT your login name]
Galaxy: [Your Galaxy or Galaxies if more than one]
Summary: [A concise description, in one sentence, of the bug.]
Date/Time: [Date and time you last experienced the bug.]
Location: [Full coordinates, if possible]
Description: [Include a detailed description of the bug, what causes it or seems to, and any other information you can think of that might be useful to someone trying to diagnose the bug]
Repro Steps: [Step-by-step instructions, if possible, on how to make this bug occur. If you can't provide full repro steps, note this and provide whatever you can. Even small amounts of information can help.]
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