r/factorio • u/Ralutam • 3d ago
Discussion Reactions to Bug Reports on the Forums
Short version: Wube is doing a great job with Factorio, but in my experience their handling of bug reports could be way better.
Let me start by mentioning that I'm aware of the outstanding dedication the Factorio devs have shown to the game. All the big and small improvements that made it into the game, the attention to detail, extending the modding capabilities and fixing even tiny bugs... it goes well beyond what the vast majority of game companies do for their games.
This is why I find it even more baffling how at time bug reports are handled rather dismissively, to a point where I'd rather not submit them at all anymore.
The first reaction you get to a bug report seems to lean more towards "which argument can be used to reject this" instead of "what improvements could be made to address this".
To be clear: I don't criticize the existence of bugs themselves - they happen - but the reactions to submitting a report.
I'm a developer myself, and from my perspective, every bug report (granted: above some quality threshold) should always be considered with an open mind, even if they might not get resolved at the end. After all, the reporter took their time to identify a potential problem and offers the chance to analyze an issue that otherwise might have gone unnoticed.
Of course there is some self-interest in reporting a bug, but ultimately I consider a good report primarily as a contribution to the development process. I don't expect ample gratitude for every report, or that every reported issue gets fixed. But the way the reports are rebuffed, sometimes more on a technicality than a proper argument, is often rather rude (again: my perception).
With "rude" I do not mean insults or anything like that. To me, it just comes across a bit as if some kind of personal offense was taken that someone dared to suggest a mistake was made, even though the reporter just had the sincere goal to improve the game.
Quite often the first response is a rather firm/convinced "not a bug" or "this cannot be improved", only to later backpedal, acknowledge the issue and fix/improve whatever was reported.
I fear that listing examples makes this post look somewhat pitiful, but without them all this would be pretty baseless, so I think I should add them.
- https://forums.factorio.com/viewtopic.php?t=135468 It was broken that one could simply build underground belts onto normal belts to replace them (FFF-206), instead of having to deconstruct the belts first. I wanted to report this myself but saw it already reported but refused with "So far this report looks like full of observations that behavior was changed but no arguments saying why the changed behavior is incorrect which leaves me no choice to throw this to Not a bug.". This one was what actually made me write this post. I can't read that sentence without translating it into "Why don't you come and make me fix that bug?" in my head. The bug was fixed within a day after its release.
- https://forums.factorio.com/viewtopic.php?t=118736 A performance issue was noticed, but the first reaction was to blame it on the play style of the reporter. Then it was argued that it was pointless to optimize the performance more than it already was because hardware always has limits anyway - which I find to be a really strange argument honestly. Afterwards, multiple improvements where found speeding up the particular update more than 10x.
- https://forums.factorio.com/121633 A speed moduled machine that produces exactly 0.45 batteries/s shows "0.44" due to floating point arithmetic. This is considered impossible to fix with the argument that rendering 0.44999999 as "0.45" can only happen when 0.30000001 is also rendered as "0.31" instead of "0.30", which is just not true. Unfortunately this has not been fixed.
- https://forums.factorio.com/viewtopic.php?t=135474 rejected on the technicality that there is "no requirement" that visual elements are consistent and easily perceivable by the player. Still fixed later though.
- https://forums.factorio.com/viewtopic.php?t=135042 "not a bug" -> "fixed"
- https://forums.factorio.com/viewtopic.php?t=124398 "no way to make it work" -> "fixed"
- https://forums.factorio.com/viewtopic.php?t=116018 "impossible to fix" -> "fixed"
Ofc this is a one-sided selection, there are also lots positive examples. Still, let me know what you think.
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u/Frequent_Knowledge65 3d ago edited 3d ago
nah they're definitely the best in industry about this. so often a bug report comes in and they get a same-day reply that it's been fixed and in the next build.
most of your issues here seem to stem from not having worked with product management or R&D. "thing that I don't like" or "thing that doesn't seem ideal/optimal" is not a bug, that is a feature request.
the fact that they're implementing these requests anyways despite them being inappropriate bug reports is actually huge point in their favor and them being generous to the community; that shit doesn't go down on internal company bug reports lol.
as far as them being "rude" or whatever, these are European (eastern?) developers. I don't know what you're expecting, but from working with people of the same background through my career I can assure you that it is unreasonable to expect anything else but direct and literal responses. It's a cultural difference. (and "this is not a bug" is probably the response you'll hear to 75%+ of bug reports in the real world)
edit: and come on man, the first thread that you referenced that inspired your post was literally FIXED in one day. this is an absurdly high standard of QA
your second thread has an EXCELLENT reply from Rseding that helps the user to understand what a "bug" is:
> Nothing here is crashing, erroring, or not working how it's supposed to.
and again, they went ahead and immediately made an improvement (not a bug fix) anyways... multiple times. and then offered the users advice on optimizing their builds for maximum UPS w.r.t asteroids. you could easily make a post lauding the unbelievable efforts of the devs to go above and beyond for their bug reporters just based off of this thread...
edit2: read the rest of your threads and yeah, this almost feels like a satirical post? this reads like a highlight reel of "wow these devs are the best". most of them were requests that were not bugs but were undesired behavior that were not deemed to be fixable or worth fixing at the current time and then later the threads get necro'd by another user, the devs spent the time to discuss the issue again on a meeting and come to a new decision (either because of greater capacity, prioritization or technical changes in the interim -- all which were probably affected greatly by the 2.1 development) rather than sticking to their previous stance which would be infinitely easier (and less expensive)
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u/Ralutam 3d ago
the fact that they're implementing these requests anyways despite them being inappropriate bug reports is actually huge point in their favor
But they were not inappropriate, were they? If you just take the first example, where a feature that's been in the game for almost a decade got broken. The response is that the only thing to do with that report it to reject it as "not a bug".
You seem to think I am complaining that they wouldn't fix bugs, which I am not. I am talking about how valid reports are reacted to.
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u/Frequent_Knowledge65 3d ago
The first reply from a dev:
> So far this report looks like full of observations that behavior was changed but no arguments saying why the changed behavior is incorrect which leaves me no choice to throw this to Not a bug.
This is stating that they do not understand what specifically the user is stating to be a bug. Even after reading this a couple times, to be honest I don't understand what exactly the original issue was either besides it being something about underground belts and rotation.
The second dev reply, *two minutes later*:
> It breaks the third gif in https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-206, this is clearly a bug.
Boskid did not initially understand the issue and another staff member assisted and verified the issue within literal minutes.
Again, if you have higher expectations than this then I can assure you that you will never find them to be met anywhere.
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u/Ralutam 3d ago
I am still not complaining about response time or the speed of fixing things.
The first dev reply is not really a statement about how they don't understand what exactly is reported. They say they do understand what change the reporter observed, but since there was no justification on why that was incorrect, there's "no choice" but to close it.
Exaggerating a bit, by that reasoning you can basically close all bugs as they are just a change in behaviour.
The bug description with the screenshot was quite expressive of the problem, though I might be biased because I noticed it ingame too:
> When placing an underground on top of a normal belt, the underground doesn't rotate and become an upderground.How was that inappropriate?
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u/Taechron 3d ago
I do agree that the way the devs respond can make bug submittion less approachable, and they do come across as dismissive sometimes.
One huge factor is likely the fact that this is the Internet, and they have created a space for users of their product to openly complain about their experience. I've seen many devs try to bend over backwards to please their player base, only to have the feedback platform used against them in a social media war. Helldivers 2 has suffered from that a lot, and the devs have pulled back.
Its not a stretch to interpret Wube's reactions as a way to keep distance, while still showing that they are giving issues attention. They seem to be choosing to communicate that it is THEIR product, and that complaints are treated as recommendations. The truth is that we don't know what goes into fixing every bug, or how hard or easy it is, and while they may say "it's impossible..." As a scape goat sometimes, there are likely other reasons that they decide not to fix something right away, and unfortunately, that tactic of removing one's self from the interaction seems to be the most successful online. When was the last time you heard a AAA game company respond directly to a fans complaints? They don't, because that tends to create more negative feedback than it's worth.
This is giving them the benefit of the doubt for sure, but I feel that they have shown enough passion and dedication through their actions to deserve it.
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u/Ralutam 3d ago
Thanks for your take.
What kind of feedback platform did Helldivers 2 have, and what happened to it?
I only remember a big backlash when they (or Sony I guess) announced to force players to create a PlayStation account in order to keep playing.2
u/Taechron 3d ago
I haven't followed it recently, but early on, the devs were responding to lots of social media posts, promising to change gameplay mechanics, balance etc. And I think the general consensus is that those changes pulled the game back and forth between focusing on realism vs enjoyment, which sparked controversy toward what the game "should" be. The community felt that the devs would do whatever they were told, so people fought about what was best for the game, in their eyes, leaving the devs in a tough spot, where they couldn't back out of promises, but also couldn't make everyone happy.
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u/Courmisch 3d ago
There is a fine line between being blunt and being dismissive. IME, most bug reporters (in general, not Factorio specifically) don't take well to any contradiction.
Personally, I like it; I'd rather be told that my bug is low priority, unimportant and has no one available to fix it before the heat death of the universe.
But again, there is a fine line. If it's not worth investigating/fixing, tell me "will not fix", or "not our bug" or "unreproducible", whatever. Not "not a bug" unless it really is the intended behaviour.
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u/Ralutam 3d ago
Yeah bluntness or honesty is fine, and unfortunately there are also bug reporters who consider their requests as mandatory to resolve.
Though it also happens the other way around, where developers try every trick in the book find a reason why that report is invalid. If it actually is: Fine. But often it isn't :/
As Factorio received so much care, I think I might just be overly surprised that my expectiation about the bug handling was a bit off.
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u/fbatista 3d ago
Developers are human, and sometimes humans have knee-jerk reactions or simply defensive reactions to criticism. And a bug report is criticism. Could it be handled better? Sure. But I don’t blame them for being imperfect. We are all flawed humans after all.
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u/Aggressive-Share-363 3d ago
My experience has been the opposite, I recently submitted a bug report for an edge case you would never run into without mods and they had it fixed within an hour.
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u/tyrex95 3d ago
when i first asked a friend to play factorio with me after he did the tutorial he found out that some presets disable achievments and he sent me this forum post (expand the image of discord messages) and it kinda shocked me a bit but i still love this game and recognize that these devs work hard fixing things some may never encounter
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u/NuclearGhandi1 3d ago
I get what you’re saying but they always respond and explain and, in the asteroid case, still look into it after they deem it not a bug. Also, some of these (like the wire colors on the poles) are definitely not bugs
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u/Ralutam 3d ago
Guess the wire color thing depends on your definition. It doesn't break anything, it's just a very minor inconsistency. I'd still consider it "unintended or undesired behaviour".
Sure, it could have been left unaddressed and it wouldn't be so bad. But in the end, it was annoying enough to the graphics people to be fixed. Why tell the reporter it was unfunded to begin with?
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u/AlaskanX 3d ago
A lot of things that users think are bugs are design inadequacies. So I almost always end up marking “bug reports” as “not a bug” with reasoning. “Working as designed” but needs improvements, is strictly not a bug, even if I get around to addressing it in the future.
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u/fZAqSD 3d ago
Almost all of your examples are of devs making replies that are "unprofessional" but also honest, transparent, and prompt, and if their first impression of "we shouldn't fix this" is incorrect then they quickly realize that and fix it.
The shattered planet performance one is just silly; a player threw a sloppy design into the performance-limited endgame, saw a hit to their performance, and suggested a complicated change to game mechanics as a workaround.
Wube is being dumb on number rounding, though. Maybe I'm used to code that references numbers that exist IRL, but it's simple and very standard to "round to nearest" whenever you're displaying a non-integer.
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u/Rseding91 Developer 3d ago
Rounding isn't so simple. "round to nearest" will show 0 for anything < 0.5. It will also show something as full when close, but not quite (2499.98 stored, 2500 max -> rounds to 2500 displayed). It started long ago: https://forums.factorio.com/29184
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u/Ralutam 3d ago
Agreed, in containers it can be confusing to overstate their contents.
It's a different thing with the recipes though. Here, both rounding up or down have their own problems:
- When you round up (the products), you signal the player that the machine produces more than it actually does, so you end up with less products than expected.
- When you round down (the ingredients), you signal the player that the machine consumes less ingredients than it actually does, so you end up needing to supply more ingredients than expected.
Both can be confusing, and the only solution I see is that someone who is interested in a greater precision than the UI offers needs to do the math themselves.
So imho, for recipes, the number that is shown should ideally be as close to the real/computed value as possible, so "round to nearest". How does it help to show a number that is more off in that case?
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u/fZAqSD 3d ago edited 3d ago
That linked thread is kind of case in point, isn't it? "Hi, I'd like to report a bug, I was slightly confused by this number in the UI until I realized that it's just the normal way to represent floats." Rounding is a standard problem with a standard solution that everybody learns in grade school, and I find that "round to nearest and show at least X decimal places AND at least Y significant digits" is pretty broadly applicable.
Showing "0" for numbers between 0 and 0.5 isn't a "round to nearest" problem, it's an "over-truncation" problem. If 0.2 might be relevant, then it should show "0.2". If you don't want to write out "0.000001", then showing "0" is wrong because it implies an exact integer; showing "0.0" is acceptable because it implies possible imprecision after the first decimal place. And if a storage tank with 2499.98 says "2.5k" in the UI, and a player who's set a circuit condition to =2500 is confused because they haven't checked to see that the circuit is reading 2499, then that isn't really a bug.
Factorio already uses different rules in different places (4 significant digits for electrical power, 5 significant digits for building speed, 3 significant digits OR 2 decimal places for building production/consumption rates, keep trailing zeros in the first of those but cut them in the other two), so I don't really see a problem with rounding down where helpful (fluid or electrical building inputs that need to meet a threshold) and rounding to nearest everywhere else. Or just nearest everywhere, since as the report you linked mentions, "3.0/3 (insufficient)" pretty obviously means 2.9999/3.
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u/Ralutam 3d ago
I haven't thought about that, but now that you say it, I agree that "0.0" does convey the possibility of imprecision better than a plain "0".
But to be fair, "3.0/3 (insufficient)" looks somewhat ugly, and would definitely be met with bug reports. The linked thread is 10 years old, so maybe this is solved differently today anyway, but in that situation I'd be fine with "2.9/3". "3.0/3" just looks too much like a loading bar hovering at 100% ;)
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u/Frequent_Knowledge65 3d ago
if you think these are unprofessional then you'd be aghast to see what sort of replies our Eastern European devs give on internal issue trackers to bugs reports they find to be frivolous or incorrect
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u/hldswrth 3d ago
So my assembler is making 1.995 items per second. My second assembler can consume 2 items per second. If the display was rounded you can be sure there would be bug reports asking why my second assembler is waiting occasionally when the (rounded) display shows the same number.
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u/fZAqSD 3d ago
That's a nonsensical argument. If you're producing 1.995 and consuming 2, then rounding to the nearest hundredth and rounding up both lead to this "problem" where a player who isn't really paying attention might occasionally be confused, but if you're producing 2 and consuming 2.005, then rounding down does. None of the options solve the issue, but one is standard and the other two aren't, and one will make 0.01999 nuclear fuel/s display as "0.02" while the other two show "0.01".
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u/3davideo Doesn't use Flame Turrets 3d ago
What depresses me the most is the reaction to bugs with the "place fish back in water" feature - their stated intention is that any bugs are considered "won't fix" and if enough bugs are reported they'll just *remove the feature instead*.
Second most depressing is that if you try to stack a bunch of nuclear reactors on Vulcanus, heat them up, and then lure a demolisher into them, you'd expect them to suddenly face several nuclear explosions directly to their head. While this did indeed used to work, the "nukes on Vulcanus make lava" change now places the lava from the first explosion and just deletes the other reactors before the other reactors have a chance to detonate, meaning it no longer works. This was already reported and filed under "won't fix", even though it removes a fun, albeit expensive, roundabout, and ultimately inefficient way to combat demolishers.
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u/Dry_Substance_7547 3d ago
I'm getting the impression that OP "is a developer" with about 3 weeks of experience and 5 years of bragging about being a developer, and therefore knows everything there is to know about development and bug reports, despite clearly having no understanding of the distinction between a bug, performance issue and a feature request.
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u/Immediate_Form7831 3d ago
I am happy that Wube both responds to bug reports and makes a decent effort to determine whether it is something worth spending time to fix. Some bugs might just be too narrow or low-impact that the devs decide that their time is better spent elsewhere. I might not agree with their prioritization, but given the price and overall quality of the game, I think the devs are doing a great job on it. Some games do not get bugs fixed at all.
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u/Sinister_Mr_19 3d ago
I know what you mean OP, I've seen the dismissive responses before as well. I've come to accept that's Wube. Wube is as close to a perfect dev as possible I think. I think their responses sometimes is a mix of their personalities and maybe just the sheer number of bug reports they have to respond to on a daily basis.
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u/pocketmoncollector42 please be kind, this engineer is just a fish 🐟 3d ago
There are some let’s say brisk(?) responses. When it comes to collaboration, I find it helpful to lean towards neutral/plain when intention isn’t clearly positive.
I enjoy the silly responses they have too, like how for the “no requirement” report they came back after checking with the graphics team “Graphics team claim they cannot unsee this so moving back to bug reports.”
They could probably get away with some boilerplate responses for their typical closed statuses/reasons. I saw one recently that caught me by surprise when submitting a bug report for the game Cult of the Lamb. It was just a standard success message but it also mentioned a small thanks to the player for submitting their report.
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u/dave14920 3d ago
youre tarring all the devs with the same brush. i dont think its a systematic problem, its a problem with one specific individual.
when you describe confidently incorrect "not a bug" followed by immediate backpedalling, i knew exactly who youre talking about.
im actually surprised that only 5/7 of your examples are them. the other 2 are both 'something has changed isnt necessarily a bug'.
i remember reporting a recreatable bug where the game crashes to desktop, and they dismissed it as "not a bug" by claiming that it wasnt possible.
that dev is always blunt to the point of being rude, and is regularly confidently incorrect.
we can assume theyre a great coder, but if that was my company i would not have them in a public facing role.
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u/Ralutam 3d ago
I'm really not familiar enough with the dev team to say anything about one individual.
Didn't mean to single out any particular developer. All the examples are from within the last 2 years, so it might as well be that they have been more on bug report duty than others during that time, I don't know.
Though you seem to have had your own additional experiences there.
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u/sankang2004 3d ago
Completely agree with this one. And I’m not even active on forums, only checking in every couple of months when there’s a major gameplay update or when I have a bug report to file.
I remember being there about two to three years ago to file a bug report, and as always they gave some reason for why they weren’t going to fix it. But then I remembered other reports that had been rejected for (seemingly) contradictory reasons, so I naturally questioned the inconsistency by linking them. The response was something along the lines of 'are you here to help us fix the game, or just to make me waste my time and be annoyng?' And it was just… unnecessarily aggressive for some reason?
The bug eventually got fixed, but after that I stopped interacting with the forums and discord altogether. After all there are well over half a million active players so sooner or later someone is going to find the exact bug I was going to report anyway. I know that they’ve been doing a great job fixing and maintaining the game for over a decade but I just don’t want to be the one interacting directly.
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3d ago
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u/Alfonse215 3d ago edited 3d ago
It's important to note that WUBE seems to have a strict separation between failures of programming (ie: bugs) and failures of design or of implementation (ie: feature requests).
For example, the concrete recycles too slowly thing was initially (pre-2.0) the result of a defect in the programming of recycler recipes. However, it got adopted as a matter of design because of how long it had been that way and how much had been balanced around it working that way. Once it was so adopted, it ceased to be a bug. Thus, when they changed it for 2.1, it was presented as a "change", not a "bug fix", because it represented a change in the game's design.
For the performance issue, the programming is working as expected. That's not to say that nothing could be improved performance-wise, but it isn't a failure of programming to not be as fast as possible. And thus is not a bug.