From now on: Please do NOT use Support Tickets to report Bugs, unless they are actual Exploits where public disclosure would be damaging to the game.

Instead, use the public Bugs Forum and please pay careful attention to the Rules of the Bugs Forum.

Historically, I've gone along with people who wanted to open tickets around Bugs, and tried to help them one-on-one, but due to recent experiences, I think this is no longer a good idea.

There are several good reasons for reporting Bugs in a public place:

- Multiple people experiencing the same Bug can come forward and corroborate one another, and help expand on, say, whether a Bug is unique to a single platform, or happening across several.

- Multiple people can add additional detail and observations about reproducing the Bug, which one person may not, and that can drastically help us narrow down problems and be able to fix issues more quickly.

- In some cases, experienced Players may actually figure out solutions to problems that are unrelated to the game itself (like hardware-specific driver bugs the game is triggering) and they may provide Community-based work-arounds faster than we can ("Switch the GPU back to XX driver version" or "upgrade the joystick to firmware YY", that kind of thing).

However, the most pertinent reason right now is that:

- The community can help keep people "in check" and clarify misunderstandings, and prevent people from getting unreasonably angry at necessary requests that I have to make for legitimate development reasons. This reduces the brunt of impact on me, personally, as one-on-one this can get pretty draining (sometimes people don't want to hear things from me).

Put simply: If there's a community understanding and expectation that Bugs needs to be a "just the pertinent facts" kind of space, and to keep emotion out of the issue, I think people are more likely to comply with that.

But, in a one-on-one environment, people are more likely to take out their frustrations on me. Clearly, this is unhelpful to me, but it's also unhelpful to solving any problems or debugging anything.

This is not a "New" problem..

..As can be demonstrated by the content of Whistler's 2021 Bugs-forum rules post linked above, which includes the line:

Please try to replicate the issue without any plugins installed. Do not state that you don't have to do this because plugins have nothing to do with the problem - because it might.

I didn't instruct Whistler to write that, or any of the rules; he just came up with them independently, based on having watched me respond on the Bugs forum over many years.

To put it simply, some players are pretty irritable and arrogant. They show up frustrated and angry about a problem, they're sure it's a "Bug" (which might be true! Or it might not), and they're already angry at me in-advance for the Bug existing and inconveniencing them.

They say things, like the above "Plugins have nothing to do with the problem", despite not having tested that.

Sometimes they get angry at me for asking for detailed "reproduction cases", which I need to make sure are extremely specific, because a lot of bugs will only happen if certain events or conditions are met.

There's a famous term called "the Heisenbug" for those Bugs which often seem to only be reproducible by those who cannot help fix them. Sometimes we run into irrationally weird edge-cases that really only impact a tiny cross-section of people, but are nonetheless really unpleasant for those people.

We always try to track down bugs. I had thought our nearly-weekly patches for 22 years was sufficient proof of that. But, some people get really upset at me for asking them to do fairly simple things, to try and differentiate between bugs and what I'll call "general IT problems" (issues on your specific computer, which are not actually the fault of Vendetta Online).

We get quite a few reported "issues" with the game, which are not actually problems with the game at all. They're driver bugs, problems on the internet, changes by major OS vendors, user-misconfiguration of the OS, hardware issues, etc.

If we didn't try to differentiate between "game-code problems" and "external problems outside our control", we would never be able to spend any time doing anything but "chasing wild geese" (foolish pursuit of the unattainable).

This needs to be Formalized..

..Which is why I'm making a General post about this, which I can reference in any future Bugs that come into the wrong place.

We will change the Support Ticket creation system, in due course, to help explain all of this.. but it has been my experience that some people don't care what guidelines are posted there, or even what I tell them in ticket responses (in fact, often the same people for whom this policy is most needed).

Basically I get told that they "refuse to post on the forums", and that Bugs is some kind of cesspool of political infighting (which is pretty bizarre).

Or, I get told that I need to be grateful they're reporting anything at all. And, for some time, I kind of agreed with that? But, at this point, I'm having to shift away from it. The "cost" is too high, people are too abusive, and it isn't productive.

At least on the Forums I have the benefit of other Guide-moderators who can jump in and help when behaviour gets out of hand, and spread out the burden. When it's just in Support Tickets, I just get to be on the receiving end of someone's misappropriated angst.

We do genuinely try to fix any bugs we can find.

Again.. we've been doing that for over two decades, almost weekly. That should stand on its own. We're willing to listen to anyone, and we try to be responsive.

But, if we ask incisive questions, make exacting requests to rule-out certain problems, or request annoyingly-specific detail on reproduction cases: It's because that's what we actually need to have a chance of tracking down and fixing things (Just because "the bug" happens to you "all the time", doesn't mean it will happen that way for us).

We know this process is necessary from great experience of operating a strongly cross-platform custom-engine game over the Internet, which is kind of the most nightmarish possible place to ship software.

So, maybe give us the benefit of the doubt, have a little patience, and post it to Bugs, okay?

(Note: We do intend to eventually add "Bug" options to the in-game "/report" system, but realistically, the issues discussed here are always more complex and custom to individual personal experiences and likely will require more back-and-forth, feedback and testing; something that cannot be achieved with any semi-automated bug-reporter. So, while an in-game Bug Reporting system is nice for a lot of cases, usually those are not the cases I'm talking about here).

(Note2: I do also hope to eventually add an email-notification thread system to Bugs, specifically, to maximize the chances of responses from people who post there, and so people don't have to re-check their threads to look for responses. But, like everything.. we have a lot on our plate, right now).