Q

Anonymous asked:

Who (if anyone) picks up an auto error report when a game crashes? And does sending it (with screenshot or video) actually help?

A

That entirely depends on the team, the game, and the audience size. A 0.1% crash for a game with millions of players is still tens of thousands of crashes daily. Sending such reports generally helps (especially if you can add more context to what happened), but not always - in maintenance mode games, for example, there’s often no one on the other end to read the report.

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In large population live games like Call of Duty, there are automated systems that collect and parse the crash data, then generate reports. Because they have access to things like crash dumps and error logs, they can actually collate duplicate crashes/errors to see which issues are one off random occurrences, and which are affecting large numbers of players. These reports get sent to production, who then create the tasks to fix them, prioritize the tasks, and then assign them to the other dev team members for validation and fixing.

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In smaller games the same kind of reports are generated and sent, but the more elaborate automated handling is reduced. The teams are smaller, which means their ability to handle live issues is also proportionately smaller. The producers generally prioritize the issues that are the worst offenders - common crashes and broken states - are must-fix, while other strange behavior or rare occurrences get ranked against the ongoing content update schedule.

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The worst case scenario are games in (or approaching) maintenance mode. Skeleton crews basically mean that fixes of any kind are fairly uncommon. Any automated error reporting was built long ago and is likely still being collected, but there’s probably no one on the team left to read the reports and interpret them.

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