Activision Wants Black Ops Owners to Report Bugs, Please

Run into a bug while blasting fools in Call of Duty: Black Ops? Treyarch and Activision want to hear about it.

Let’s face it, games have bugs. Some games have more bugs than others, but every game has bugs. No matter how much QA testing you do, you will never find every possible way in which your code can get tangled in on itself when a player jump-crouches next to the king’s throne while holding the Green Barrier Shell and activating the Rainbow Wish ability at the apex of his leap, or whatever it is.

This is simply a fact of game development, says Activision social media mastermind Dan Amrich, and when it comes to Black Ops publisher Activision and developer Treyarch are going to need the help of fans. “These are things that the Treyarch development team needs to hear about in order for them to fix them,” Amrich writes on his blog.

Just what sort of things does Treyarch need to know, you ask? You should sound off if, writes Amrich, “you found an exploit or saw someone using an exploit online, you are having trouble with server reliability, you discovered a bug in the single-player game, or something along those lines that is more related to how the software performs.”

The best way to let the Black Ops team know about bugs, he says, is to post on the Call of Duty forums, but Amrich cautions against typical message-board behavior.

When you explain your issue – whichever realm it falls under – it helps to be polite (insults in all caps might make you feel better, but it makes it tougher to get to the useful stuff), be specific (the more detail you can offer about what was going on when the problem occurred, the better) and be clear and direct, and you have a much better chance of finding the info you need and/or helping get the problem fixed.

Less helpful things include angry Tweets directed at nobody in particular, how-to-exploit-the-bugs videos on YouTube, and screaming at the walls, so I do not recommend them.

I can’t really disagree with anything that he’s saying, here. Even the most meticulous QA will never find anything that an army of millions of players will unearth in mere days. The only way a developer can fix these things is with proper feedback, and shouting bloody murder on online forums is anything but proper feedback.

(One of Swords via Eurogamer)