I joined the Fallen Earth closed beta soon after it began. The game lured me in with its post-apocalyptic theme and I was ready to break it to make it better. It quickly gave me the opportunity to squash not just one bug but several.
The first bug I encountered was a crash to desktop. I had moved my character into an empty building and clicked the “Menu” button in the options bar. When the main menu opened I clicked “Exit”. The game immediately crashed to desktop. I cleared my computer’s cache and dumped the memory. Then I went back into the game. My character reappeared right where I had left her so I took a screenshot of her location and then repeated the above steps. The game crashed to desktop once again. I then filed a bug report with the developers.
Fallen Earth made it quite easy for their Beta Testers to file bug reports. There was a link placed prominently in the closed beta section of the forum. One click and a detailed bug report form would load. We were expected to enter our character’s name, the exact location in the game world we were when the bug occurred, the type of bug that occurred, how frequently we experienced the bug, which version of the game we were testing, and a summary of what we had experienced. They also asked us to attach screenshots of the bug and any other files produced by the bug such as .dmp files created by crashes.
While the developers were new to creating MMORPG games they handled the closed beta like veterans. Every bug report that was filed received a response. Sometimes the response was to gather more information or ask you to recreate the bug. Other times the response was simply to thank you for filing the report and to let you know that they’re working on fixing the issue. It was a very positive experience for me.
Credit where credit is due:
Fallen Earth Forums. (2007, January). Various Online Forum Comments. Retrieved from http://forums.fallenearth.com/fallenearth/index.php
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