Can We Have Some Clarification Of What Is A Bug?

[jrichards]

Most users accept that a software bug is, as shown on wikipedia, roughly defined as "used to describe an error, flaw, mistake, [url="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Failure"]failure[/url], or [url="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fault_%28technology%29"]fault[/url] in a computer program or [url="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_system"]system[/url] that produces an incorrect or unexpected result, or causes it to behave in unintended ways." There have been a number of bugs posted in the Bug Tracker that have been closed, called not a bug, or moved to Suggestions or other areas of the forums. Do the Devs actually want to see bugs posted by players?

[quote name='Crichton' timestamp='1331676829' post='55474']
[url="https://forum.enb-emulator.com/index.php?/user/406-dakynos/"]Dakynos[/url]
[url="https://forum.enb-emulator.com/index.php?/tracker/issue-29-item-quality-is-not-being-consistently-effected-when-hull-takes-damage/page__view__findpost__p__107"]Jan 26 2012 04:05 PM[/url]

This is really under the category of 'things not balanced', rather than a bug. Discussion (which this is at the moment) of this should really be under Suggestions or in the Player Advocate area.
[/quote]

Example response and closure of a bug I sibmitted regarding item quality not being damaged when shields are down. While I can accept this is a low issue and probably shouldn't be addressed until closer to Beta it is clearly a bug. However if the Devs are going with a 'general discussion' on how the game should work, instead of the previously Dev goal of 'get it as close to live as possible and then worrying about tweaking key areas of the game', can we receive clarification on this change?

Ideally, as I previously posted in Suggestions, additionaly Satus flags would allow the Dev staff/web devs to flag issues so that they were not closed but moved to 'Dev Consideration/Further evaluation' rather then closing issues like this. Another example is items that don't work. Having to search around the forums for a list of items that are now working seems weird when it could just be posted as a bug/bugs with a specific error type in the Bug Tracker. At the moment I really don't see any benefit for reporting bugs until the Bug Tracker gets better organized and there is some clarification on the Dev goal for how it should be used....but maybe it's just me.

[Kyp [LDEV]]

Ok, I can do that:

Development Goal:
Live is a baseline, we're going to fix in areas which were obviously not finished where we can, but we are limited in what we can do.

Bug:
Any circumstance where something does not work as expected. However, we may mark these as 'Working As Intended.'

Balance issue:
A circumstance where math in a system like combat damage is not entirely correct and may need a tweak.