Reporting a bug
Type it where it happened. /bug followed by what went wrong, in a sentence:
/bug clicked the Godly Artisan and got the old socket menu instead of repair
You get a number back — Report No.14 — and that number is how you follow it up later.
What we already know, so you don't type it
The three questions a report normally costs are answered automatically. When you send one, we record:
- who you were playing, and which account
- where you were standing — map and exact cell
- your level and class
- which client build you were on
That last one matters more than it sounds: half of "works for me" is two people on different builds.
So you never need to write "I was in the Market at 262,220 on the latest patch" — that part is done.
And what was happening
A report also carries a short recording of the moments before you sent it — the last handful of
things your client did, and the last handful of messages it sent us. It is the difference between
"the button did nothing" and knowing whether the click ever left your machine.
It is only ever the recent past: about a dozen lines, no screen capture, no keystrokes, and nothing
at all unless you file a report. It is attached to the report you just sent and nowhere else.
If the client crashes, it reports itself
A crashed client cannot type /bug — the session is gone, and that is exactly why crashes have
always been the hardest thing to hear about. So when the client dies, it leaves a note beside its log,
and the next time you log in that note is sent up as a report. You do not have to do anything, and
you will not see anything happen.
Two things follow from that, both deliberate:
- A crash that keeps happening is still one report, counted. Twenty crashes in a row do not
become twenty items in the inbox — they become one item that says it happened twenty times, which
is both easier to read and more useful. - Quitting normally leaves nothing behind. The note is deleted when the client closes cleanly, so
it only ever survives a client that actually died.
If you crashed and you can say what you were doing, please still /bug it after logging back in.
The automatic report knows where the client was; only you know what you were trying to do.
What makes a report useful
Three things, in one or two sentences:
- what you did — "clicked X", "cast Scatter with no arrows"
- what happened — the actual result, including the exact message if there was one
- what you expected instead
The third is the one people skip and it is often the most useful, because a surprising number of
reports turn out to be a system working as built and reading as broken. That is still worth fixing —
but it is a different fix, and only your expectation tells us which kind it is.
Quote the message exactly if you got one. "It said I can't do that" and "It said Please equip
the weapon you want me to work on first" are minutes apart in tracking down.
Ideas are welcome too
/idea is the same command for the other half — anything you would change, add or remove:
/idea let the reveal card stay open until I dismiss it
It is deliberately the same door. There is no form to choose between, and nothing is lost by
guessing wrong — we sort bugs from ideas at our end.
Limits and honesty
- Around a dozen reports an hour each, which is far more than anyone files in a normal session.
- Very short ones bounce. "broken" cannot be acted on, and the game will ask for a bit more.
- Sending the same report twice is not wasted. It folds into the one already on file and adds to
its count, and you are told that is what happened. A thing reported five times gets looked at
sooner, so telling us it happened again is genuinely useful — it is not noise. - A report you typed is never turned away because other people were busy. There is a ceiling on
the reports clients file automatically (see above), and it deliberately does not apply to you --
a wave of crashes must never be able to silence the person writing about those very crashes. - If a report saves, you get a number. If it does not save, you are told. There is no third
outcome where it quietly disappears.
What happens next
Reports land in a staff inbox that shows your sentence alongside the context and the recording — and
groups them, so five reports from the same map surface as one likely cause rather than five separate
mysteries. The ones reported most often are listed first, which is the whole reason the counting
matters. They move new → triaged → done, and the note we attach stays with the report.
You will not always get a reply. You will always have been read.
The things most worth reporting
See Tester: what to test for the systems worth poking at and what
"working" looks like for each. Anything on that page that behaves differently to its description is
worth a /bug, even if you are not sure — a wrong description is a bug too.