Submitting Issue Tracker & Feedback Requests feels worthless

Every time I complain about a Unity3D issue on Twitter their Twitter person kindly asks me to submit a Feedback or Issue Tracker issue. Fair enough, I understand that Twitter isn't great for in-depth issues and it's not trackable.

However, every time I have submitted a Feedback or Issue Tracker entry, it feels like I'm throwing my comments into a black hole and that it's ultimately a waste of my time. If I feel like it's a waste of my time, I'm not going to do it, Unity won't be able to make improvements, and the overall situation will just get worse.

If I submit a bug via the Unity Editor, my experience is as follows:
I get an email with a bug number confirming that they received my bug report. Awesome!
I try to check up on the status of the bug report a version or two later. Can't find anywhere on my Unity account that has this information tied to it.
Search through my email to find the email from bugs@unity3d.com and get the bug number.
Find a link within the email that lets me see it. Cool, I've got three bugs. (551179, 739237, 739246). The first one from 2013 was closed without reason and the documentation was never improved. The second two bugs are from October of 2015, and they both remain open with no followup. Are they in progress? Do they need more info? Do they care?

Have I submitted Feedback? I think I have. I can't tell, there's no way for me to find Feedback items I've created. The same goes for the Issue Tracker - I see no way to find issues I've reported. Speaking of reporting what uh... what is the difference between the Issue Tracker and submitting a Bug? I honestly had no idea they were different until I went to write this forum post right now.

Issue Tracker appears to generate a "Issue ID". You cannot search the Issue Tracker by ID. This means finding bugs again (if you wrote down their ids...) is very difficult.

Running into bugs is frustrating. I understand Unity is a giant piece of software with a lot of moving pieces, and frankly I'm amazed it works at all. However, reporting bugs should not be frustrating or users will stop reporting bugs. If users don't report them, Unity doesn't fix them, and everyone just gets more frustrated.

CC: @holliebuckets

 

This issue is fixed in a future release.

But seriously, I rolled back to 5.2.3 due to performance issues with 5.3.x. I've been keeping tabs on this thread, which seems to have some eyes from Unity on it: http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/unity-5-3-performance-issues.372648/

The main driver for me to stay on Unity's bleeding edge of releases is the WebGL export. It does seem to improve with each release, but still very far from being a peer of the WebPlayer in terms of performance/actually working.

I do occasionally burn a LOT of time when running into one of those undocumented features/quirks of Unity. Saw the mention that the doc team will be 3x in 2016, which is great news.

I would LOVE to see a few releases devoted to stomping existing bugs instead of adding new features.

 

Hi! So I just chatted with @SaraCecilia I want to loop Sara and @Aurore into this thread because it has a ton of Feedback feedback as well as feedback on how we interact with our community

 

Agreed that the bug reporting process isn't very clear at all until you manage to make it through enough of the process. I got an issue to go through the pipeline last time and got a better understanding of it. I'd say this was overall a positive experience:

https://fogbugz.unity3d.com/default.asp?745188_111uuj0rbm4kgh2p

http://issuetracker.unity3d.com/iss...child-and-is-called-twice-when-adding-a-child

So after a successful repro, it goes to the devs, makes sense. The person who responded mentioned it was already fixed for a future and would try to get it backported to 5.2. I'd say that was an okay experience, but an improvement would have been to link to the duplicate issues so I could easier track them in the release notes (looked them up by searching the issue tracker and ctrl-f'ing release notes for 5.2 and 5.3 while writing this post).


For the feedback section, is there a way to be notified when the dev team responds? I submitted feedback and dumped all my votes into it, and ended up not noticing the reply until a couple of months after the fact when I happened to see that my feedback votes had been deallocated, prompting me to search for the feedback I'd posted.


Not fully on-topic for this thread, but LordNed linked to @Sabo's post about documentation problems in a tweet, and I wanted to draw attention to it: http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/the-documentation-is-overall-quite-poor.375840/

I've never gotten an answer from a documentation bug report. I saw a change I'd requested made long after the fact (reporting whether a type is a class or a struct), but that's about it. Also, a point I made in my post in the docs thread:

^ I don't know if you've since added an auto-reply for de-prioritized editor versions, but wanted to include this feedback just in case.

Thank you for hearing out our gripes, Hollie!

 

I thank you for taking the time to look them up and reply, but this is the kind of stuff that makes me feel like this.

If I have to specifically reach out to people on the Unity Technologies team to get any sort of status update (and everyone is always really happy to give one, so props for that) then it makes me feel like things I report are only ever looked at if I do have to bug someone.

 

Since I got you here, can you confirm if this is a bug within Unity so I can file a bug report. Thanks!

 

just chiming in to say that it's always seemed like bug reports go straight into a memory hole and so i stopped reporting them altogether. anything to make me feel like a human has ever seen what i've written would help a lot

 

Oh, so there is at the very least a time delay. It would be nice if and when an issue goes public on the issue tracker, we got a mail that "this issue is on the tracker now : There".

For example, I've reported bugs that other people had to add things to them, or at the very least wanted to be up to date with the progress. I didn't want to link to fogbugz, and I never found out if the issue ever got on the public issue tracker.

 

I'd kind of like a person bug tracker that we can manually record in the Unity editor and save be available. I know all I'd have to do is create a text document and add those to it but having that ability in Unity would seem better. And maybe tab with Sticky Notes you put on days in a calendar and Unity could even give a synopsis of how much time you spend active in the editor each day and it's top 10 API usage for that work. Not too fancy so there won't be too much feature creep but sort of a ultra simplified planner.

Looking at my past Fogbugz, most of my bugs have to do with asset store bugs or GPU code bugs and so they are stripping out that code and replacing it. Although there is a bug with the madewithunity site related to the domain name validation they are using being behind the times (I just tested and domain name validation is still broken, i.e. there are many more valid domain suffixes now than .com, .co.uk, .de, and so on...).

 

You have to remember with bug trackers and feed back systems that the idea is never to respond to each individual item. That way lies insanity. The idea is to build up an aggregate of data that can be mined for high level trends and prioritization.

So while it seems like it might be a black hole at times, submitting data to these things is still highly useful. Even if you never get a specific response.

 

It would be nice if I could close bugs that I know have been overcome by events, i.e. new Unity code, but of course that ain't going to happen. I'm sure they have paid support for very old versions of Unity.