Oracle Selective Channeling

[Aaron]

Originally Posted by Silveras

It is something of a double-edged blade, though...

Reporting the bug "properly" ensures that it gets on the internal tracker. More people reporting it helps to gauge the impact on the community as a whole. There are bugs I have reported that are languishing 2+ years later... perhaps because no one else has reported them, they are not seen as impacting enough people to be worth the effort to fixing when there are other bugs that help more people with less effort. By seeing a post in the forums, do more people assume they do not need to report the bug? There may be that kind of impact as well.

At the same time, LWD has asked people to report the bugs in the tracker even when not sure.. because it is easy for them to miss a forum post. Yet, sometimes they still acknowledge forum posts and say that it will be fixed. I think that undercuts the message to use the bug report system.

Yes, getting lots of reports about a certain thing does move it up the priority list. I think I usually only respond that issue X is fixed when either I'm personally embarrassed by the bug or it's something like this where we get a flood of interest on the forums. Who knew so many people were playing life oracles and building their characters around channelling? I guess we know now it's a lot!

[Mathias]

But number of posts is not at all the most important thing in terms of how to prioritize a bug. The most important is how long the issue will take to fix - if it'll take 5-10 minutes, it's very likely to be fixed quickly. If it'll take several days to rebuild the way Hero Lab handles a mechanic, that's probably going to go on the back burner.

Another thing that can raise the importance of a bug is whether it was working at one time - fixing recently created mistakes is a priority.

Also important is how easily you can work around the bug - if it just alters the prereqs, for example, making it give an incorrect error, or when it doesn't report an error it should, that's not a major problem - users can still make a working character, they just have to ignore a message, or be careful to enforce a prereq themselves.

The percentage of characters affected is also important - if the bug only occurs on a specific build that requires a particular weapon + a particular feat + a particular class ability in order to encounter the issue, that's not as important as if something that would be encountered at 5th level by anyone playing a certain core rulebook character.

[Olmac]

Originally Posted by Aaron

Yes, getting lots of reports about a certain thing does move it up the priority list. I think I usually only respond that issue X is fixed when either I'm personally embarrassed by the bug or it's something like this where we get a flood of interest on the forums. Who knew so many people were playing life oracles and building their characters around channelling? I guess we know now it's a lot!

I would think with Hell's Vengeance there are a lot of us playing Life Oracles. It is the best way to get healing on evil characters.

Originally Posted by Mathias

But number of posts is not at all the most important thing in terms of how to prioritize a bug. The most important is how long the issue will take to fix - if it'll take 5-10 minutes, it's very likely to be fixed quickly. If it'll take several days to rebuild the way Hero Lab handles a mechanic, that's probably going to go on the back burner.

Another thing that can raise the importance of a bug is whether it was working at one time - fixing recently created mistakes is a priority.

Also important is how easily you can work around the bug - if it just alters the prereqs, for example, making it give an incorrect error, or when it doesn't report an error it should, that's not a major problem - users can still make a working character, they just have to ignore a message, or be careful to enforce a prereq themselves.

The percentage of characters affected is also important - if the bug only occurs on a specific build that requires a particular weapon + a particular feat + a particular class ability in order to encounter the issue, that's not as important as if something that would be encountered at 5th level by anyone playing a certain core rulebook character.

This is something that was working when I built the character and stopped working after the last big update.

I get the priority issue and honestly, it is only a warning, and does not seem to effect the play ability of the character in Hero Lab. It is just the annoying red lettering and error message I get that bothers me. I hate error messages, they play with my OCD.

[Mathias]

With the thread this long - just so everyone knows - this was fixed three weeks ago, and the fix will be in the next release.

And there were around 6 or 8 reports of it in the inbox that first Monday after the last release, so thank you to all the people who sent their reports to the bug tracker.