First of all, I do know that, despite the inflammatory headline, many users do in fact report bugs, and those users are a valuable asset and are appreciated.  But without any way to know specific numbers, I’d guess that maybe 75% of the bugs that are experienced by C:SI users go unreported.

This is especially frustrating because I have on many occasions heard people - either first-hand or through stories related by very close friends - saying derogatory things about C:SI developers (and me specifically) because of the bugs.  This is pretty unfair in my opinion, and such people are a part of the problem they are complaining about.

Not everyone says nasty things, of course, probably most people simply don’t say anything at all.  I guess I can’t fault people too much for that, it is after all not their job to spend their own time helping us with a product they had to spend money on, though in some cases it is only the end users who are in the position to see a problem.

For instance, there was apparently an incident last night (on Meiji?) that was reported to me by my buddy Zai, where several people had their C:SI weapons break in a short period of time.  This seems to be the same problem that has been discussed several times recently both here on this blog and the C:SI forums, and which is so sporadic and uncommon that no dev has been able to reproduce it. 

Every time I’ve written about it, I’ve asked people to report when it happens, with as much information as they could give, and only a few people have responded to the call (a special THANK YOU to those that have!!!!), certainly fewer people than have experienced the issue.

For whatever reason, though, of the supposedly several people who experienced the problem last night, so far as I know at this point only Zai has reported it.  It may be that the others have reported the problems to other devs, I don’t know yet, but I do know that only one person reported it to me personally.

Because I know Zai in real life, I was able to discuss the problem with him and ask him questions in real-time over the phone, and I think that the information he gave me was very enlightening.  For instance, he is the very first person to my knowledge to describe the actual symptoms of what it means when the "weapon broke". 

According to him, after the script errors occurred, people could still attack with the swords, but while the weapon would still play the attack animations, there was no damage, no blood sprays, and no sounds. In addition, it didn’t seem to be happening to the Wave (or at least not to him personally).  I have yet to find another person to validate that information, but if it is true and is what most people who experience the problem are seeing, then I believe that it tells me at least which one of the scripts is most likely to be the culprit.

If the info he reported is correct, then I am pretty excited to know that I can localize the problem to a (hopefully) single script and start really looking into it.  This is the first big break we’ve had on this bug in terms of locating the offending code, though thanks to Darien we might know *what* is happening, just not where.

So I’m asking again, please, we really do want to fix this bug.  If you experienced this issue or experience it in the future, please send us a notecard or IM with as much information as you can remember about what happened.  Did it happen during a fight?  Did it happen drawing the sword?  Could you still attack, was there blood, sounds, etc?  You never know what important details might be critical to fixing the issue, so please please please send us any information you can.

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