Over time, we have continued looking at different ways to improve communication between the team and the community. One area we have wanted to improve for a while now is bug reporting and how we communicate with players after a report has been submitted.

We receive a lot of bug reports and feedback through Steam, Discord, email and other places. While these reports are extremely helpful, quite often some of the information needed to properly investigate an issue is missing. This can be anything from the game version or steps to reproduce the issue, to screenshots, save files, crash files or simply a way for us to contact the original reporter and ask for more information.

Because of this, we have been working on a new system to make the whole process easier for both players and the team.

All reports submitted through the previous system are still there and have not disappeared. We still have access to those reports and will continue working through them as before.

New way to report bugs, crashes, and suggestions

The main focus of the Player Help Center is to give everyone a much better and more organized way to report issues with Out of Ore.

Instead of using one general report for everything, there are now more specific categories depending on what you want to send us:

• Bug Reports are for gameplay issues and other problems you encounter while playing.

• Crash Reports are specifically for crashes and allow us to collect the information and crash files needed to investigate them.

• Suggestions & Ideas have their own place as well, keeping suggestions separate from actual bug reports.

Each form asks for information relevant to what you are reporting. This helps us collect things such as your game version, game mode, steps to reproduce the issue and relevant files right from the start.

This is one of the biggest improvements we wanted from the new system.

Previously, we could receive a report that looked useful, but if important information was missing and we had no way of contacting the person who submitted it, there wasn't much we could do besides trying to reproduce the problem ourselves. This can significantly increase the time it takes to investigate, reproduce and eventually find the actual cause of an issue.

With the new system, we can communicate directly with the reporter when additional information is needed.

You can either log in to the Player Help Center to keep track of your reports and responses, or simply use your email without creating an account.

If we need more information, we can ask you directly through your report. You can then reply and provide additional details that may help us investigate the issue more efficiently.

This also makes it much easier for us to track reports through investigation, development, and testing, without losing important information along the way.

Suggestions now have their own dedicated form as well.

This keeps suggestions separate from bug reports and gives us a better place to collect and review the ideas you send us.

If we see something we want to keep for the future, we can now properly keep track of it instead of having suggestions spread across Steam, Discord and other places.

Of course, submitting a suggestion doesn't mean it will automatically be added to the game, but it makes it much easier for us to keep track of your ideas and come back to them later.

The new Out of Ore Player Help Center is available now:

https://bug.outofore.com

Our existing bug reporting link has not changed. If you already have it bookmarked or saved somewhere, you can continue using it as before and it will automatically take you to the new Player Help Center.

Steam and Discord will of course continue to be places where you can discuss Out of Ore, share feedback and talk with the community. However, if you encounter a bug or crash that needs to be properly investigated, we highly recommend submitting it through the Player Help Center.

This gives us the information we need and, most importantly, gives us a way to get back to you if something is missing.

As always, a big thank you to everyone who continues to send us bug reports, feedback and suggestions. Your reports help us find issues, improve existing parts of the game and give us a better understanding of what needs our attention.

We hope the new system makes reporting issues easier for everyone and gives you a much better way to follow your reports and communicate with us when needed.

Another part of the Player Help Center that we plan to make use of is player surveys and more focused feedback forms.

There are areas of Out of Ore where the community can have very different opinions about how something should work. We have seen cases where something gets changed based on feedback, only for another part of the community to prefer how it worked before.

Instead of going back and forth based on individual comments, we want to be able to ask a broader range of players directly.

For certain changes, we will be able to create surveys asking what players think about specific options or directions. This should give us a much clearer picture of the overall feedback when we are looking at systems where opinions are divided.

The goal isn't for surveys to decide every change on their own, but to give us a broader and more representative picture of player feedback when we're deciding how to move forward.