Game breaking bugs listed on the wiki

Hey Folks,

In light of the recent games (AC5, Halo, etc) being shipped with game breaking issues, I think Giant Bomb could help call attention to those problems. I made a little mini-mock to show one idea:

This would be an area at the top of the page, only editable by the staff, to alert users to a game's major issues. It would details any game-breaking problem along with the last time this area was updated. It could also include links to the game's support page or forum post.

I think this would go a long way in helping inform people of a game's issue at the time of inquiry about the game - and not just through a news post which could be missed. Certainly another option would be to call forth any news articles about issues for that game as well. Perhaps displayed prominently at the top until the time they've been resolved.

What do you think? Would this type of information be helpful to you and others? Any other ideas?

Yes.

Uh, no. It's a decent idea and all, but having the staff update this for all these games seems dumb, also the fact that not everyone experiences these kinds of problems, so it just seems... weird to have on a wiki.

It should probably be user controlled like everything else on the Wiki, perhaps locked to moderator approval. There should probably be some threshold of how broken a game must be to earn this. (ex: broken for a few people, broken for some, broken for most, broken for all)

This seems like entirely too much work and completely unrealistic to maintain.

It seems a hard thing to set rules around. What percentage of users have to be experiencing these issues?

How detailed do you go? If you walk through the right door prior to the left one whilst having the shotgun equipped the game will sometimes crash.

If it weren't locked down to staff/mods, given that it would be a fair amount of extra work, how could user entered content be consistent across GB? I know a few that were so upset about Mass Effect 3's ending that they considered it broken.

I understand what you are trying to address, and it certainly is a good intention, but it reminds me of how Polygon dealt with their wildly fluctuating Sim City score. It sounds like publishers have more than enough things to bitch about to games press, not to mention the users.

Along with all the other reasons mentioned why this just wouldn't really work, I'd add that one of the biggest problems with current Wiki pages is temporary information that was never updated/removed.

I could see people gleefully filling a thing out to say a game is broken at the time, but getting them or someone else to come in and remove that notice is a much more difficult thing.

(great job on that mock up, though!) :)

Usually these issues are over so quickly there's no reason to put the effort into changing or updating the wiki just to reflect current problems. Not to mention one person's problem with the game doesn't reflect accurately on everyone else's. We could have one person calling a game "broken" when in reality it just has a few bugs.

Seems like a lot of work for a temporary and small problem imo.

Step one to make this work: Hire interns.

Step two to making this work: Resist the urge to use said interns only for sandwiches and instead task them exclusively with staying on top of dull wiki maintenance.

Step three: Profit!! Because you have to donate a buck to unlock a bug. "Bug Bucks" patent pending.