If people are too lazy to send in a minidump, then the bugs wont be fixed. Its that simple

I cant understand why this is even being discussed, either people send in the minidump with a small description of what happened. Or the user might have to wait a long time or maybe never to have his or hers issue fixed.

I dont know if this is possible but I see why someone would not send in a minidump they would be irritated and not even bother so I don't know if it would take to much time effort but when the minidump pops up have a button or option that says "report minidump?" just to make it easier for all the angry people out there

This talk of minidumps, I've never encounted one either. Same with all my friends, so when we look on this forum and see mini dumps this and that, we think, it most be their computers (conflicting programs) because we have it on at least 10 highly different PCs/Laptops and no problems (also with a range of patchs). However that also means that it isn't their pcs. Strange, minidumps, as mythical and unknown as UFOS.

It was mentioned when the beta release of the 174 series was made a month or so (?) ago.

The minidumps are log files that tell the developers what went wrong on your system that caused the crash. Without these, we can't fix problems or even investigate them to any degree.

If people choose not to provide us with information then their problems will likely never be resolved. However, that's their decision, not ours.  No program is flawless.  No human is a perfect.

./snicker

They had the game in beta for over six months (closer to 9 I think) before release, how could they have gotten much more thorough than that?

Its a relative thing. Without those 9 months of beta testing , this game would have get desyncs every 5 seconds.

Also just to clarify. Im not advocating not sending minidumps in. I just recognise the problem of sending minidumps in even if it does defy common sense ,and that maybe there can be some better way of encouraging people to send them.

Forexample for 1.1 , we are having a beta test. People will be getting minidumps. Why not during the beta phase have the minidump say "PLEASE send to developers". Alot of people who dont go to the forums simply dont know that problems can be solved by sending them in. Infact we have not heard an official sticky saying the devs appreciate if you send in dumps. Only numerous SD replies in complain threads BUT many dont read them.

Unless I'm mistaking, Stardock doesn't do any programing.

The reality is that complex software has bugs and crashes. There's no escaping it. Games especially, since the game code has to interact with the OS code and the display driver - both of which are largely out of the hands of developers.

One of the first things you learn when you start taking programming classes is that good programming partly means you want to make it easy to find what went wrong. In that sense, I'm quite glad Ironclad went with reporting minidumps as it makes it much easier to find the cause of the problem. It would be much worse if the game simply crashed (as pretty much all the others do) with no info given.

I honestly don't understand the "It's not my job to send these in, I'm not their QA, etc etc" position. Nobody's asking you to be. Many people who play Sins don't experience any crashes whatsoever, or incredibly few. Some people experience them more frequently. In the end, the developers are human and not psychic, and any developer has limited resources with which to test their code. If the game crashes for you and you want it fixed, you should send in the minidump. If you don't send it in and just post "my game crashes", well, there's nothing anyone can do because there's no way to know why it crashed, so if it's something in the game code it can't be fixed.

Auto-mailing minidumps would not work, because the dump files themselves are quite large uncompressed and I'm sure more people wouldn't like automatic uploading of 5+mb of data. It's faster to quickly compress it and e-mail it. Likewise, a central storage database would not be the best idea, as that way if the developers need to follow up for more info or a solution (if the crash was user-side), they have no way to reach the submitter easily. In an e-mail, they just hit the reply button.

There's only so much Ironclad or Stardock can do to educate people that minidumps are not evil gremlins that cause game crashes. All of this info has been available on the forums since launch, it has been explained numerous times. Minidumps are "new" to a lot of gamers so they can be confusing, but some responsibility also lies with the gamers themselves to understand it before they go off writing forum rants and complaints.

The problem is that crashes can be caused by a LOT of things. It can be the game, it can be driver issues, network issues, hardware issues, heat issues, electrical issues, or possibly an infection of hostile software.

If you have no idea what crashes your game or how to reproduce it, then your cries will simply fall on deaf ears. No one can fix what you can't find.

The only game crashes I've had to deal with are caused by my own slip ups. I haven't seen crashes occur as a result of the game itself.

cant even play game it minidumps after 1 minute but yet i can play every game i own but this one it kinda made me not want to play it i mean it fun but it unplayablei updated to 1.5 but it didnt fix it

I've read alot of your posts on this forum, they are all worthless like this one.

- a more constructive post to come later after work... ta ta