Fortnite's low-priority bug reports are regularly wiped, which Epic Games CEO says is "normal," but Rust boss says he'd "rather have them logged than forgotten," even if they're old

When it comes to bugs and glitches in Fortnite, Epic is pretty ruthless about what gets priority, according to CEO Tim Sweeney. There's a queue of importance, but the whole list gets wiped periodically, something that's prompted one of the leads on Rust to provide an alternative methodology.

On Twitter, Sweeney responded to a report that Epic just deletes the backlog of bug reports, even when entries haven't been looked at yet. "We prioritize reported bugs," he says. "We fix them in priority order. At the bottom are low-priority, low-impact bugs. We find the cutoff point where fixing those bugs is less valuable to the game than other things, and we drop them."

He calls this "normal software development," and clarifies this never includes things players are experiencing to a widespread degree. "Bugs that many players experience and that affect the quality of the game are not those abandoned low-priority, low-impact bugs," Sweeney states. "They are higher priority bugs the team is tasked with fixing. When that takes time, it is because they are hard to track down, fix, or deploy."

One of the responses comes from Alistair McFarlane, COO and company director of Facepunch Studios, the team behind Rust, who says they keep reports going back years. "Our backlog on Rust is usually several hundred of low priority bugs, many are bugs to us rather than players, but we never deleted them," he tweets.

"Generally we have cleanup sprints to tackle them, allow QA to fix them, or they're a good starting point for new staff to resolve and becomes familiar with the project during their starting period," he adds. "A lot of our low priority bugs can date back years, it's a burden on QA and the whole team to know if its still broken or fixed in passing."

He finishes by saying he "can see the logic in deleting them," however, he'd "rather have them logged than forgotten." There's logic both ways, but when it comes to remedying issues within a game, I can imagine having the full extent of your bug reports is more helpful than not. That's easy to say though, when something like Fortnite must have an avalanche of them on a regular basis. Either way, as long as things get fixed, that's the most important part.

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