Factorio Forums

1. For players who are not going to report anything and just want to play the game .... it is a complete waste of everyone's time for a multiplayer server to pause and save a special large desync reporting file for that player... which they then will proceed to ignore and which they will not upload for the developers, but will just immediately try to resume playing the game again which destroys the debug data log.

Therefore make error reporting a clearly marked opt-in/opt-out choice on the main menu. For everyone who opts out, they will never be sent desync reporting data by the server, saving everyone the time and grief waiting a long server pause for useless debug data to be sent to those players that will just be discarded anyway.


2. The crash/desync reporting needs to be automated so that end users do not have to fool around with Google Drive or whatever to upload 300+ megabyte error reports for the developers. Handle all uploading of crash data automatically and transparently to the player.

Due to the potentially huge size of the crash / desync reports for large factories, offer an option to upload reports and debug data in the background with a pause/resume capability, when the players are not playing online.

Or can you do preprocessing on the client, to only send relevant data rather than the full blob of all events from the beginning of the game?


3. The crash/desync reporting needs to automatically store crash data itself in a special directory in the game folder without users having to do anything. These can collectively take up gigabytes of disk space as the accumulate, so they should be automatically removed once uploaded successfully to the developers, or deemed irrelevant by developers and removable.
./factorio/crash-reports/2017-04-25_13-59-59_0.15.2_crashreport.zip

Please consider one thing:
You are playing experimental version of beta game. If you are unwilling to cooperate with developers on debugging then stay on latest stable version.

As for automated report handling - while it would work why do you think that person unwilling to wait for it to be saved would be willing to wait for it to be saved and then also sent? And most likely also provide description of what was happening when the issue occured since it can be relevant.

Saving those in Factorio dir subfolder would be prefferable if you are running zipped version - if it's installed in default windows location it would fail.

No this does not make any sense. It should not fall on the player's shoulders to have to deal with crash handling. I can name any number of other programs that automate all this without needing anything to be done by the user.

If you are serious that debug data should be FORCED onto everyone, then by that logic, the game should REFUSE to start a new game until an upload of the debug data has been either confirmed by the developers or manually deleted from the Temp folder by the player.

If we're going to nitpick the naming example, then really if you're on Windows the Temp folder and Desync data shouldn't be in AppData/Roaming/Factorio at all but rather in AppData/Local/Factorio where all nonessential program data is supposed to go.

You chose to opt into the version marked "experimental". The least you could do is ask politely instead of making angry demands.

Forget "experimental"... This guy should probably be waiting for the 1.0 release.

Moved to not implement. In the current alpha testing this doesn't make sense; such a feature has the potential to add more bugs than to solve.