Bug Reporting for Games with Cross-Progression

Cross-progression lets a player carry their progress, unlocks, and purchases across platforms, playing on a console and continuing on a phone or PC with everything intact, which players increasingly expect. It is also a distributed-systems problem with high stakes, since a cross-progression bug can lose a player progress or fail to sync it between their devices, and lost progress, as ever, is the failure players least forgive. Like cloud save sync but across platforms and accounts, these depend on the account and progress state. Tracking cross-progression bugs means capturing the account, platforms, and progress context behind a sync that went wrong.

Cross-progression is a high-stakes sync problem

Cross-progression carries a player progress, unlocks, currency, and purchases across platforms, tied to an account that links the player platforms so they can play on one and continue on another with everything synced. Players increasingly expect this, but it is fundamentally a distributed-systems problem, the same progress existing on multiple platforms that must stay synced through an account, with all the conflict and consistency challenges of any sync, like cloud save sync but across platforms and account-linked.

This makes cross-progression high-stakes, since a bug can lose progress, the worst failure, or fail to sync it, leaving the player progress out of date on a platform, and because it touches unlocks, currency, and purchases, a cross-progression bug can also be a money issue. The stakes, lost progress and money, and the distributed-systems complexity make cross-progression bugs serious and tricky. Understanding that cross-progression is a high-stakes sync problem, carrying valued progress across platforms with all the conflict and consistency challenges of sync, frames the bug tracking: capture the account, the platforms, and the progress state to diagnose and fairly resolve a sync gone wrong.

Capture the account and platforms

The core context for a cross-progression bug is the account and the platforms involved, the account that links the player platforms, and which platforms are involved in the bug, the platform the player was on, the platform the progress should sync to or from, since cross-progression is account-and-platform based and a bug involves the sync between specific platforms through the account. Capture the account and the platforms when a bug is reported.

A report of a cross-progression bug, progress not syncing between the player console and phone, an account-linking issue, becomes diagnosable when you know the account and the platforms involved, since the bug is in the sync between those platforms through that account, and a bug may be specific to a platform pairing or an account state. The account links the player progress across platforms, and the platforms are the endpoints of the sync. Capturing the account and platforms is the foundation, providing the account context and the platform endpoints of the cross-progression sync from which a bug emerged, letting you see which platforms and account the sync bug involves.

Capture the progress state and timestamps

The substance of cross-progression is the progress, so capture the progress state and timestamps on bug reports, the progress, unlocks, currency, and purchases on each platform involved, and the timestamps of the progress and the sync, since a cross-progression bug, especially a lost-progress or sync-conflict bug, is about the progress state on the platforms and which is current, like capturing the save state and timestamps in cloud save sync.

The timestamps are especially important, since cross-progression conflicts arise when the progress on different platforms diverges and the sync must determine which is current, and a bug here, the wrong progress winning, the more advanced progress overwritten, is diagnosed by the timestamps showing which progress was newer. A report of lost or out-of-date progress becomes diagnosable when you can see the progress state on each platform and the timestamps, revealing which progress should have won and whether the sync chose wrong. Capturing the progress state and timestamps is what lets you diagnose the cross-progression conflicts and lost-progress bugs, seeing the progress on each platform and which the sync should have kept, which is the crux of cross-progression bugs.

Watch the conflict resolution and account linking

The hardest cross-progression bugs are in the conflict resolution, when the progress on different platforms diverges and the sync must merge or choose, and a bug, the wrong progress winning, progress lost in the merge, the more advanced progress overwritten by the older, can lose progress, like the conflict-resolution bugs in cloud save sync but across platforms. Capture the conflict context, the diverging progress and the resolution chosen, when a conflict bug is reported.

And watch the account linking, the process of linking the player platforms to the account that enables cross-progression, since account-linking bugs are a real source, a linking that fails, that links wrong, that loses progress in the linking, which can be confusing and costly for the player. Capture the account-linking context for these. Watching the conflict resolution, for the merge and choice bugs that can lose progress, and the account linking, for the linking bugs that can fail or lose progress, covers the critical cross-progression bug areas, where the distributed-systems complexity and the account-linking produce the lost-progress and sync failures that are the genre most damaging bugs, alongside the general progress sync.

Setting it up with Bugnet

Add an in-game report option and attach the account, the platforms involved, the progress state on each, the timestamps, and the conflict and account-linking context as custom fields. Bugnet stores them so a cross-progression bug arrives with the account, platform, and progress context needed to diagnose a sync, conflict, or account-linking bug and, crucially, to fairly resolve a lost-progress bug by seeing the progress on each platform and which should have been kept.

Group identical reports into occurrence counts, watching whether bugs cluster around platform pairings, account states, or conflict situations. Because cross-progression is high-stakes, with lost progress and money at risk, the captured context is especially important for the lost-progress and sync bugs, letting you see what the player had on each platform, determine what they should have, and restore wrongly-lost progress, as with any progress or money loss. Capturing the account, platform, and progress context is what lets you protect the cross-platform progress that players increasingly expect, diagnosing and fairly resolving the sync, conflict, and linking bugs that would otherwise lose their valued progress.

Resolve lost-progress bugs fairly

Because cross-progression bugs can lose valued progress, and progress loss is the failure players least forgive, resolve lost-progress bugs fairly, using the captured account, platform, and progress context to determine what the player should have, the most advanced progress across their platforms, and restore it. A player whose progress was lost or overwritten by a cross-progression bug must be made whole, like resolving any progress or save loss.

Be responsive and fair, since cross-progression bugs touch the progress and purchases players are deeply invested in across their devices, and how you handle a lost-progress bug determines their trust in the feature. The captured progress state and timestamps are what enable fair resolution, letting you see the player progress on each platform and determine and restore what they should have. Resolving lost-progress cross-progression bugs fairly, using the captured context to verify and restore the correct progress, is essential, since the feature whole value is carrying the player progress safely across platforms, and a bug that loses it, unfairly resolved, betrays exactly the trust cross-progression is meant to provide.

Cross-progression carries valued progress across platforms. Capture the account, platforms, progress, and timestamps, and resolve loss fairly.