How to Write a Known Issues Page for Your Game

A known issues page tells players which problems you already know about, and it does more good than developers expect. Players who hit a bug check the known issues page, see it is acknowledged and being worked on, and feel reassured instead of frustrated, and they do not file a duplicate report. But a known issues page can also backfire, overwhelming or alarming players with a long list of bugs, or going stale and misleading them. Writing one well, current, clear, and appropriately scoped, builds trust and reduces noise. Here is how to write a known issues page for your game that helps.

A known issues page reduces frustration and noise

A known issues page serves players who hit a bug by telling them you already know about it. This does two valuable things: it reduces their frustration, since a player who sees their bug acknowledged and being worked on feels heard rather than ignored, and it reduces duplicate reports, since a player who finds their issue already listed does not file another. The page turns the experience of hitting a bug from frustrating and report-prompting into reassuring and quiet.

This benefit is real and often underused, since many developers do not maintain a known issues page and miss its effects. A player who hits a bug and finds nothing about it assumes you do not know and either files a report, adding to your duplicate load, or vents, while a player who finds it on a known issues page is reassured and quiet. Recognizing that a known issues page reduces both frustration and noise, by showing players you are aware, is the reason to maintain one, since it improves the player experience and lightens your support load at once.

List the significant issues, not every bug

A known issues page should list the significant issues players are likely to hit, not every minor bug in your tracker. The purpose is to address the problems players will encounter and want to know about, the notable bugs, the common crashes, the things affecting many players, and listing these serves players who hit them. Listing every trivial bug, by contrast, overwhelms the page and alarms players with a long list of problems, most of which they would never have noticed.

This scoping is important, since a known issues page that lists everything makes your game look broken and buries the issues players actually care about, while one that lists the significant issues is useful and reassuring. Curate the page to the problems worth telling players about, the ones they are likely to hit and want acknowledged, and leave the minor bugs to your internal tracker. Listing the significant issues, not every bug, keeps the page useful, manageable, and reassuring rather than overwhelming, which is essential to its serving players rather than alarming them.

Include status and workarounds

For each known issue, include its status, that you are aware and investigating, working on a fix, or have a fix coming, since the status is what reassures players that the issue is being handled, not just acknowledged and ignored. A known issue with a status showing active work tells players you are on it, which is the reassurance the page exists to provide. An issue listed with no indication of progress is less reassuring.

Include any workaround you can offer, since a workaround helps players cope with the issue until it is fixed, turning the known issues page from merely informative into actively helpful. If players can avoid or mitigate a bug by doing something, telling them on the known issues page improves their experience meaningfully while they wait for the fix. The combination of status, showing the issue is being handled, and workarounds, helping players cope, makes each known issue entry genuinely useful, which is what makes the page valuable to the players who consult it.

Keep it current

A known issues page must be kept current to be trustworthy, since a stale page that lists issues you have already fixed, or omits new ones, misleads players and erodes the trust the page is meant to build. A player who finds a known issues page listing a bug as known and unfixed, when you actually fixed it weeks ago, learns the page is unreliable and stops trusting it, which defeats its purpose.

Keeping the page current means updating it as issues are fixed, removing or marking resolved the ones you have addressed, and adding significant new ones as they emerge. This maintenance is the cost of a known issues page, but it is what keeps the page accurate and trustworthy, which is essential, since an inaccurate known issues page is worse than none, actively misleading players. A current, accurate known issues page that reflects the real state of your significant issues is what delivers the trust and noise-reduction benefits, and keeping it current is non-negotiable for those benefits to hold.

Connect it to your real issue tracking

A known issues page works best when connected to your real issue tracking, so it reflects your actual issues and their real status rather than being a separate document you maintain by hand and that drifts from reality. When the known issues page is a public view of your real tracker, the significant issues you are working on, it stays current automatically as you work, avoiding the staleness that a hand-maintained page suffers.

This connection also makes the known issues page low-effort to maintain, since it derives from the tracking you do anyway rather than being separate bookkeeping. A public tracker that exposes your significant issues and their status is essentially a living known issues page, current by construction and reflecting your real work. Connecting the known issues page to your real issue tracking, so it is a view of your actual issues rather than a separate document, is what makes it both trustworthy, since it is real, and sustainable, since it does not require separate maintenance, which is the ideal form of a known issues page.

Setting it up with Bugnet

Bugnet public tracker is essentially a known issues page connected to your real issue tracking: you expose the significant issues you choose, with their real status, and players can see what is known and being worked on, current by construction since it reflects your actual tracker. You control which issues are public, so you list the significant ones and keep the minor bugs internal.

Because the public tracker is a view of your real work, it stays current as you triage and fix, avoiding the staleness of a hand-maintained page, and players can find their issue, see its status, and even upvote and follow it, which reduces duplicate reports and reassures them. This connected, current, controllable public tracker delivers exactly what a known issues page should: the trust and noise-reduction benefits of telling players what you know, without the maintenance burden or staleness risk of a separate document, which is the most effective form a known issues page can take.

A known issues page reassures players and cuts duplicates, but only if it's current. Connect it to your real tracker.