Making Bug Reporting Easier for Players and the Team

Wishlist
1

I wanted to make a small Wishlist suggestion regarding the current bug reporting process.

First: I completely understand why the team prefers separate bug reports. From a QA/tracking perspective, isolating issues individually makes complete sense.

That said, once players begin interacting with larger interconnected systems like:

  • businesses

  • careers

  • crime

  • social AI

  • household autonomy

…the current reporting structure can become difficult from the player side.

A single gameplay session can easily produce multiple related bugs that appear connected to the same underlying system behavior.

For example, while running a café-style business, players may encounter:

  • employees ignoring assignments

  • wandering interruptions

  • customer interaction failures

  • broken restocking logic

  • off-lot simulation issues

  • social AI interruptions

From the player’s perspective, those don’t feel like six unrelated bugs. They feel like:

“Something in the business AI/system is unstable.”

Because of that, reporting every issue separately can become overwhelming and may scatter related reports across the forum, making recurring patterns harder for both players and the team to identify.

Possible Improvements

1) Extensive System-Based Categories + Subcategories

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Examples:

Businesses

  • Restaurant

  • Hair Salon

  • Retail

Subcategories:

  • Employees

  • Customers

  • Assignments

  • Interactions

  • Objects

  • Off-Lot Simulation

Crime

  • Heists

  • Wanted System

  • Police

  • Court

Subcategories:

  • Lockpicking

  • Hacking

  • Scripted Events

  • World Interactions

Careers

  • Music Production

  • Reporter

  • Researcher

Subcategories:

  • Tasks

  • Promotions

  • Interviews

  • Workplace Interactions

  • Objects

This would help players organize reports while still allowing the team to isolate individual bugs internally. There can even be a quick wins category listing simple lot issues, e.g., a door on a public lot needs to be moved, or a restaurant is missing a trash can.

2) Grouped / Linked Reporting

Allow players to:

  • Create one “master” gameplay-session thread under a main category

  • Attach multiple related bugs underneath it

  • Link related bug reports together so players don’t have to keep uploading the same save file in multiple threads. It would help reduce duplicate uploads, repeated context explanations, and fragmented investigation efforts for issues that appear to share the same underlying system behavior.

Additional ideas:

  • Players can quickly +1 existing bugs individually within the thread instead of creating duplicates

  • AI summary at the top lists bugs noted in the thread individually, with the number of +1’s

  • Known workarounds or temporary fixes can be added to the summary

Benefits:

  • Easier for players to check if a bug report already exists

  • Easier for the team to identify recurring patterns

  • Reduces duplicate reporting and repeated setup/context explanations

  • The current AI gets better at connecting players to relevant threads as they write their bug report

I think changes like this could create a better balance between:

  • keeping bug tracking manageable for the team

  • and keeping reporting manageable for players

Especially in early access, where interconnected systems can generate a large number of overlapping bugs very quickly.

Please chime in with anything you’d like to add @HeinziDerHeld and @yofford.

5 Likes
2

Thank you for tagging me. I will deep dive once I get time when I make it home from work. This is great! :clap:t5:

2 Likes
3

You’ve managed to put so many great ideas in this in-depth suggestion. Love it!

The only thing that comes to my mind as additional improvement to make sure the forum becomes organized better than it currently is: Choosing categories, subcategories and hashtags should become mandatory (e.g. 3-4 before being able to post a new thread). If the team adds this to the detailed suggestion above, a true and constantly visible structure for all bugs would develop instantly.

Maybe having the option (for the creator of each thread / subcategory) to connect certain replies in a specific order to their main thread would allow even easier access for bug reporting, especially for new forum users :thinking:

1 Like
4

I actually really like where your mind is going with this, and your comment gave me another idea that might reduce bug-reporting friction for both players and the team!

Do you think something like AI-assisted categorization/tagging could work here?

For example, a player could choose a simple base structure like:

Bug Report → Crime → Heist → Bank

Then while typing:

“The vault door is inaccessible during the Southwest Bank robbery…”

…the system could automatically suggest additional tags like:

  • Vault Door

  • Interaction Failure

  • Lockpicking

  • Collision

  • Scripted Event

The player could then simply:

  • accept suggestions

  • remove incorrect ones

  • or add more context if needed

That way:

  • the forum still becomes more organized

  • recurring patterns become easier to spot

  • but players don’t feel like they need to manually navigate a huge taxonomy system before posting a bug report

And since inZOI already has AI-assisted related-thread suggestions while creating posts, this feels like it could build naturally on top of systems they already seem interested in using.

I also think this could help with another issue:
players often know what broke, but not necessarily which underlying system broke.

For example:

Is “wander around interrupts work tasks” a career bug?
AI issue?
Pathfinding problem?
Task queue conflict?

Most players can describe the behavior clearly, but expecting them to classify the exact root cause every time may be difficult.

AI-assisted suggestions could help bridge that gap while still keeping the reporting process lightweight and collaborative.

Honestly, I think your idea plus AI-assisted organization together could create a really nice middle ground.

1 Like
5

Yes, that’s a great idea. AI is very capable of performing those simply tasks, especially when the users describe the bugs in such easy sentences. This would make organizing the forum a dream from my point of view =)

1 Like