As always, you don't need any specific coding knowledge to report, but I'm going to put more details if you want to figure it out by yourself and make absolutely sure you're reporting incorrect behavior (although, if the sentence doesn't make sense in English, it probably is incorrect behavior)
Things to report :
- Broken text macros ("X picks up a the brick", "X slashes the the bush", "X attacks Automated turret", "the X screams"). This is caused by DM automatically adding "the" before improper cast names (things like "ITEM NAME HERE"). In some cases, someone might have accidentally added an improperly written "the" before a cast, hence the double "the the". DM also respects proper nouns and will not put "the" behind them, which is an issue if someone put a common item in capitals or forgot to mark one as improper (as an example, Xenomorph names were fixed lately). If the cast was not set up properly, it will put "the" behind it when not desirable (for example, if there's already "a" behind it). Last but not least, DM is set to detect when a cast is at the start of a sentence and use "The" instead of "the", but some special text like embedded icons break this.
- Grammar, lexical and syntax errors (Typos, nonsensical punctuation, train-wreck sentences, written lapsus). Being plain bad at English or skipping over a mistake or key miss in a big project is usually the cause (DM doesn't have an inbuilt spellchecker like your average modern text editing suite or browser). It's also possible the coder was tired, or distracted, or spotted the error but forgot to go back to fix it. Anything goes.
- Errors with tenses or singular/plural ("The X build a barricade", tense progression in actions that makes no sense). We have at least one method of easily broadcasting first person and third person messages to everyone in view, which might lead to errors (both being swapped, or we forgot to properly modify one after copy-pasting). It's also possible to forget what tense we started with during long actions with delays and end up with an illogical sequence of actions.
- Issues with names or descriptions (Has better lore name or plain wrong, description is outdated, wrong, silly). I'm going to put this here to make things easier. If you see a name that is plain incorrect (might slip by us, please don't report non-Aliens items unless it has a real-life equivalent) or a description that just lies to you on what an item actually does (do note descriptions don't always go in clinical details over what the item does, but what it does give should be correct), then go ahead and tell it to us, and we'll check.
- Informal or immersion-breaking text (netspeak, smileys, casual speech, ellipses, parenthesis, OOC references and suggestions and obvious immersion breakers). Getting immersed into the game is part of the goal here, otherwise it just becomes a sup-bar top-down shooter. So having an item suddenly tell you to "use a welder you dumbass
", "talk to an admin", or talk to you like a friend on a drunken Sunday night is a no-no. Debug messages are excluded unless they happen when nothing is broken.
- UK English/US English, ambiguous forms, multiple accepted spellings and foreign loanwords ("Centre/Center", "-our/-or", "-ize/-ise", Latin/French/German/Dutch/Misc. loanwords in both). Languages are complicated, and despite what your English teacher might have told you, US and UK English are different. They're just the same language (English). It is also notable that we will include foreign loanwords, even if there's "a more English version". Seeing it as a red tilde on your spellchecker might not be enough to call it an error (hell, a lot of proper English words don't show properly on major spellcheckers, like Google's spellchecker).
- User-generated messages (Non-automated announcements, radio chatter, admin messages). We can't fix the fact that people tend to make mistakes when writing or speaking English. Please make sure the game's code was the source of an erroneous message, and not a rogue human being with bad "grammer", before reporting.
- Controversial, petty, evolving and barely respected English conventions (Oxford commas to cite a famous one, spaces before question marks, exclamation points and colons, use of semi-colons, very new loanwords, periods at the end of sentences). The cause is not too relevant here, it could be foreign speakers changing part of the language, some abnormally strict rules loosening since no-one respects them, or the fact no-one cares except for the nerds at Oxford. A simple guideline here is that, if the error does not even slightly warp your understanding of a sentence, it might not be worth reporting, even if it is, in the strictest sense, "incorrect". English is a remarkably non-rigid language with many variations across the globe, and billions of non-native speakers who add their own personal touch to it. The kind of debates such as "should you put a comma before the last item in a list" or "is it acceptable as an alternative to put spaces before question marks ?" that keep Grammar Nazis up at night are not worth our time.
You can censor names if you really need to for some reason, we don't need them to track down issues. Censoring item names if they appear might not be a good idea, however.
Example of a simple, concise, useful report :
- "The Mature Hunter (666) smashes the the barricade apart"
- "You fail to deploy your sentry gun. You can't do that because you are inside the Xenomorph's spawn area!"
- "Marine Underpants assemble a sentry gun!"
