I almost completely ignore the severity, because it's pretty much irrelevant. Many of the most important bugs people leave as minor, and some of the least important bugs some folks mark as high importance because they want to force whatever their agenda is.
More to the point, only a single person (the submitter) can set the severity of bugs. When we're trying to go through a list of hundreds of items, what individual people think about specific items is not that helpful, because obviously each thing was important enough to be submitted in the first place. What we're looking for that we don't really have at the moment is things that are important to
many people. If a bug is affecting you and you feel strongly about it, feel free to vote it up, as that brings it more to our attention than anything else.
To your confirmation on severities:
None: Not really an issue, but just something put in as a note or whatever
Yeah, this one is kind of meaningless, really.
Text: Simple typo or missing text that does not really impact gameplay
Yep, exactly. People are pretty good about that.
Minor: Normal bugs, things that don't really impact things greatly, or at least not very often (note, typos that impact gameplay due to it giving mis-information also fit here)
Yeah, pretty much, but also people just put whatever in minor.
Major: Something that occurs moderately often, and can really hurt game-play or balance when it strikes.
"Moderately often" is meaningless, though. Maybe it happens very often in one specific save, but nobody else has ever seen it, ever. That's why group feedback is so important, versus one person.
Crash: Basically, the name. If the bug causes a crash or causes a desync.
Yes, and we do take these particularly seriously, but not because of the severity that's set. We scan each bug report that comes in, more or less as they come in, and the ones that are super high priority things we look at quickly. Many of the crashes that are reported are actually bad installs or something, so they wind up going through a feedback cycle and then getting closed.
Blocking: This bug makes the game unplayable, literally. As in, this bug is so big that you better fix it in the next few hours bug. Thankfully, VERY rare.
People are very bad at determining what is a blocking issue, I've found. People put all sorts of things as blocking that are not really. As in "this balance item is off, and it's making my specific campaign too difficult until you fix this." Another good example of why I mostly ignore severity, but why aggregate voting is helpful. When blade spawners are a problem for a lot of people, we take that really seriously. When one person is having some trouble with blade spawners in their specific campaign, that's not all that meaningful without more data or a specific save, because they could have just bad luck of their opposing ships, or playing the strategy against them wrong, or whatever.
See what I mean? We have to filter an enormous amount of stuff, and the aggregate voting helps us do so. That's all I'm saying. More accurate severity settings would be great, but you can't train the random people who show up and make just a single bug report or two with them marked as blocking. And there are plenty of minor issues that actually are more serious when you look at how many people they are affecting. So it kind of cuts both ways.
