We're Running a Bug Hunt (and We'll Pay You in Credits to Break Things)

NothIQ is in early access. That is a polite way of saying the app works, we use it ourselves, and there are absolutely bugs in it that we have not found yet. So we are going to ask the people most likely to find them, which is you, to go looking on purpose. And we are going to pay you in assist credits for the ones that count.

It’s called the Bug Hunt. Here is how it works and why we’re doing it.

Why we’re doing this

The honest answer is that we cannot test NothIQ the way you use it. We built it, so we use it the way we expect it to be used. We click the buttons in the order we designed them to be clicked. We feed it the kind of campaign data we had in mind when we wrote the code. That is exactly the problem. The bugs that survive into early access are the ones that only show up when somebody does something we never thought of, with a campaign that looks nothing like ours, on a setup we never tested.

That somebody is you. You are going to upload a hand drawn map we did not expect, name a room something with an emoji in it, paste in a 9000 word backstory, share a link in a way we did not plan for, and find the thing that breaks. That is genuinely useful to us, and the polite thing to do is pay you for it.

The other reason is simpler. Early access is the time to fix this stuff. A bug found now is a bug your future self never hits in the middle of a session with five people waiting on you. We would much rather you break it than your players break your night.

What you get

Verified bugs earn 50 to 100 assist credits each.

The amount depends on how serious the bug is. A cosmetic glitch is worth less than something that loses data or breaks a core flow like map generation or sharing. We decide the amount, and we’ll be fair about it, but that’s the rough range.

A couple of important things about that, so nobody is surprised later:

The reward is for the report, not for whether we end up shipping a fix. If you find a real, reproducible problem and tell us about it clearly, that’s what earns the credits. Some bugs get fixed fast, some sit in the queue, some turn out to be environmental, and a few we decide not to fix at all. None of that changes what your report was worth. We are not going to make you wait on our release schedule to get paid.

First person to report a given bug gets the credit. If three people report the same thing, the credit goes to whoever got there first. And anything already on our list does not count, since we already knew about it.

What counts as a bug

The stuff we want:

• Things that break. A button that does nothing, a flow that errors out, a map that never generates, a page that crashes.
• Things that are wrong. Credits that don’t add up right, a shared link that shows the wrong thing, data that saves incorrectly or disappears.
• Things that look broken. Layout that falls apart, text that overflows, an image that renders wrong.

The stuff we don’t want, and that will not earn credits:

• Anything that involves messing with an account that isn’t yours, or trying to get at other people’s data.
• Hammering the service to see if you can knock it over. No load testing, no stress testing, no automated scanners. Please don’t try to take the thing down.
• Bugs in services we use but don’t control, like the hosting, the payment processor, or the AI image generation. If the issue is genuinely ours, report it. If it’s their outage, that’s not a NothIQ bug.

The short version: poke at your own stuff as hard as you want, but don’t go after other people or try to break the service for everyone. There are full rules linked at the bottom, and yes, you should read them, because the legal version is more precise than this paragraph.

How to report a bug

Send it to [REPORTING CHANNEL] with:

• What you were trying to do.
• What you expected to happen.
• What actually happened.
• The steps to make it happen again. This is the big one. A bug we can reproduce is a bug we can fix. A bug we can’t reproduce is a bug we stare at for an hour and then give up on.
• A screenshot or screen recording if you’ve got one.

Please don’t put real personal information about yourself or anyone else into a report. Use test data.

One more thing. If you find something security related, something where you could see data you shouldn’t or do something you shouldn’t, please don’t post it publicly before we’ve had a chance to fix it. Send it to us, give us a reasonable window, and we’ll sort it out. That protects everyone using the app, including you.

That’s it

NothIQ gets better faster when the people actually running games at the table are the ones telling us what’s broken. The Bug Hunt runs through early access. Go find the weird stuff. Break it on purpose. Tell us how. We’ll thank you in credits.

Full program terms are here. Happy hunting.