Dear Satya Nadella,
Re Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020
I would like to congratulate you and your team for bringing back MSFS after so many years absence.
From the press you are getting it seems it’s been a huge success with accolades galore for the incredible visual representation of our Planet and for the undoubted marriage of several ground breaking technologies which have enabled this to happen. And your team is understandably, clearly and openly, wallowing in their success.
Many of us who participated in the Alpha and Beta were surprised to say the least, when in July it was announced that August 18th would be the release date. Many posts (subject to an NDA) highlighted this and voiced concern. We took time and effort, over 5 months, to highlight and report bugs and issues only to find almost all had not been addressed in the Beta. I thought “they” must have an RC they are holding back with most of the major stuff fixed. “They” didn’t.
This letter comes after considerable thought but the tipping point came yesterday when suddenly many users started to report stuttering, myself included, with nothing having changed on our systems. Many re-installed or even reported re-installing Windows to try to fix the issue. But the problem persists and all the while, nothing from your side to acknowledge the issue. Where was your Community Manager? Who monitors the forum for possible issues. Right now sending stuff to Zendesk is like writing to the Ether. Please read this: Stutter that has appeared in the last 24 hours
I look carefully at the posts in the Forum and can see clearly that there are many many satisfied customers who are fully or partially satisfied with what has been released. There are also many many who are downright disappointed or angry. There is no way of telling the relative proportions or who are “simmer’s” and who are “gamer’s”.
Throughout the Alpha and Beta I was a strong and staunch believer that Microsoft and Asobo would pull off the impossible and launch a simulator which would be both a game to gamer’s and a fully fledged simulator for the simming community. The Twitch Q&A covered this nicely but my conclusion now is that you have so far lost the plot.
The Forum is littered with your customers who can’t get even the basic simulator running. After 5 months in Alpha and Beta, why?
If you have someone go through the forum for you and identify the issues, it will become apparent that there are many common threads. Way too many to identify or prioritize here because doing so will upset users who have differing priorities or outstanding issues of their own. But maybe there are hundreds. So I would implore you to do the exercise and then have your people quickly work the list to get things fixed and to report to the community on progress. Jorge promising new detail areas and new “stuff” is all well and good but getting what we have, fixed up should also be on the radar and communicated at the same time.
I cannot speak for anyone other than myself so please allow me a paragraph of self indulgence.
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SimConnect breaks the program.
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No “steam gauge” airplane with DME, really important given that the Garmin 430/530 implementations are so far from complete as to be pretty much useless for this purpose because the units cannot be decoupled. I bought the top end Premium Deluxe version to get the 172 “steam” IFR that has been core to MSFS for so long. In the absence of decent specifications ahead of time, was I wrong to assume I’d get it?
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A camera system that’s neither intuitive nor easy to understand.
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Sensitivity issues with the control binding system which have been there since day one.
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Really deeply rooted basic performance issues being reported by even users with top end machines.
But core to my point here is that I’m not seeing many issues since launch which were not reported as issues during the Alpha and Beta. That in and of itself is inexcusable. Bugs on launch are to be expected but not bugs which have been reported for the past several months by committed volunteers who signed up to help you by giving their time to our community.
I don’t want my money back. What I want is the simulator to do what it says on the tin; simulate flying an airplane. I don’t expect study level but the basic stuff must be a good approximation. A Cessna 172 with enough to fly real IFR with “steam” gauges. And documentation which tells users how to fly the incomplete airplanes without discovering mid flight that some systems are INOP. So many posts start with, “Am I doing something wrong?”.
“Known Issue” posts are all well and good but for many they are way too obscure and long! And they are currently at least 6 days out of date. YouTube has many videos on How To in simulators but when you come back to MSFS, so much of the stuff is either INOP or working incorrectly.
Personally, I’m here for the long haul and hope you will do something to get this right. You rushed this to market and it shows.
Thank You.
Chris Stanley.
A Microsoft customer since cp/m on a Z80 card in an Apple //e.
are a couple of examples.
. Mind you I don’t actually disagree with anything you’ve written, but I do think the devs need more than a week to sort through the feedback and get a sensible communication strategy up and runnning for keeping us informed