An Open Letter to Microsoft

For some of us it’s been 8 months. Enough time to set a trend.

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met the captain obvious, and he told me about the current situation in the world, the older the digital world becomes, the greater the likelihood of error, since the number of system components increases, and in our case it increases very, very much, so if you think that you are in frustration , you don’t know how frustrated young programmers are when faced with this massive lump of problems
i think that captain is very good man with big empathy heart, but i feel angry and fury… and that’s feelings are overwhelming :slight_smile:

Nice comment…nothing to do with the dollar…all to do with the potential frustration.
If MS want to hire me as a Beta tester and pay me accordingly…I’d put up with with that.

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Q and A stream, Where? Were not all phd enabled internet gurus who can fin anything anywhere anytime. Give me a break. I`m sitting on a £3500 motion platform that wont work without simconnect and other periferals also no good without the borked Simconnect.

I really like the camera system, it’s 100x better than what we had for FSX.

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Oops the CEO send open letter to MS CEO… then later MS CEO will think about should they continue this game?

I think it’s important to remember that the installation, loading or un-playable errors were not (to my knowledge) rife during the Alpha/Beta. These have only become a major issue when the wider audience came on board. They will of course fix the issues.

But the game is largely playable and will get better to appease the hardcore simmers. I agree the release date was premature. A lot of testers were surprised by the August date, but this is nothing more than a business decision by MS and I have no doubt behind closed doors Asobo were not keen either.

The biggest fault of MS and Asobo is their silence. That hurts those people who have paid a serious amount of cash and can’t play. But, that’s the corporate way.

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What concerns me is that the developers appear not to listen. I think back to the videos showcasing the program a year ago, various concerns were raised. Why are cars driving in two different directions on the same side of road? A year later, nothing has changed. A year ago, why are the trees so tall? A year later nothing has changed. And there are other concerns that have been expressed numerous times by testers and apparently ignored.

I fear that Asobo and MS may be paying lip service to the community. Some praise the sim if they have a personal financial investment in the project. I get that some invested a lot of time and perhaps even money in hardware to run the sim and feel that they have a closer connection to it but they appear to be forgetting or ignoring what was said many months ago about the importance of engaging with the community and listening.

So I share the concerns of people that are disappointed and are not afraid to express that or the lack of feedback from the developers on this forum.

I dont know where this product will go but MS track record is one of ultimately letting people down if the numbers don’t crunch the way they want them too. They did it with FSX, Windows Phone where an entire company was bought and all but died and they may do the same with FS. Time will tell but I am not holding my breath.

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An extremely well written letter and mirrors my thoughts exactly. This product has been released far too early and as such I feel I’ve been misled and therefore disappointed. I will be closing the book on this program for at least 12 months in the hope that when I return to it maybe it will have made significant improvements that will allow me to fly complete and accurate aircraft in a world that isn’t full of stutters!

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I’m also a fan of the camera system. I think it’s very clean and easy to use! Presets I want to use quickly are bound to my throttle and I can use drone cam with the little joystick hat (On main stick) combined with d-pad from the throttle. I honestly don’t see how it could be any easier to use, even without my rebinds!

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Back in the day we could move the camera easily with just keyboard arrow and mouse…
Now, you need like 10 buttons? lol

PMDG are talking late 1st Q '21 for the NG3. Maybe you won’t need to wait 1 year! A2A might oblige too. Can’t for the life of me find it again but somewhere on the PMDG forum Robert Randazzo took a slight dig at MSFS hinting at some frustration in communicating.

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Then use drone cam instead of external camera, it’s the same thing as what you mention! It’s 4 buttons to move around!

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Some could argue that a multinational company with 50 years of experience of software development should already have a sensible communication strategy up and running before release…

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They really have a problem with communication, plenty of issues have been reported (missing airport, bugged systems, etc.) … Yet no reaction from the team except generic unrelated message on ZenDesk.

I truly hope the next dev updates will address all this points, else I’m worried for the future.

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You are entirely correct. I’ve just become so numb to it after years of game releases with similar stories. No excuse really, just… as expected in my experience.

Still, reality hits hard, so hopefully the Asobo and MS teams will get their ■■■■ together and give us a clear indication of what will be fixed and when :slight_smile:

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Well spoken, however maybe a little premature? There are a lot of issues, but maybe before penning a letter like this, give them a chance to get an update or two out. Like you said, everyone has things they want to see fixed first. Personally, the lack of reliable/accurate weather is a deal breaker for me, but it’s a process. The developers definitely could work on their communication, and at least update their list of fixed or triaged items much better than they are doing.

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We see a lot of Asobo selling the eye candy, including really great weather shots. Begs the question is this a travel game or a flight simulator. :joy: But yes @gr82bagator, live weather is a thing for me too. And I think the SDK as released prevents 3rd parties from inserting weather into the SIM. (But I may be wrong on that)

I consider myself a perfectionist at heart in the situations that really count.

In my opinion if you run an Alpha for a year, you don’t end that Alpha until the issues flagged early in the Alpha are remedied.

The testers obviously flew over say, Niagara Falls, or any waterfall. They noticed trim tabs not being animated. They noticed the in cockpit zoom level resetting itself every time you use quick look left/right which otherwise would actually work brilliantly.

I don’t need first hand knowledge of the testing phase to know that they obviously saw these things.

So what the team should be asking themselves is, what stopped them from fixing Alpha-level issues before launch?

My guess is, the same pressures from the same people, who don’t deliver product they just talk about it, that forced them to keep the Beta closed and to rush it as well.

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I agree with almost everything that is written here, with this one exception. My system is no longer cutting edge, a 9900K/1080 combo, and before release, and after reading users reports, I had resigned myself to running at High-end settings. That is in fact what it defaulted to. But I have been surprised to see that I can in fact notch this up to the Ultra preset, with nothing altered, and still get 40-50fps in most cases. In bush locations I’ve seen it pegged at 60.

So if even higher performance systems are having problems, I can only assume that unlike me where I expected less, perhaps they are expecting too much? They might be the “4K @ 60fps or it sucks” crowd for all I know.

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