Legit question. I see all the posts about complaints. Suggestions. Bugs… Bad feedback. Constructive feedback. Issues. concerns etc etc… And yet i’m fairly sure i’ve not once seen any kind of Admin / Developer feedback or reply to any of these topics…
Doubtless asobo look at the forums… but is anyone actually here to you know… engage in the community? You’d think with all the issues we’ve been having someone would have atleast made a statement to say they’re aware of it. but so far i’ve seen nothing…
Why are asobo ghosting the forums? this isnt a good stratagy for keeping a happy community. Would Very much like to see more engagement from your side devs!. I’m sure you’re doing your best to resolve the issues but a quick 5 minute post saying “we know we’re looking” would make your community much less toxic.
They’re good at lurking but their absence has been conspicuous in these forums from the start. A couple of moderators, as great as they are, shouldn’t replace staff from checking in either imo.
Microsoft / Asobo is taking all the feedback out of the forums and they are working with it. If you check out the posts with the most upvotes and also check the patch notes, you notify that they are taking the most upvoted issues on their patch list.
The problem that nobody makes a statement is much more located in our community. The forums are filled with a bunch of complaints and most of them just contain mad hate speech.
Just be happy, that the staff is focusing on fixing issues and not on discussing in 100 senseless topics with people who can’t be statisfied anyway.
Everyday, I read minor issues here, that are totally semi important to the Sim and even people are raging in this topics.
Maybe, we all should think about what this Sim really is, that it uses new technology, you can’t find in any other game and we should be happy, that Microsoft still invested money in a game, that will never be that successful like other game genres with more paying people.
Everyone here is only looking on his problems. MY problems are the most important, why nobody fixes MY problems?
For me, not MSFS is the problem. The problem is a part of our community, that is inpatient and just self centered!
If a single Asobo dev. posted on here openly, they would get jumped on, and likely abused, by forum members. It would not be constructive, or helpful, would lead to more overhead for moderators, who would then need to tidy those threads up, and just cause unnecessary upheaval for very little back, I suspect.
“Hi! I’m Luis, one of the Asobo devs. Just checking in to see how you’re all enjoying Microsoft Flight Simulator right now?”
500 people proceed to scream their frustration at someone that just wants to do a good job, sprinkled with a few voices that appreciate their efforts, drowned in a cacophony of frustration.
No, they have all the access they need without making themselves visible. They don’t need that kind of hassle.
For certain they read it and there is to my knowlage atleast one moderator lurking around. mostly doing the community posts and occasional “Read the F.A.Q / have you tried turning it off and on again?” answers.
And sure 100% involvement is not going to happen. And sure they will no doubt talk about this in the next big community update… And Sure They will no doubt address these issues in the next patch.
What i’m talking about is simple “We are here and taking notice of your guys concerns” kind of posts in the mean time. They don’t need to engage actively. even a “known issues resulting from patch x.x.x” would do.
or a “Dont worry guys we got this” message and leaving it at that. ya know? Simple Small. statement which the community that care will appreciate and the toxic side can make of it what they wish.
What would such an engagement look like? What kind of replies do we expect? Something like “we are working on it” in a few threads here and there (there are sooo many duplicates) won’t change a thing and only encourage trolls to continue their bs.
Regarding the OP’s complaint that the developers presumably haven’t acknowledged the existance of specific bugs and that they are working on it: See Known Issues in the titlebar of this forum (ymmv on mobile).
IMO this is the perfect strategy. Little to none direct interaction in the forums by the devs - let the community managers handle it. Have a compiled list of known issues the devs are working on. What else do we need?
Yeah its a community strategy i’ve seen from a few other developers, can’t say i agree with it. For sure it will have no actual effect on the simulation at the end of it. and only a mild impact on the actual sims popularity. so at the end of the day my thoughts and opinions on it don’t even matter.
I’m very aware of that. But the outcome of that is eventually these forums will either die or turn into a wasteland with just the occasional “look at this pretty scenery” message.
But yeah at the end of it. it dosn’t matter I just don’t agree with this form of community management is all
With regard to current issues, it would have been nice to have a statement on what exactly they did for FPS gains so a significant portion of this forum isn’t running experiments with settings and comparing screen shots of launch and patch 1 versions.
A simple in depth explanation is all they need to drop. Something like “we decided that we had our settings configured too high on the quality side. Your high is now what medium was and ultra is high. We are still working on getting the same level of ultra you had before but this will help min spec machines run the game”
After that they don’t really need to respond either. But it gives us more than that known issues or dev update.
Also, if you look at other games like League or Nba 2k, they have community managers that will say they’ve talked to a dev and give timelines on updates in a few hrs. Or they’ll say the change is intended. Or they actually forgot to put some notes in the patch notes.
With this format, there’s way too much vagueness and that’s kind of leaves people headless and running and screaming in different directions. No crowd control at all. Like if planes didn’t have an emergency exit plan that they tell us every time we board an airliner.
There may well be a healthy debate about what these forums are and what these forums should be.
There is clarity in what these forums are in both the forum welcome post and the Code of Conduct, which opens with a comment as to the aims of the forum.
In brief this is primarily a community forum for MSFS simmers (to discuss the sim and give feedback) and a place for fellow simmers to help post bugs and workarounds for the benefit of fellow simmers. This is not a venue for officially reporting bugs (even though MS may gather information from the posts on the forum) nor is it a place for meeting or discussing issues with the developers. However feedback through the official channel of Zendesk is always welcome.
What we make of this community is up to us together, constrained by the guidelines set out in the Code of Conduct.
So What we can expect in short is community stuff / events etc etc.
Posting of bugs. And work arounds (if any) provided by us.
But besides a known issues list no real comments from devs about current issues until the next big updates. and no active engagement from their side.
Good to know. Again i dont really agree with this i think having active devs and getting involved in discussions on hot topics is really good for a healthy and active community.
But hey. atleast you guys are lurking thats something
Right above your post is a tab called “Known Issues” which is constantly updated.
There is the Zendesk tab for convenient reporting there also.
There is a bug thread that can receive upvotes by the community, thereby focusing Asobo’s efforts.
There is the Wishlist thread that can receive upvotes from the community.
There are weekly developer notes released here.
The roadmap is updated and released within the dev dairy.
I can understand having some frustration and rightly so as there are items that should have been cleared before the sim took off, but lately this forum is starting to remind me of the scene where the locals scurry out of town with torches and pitchforks in hand.
Just take a deep breath…breath…there ya go! Everything’s gonna be fine.
But I don’t see a necessity for it.