Are developers even present on these forums?

Nekhebu · August 30, 2020, 12:04am

Browsing through the forums got me thinking - is anyone from Asobo or Microsoft even officially here or are we left here to boil in our own juices? I’ve not seen one official reply to any of the threads acknowledging anything.

The whole vibe here feels a bit dead for an official forum. Subreddits for lesser known games seem to be livelier sometimes with developers participating in conversations.

LovesickChief13 · August 30, 2020, 12:08am

There are Community Managers and Moderators that watch the forums. If you have specific items for the Devs themselves then Zendesk is the place to report bugs or make recommendations. This is more of a community forum as opposed to a direct means of communications with the Devs.

StretchPrawn610 · August 30, 2020, 12:12am

There busy working, what’s your point?

Ryanosaurs13 · August 30, 2020, 12:25am

Sometimes devs may browse the forums but they don’t usually post here if at all. The official communication from MS that you will see are from the Community Managers as another use has mentioned.

The best advice I can give you is to “boil your juice” over at zendesk. You may not get a reply at Zendesk either but at least they’re actually keeping score with tickets there.

More tickets = higher chance that the bug will be prioritize. You can have a thread with thousands of replies but if there is barely any tickets on it then it’s likely nothing will happen.

FrankPilot1530 · August 30, 2020, 1:15am

Thanks @Ryanosaurs13. A message along these lines should be pinned at the top of the forum. Cheers.

R4microds · August 30, 2020, 1:21am

They are and they do read posts when possible. This was stated in multiple interviews. From what I gather, some may have gone on vacation. I would do the same after spending over half a decade developing the sim. A bit of rest and time for people to pick out the worst bugs is a good thing imo. That way it gives the community enough time to make repeat threads about the ones that they want worked on first. Mods of the forums do merge threads when possible so its quite a good system to gauge feedback / assess post release development priority.

NyxViliana · August 30, 2020, 3:44am

To supplement what @Ryanosaurs13 and @LovesickChief13 said.. It has been stated on a few occasions during streams and a post from Skeedorr that the developers do read posts on the forums, often on their free time.

The official voice from Microsoft is carried out by the Community Managers, you can view their post feed by clicking this link or by clicking on the ‘Community Posts’ link in the menu.

The moderators assist the community team by enforcing the Code of Conduct and answering questions where we can. You can view our post feed here or by clicking on the ‘Moderator Posts’ option in the menu.

An Open Letter to Microsoft

that there is no communication with the devs.

To start the community team does communicate back when they have things that they can contribute to the conversation. They do their best to respond in kind to issues that are brought up by the community and just in general threads. Granted right now there is so much work going on behind the scenes and with our current team size of two Community Managers and the many channels they have to moderate you can fill in the gap as to why communication is slow and selective to important and informative responses. We want to hit every question and the CM’s are working hard to bring every concern to the team, along with working on many other ways to help improve community feedback from the team to the community and vise versa.

Forum Moderators . Please understand that they have been chosen to help us respond on behalf of the community team. They check with the CM’s on hot button issues and act and do things as an extension of the CM’s to help them out. Please respect them and understand that they are doing what they are asked, and are here to help you, so they can help us.

Next let’s talk Devs. Conversations with the devs are something we are increasing. We are hosting a monthly Q&A with the devs on our twitch stream similar to the one we already released before launch. We want to continue the feature discovery series, and have more 1 to many conversations with the team. This will take time for us to figure out the best route to do that. You may ask "Why not just have the devs respond here? " We don’t want them to do due to the FLOOD of messages they would receive as a result, or the demand for people to read their post and fix their problem. Them responding constantly takes them away from… fixing the sim. Developing the sim, working on new features, etc.

Nekhebu · August 30, 2020, 6:08pm

Nothing, I’m just curious. GA flight simming is not my primary form of entertainment so I don’t know much about how it works with these types of games. Having participated in loads of other communities I thought it would be cool if people making the game would directly engage with the community. I don’t see anything bad about that.

I play a lot of DCS and Eagle Dynamics are relatively active on their forums, Reddit and Discord and I thought it would be nice if we had the same with Asobo.

Thanks for taking your time to reply, everyone!