I am new to MSFS 2020… I flew A LOT of FSX, but until recently have never flown MSFS 2020 (Steam had the super duper deluxe version on sale for 50% off, so i got it.) All-in-all, I’m liking it a lot.
My question is, as the title of this post suggests, how responsive has Microsoft/Asobo been over the years to player “wishlist” items? From my very limited pov, it seems somewhere between not very and not at all.
Mike
Hi @SillyGameMonkey and welcome to the forums. 
It’s hard to say. Right now there appear to be ~3,000 Wishlist items, but I don’t know of a tag that is added to them if the wish has been included in the sim. You can’t use the “closed” status as the Wishlist can be closed for a variety of reasons.
It is a easier for bugs, as they have a fixed-on-live tag. ~ 59% of the total bugs that the MSFS team has feedback-logged and then bug-logged have been fixed, based on my calculation.
Oh boy. Short answer is yes, Microsoft and Asobo have been responding to the community from the start, way more than any big developers/publishers.
Over the years they have added so much to this sim, it’s like the most value for your money you could ever get. And there are so many ways to play the sim, you can find what works best for you.
There are no gimmicks. You can play the game equally well without spending any extra money. The downloadable content is fairly priced although ranges in quality wildly, so read reviews first.
But what is great about MSFS is they remain very open to any third-party mods. You can build practically anything with very little restrictions. For me, I have already built many custom aircraft that are constructed exactly to my liking. And I can fly them around the world as long as I want for free. They are carrying on the open tradition from FSX and X-Plane. So others will fill in the missing pieces you see.
My take is that they have been pretty responsive within the limits of being a commercial enterprise. Reading some of the wish list items I definitely get the feel that some would be / would have been a shed load of effort for a minimal benefit. Add to that the challenge of making it work on a (for pc at least) uncontrolled set of configurations and frankly I’m amazed at how open they have been. They listen but in the end they’ve got limited resources and a need to balance costs vs income.
They certainly have their own agenda as to what they think should be in the sim, but this does not often coincide with the wishlist. Even trivial but useful performance items are ignored, although they spend an awful lot of time for example on scenery updates.
This goes right back to the first release, and the “Push any key to continue” debacle, when they said it was an easy fix, but then didn’t bother to do it, and had to be reminded in the forum. A recent example is the idea to automatically change the LOD based on altitude, giving a useful performance increase. Apparently this is already in the sim for the XBox version so just needs to be enabled for the PC. I seem to remember it has twice been brought up in the Q&A sessions, with Martial saying “yes, that could be done”, but still nothing has happened, nor is likely to happen before the release of FS2024.
So welcome to the sim. There is a lot to enjoy in it, but I’m afraid you will also have to get used to the caprices of Asobo/MS, so don’t expect too much.
I would say - no interest at all.
Unless it’s tweaks to make it run on Xbox, or non-flightsim things - like spaceships…
I disagree, they’re far more responsive than other / previous devs. I don’t remember any flight sim devs, or indeed any software devs at all, holding such regular updates, q&a sessions, publishing both bug and wishlists and how popular each item is, and being (mostly) transparent about what the can / can’t or will / won’t do.
Very responsive. The problem is, many people are never satisfied, and blame the devs for not immediately fixing the things they want fixed.
You could ask, “Well, what about the things that a lot of people want fixed?”
I’d argue that some of those things are ‘bandwagon items.’
I think Microsoft/Asobo want the sim to be all inclusive rather than appealing to just a specific sector of the simming world. I think this is seen as the best way to get a massive customer base and as a way to please all stakeholders including Microsoft, the developers and the customers.
With this object in mind I think they make great efforts to appeal to all kinds of simmers and try to be responsive to customers wishes. It’s pretty much a balancing act. Sometimes they succeed sometimes they don’t. I think they genuinely try though.
At the end of the day this currently for me is still a generation in front of the competition and we will have a new sim in 4 months time with new features. The future looks pretty good. The competition has a pretty steep uphill road to climb at least imo.
i would say they are actually very responsive in some things and not so much in others. Regarding adding new content, scenery improvements and the visual side of things… they are actually very active
Regarding bug fixes, they go from slow to not at all. They seem to have their own discretion as to what is a bug that merits fixing and what’s not, regardless of what’s reported by the community. There are hundreds of bugs reported literally years ago, some of them since game launch, and the system updates go by and they dont get fixed. Little fixes that can’t be too much work for the devs to fix, but don’t get any attention whatsoever.
I keep seeing this. I know that I don’t know how easy those fixes may or may not be.
What surprised me, and continues to remain in my mind as a massive surprise, was the DX12 beta airport tile “base map bleed through” issue.
This issue was initially reported way back when DX12 beta was introduced in the 40th Anniversary release in Nov ‘21, and was reported on and reported on and reported on…
Somehow, during the last Dev Q&A during SU15 beta, in April of this year, there was some discussion about the issue that, somehow, managed to resonate with the dev team and BAM! one week or so later the very next SU15 beta release had the issue resolved.
Like that, poof!, the issue that plagued us for ~2.5 years was gone.
It does make one wonder just how many other issues we deal with everyday could be resolved with similar timeliness once the devs choose to focus on them.
exactly, its a matter of focus and priorities
Well i think there’s a bit of everything. It is true that some things get thrown around a lot in here like they are nothing… “fix the atc” they say… like its nothing… I, however, understand that making atc work in the way they are thinking that it should, would be a MAJOR undertaking. Like making a sim within a sim. That’s understandable. But some things, like the backspace key not working, or a button that has its on/off light inverted… at least in my opinion those are easy fixes. Sure, maybe you have to recompile, true. But we’ve had 15 system updates… you could have sent them down the pipe along with any of those… It just a question of decision making by management.
Well said.
This was indeed a very interesting issue. On one of the dev-streams (can’t recall exact one at the moment) Jorg indicated that upon further research they realized by recoding something involving DX12 in a different way, they could “fix” this issue. If I remember correctly though there was an unfortunate side effect of losing a few fps as a result.
I think MS/Asobo really didn’t want to implement this fix due to the impact on performance but did it anyway due to the feedback from a large number of simmers 
.
As the OP referred to the responsiveness on the Wishlist (rather than bugs, new features etc), here are the wishlists for June 24 and June 23 for comparison.
They look surprisingly similar. The only comment I would make is that several items are no longer applicable to the current flight sim as they have now been pushed to FS2024 (and not necessarily on launch).
Or it took them a fair bit of time to resolve the issue, and decided not to mention anything until they had a solution to release.
Many of such issues can only be fixed when better scenery becomes available and even then it has to be processed before we get it. It doesn’t seem to matter how many times we have been told this there’s always those few that for them it’s not good enough.
I think the average person does not fully understand how long the process for software or manufacturing actually takes. Developers are working on things today that we will see in many months from now. It just takes a long time for everything to work its way through the process no matter how simple the fix is. But in return, we get a more quality product. Everyone would complain if things were faster but buggier.
Overall, this sim has been a joy and I fly with it almost every day. The main issue I have with bugs/wish-list response is the representation of flight itself.
It’s already been pointed out that the MS/Asobo team have been very responsive when it comes to scenery and a constant introduction of new aircraft (some at a high level for default). They’ve struggled with weather and ATC, though these are far more complex environments.
The problem for me has been the basic attributes of flight itself not being properly represented. There have been big issues with crosswind weather-vaning and loss of traction/control at touchdown. There is a big disconnect from reality during the transition from ground to air and from air to ground, if there is even a moderate crosswind. Since, in the real world, there is never a takeoff or landing that is not crosswind (there are always corrections to be made), this is a major failing.
If this is really to be a “flight simulator”, then it needs to simulate the basics of flight, and take-offs and landings are a major part of that. I guess I would beg for a fix of these flight response issues before any new scenery or aircraft are developed.
Finally, fix the little things. A few updates back the exterior camera was broken (it slowly rotates non-stop). It would be nice if that new aircraft I’m enjoying didn’t turn upside down in that camera view.
Again , this sim is a major achievement and I enjoy it - however, my priorities sometine seem to be different than the developers.
