First of all, let me say that I’m a massive advocate of this sim and to me it’s the future of flight simming. Nevertheless something has baffled me since the sim came out. The sim is far ahead of its time. It’s the first cloud based game (as far as I know). How can a magnificent project like this, under the umbrella of a major player like Microsoft, be plagued by such bad quality control? There is only on explanation I can come up with. Management keeps giving the developers too tight time lines which prevents them from conducting proper quality control. I think it’s truly embarrassing.
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Why don’t you tell us what your problem is?
Then we may be able to help - or, if not point you at further help.
See how it works?
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Probably spot on… they have shown that they can do great work but there is „a“ problem at either Asobo or MS. Time is probably a large factor. And possibly internal structures but that‘s an assumption.
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This has been my general take as well – great tech, obviously some brillant devs, but questionable management, frustratingly distant & compartmentalized PR style. I don’t think anything about this is gonna change, and I don’t think XP12 is gonna offer any real competition, so we’re sorta stuck with it. Best you can do is to try to be helpful to the rest of the community, etc.
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Yeah I agree here. It appears the devs are kept to strict release schedules that they obviously struggle to meet, that’s blatantly obvious by the mess we’ve seen from SU7 and other releases. It’s also clear to see they are kept to a very rigid schedule in the way they communicate with us; rigid schedule of dev updates instead of communicating more freely with us on bigger bugs and issues on a more frequent and open bases.
It’s a shame it is all so rigid, it can often give the impression that concerns are not actively listened to or acknowledged properly. I can think of several times including recently with the live weather issues were a more transparent and two-way communication would do wonders for everyone here.
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You are probably right. There are major updates but in between there are no bug fixes/minor patches. Maybe they think their update system is too prone to error so they want to minimise the number of patches? Normally after a big update of a game you see at least a couple of bug fixing patches in the weeks afterwards.
Also the lack of customer support. There is no support forum, they basically expect us to help each other. There is Zendesk but i didn’t get anything other than a standard response yet, there seems to be no 2nd line support that will actually deal with issues.
The Q&A sessions on Twitch suggest they are very willing but unaware of some issues often described on the forums indicating they are not reading these topics. I wonder if they even have full time QA testing the game.
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We used to get bug fixes / patches and that just broke things even more, and then people started crying take your time dont rush to release, so they took to that, and nothing has changed for the most part, except now it takes a little longer for them to break something.
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We never got bug fixes. Those were all packaged inside big sim updates. Big updates/expansions tend to cause new issues because of the complexity. That is what we have seen.
The normal thing to do in the software business is fix those issues with smaller patches, and smaller patches are less likely to cause new problems. But if you never fix bugs in small patches you have to fix them in the big updates that themselves cause more issues because they are so big and complex.
So maybe it’s because of the problems with the patching system or maybe it’s because of a strict long term timeline and the devs have no time to dedicate to bug fixing.
Really? I seem to remember su5 release, and then people started whining, so they issued a bug fix a few weeks later and it actually made the sim worse (at least here). People by that point wanted them to take their time and release things when they were ready. Thats when we got the delay on the what was it 6 then the delay on 7.
It wont matter what they do, it’ll never be correct for everyone.
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I think they released maybe 3 hotfixes in total? So basically they are only releasing major updates where they add lots of things at once. When you change lots of things at once a lot of things can go wrong.
So you should test these releases and fix the game breakers before you release. Then afterwards you can push a couple of hotfixes if needed. This is how everyone works because it’s the best way.
To me it seems they never intend to release fixes unless it’s really needed and it can’t wait until the next major update, while other companies may release weekly patches.
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Yep, like all the issues we are seeing with live weather now. We hope it will get fixed, but we don’t know when that would be. SU8? Hopefully. But the bigger issues they are reported and discussed in the forum haven’t even been officially acknowledged, so who knows when we will see fixes. Again this comes down to really poor communication.
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True. We never know what’s in SU8 until they post the release notes.
Hmm. This sounds a bit strange to me. So did we, or did we not get bug fixes? I’d say we did. And, they have promised a huge one with the next SU8, that at least originally was planned to be only about bug fixes. As mentioned in those Q&As.
Hand on heart, has the amount of bugs objectively been going down or up during the time the sim has been live? I’d tend to say clearly down.
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It’s kind of funny, how the community, or at least the loudest parts of it, always seem to focus on one issue only, and forget everything else that this community has been complaining about. And making fixing that one issue in the next update the most imporrtant thing ahead of those other longer standing issues that we used to complain about equally loudly before we started focusing on this one…
The weather… no it is not perfect, and yes, it needs improvements for sure. But it really is not the biggest issue for a lot of us. And no, it is not “broken”.
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Yeah, they’ve been getting better and too many people overlook this. Probably largely due to the selection bias of being on a forum where people go for tech support – the group who has intractable installation/CTD issues and consequently does nothing but trash Asobo is naturally overrepresented here.
Firstly, unless someone has insider information, we have no clue as to what constraints are placed on the developers.
Secondly, if the developers are so brilliant, then why the need for such robust quality control?
Perhaps QC is overworked with less than brilliant development. I honestly haven’t a clue which is true…just like almost everyone else on here.
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We don’t decide what the Developers prioritise on their updates, they do. They decide what is important and what isn’t, we as users can only give them feedback. What they choose to do with that feedback is totally up to them.
For many it is the biggest issue, for many others as you say it isn’t. That’s just the nature of bugs, they impact some users more than others. If it’s not a big issue for you then that’s great! 
But this group with legit concerns of not being able to run the sim at all has clearly diminished over time. Sure, some have likely just given up, but I am quite sure many have also found solutions to their issues here in the forums and through the updates. It’s a bit like the famous mathematical example of coin tossing; Take a group of 1000, and after 10 tosses, you will have people with a perfect score.
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it’s a big issue for a lot of us, and yes it’s broken otherwise we would be not talking here about the many issue that are affecting it, when is going to be broken for you? when there is no clouds at all? and the many other bugs are not immersion breaking like the weather is…the weather being so important that was basically one of the selling point of the game. Maybe your priority are different…
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Personally think criticism should be leveled at the product and the product alone and keep opinions about management, developers, moderators, community managers out of it.
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