Brilliant developers but poor management?

I dont see a problem with the devs. They are working on a product simulating the entire planet, its weather and everything has to be accurate or its a bug. Compare that to other titles that have make-believe worlds where “something wrong” would not be noticed.

Also consider the millions of different scenarios, places, airplanes, sceneries and addons and controllers that all have to work in various combinations without performance issues and compare that with a shoot em up or racing game that would have a hundred times fewer components/combinations to test on a much smaller map.

I am amazed they have done what they have done.

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When things don’t work at all. If there is no live weather at all injected into the game constantly. Or when I try to load a plane and it hangs. Or when I try to fly the plane and the controls don’t work as they should.

Clouds that are not exactly like they may be in real life do not constitute “brokenness” for me, specifically when I can see logical formations when I follow inputs like FBW EFB during the flights.

And yes, the missing overcasts in live weather are an issue, as well as lacking gusts and thunderstorms. Those are however only specific parts of weather. When I have snow or rain according to real life when I load into the plane, I just cannot agree with an all-encompassing statement that “weather is broken”.

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Wow…It appears that most seem to think the Devs are held to a TO TIGHT release schedule.
So, when they release an update, We (The Public Consumer) find most of the flaws within HOURS ?
Sounds like really poor program testing control to me.

yes well went there was the issue of “too many lightening” I never complained or even felt the necessity to come to the forum to address the issue, not because I was not aware of it (being very aware on the weather should behave I noticed that too) but I didn’t consider it an impelling issue, an immersion breaking one. Now the issues are so many…and for me that I fly to enjoy the virtual feel of exploring the world, the weather issues are extremely important…or I would have bought another simulator that does a better job in terms of flying!

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:repeat::repeat::repeat::repeat::repeat::repeat::repeat::repeat::repeat::repeat::repeat:
“Round and round we go…………”

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More likely MS does !!! and Asobo do what they are told to do by MS.

I prefer the monkey methodology. Give a million monkeys a million piano’s and one of them will play Beethovans 5th. :grin:

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Of course ! developers are brilliant, managers don’t do anything, they wait for developers… what’s new ?

@AstuteGecko3431, hope you make zendesk bug reports. Hopefully IFR and systems will improve sooner rather than later. Cheers.

“Brilliant developers but poor management”
Perfect description.

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Quality Control has been very very poor since day one to the point I actually think it’s nonexistent in this sim, far too many weak bugs and game breaking issues have consistently got through to Public Update Releases time and time again and it’s simply not good enough.

It seems that they either have zero QC or, as many of us have said in the past, MS just put too much pressure on Asobo to meet deadlines for product releases - Xbox & Reno two prime examples with SU5 & SU7 which both had major issues.

Will it change? Well it hasn’t yet after nearly 18 months, instead of looking forward to Sim Updates I’m now far more concerned with what they break - this mentality from MS and/or Asobo needs to change, they need to get a grip on this title and hopefully SU8 will be a start.

But then SU8 not a pressured release (unlike SU5/7), SU6 wasn’t either and that was largely OK. The update that coincides with the Top Gun DLC will be the one to keep an eye on, if that is riddled with new bugs, game breaking issues unfixed and the need for a beta thereafter with zero communication from the Devs, then we need to worry.

Quality Control; It simply needs to be better.

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Most people think their PC is in perfect shape when in fact probably less than 10% are. All complex games suffer problems on release for some people and differences in configuration can run in to hundreds if not thousands, are Asobo expected to test every one of them?

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I think the current problem about time is:

There is a 40hrs working week with work for a 45-50hrs week. Part of this week, french are not that different from other western people, is coffee and cigarette breaks, meetings and discussions, children who might still have less school than normal thanks to Covid, people getting ill, France being at almost 3000 Covid infections per 100.000 residents within the last 7 days. I can’t talk about Asobo of course but at my workplace in Germany there is very little going on atm. Many many people are working in home office now, communication is difficult, the number of sick certificates has never been that high. With people living in 2 or 3 room appartments there is often a 4 years old calling for daddy in the background, I can’t imaging how coding and development work must be in these circumstances. I’m just developing and drawing cutting tools but I’m constantly annoyed and distracted by my girlfriend or the needy dog and have to find back into work.

I’m often annoyed by Asobo and the sloppy work. But thinking about it I understand why that might be. The release state was probably a quick decision made by MS knowing about people sitting in lockdowns at home, they would all purchase a new flight sim. But now Asobo who are not different from other companies have to reinvent themselves in the pandamic and with MS pushing in the background.

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This project was, is, and continues to be primairly a photography game for gamers and streamers. The division within this communtiy as to what MSFS should be is obvious.

If the MSFS team would just have listened only to flight simmers (not even real world pilots that are not flight simmers) in the begining and now, all would likely be very well. Since streamers and gamers get more say and even get a free copy and a free $1000+ controller package, there is no way this project can be a flight sim.

Called a flight sim, but its not, and that is why the problems remain and will continue. Jorg keeps saying that they are going to make this a flight sim for flight simmers, so I hope nobody thinks that this is a flight sim.

More money for the MSFS team and problems galore for flight simmers. I personally have no problem with gamers and streamers enjoying a flight sim, but I do have a problem with the appeal to them and the favoritism for them, with the direct and intentional forsaking of aviation realism (flight simmers); this is exactly what is happening.

Its being managed and developed exactly as planned. I even detect adversity against (or at the very minimum, a strong lack of care of) aviation with this MSFS project.

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I never had a CTD till SU5. Now I get them regularly. Three in the past two days, flying standard planes between standard airports. Most of the bugs they’ve fixed have been ones they have introduced in the updates. Many bugs in the original release (eg the ATC) remain unfixed. The number of bugs is going up, one major reason being they are trying to juggle too many extra balls at once (VR, World updates, Reno, XBox). I now get umpteen messages saying my license can’t be authenticated, Azure voices is down etc. I know this can be viewed as a result so the popularity of the sim putting too much load on the infrastructure, but it’s still their problem if they did not have contingency plans in place.

Speaking as someone who used to work in a hi-tech space industry, I can state with confidence that no matter how good an engineer/developer is, QC is absolutely essential. It’s the same reason (“belt and braces”) that even experienced pilots need to follow checklists.

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I often tend to think so too and from a purely MS/Asobo work perspective this might be the case. But they didn’t reject the demand for a good flightsim, they didn’t tell PMDG or A2A off, in fact they asked them what they would need and keep talking to them regularily. I doubt that RSR is lying at us here, Scott (A2A) says the same. And Asobo even extended their team with outsiders (Working Title) who are professionally working and dedicated flight simmers who improve the stock (!) sim. Asobo themselves possibly really focus on a visual showcase but the sim itself will not fall short in the long term. It has been released way too early but it’s being worked on and I am confident (and very very impatient, I admit) that it will reach a state for PC that we can work with as hobby flightsimmers.

So it’s got nothing to do with it being a massively complex piece of software that’s having to be built for essentially an infinite combination of PCs?

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Again. It was said that SU7 was a FIRST go at blending Metar and Meteoblue data.
So what you see as a bug is actually a point for improvement in future releases. A bug would mean that the sim crashes when flying from a meteoblue area intto an airport metar area. But it doesn’t. Clouds on the ground, same thing. It’s not pretty, it’s a flaw, to be improved later. But it can be shipped. That’s the whole point of agile development. Ship what’s good enough and improve later. That’s a management decision that will yield user feedback much earlier in the process. And that’s the reason that lots of users feel tricked for being beta testers. It’s just how it works. They know it’s not perfect yet and they merge it to master nonetheless, because they find it good enough.
Maybe they will need 5 releases to get it straight.

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I will just say, it’s not even passable for me…before su7 it wasn’t perfect people say, it kinda was for me! But now? Have a look at the weather section and tell me if it’s remotely acceptable.

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