Being in this community for a while now, and seeing the interaction between the users and Asobo, i am left with a conflicted impression: It seems to me that Asobo do genuinely care about user feedback, they are trying to deliver the best product they possibly can… but at the same time, it looks like there is a pretty wide gap between what the community is reporting and what Asobo is hearing.
This is the disconnect people are talking about in multiple threads on this forum. I don’t think it’s done intentionally. It seems to me like the overarching issue here is that the method through which feedback is passed from the community to the devs is fundamentally broken. Look at the Q&As. People spend time writing elaborate posts, bringing in evidence, suggesting fixes, discussing user experience. Out of that, all that makes it to Jorg, Seb, and Martial’s ears is one, maybe two sentences at best. Take the question about the 3 cloud layers in ATIS. It took half of chat screaming about it for them to finally realize what we were talking about, that’s how abbreviated the question was. Or the night lighting issue mentioned here on the forums. They are not shown before and after photos of the night lighting. They are not given any detailed information on what the issue is. The community is talking about things such as the size and appearance of lights and Asobo responds with “yes, we’re aware of it, we’re fixing the long distance lights” But… that’s not what we’re talking about. The information that makes it from the forums to the devs seems to be very abbreviated. So short of them personally reading the thread they are not getting any of this information. And even when they do it, this thread has over 1000 messages. I’m pretty sure they don’t have time to read through that.
I think what we need to do right now is, before complaining about this bug, or that bug, or this downgrade, or this issue, we should make it a top priority for Asobo to change their feedback system, especially during Q&As. More detail needs to be provided to them when the question is asked.
My suggestion is that there must be a team of people, maybe dedicated users from the forum, that take the questions suggested for Q&As and compile a slide or two of evidence and descriptions which is then passed to the devs during Q&A. That way they can see what we’re talking about. I feel like this would massively improve the relation between the community and Asobo. At the very least, we’d all be on the same page. The knowledge floating about on this forum is absolutely incredible. The amount of work some people put into testing issues and explaining technical details is downright humbling at times. It would be a crying shame if the devs aren’t aware of this.
Would it not be simpler for Jorg, Seb & Martial to be pointed directly to the relevant threads in the Q&A folder and for them to ensure that they read at least the first few posts before the Q&A? After all Jayne closes the Q&A questions a few days prior to the Q&A.
We know that in a previous Q&A Seb must have been aware of at least some of the questions because he had the time to create some flights to show as part of his answers.
It might be. In the last Q&A it looked to me like all three of them were pretty tired. I can imagine that all of them worked pretty hard to make the release deadline. If this was the case, i don’t see how they would have time to put in some casual reading before the Q&A.
Not to mention that if such a slide pack were put together before the Q&A it can be used as reference later.
Sounds like a great idea, if there are a group of users who are willing to consistently devote time to compiling feedback. That’s always the problem with volunteering time. People get really excited to help at first then enthusiam tends to taper off.
The distrust or discontent or anger, whatever you choose to call it, began way back when the game was first brought to the public’s attention. PR departments want to create hype around a product in hopes of higher sales. They want to create a desire for the product. For whatever reason, TRANSPARENCY has become vogue, and MS/ASOBO started this transparency claim by releasing videos of the development process and showing off all the new tech being used. This created more hype and more desire for the game. I think it also created unrealistic expectation. PR departments, I am sure, were loving it.
Fast forward to release of the game, Buyers were happy that the game had launched and started playing. It didn’t take them long to realize that things were not all that had been claimed would be. Things didn’t work. Things were missing. Things were broken, etc.
In keeping with the whole transparency theme, the developers had to answer questions and state that things would be fixed. As time passed, some things were tweaked, many things not fixed and many things not addressed. On top of that, with each update, other things got broken. Name one update that has not broke something or created another problem. Now the community is at the point that many of us just don’t believe anything they say. The developers have been ‘painted into a corner’. This, IMO is because of this so called transparency, which in the case of this game was nothing more than marketing.
True transparency not only highlights the good, but also showcases the problems. I think they would have been better served if they had just said " We have a new FS game coming out. It will be great " and left it at that. If you are going to be transparent, admit when you can’t get something to work.
The whole Q&A sessions, roadmaps and videos they put out, I think, do more harm than good in building community trust. Just do their best work and make the game is as good as possible while not breaking other stuff along the way. Stop creating unrealistic expectation with all the marketing hype.
I’m not disputing anything you say, but wouldn’t it be a shame if this was all one big misunderstanding? Improving communications goes a long way. Whatever the outcome is, it will be better than the present. We will all be on the same page, finally. Whether that page is “Asobo finally understands us” or “Asobo doesn’t really care”, that remains to be seen, but i think it will be the former rather than the latter.
I think ASOBO cares, if for no other reasons than money and reputation. If I came across otherwise, I’m sorry.
I just think this whole game got off on the wrong foot. PR and Marketing people created expectations that were too high and now this distrust is the result. Asobo is now faced with an almost impossible task. I still feel that they would be better served by locking the doors and doing their best work instead of be paraded around the internet trying to respond to all the fires. I think we are on the same page mostly.
Let’s be careful to not bring up the past and what has/has not happened. That is negative. There are always three fingers pointing back at you while pointing.
Let’s focus this conversation on today, tomorrow, and the next six months and beyond. “Then” we are working towards a common goal.
I don’t think we should expect Seb and Martial to be able to paint an accurate picture of what Asobo have read and understood about every topic discussed in these fora. Their primary function is to lead the efforts, not to digest all the details.
A good example is the seemingly eternal thread about night lighting, where there is an abundance of valuable info for whoever may be assigned to make improvements to this. Just because Seb and Martial appear not to have much of that info available to them, doesn’t mean that it isn’t digested and fed in a suitable form to the involved programmers. I’m not saying that it is, just that we cannot tell from what we hear in the Q&As.
This is the downside of having the top brass show up on the screen to represent what Asobo are working on. They’re bound to appear ignorant of certain things that the floor people involved are well aware of.
On top of that, they both seemed tired and less prepared than usual the other day. Orchestrating a big update takes its toll, I’m sure.
I would much rather ASOBO communicated with the 3rd part Developers, than with “The COMMUNITY”, AND if the 3rd party developers were the ones, communicating with the Community and were the filter/conduit for “relevant” information to pass back to ASOBO.
That is true, but the problem is that it sounds like they’re working on a different problem than what people are reporting. I noticed this both with the night lighting topic and with the rudder issues. A lot of people are pointing out the crazy windmilling effect planes have when taking off with a crosswind. But what we see is the devs working on rudder dynamics in flight. Almost like they were only told “there’s a problem with the rudder”, they had a look at it, found a problem, and stuck with that.
Like i said in my first post, i don’t think they’re doing this cause they don’t care or something like that. If that’s what i thought, i wouldn’t have posted any of this. As such, i’m hoping to draw attention to this breakdown in communication.
I certainly hope they read the Questions before the (or a couple of days before ) the session starts.
So they can read up on our exact issues, and prepare for the answer.
Congratulations to all in this topic nailing this one down!
Your comment about stop rendering then starting again reminds me something I’ve posted in the forum and Zendesk some time ago. I’ve observed the same pattern with Trees where as you get closer, they disappear then reapear:
Being one among others documenting the exact problems with LOD and Trees for months, I was indeed quite puzzled they were answering as if they were just discovering there could be an issue with LOD and Trees. It is especially even more troubling to me that IIRC, in a previous Q&A the same topic was brought to their attention with the same reaction.
@Jummivana
I believe the question of LOD bugs can’t just be ignored again in the next Q&A and it is important this is officially acknowledged and being worked on once for all. We’re counting on you!
Or this other example, where it took an enormous amount of energy repeating every single time the VR snapshot was not reflecting the community topics and votes, until this gets finally acted upon and corrected:
Yeah, at the very least if they read the questions a day or two before the session (when the CM closes the subforum) they wouldn’t be surprised by ‘new’ bug reports.
Right now… there doesn’t seem to be much point to it. I am giving them the benefit of the doubt and i am assuming they have good intentions, which is why decided to make this thread. I am hoping we can find out what the truth is here. Do they care about the wealth of information available here, on these forums? Or have they completely tuned out of the forums and are only taking vague cues from here? Their response to this, if one ever comes, should make it clear where they stand.
I honestly believe your intention is not to nailing Asobo nor Microsoft at all.
I shall add (to make it clear about my 2 posts above) my posts are not meant to nail them either.
The topic subject matter is what can be done to make feedback from the community to the developers a better experience for both, with a better outcome for both too. I’m trying to illustrate that some of the difficulties are due to the specific technical nature of such reports and to the difficulty in assessing the problem form one side to the other, but I’m also showing that even with the most technically detailed reports, from my own experience, this doesn’t seem to help much either. I’ve been doing this for the community, along with “My VR” topics which are really helping a lot of FS2020 customers, but I can understand some are simply abandoning reporting because there is no progress whatsoever.
I do hope this topic, and the different problems posters are raising about reporting, are sufficient enough to make Asobo and Microsoft realizing there is a disconnect between what they say, what they do, and what they are delivering, and this disconnect is growing negatively on the community. However, the mere fact this topic is bringing both positive and negative comments is showing to me there are people caring about the franchise and lending a solid hand.
A Game Designer is supposed to do this no? He designs features/ux, has an overview of the bugs, decides priorities and divides the work. He also has access and good knowledge of the code.
The problem is most companies cheap out on these designers, and honestly I feel Asobo does too. I actually even fear Seb and Jorg are doing a big part of this design while also doing a bunch of other stuff? This job is easily a full time job, if not a team for a project this big.
) the session starts.