“We appreciate the passion we are seeing for this particular bug and your feedback on the situation is duly noted and will be passed on to the rest of the team for further consideration.” Hotfix the flaps bug now, not in sim update 3 - #99 by CapsLockDH
That’s the most tone-deaf response I’ve ever heard from a developer about a game breaking bug (I consider degrading the flight model on landing game breaking enough to call it game breaking).
It’s not passion either, it’s disgust at their inability to hotfix it immediately like any sensible product manager would.
“As this is not always easy to notice, and because this update was not supposed to be about the flight model, the issue was not caught by our quality teams despite all their efforts to avoid this type of situation.” via original post
This means their QA team doesn’t do full coverage test cases per release as a matter of course. That’s not encouraging on a lot of levels. It either means their QA isn’t big enough, or their processes ■■■■ donkey balls, or both. I can accept a complex sim having bugs, I can’t accept them not doing all they can QA wise to pick up issues - especially core functionality of the product - before a release. The release can either be delayed or problems documented in “Known Issues” (as they do already).
But to just not test things because the release “wasn’t about that” is incredibly bad from a software engineering testing perspective. You test standard functionality as a matter of course, every.single.time - even it’s slimmed down. Landing in all flaps configurations seems a bit of an obvious test case not to skip, at least on a subset of planes that exhibit very dynamic response. If it’s not possible to automate this (I think it should be doable tbh) and compare graphs of responses to detect issues, then at the very least farm it out to a group of pilots to run through a set of standard flight profile tests before you hit the big green release button.
I’ve been supportive of the rollout process and twitchy nature of MSFS up to now, given the complex nature of it, but seeing something like this slip through that points to a failure of basic QA practices makes me do a double take.