Microsoft seems to only invest / commission “new” things that they believe will lead to immediate sales. The new things have deadlines, and often get pushed with bugs (which is unfortunately normal). But then they are very stingy / slow with commissioning fixes because they ASSUME there is less return on investment.
The problem is, the growing gaps in quality between the things that receive a lot of work, and the more procedural things that have “always been broken”, creates a jarring experience that affects the experience as a whole.
Microsoft should understand that an investment in serious QA will result in a more consistent quality, much happier customers, who are more willing to convince their friends, and lead to a better return on investment over time.
If you watch the Dev Q&A videos, Seb spends a lot of time showing off new air flow and flight models, and a lot of things that are core to the sim, and needed to introduce new products. That’s great - and he’s proud of the work.
But from the user perspective, the ground support person’s head pops through the floor of the cockpit, your plane hits an invisible wall, controller UI is a mess, and half the ground is blurry. Microsoft needs to see the financial potential in QA, incentivize it, and give Asobo the lattitude to take pride in QA across all (or at least more) aspects of MSFS.
Microsoft has set a low bar for “normal bugs” - which undermine their own sales. They just need to see it that way in order to commission QA. If they don’t the the title will just remain half-baked, and maybe after a year will be at the level 2020 was with SU11.
I’m nearly at the point of bowing out of all these conversations about QA and bugs and muting them from my feed, because it’s so clear they aren’t going to do what we all feel they should be doing.
All the talk is futile and reminds me of how much it just bums me out.
They do what they do and it’s clear from all this time that they have set HDG Hold and left it right where they set it, never deviating from their course.
It was a later-model VW Bug that had been modified to stuff a small-block Chevy V-8 under the hood.
That’s my opinion of all these mods and updates to people’s systems so they’ll run FS-2024 within a reasonable approximation of “correctly”
IMHO, it doesn’t really matter how big an engine you put in a VW bug - the basic car is still a VW Bug!
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Corollary:
I used to see a car when I lived on Long Island in the Waverly/Holtsville area that was a VW Bug with a special decorative mod:
He’d attached a small motor with a 1rpm output shaft on the inside of the back hood, and attached a big “key” to it on the outside. Every time the car was driving anywhere, the “key” would slowly turn like it was a wind-up toy.
I tried to cope a little bit with statistics and capabilities of my modern as capable, but not to rather strong systems(plural).
It seems to be it should work very good, I can see that certain things do work very well indeed. In FS.
And is just a couple of minor bugs which have to be fixed, could give this programs a big future.
So why all this talk around from so many users, I do not know who to address when I got basic issues.
Like many here, would love to have fixed a couple of bugs and we are all good to go on any entry level.
Why on earth are there no solutions to little things.
I do not get it.
I suggest fix little things first, and than go to more specific big ones.
I expect with today’s knowledge and capabilities that this should be easy over a reasonable frame of time.
if you had been here since the launch of 2020 you would have experienced how these guys do care about us, the bugs, keeping us informed and fulfilling our wishes. Just a little patience, they are getting this rolling right now.
I’ve been here for half of it. Most of it spent beta testing and reporting bugs, and advocating for QA:
Most of the stability issues were rooted in file corruption due to memory allocation. They spent a long time finding those bugs and optimizing memory just to make MSFS 2020 work on Xbox.
But it was a painful ride, and I just don’t have the energy to go through it again. Feels like being back at the begining. I’ll just repeat what I’ve always said - without a proper internal QA team, MSFS will always be half baked and riddled with bugs that get reported and ignored.
To be fair, I do believe they did listen to a lot, and there was significant improvement in fixes, and in communication, and in how they answered more questions in the Dev Q&A videos. I have to give full marks for that - it’s the reason I’m still here.
It’s also why it’s disappointing to feel like MSFS 2024 was a big regression in bugs and in communication. (I think they branched 2020 a long time ago, so all recent fixes in 2020 are not in 2024, and they have to go back and fix them again, maybe).
I have to believe - largely due to the bad launch - they will work hard to make up lost ground. There is little hope of changing the Microsoft executives habits, but as long as the hope is greater than zero, I’ll still advocate for a better product.
Like here’s an example that is confusing to me that happened today.
I was using My library and found these two bugs:
I entered both bugs within seconds of each other. Jayne tagged one of them as feedback-logged and the other received no tag.
Why is this? Did she just miss the one? Is it not worthy? Is there something about it that needs clarification?
I’ve come away trying to understand why some bugs actually get a tag and so many others do not.
Do the CMs just randomly choose to tag bugs? Do they act as a first line filter? If so, what is the criteria for filtering?
The bugs seem to come in faster than the amount of time the CMs even spend here being able to read and tag them. It all seems so unclear and unimportant.
The whole thing is just so confusing to me, the end user who spends so much time and effort logging bugs.
I see the “unselect” has been logged as feedback. I think that is correct, CMs have have checked and seen it is exactly what happens. Next step is taking it to the dev team, who will then reproduce it and log it as a bug. When it will happen and gets fixed depends of course on the priority they give to it. Personally, I think it will take some time, it is not a huge issue, I did not even know it existed. I would not expect it to get a high prio on their long list of bugs to fix.
Now, the other one: did you notice that “streamed 0/29”? You have filtered all items out, hence it will not open it. That is not a bug or an issue. More like bad design, as it made you (and myself as well before) to think it should open, rather than clearly signaling there is nothing to list.