Is There Going To Be A Beta Team For SU6?

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As the subject says…if so, do you have an idea when?

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Only Microsoft can give you a definitive answer.

If and when they announce pre-release testing for future updates they will likely do so in two places:

  1. On the official website - https://flightsimulator.com

  2. The #community:news-and-announcements category on the forums

Given they have used pre-release testing for most major releases since the VR update, I would expect this trend will continue.

In the past, pre-release tests have been invite-only and by filling limited sign-up slots. Whether this will always be the way, I cannot say for sure…

What I would suggest is that you do not rely on getting information about future updates through the website, it has had a horrible caching issue for months which means users often see outdated content, and often don’t see new posts for days or weeks.

Instead, if you haven’t already done so, set your notification preference for the #community:news-and-announcements category to ‘Watching First Post’, that way you get a forum notification whenever a new topic is created there. - Only forum staff Admins and Moderators can post in that category, so you will not get notification spam.

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Thank you!

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To Asobo, test the WU6 yourself. Play your own SIM for once and seek for the bugs and glitches. If it was me, i would make sure that new updates works 100% right and then send it to the beta testers. I cannot give my people an half baked cake… no way

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But it isn’t you, and it probably isn’t them either.

I don’t know a single fellow programmer who likes deploying software riddled with major show-stopping bugs… Microsoft on the other hand not only have a history of it, but had announced the Xbox launch date, AND were the ones that stood to profit from releasing the sim to millions of hundreds of thousands of new customers.

But I digress, the question was “Is There Going To Be A Beta Team For SU6?”, not the merits of pre-release public testing.

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And if it was 100% right, there would be no point in sending it to the beta testers

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Ofcourse it does. You dont know how it runs on other user PC’s with different configuration/drivers/GPU and so on. And those people will always find something. What i try to say is that Asobo should put more effort and time because SU5 is a Disaster

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Is There Going To Be A Beta Team For SU6?

  • Yes

Will Asobo make more of an effort to release an update that isn’t riddled with bugs, a patch that doesn’t break things that worked previously, that doesn’t degrade the general experience of the Sim and will they delay the update release should they not meet new “Quality Control” requirements that should now be in place?

  • That is the question(s)!
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I understand your sentiments but I wonder if you could maybe have presented it in a better manner perhaps which may have afforded you a little more support?

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Maybe more people need to vote for an “opt in” beta test feature where every MSFS player can have the option to opt in the beta test or not:

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All the BETA,s they have done in the past has done nothing to fix the the bugs once a public release has come out…So i dont see the point

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The current beta process just needs to be improved that is all.

Dropping betas would be a massive step back.

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What did the last BETA do for a public release before hotfix 1 and 2 and evan now things are broke, The last 2 hotfixes have inproved things for sure but ATC is messed up…pop up(culling) is everywhere, Toolbar arrow never goes away, Low rez textures (thats now fixed)…How did this SU5 BETA break the things that were working before?

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And yet, for some reason, I still don’t think that the next sensible step forward is to say ‘stuff it, it’s not working so let’s just completely forget about betas’.

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BETA program or no BETA program; the end results are the same. Fix something, break something else. Argue if you want, but show one update that didn’t.

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And to address the Obvious Elephant in the room.

There is little point in starting Beta testing, a few days before a release, and even less point in asking users to beta test, if you are going to ignore their testing reports, or not have time to act on them

Then again, if you cannot run a successfully beta testing program, you can always wrap it up in a NDA, so nobody can talk about what a failure it is.

FYI: I speak form some former experience. I was an Alpha & Beta tester for FSX & P3D - but not for MSFS 2020

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Voted just now

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I believe this is likely the most pertinent point. A few weeks of beta testing might be long enough to gather data. But it’s certainly not long enough to act on those findings effectively. For the patch after that, perhaps. If they aren’t acted upon in the next patch, or the patch after that, I think its then acceptable to question the entire process.

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WU 6 is being released in just 2 weeks from now. I think it’s pretty well guaranteed that there has been a Beta test team for WU6 (and beyond) for some time now, and an Alpha team some time before that. It’s just that we don’t know who was on that team, because they are there by private invite rather than asking publicly for volunteers.

In my opinion the public Beta team we had previously (and Alpha) were good publicity to make the process appear more transparent, but probably poor quality because the selection process was done on a “first come first served” basis, rather than a QA driven “who understands what testing is all about?” basis.

Practically every software written by any major company is Beta tested by private QA rather than public “pre-release”. By the time the public gets to see pre-release (if they do) usually the Beta testing has pretty much been done, and it’s just there to catch common bugs and glitches.

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Not being a MSFS 2020 Beta tester, I have no idea what really goes on, and nobody is going to tell me, because of the NDA.

In an idea world, all beta tester reports, and all ZenDesk reports would be in a Read only datbase fro any MSFS user to look over, and both learn what is an an issue, and relate their issues w ith what others have found already.

If I currently submit a Zendesk report, I have no idea what its progress is, or who else have reported similar issues.
As a user, I am alone in isolation, and my only reference as to what is going on, are Forum Post by "who knows who "