As a QA tester myself, I’m quite surprised at how some very obvious bugs and issues made it into the release version. My current project is a mobile app being developed by a relatively small company, and they’ve been excellent at resolving issues that I and my coworkers report. Granted, sometimes fixing one bug creates another, but then those are promptly fixed. You might say, “Well, this sim is way more complicated than a mobile game” and you’d be right, but there are so many tiny things here and there that don’t seem like they’d take any time or effort to fix. For example, how you have to push or pull the altitude knob on the Airbus to get the new altitude to appear on the PFD.
Maybe I’m totally wrong about this since I’ve never worked on such a complicated project, but these are just my thoughts. If you’re a QA tester who worked on a large project like this sim, please weigh in.
I’ve beta tested games before, and I’m a developer at the day job with over a decade of experience doing professional grade simulation tools.
So let’s take a step back here. Does it make any sense that they would put together a ticketing system through Zendesk, have people submit reports, and then just be like, “Ehhhh… to heck with it, let’s just ignore them”? Does that sound plausible?
Obviously that makes no sense and is extremely unlikely.
So what’s the other possibility? Each ticket takes some amount of time to gather up, identify, resolve, test, merge, release. You also have a fixed amount of time before a release date. So if there are a bounty of issues after release, one can reasonably conclude that there were more issues and tickets than time to resolve them.
I was not part of pre-release testing on this platform, but presumably it wasn’t just a completely static install. Probably reasonable to assume that things were added, fixed, tweaked, etc. during the alpha and beta cycles, but the release time frame did not match the required development timeline. These things happen for a variety of reasons, I’m not going to speculate on why.
You said it yourself - there are so many. It all adds up, and a mountain of small issues winds up being an appreciable amount of time to get through, and there may be far more glaring or critical items to resolve. As we’ve seen in the first upcoming patch, the focus was on fixing show-stopping problems that caused people to not even be able to get the game going (and rightfully so, that should be an all-hands-on-deck endeavor with everything else put aside).
Hell, half the battle is sorting out the signal from the noise with user tickets. We’ve seen this even on this forum here with things like, “There’s a bug with the A320, the auto-thrust kicks in when I’m trying to land.” Or “There’s a bug with prop planes they want to veer to the side of the runway on takeoff.” These are both actually correct behaviors, but people submit them as bugs if they don’t know any better, and there’s non-zero time spent just separating the fact from fiction. I’m not sure how many tickets you guys have floating through your mobile app, but the volume of MSFS’s Zendesk platform is ~1300 a day, or about 1 every 22 seconds during an 8 hour workday.
That’s some background and my thoughts. In any event, speculating on what could have or should have been done before release is meaningless at this point; that ship has sailed. Only thing that matters is how the cadence of updates rolls out and that a steady stream of issues are resolved in each.
I agree, but I also think that right now should be an open beta. It seems dishonest to rush a release with so many issues being worked on and not call it a beta.
This whole argument that “it will all get fixed eventually” would be acceptable if they labeled it as early access. They released an early access title without labeling it as such and hence the rage. People have no problem paying $50 to get into Star Citizen knowing full well that it is early access. And I am sure many people here would have done the same with FS2020. But at least it would be transparent, and people would know what they were getting into.
I agree that it should have been called a beta and then maybe some peoples expectations would have been better managed. As it is, many people expecting a more complete and less buggy sim have legitimate complaints that it wasn’t sold to them on that basis.
For myself, I would still have bought the sim for the next gen experience, warts and all, and don’t regret the purchase. But maybe other people may feel a bit misled?
I’m speculating here of course, but this was built on top of the FSX code base, which was probably built on top of the ACOF code base, and on and one for who knows how far back. There’s probably a ton of spaghetti code in there, and it’s probably really tough (read: slow and expensive) to fix even seemingly simple things sometimes. Not to mention performance issues with code designed for a single core. I’ve worked on code like that. I hate to burst anyone’s bubble, but there are most likely issues that they’ll just never get to because of the complexity involved.
within 7 days, we will be much happier. will they fix those issues you speak of? probably , if they are MAJOR issues. Otherwise, in the next month I would think they’ll have all the big issues mowed down.
Might help if the tickets were public so that duplicate tickets could be mitigated. It would also help alleviate community concern about updates. The tighter you control information, the more misinformation and speculation there will be,.
You would maybe think so, in theory. But realistically:
People already don’t look for duplicate topics on the forum and ask about the same issues over and over, so I wouldn’t expect any different on any other platform
I wouldn’t expect anyone to crawl through the 40,000+ tickets that are out there
I think what they have for a “known issues” list that’s updated several times a week is a good starting point. I wouldn’t mind if it was a bit more comprehensive, but so long as it continues to be updated and expanded, it’s going in the right direction.
Yes, this kind of possible situation has been speculated before. However, these things need to be SOLVED before release, before, or at the very least, during development, and/or plainly disclosed by price point and advertising.
It is way too late for “coding”, “complexity”, “covid”, or any other excuses at this point.
The concept of selling us a journey is presented to us; but we don’t need to be SOLD a journey. All of us began a free journey at birth, and we have so many mini free journeys day after day. We don’t NEED another journey, we just want a flight sim that everybody can reasonably enjoy, as per the $60-$120 price tag and what was advertised for about a year.
Are you implying that you think theyll probably fix the airliners in this coming patch? I need to come up with something new to bet on this forum since I cant offer to buy people full copies of the game if they’re right like I did during the alpha.
I get the imressions the OP is talking about the x-plane mobile app and the trolls have found another way to start a thread here to cause dissatisfaction.
Gaming is amazing over 17k online right now flying , Steam review climbing every day. \o/ PMDG porting over all their Study level Planes is going to be amazing Only thing Asobo ignored are post like this lol
