Known Issues? Honesty and Transparency

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I can’t believe that the only issues MS is acknowledging are the one posted here: https://www.flightsimulator.com/known-issues/ and here - Known Issues - (Last modified: 11/24/2020)

I’d like to see more honesty and transparency for MS. If I could look-up my issue in the bug tracker, I would have to complain about it on these forums. Could MS be afraid that being honest and open about the bugs and issues could chase away potential customers?

Everything from the stuttering issue to the lack of VOR stations should be disclosed in a tracker system somewhere on this site for us to see. No just the handful of issues shown when there’s a mountain of issues to tackle.

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What would you want to do - scroll through all 40 thousand tickets on Zendesk? Keep up with the 1000+ new ones every day? And obviously it’s not like they’re going to open up their internal code repository system to you or I.

Your first link there states that it is the top issues tracker, not an exhaustive or all-encompassing list. The second list is getting updated regularly, and I’m sure will become more comprehensive as time goes on.

As a developer at the day job and a consumer in this case, I just don’t expect up-to-the-minute updates. There’s a balance to be struck and there’s such thing as too much status reporting at the expense of getting work done.

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Well consider they keep these forums going with a easy to use search function and all the na sayers w/o banning anyone. I would say MS is doing a bang up job on Transparency!

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No, no one expects to see the 40,000 zendesk tickets. But it isn’t unreasonable for the community to be in the loop on what issues have been verified and are in-work to be fixed.

It would be in their best interests, and respectful of users’ time because it would result in users not spending time troubleshooting, or writing up and submitting a zendesk ticket.

Even if they don’ t want to provide visibility into each ticket, they could at least categorize. For example say that under “Installation” there are X number of issues in work, under “Stability” there are Y issues in work, etc. It’s actually pretty basic.

People want to understand what they can expect to be fixed or improved. And they want to know they haven’t wasted time submitting zendesk, or for those in the alpha/beta programs that they didn’t waste hundreds of hours reporting issues which went into the bit bucket.

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And it seems like the plan is to do that via the known & top issues summaries. There’s more stuff in them with every update. We’ll see how that continues.

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It gets pretty old seeing people calling every shortcoming of a brand-new flight sim that gives the whole world some kind of dishonesty or other shenanigans instead of maturely understanding that this is all part of releasing a new, complex, and huge simulator platform. :roll_eyes:

Go fly. Or go for a walk.

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Surely, you’re familiar with the term ‘search’. I do commend MS and Asobo for the work on MSFS20. I believe the sim has potential and may become the premiere flight sim, eventually. However, I’m not counting LR out either.

I am somewhat distrustful of MS. I remember when they swore MS Office would never become subscription-based. I remember when they first implemented the system to check to see if a copy of Windows was legitimate; and again said, you could still use one copy of multiple computers. The implication was that Windows would always belong to the user (the prevailing thought was the OS belonged to the user and not the machine). I can’t say that I blame them for allowing some policies to evolve, but moving to a subscription base for Office left a bad taste in my mouth that persists today (I use LibreOffice now).

Then MSFS20 came along, and it looked terrific. MS wined and dined large groups of content creators, not earning their loyalty but buying it. Furthermore, MS instituted a strict gag policy (the NDA) to keep MSFS20’s shortcomings hidden purposely. Now the cat’s out of the bag; the good and the ugly is on display for all to see. So what does MS do? They create a known-issues section with just a few issues. Stuttering is a big issue for a great number of users, yet there is no mention of it as an issue.

If MS had not encouraged the content creators to only talk about the stuff like flying to your house, rather than real issues, good and bad, expectations would have been much more subdued - for the lack of a better word. These forums are riddled with issues, yet we have no idea if they’re being acknowledged - even if tickets were submitted.

No. I’m not interested in reading through everyone’s issues. I’m sure more than a few are user-issues and are no fault of the sim. I am, however, interested in seeing more than 8 or so issues being acknowledged.

I fear that we’re in a giant beta (pronuounced bea-ta - not beetah) test sim. Once everything is working as expected, it may become subscription-based too (Azure servers are not cheap). Anyway, I digress. MS could undoubtedly be more transparent about the issues associated with MSFS20.

Finally, I’m aware the sim is new and has yet to cut its teeth. MS’s behavior early-on will determine how vested they are in the flight sim community.

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If they weren’t working on a patch, and hadn’t said anything about it, I would be upset. I think it’s fine the way it is. I don’t need more transparency.

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Totally aggree with everything in your post. Especially the mention of eventually being a subscription based Sim, Azure and other included benefits are certainly not cheap let alone FREE!!!
Many of the questions or points raised in this forum maybe would not be necessary if Microsoft simply released some form of user guide in PDF format, I dont know the quality or form but is one not included with the boxed version of the sim? I for one could then hopefully look to that instead of trawling forums like this hoping to find answers.

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