I only filed four bugs and submitted four technical improvement requests today and somehow start to feel like I should get paid for this. Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love and enjoy MSFS and consider it the best experience in years. It really helps me get along in those times and it’s a technical marvel.
Yet, I keep on reporting new bugs and regressions and somehow they sink into Zendesk. Some are fixed, some are not but it’s hard to track. Maybe I filed a feature request that 10k people already filed. I have no clue.
I somehow start to believe we should start a community bug tracker where we submit bugs to instead. We could rank and triage them and mark duplicates. The official system clearly is broken. From the last Dev Q&A I got the impression that Asobo doesn’t even know about glaring issues (the ATIS cloud layers, 50% throttle bug added with WO4 and tons of bugs in various planes).
Maybe we should create a new project on Github and start collecting issues, provide screenshots and detailed descriptions, add severity and votes to them. Like a real bug tracker that is used in almost any other software project these days. Would anyone else be interested in maintaining such a thing together? Maybe that would be a better tool to communicate most relevant bugs to fix to Asobo…
Where do you get these wild and crazy ideas? Like a real bug tracker? Like a real software project? LOL, it could not possibly hurt, Zendesk is not transparent, no idea how many bugs have been reported, how many are the same, what if any resolutions are in progress. I agree with your assessment and suggestion…
For that to work you need people to actually properly research issues and make reproducible test cases. You also need people that know what is actually a bug and what isn’t. Otherwise it will just be as useful as Zendesk.
A lot of people here say they report bugs. They really don’t, they complain about a possible bug. There is a world of difference. One helps prove a bug for the devs and helps them find a cause, the other just says “there may be a bug here but there is zero evidence and no way to reproduce it”.
A lot of people just want stuff fixed and don’t want to really help doing it. That is fair enough, they jsut want to play the game they paid for, even if it is counter productive. But if they add stuff to the tracker it is just more noise for Asobo and “us” to go through.
What you ask for is not a bad idea and sounds like it is taken from Star Citizen. But it takes time and money to implement and more time and money to continually manage. For Star Citizen they do it because the game is literally guided by the backers and CIG was willing to spend a lot of money to engage the community from the start of the project.
Whether a company should take that time and money away from fixing known bugs to do this is a very hard question to answer. This is a completely different development to SC in many ways so realistically it may be worth it or may not. It is certainly less worth it than SC given it development state.
Another day, a couple more bugs filed. Currently I am not sure a proper bug tracker would help. Each end every plane I tried since WO4 had regression (newly introduced bugs). Glaring issues you don’t need 2 hours of IFR flight. It’s things you see right after taking of. It is obvious that no QA was done before the release, at all.