Many of us love MSFS and we will do whatever we can to embrace it and improve it. However, your update process have been doing harm more than good with releases that fix things but break more crucial things. We as community can’t go with this any longer, this makes the sim unstable and issues with every update that we end up fiddling around. This should stop and you need to rethink your update process. Instead of these monthly updates, you can move to quarterly updates, that is bigger and more tested. With these quarterly updates, it will allow you to have a proper Q&A, have a good time window for beta releases. I am pretty sure, the community will help and contribute to make this sim the best sim ever.
The issue I see with this, is that there are several topics discussing the update method. Even for some time, the beta testers process was on the wishlist and was announced to be introduced on the update 9 (which was the UK one)
I know and why that is why I opened this topic. To bring awareness and attention, to pressure Asobo and Microsoft. I assure you, in the next Q&A, this will be the biggest topic.
Seems to me there is a fundamental issue with their process currently, and whether we get updates every two weeks, a month, or a quarter, there’s still too much risk of a show stopping bug. They need to fix that issue first. I don’t know if that’s a QA problem, or a pipeline problem, or a management problem. Maybe a combination of things. But until they fix that, I don’t think the update cadence matters.
We already saw that switching release cadence from bi-weekly to monthly made no difference in the quality of product delivered. The December update (Sim Update 2) had a bunch of bugs. Some pretty nasty ones too. We were told to wait until the next release for a fix. THey should have warranted hot fixing. But nope. Deal wth it.
This time around, they delayed the update almost 3 fulll weeks. Yeah, the scenery they updated looks great, but they broke a bunch of other stuff they messed with. Now they published their “OOPS! We screwed up!” message. They told us exactly what the problem was, and politely told us to either fix it ourselves or once again just deal with it.
Their release schedule isn’t the issue. Nor is it not having time to test. The issue is their testing methodology. They’ve been doing a rather poor job of that since launch. And if the alpha and beta testers are to be believed, since before launch too.
And their response to these errors is downright shameful IMHO. I’m not picking on the community managers here. They’re down at the bottom of the totem pole and publish what they’re told to. Those decisions are made well above their pay grade.
Then we have to wait 3 months for bugs to be fixed. No thank you.
Honestly this update was the smoothest yet for me: no crashes, no regressions, everything seems to work so far, new scenery looks good. I do hope issues that other people are having are resolved soon, though.
Indeed totally agree with that. Something wrong with their testing methodology, my guess either:
1- bad management
2- bad coordination between teams
3- bad Q&A process.
Until now, I still can’t believe, how obvious bugs have not been seen, for example that mesh issue of December, or this time with the flaps issue, airport light issue and the glow issue.
Okay, I am okay with bugs breaking the sim, but as long as I know, there will be hotfixes following in few days to fix these issues, I will be saying, it is fine as long there is a hotfix. But with this idea, oops deal with it until next release, no, big no!
And an excerpt of the latest post about this closing the bug vote thread. Like I said. A polite, diplomatic way of saying “Fix it yourself or deal with it till next month”.
Ridiculous indeed. Another example the CTD bing issue, close to a week, the sim was suffering from CTDs, they even seem not to have a proper infrastructure to roll back a faulty update to their online service. This is like 101 DevOps, to have a fallback services or way to rollback in case issues appear.
You know what surprise me the most, are they really ready for more users coming from X-Box? Can they handle that?
I think the most logical solution would be a beta branch.
That way the testing process goes from QA testing to beta testers from the community, then the public release. That way all aspects of the sim are tested
I hope so. But even that, if they want to release it at the beginning of March, when will they release the beta and when will they have the time to fix the issues. That is why it goes back to my original topic the quarterly updates make more sense work more buffer for beta testing
I don’t think the issue is how much testing, it’s how much of the sim is tested. They can’t test every situation (though arguably the physics issue should have been discovered) and a beta group would fix that.