I found Microsoft’s recent communication regarding the weather issue rather opaque. They say: " UPDATE - Live Weather Issue - A server side fix has been deployed – You should now be able to experience MSFS using the Live Weather feature." Would be better (i.e. more transparent) to have said something like: " The recent issues that users have been experiencing with live weather have been investigated. The problem was found to be [describe the problem] and the following corrective measures were implemented [describe measures taken]. If you should continue to experience issues related to live weather, please report them via the zendesk.
I don’t know why Microsoft feel that they have to treat us as children.
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Having worked in customer support in one way or another for the majority of my working career, what would you do with that information? That’s a serious question. How the issue was fixed isn’t going to change how you use the software. All it’s going to do is satisfy your curiosity.
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Having also worked all my career in a service industry, my point is that transparent communications help build trust. That they won’t tell me what went wrong and how it was fixed doesn’t fill me with confidence that they really “fixed” the problem and that it will not happen again. I think that the flight sim community is pretty tech savvy and is quite able to understand the details. I just want to be treated like a good grown up customer and not like a child.
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There was a problem.
We have fixed the problem.
There is nothing you need to do as we fixed it centrally.
Sounds like good coms to me.
To set some expectation, you should she how Activision do it with Call of Duty. No support forum, no trackable bug and fixes list. Just x…“isn’t working” followed by “we’ve fixed x”
And they have a much bigger budget 
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I too have worked with customer software and I think what is being asked is for more communication. More communication is never a bad thing when it comes to frustrated customers. A “we got it fixed - have a nice day” does not build up confidence that it won’t happen again tomorrow. That is what we customers are asking for is some confidence.
Companies that make the effort to communicate to their customers are what set’s them above others and where I like to spend my money.
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My point exactly!
I would wish some communication from Asobo/Microsoft like this when a big bug appears: I mean on the same day a short info like the following sentence:
“Hey Pilots, we are aware of the Bug and we will fix it on this date at this time. And the BUg was triggered by following issue of the code/programm or api etc”
But i gave up all hopes for communication. i think that only think were Asobo and microsft is interested is money. And we are ms/Asobo no matter. it dont understand me false its 't meaning isnt evil mean. its just my point of view. how the gaming industry became in the last few years. unfinished games became released that have luckyly a beta status. in the past it would be a absurdity when a game got unfinsiched released.
Shortly:
Games Now: release and finsih them with updates trought big bug fixes which destroy a another part of the code. To make earlier money
Games in the past: finish them first and release themand bring cool function and little fixes with updates.
the gaming industry don’t care about us and we are totally matter of their. That only thing at these ddays in that the gaming industry is interested is our money. And not that we can have a good experience with the game or software.
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Well, with respect, if Microsoft treat this community like the Call of Duty community, they are making a huge strategic error. But I believe (or at least hope) that they understand that.
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The level of information was exactly right. We are consumers, we don’t need to know the detail because, most of us don’t work in this environment and have no expertise in it. Therefore providing more detailed technical information will only need to be explained to mere mortals. And that will then become even more confusing for the vast majority of Simmers. This is a broadcast announcement, not a customer service response to a specific issue by an individual customer.
What I would say, as a consumer, is that some sort of status or issues area could be built into the sim. Several other games do this and it works well.
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That probably depends on where in the company hierarchy you are talking about. The higher you go the less they see any potential differences I expect.
I would hope that Microsoft realizes that this has their name on it. Many of their customers aren’t just a bunch of gamers; I use Microsoft products in the corporate world too. It all comes back to quality.
To speak for me, a number of these issues have eroded my confidence in the Microsoft products I use every day. When I have a glitch in my cloud services in the back of my mind I am wondering what level of quality they are at as well.
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https://forums.flightsimulator.com/t/online-services-monitoring/486800/3
You will now be happy to know they now I have a dashboard for such things. I disagree that people need to know the minutia behind the server problems. They just need to know that it is down and not their problem.
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I’d love a detailed explanation from MSAsobo too, but I have to admit I’m faced with this truth: Why would they provide that information?
Imagine how that might go.
Day 1: “We apologize for the outage. We found a piece of code that caused a disruption in our servers.”
Day 4: “We apologize for the interruption. We found that a new API was causing problems with a previous change.”
Day 9: “We apologize for the outage. Our servers were found to have code which caused a problem with Live Weather.”
You see a trend? What little confidence some here have in MSAsobo would be shattered. They’re not going to blatantly advertise that their code caused problems. I know that they don’t want continued outages and complaints, and I’m confident that they’re looking for solutions, but they simply haven’t found them yet (or MS isn’t giving them the budget to fix them).
A lot of developers have some kind of technical dev blog and are actively engaging with users on the forums. This includes small studios and large AAA studio’s. If you have a question on the forums a company representative will often answer you within a couple of hours.
We only have a community forum and if you have a problem we can only guess and try to help each other but ther is not much action from the company. We have Zendesk but we get no follow ups on what happens with the request/bug report.
If you want people to report bugs and have trust in the process you have to give the people the feeling you are listening.
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Communicating on important issues hasn’t been MS/Asobos strong point since day one, the weekly blogs can be extremely weak and serve only to feed marketplace & screenshot hunger, the Q&As only appease the few whilst glossing over the serious issues every single time.
When it comes down to SU7 Beta testing, the (constant) issues with live weather & server problems, game breaking bugs (flaps in the past, TrackIR & mouse in VR toolbar currently) they remain deadly silent…it’s not good enough.
The mods are doing their best here, there’s no denying that, but their bosses are appallingly bad at communicating when it matters. They may well read the forums, it’s high time they started interacting with them and improving the fundamental basics of communication with their paying customers.
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Agreed but at least Jorg and the people working with him should understand the difference. And presumably Jorg has the ability to manage the communications activity.
Another red flag, being seen and treated as mere “consumers” incapable of understanding. Ever seen those incident postmortems put out by companies after a service outage? That’s when you know you’re being respected as a customer.
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Well I have been generally impressed with much of the communications. I think that the dev Q&A streams for example have been very helpful. And I do get the sense that they do understand the flight sim community as something separate and distinct from the general gaming community. But they do have to keep working on transparency. In fairness, they have had a very busy couple of years and it is easy to forget to communicate fully when you are up to your ■■■ in alligators.
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I would rather they use their time to work on the sim. I don’t need communications.
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we do need communication. Some people are testing the beta not knowing anymore what to expect from the beta anymore. Like the weather where we are focusing on, for a few hours it looks good then it goes back to the towering clouds mess (on ground too) and we have no idea if the changes are accruing because of the developers working on it or just the game bugging constantly! and it’s been almost two months with the beta that was supposed to provide a hotfix …the timing for hotfix should be fast. I would appreciate if they would say tomorrow " guys stop testing we now know what’s going on with the weather, but we don’t know how long it will take" but we just know that there is issues with the weather, nothing more…other than the sky in the game looking like a volcanic explosion with a best some clouds at ground level! It is bad, and they should update us on the state of the game.
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