No follow up of bug reports

Discussion Hub General Discussion
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ISSUE DESCRIPTION

Description of the issue:

When reporting bugs, we are encouraged to use this form to help resolve the issue. The problem is that there’s no follow up with the most of the bugs that are reported. Yeah, the 100-400 vote bugs do get some visibility and have a chance of somebody looking at them, but anything under 40 votes or so is basically ignored.

How about Asobo/MS make a template to address every bug reported?

-The bug was reviewed and it’s legitimate.

-It’s in work/will be in work.

-Assigned to whatever team/developer.

-The bug will be fixed by such and such date.

So on and so forth, you get the idea. Some sort of acknowledgement from Asobo/MS, tracking of progress with each bug.

I think it’s only fair, we spend hours and hours of our time beta testing after we paid full price for the game, and most of the time there’s no reply from anybody, no acknowledgements, no nothing.

Example:
Cessna 207A Landing Light - Sim Update 1 Beta | MSFS 2024 / Aircraft & Systems - Microsoft Flight Simulator Forums

This is a legitimate issue that needs addressed. I like flying that plane, I paid money to fly that plane, but I can’t fly it at night. It’s not a popular aircraft, so this will likely never get fixed, yet it’s the same issue that the Longitude had, which got addressed.

REPRODUCTION STEPS

Please list clear steps you took in order to help our test team reproduce the same issue:

  1. Submit a bug
  2. Wait
  3. Nothing happens

[END OF FIRST USER REPORT]

:loudspeaker: For anyone who wants to contribute on this issue, Click on the button below to use this template:

Do you have the same issue if you follow the OP’s steps to reproduce it?
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Provide extra information to complete the original description of the issue:
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Moved to General Discussion that is the appropriate category based on the topic.
Bug Reporting Hub is dedicated to report Bugs for the core sim and 1st party content.

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I guess I’m too dumb to understand the workflow here. Okay, so the tread is moved to the General Discussion tread from Bug Reporting. Now what? Is “Joe” from the forums going to get busy on fixing the sim and posting progress/updates to each issue?

The only way to get Asobo/MSs attention is to submit a but report and hope it gets enough votes. You moving it here, just buries the tread and ignores the issue.

Issues submitted when the sim was released are still not addressed. What’s the next step here? Keep the status quo and nothing gets done? Be patient? Wait another 6-8 months and maybe somebody might glance over some of those bugs? What’s wrong with a little accountability on Asobo/MS part? How do we go about that?

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What you’re asking for just won’t happen. I hate the bug reporting process as much as you do.

I’m sure this thread was moved to another section of the forum because it’s not actually a bug report, it’s a complaint.

You’re asking Asobo to respond directly to each report. While that’s ideal, an entire department would need to be dedicated to just that task alone. Jorg said the sim shipped with tens of thousands of bugs, and thousands still remain unfixed. It’s simply not feasible for Asobo to respond to every single report. Now put yourself in the underpaid, overworked, dog tired shoes of a lowly Asobo staffer tasked with logging, confirming, and responding to thousands of reports, with new ones coming in each day. Do you want that job? I sure don’t!

I agree with you, the reporting process in place doesn’t work that well, but it’s all we have to work with. But they do see at least some of our reports, clearly, because they know to work on them and they provide feedback during dev diaries. We sort of just have to trust that they’re doing their best. Even if they really dropped the ball with FS24, we have to give them a chance to pick it back up.

SU1 seems to be providing massive improvements in a lot of areas. I’m sure that’s exactly what they’re shooting for.

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The number of Votes is not really important, as long as a bug gets a Tag with “Bug-logged” or similar, because that means that it is a validated bug and now included in the Ticket system by Asobo. Under the first fixed bugs in the Beta now were several bugs that were only around 100 or so votes, so your claim only the big ones are getting investigated and fixed is definitely not correct.

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Blockquote
Jorg said the sim shipped with tens of thousands of bugs, and thousands still remain unfixed.

I didn’t release the game with tens of thousands of bugs. I don’t know why it was okay to do so. If they did, the least they can do is have some accountability on where things stand.

There are plenty of smaller companies that put out a great product and have better/more frequent updates. I don’t know why MS gets a pass, it’s not like they can’t afford to hire people. And never mind all the free labor they get from this community with beta testing.

Maybe they should have called it MSFS2025 and worked on the bugs for another year.

Truth is, if I put out this kind of work at my work place I’d be gone in a heartbeat.

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No, this was a bug report on the process.

I totally agree, there is just no point making bug reports if they are not taken seriously. There is some obscure decision process no one has any visibility in it, which of the reported bugs get “feedback logged” and then “bug logged”. Hundreds are sitting there for months without even “feedback logged”. This is simply ignoring all the effort the community puts in reporting bugs, I mean, who ever wants to spend the time, if 90% of these reports are simply ignored and forgotten.

This surely makes sense from a business perspective as it would be a lot of work to check all of these reports, and I’m pretty sure 99% of them are already in their system, since they released it with 18,000 unresolved bugs as we heard.

The morally sustainable solution would be to open that database so the community can check if the bug has already been reported, before spending time on creating a report and getting frustrated that those are all ignored.

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How do you get it tagged with Bug-logged? What’s the process?

“Under the first fixed bugs in the Beta now were several bugs that were only around 100 or so votes, so your claim only the big ones are getting investigated and fixed is definitely not correct.”

I said 100-400 votes. I guess you’re agreeing?

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No I am not agreeing, as it always also depend on the type of bug that is reported. Game breaking bugs always come first, regardless of how many votes they have. When I scroll through the bug selection from today, I see reports that have already “Bug-Logged” as a tag, that have as many as 9 Votes total.

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The moderator did the right thing. The Bug Reporting Hub category is for reporting bugs, not for making comments on the general situation about bugs. The appropriate place for this conversation is General Discussion.

The overall process is, a Community Manager logs a bug. That bug report gets tagged with feedback-logged , and it goes to someone in QA. From there, QA tries to reproduce the bug. Everybody know that “REPRODUCTION STEPS” section? That’s where they read people’s, “Just fly the plane” step to reproduce and probably get really frustrated that there isn’t more information. (As much information as possible needs to be given in this step.) If they are able to reproduce the issue, they will create a bug report in their system. At this point, a Community Manager will either close them out as “no repro” or tag them bug-logged. If they tag them bug-logged, then a reproduction of the bug report has been successful.

That being said, I agree with your premise. There are several problems:

  1. There is no guarantee that any given bug report will even get feedback-logged. There are literally thousands of bug reports that will never be seen by anyone. The Community team has many responsibilities, of which logging bugs is just one of many. I don’t see a way that they could possibly follow through with all the bugs that come through the forums. My recommendation is that people log bugs on Zendesk, where someone will look at them. Zendesk has improved over the years, and at a minimum, someone will look at what you send them there. Be respectful, give copious amounts of information on how to reproduce a bug. (Don’t assume that the person reading your bug report will figure this out. They go through dozens of bug reports every day. The more you can get to the level of, “flip this switch then turn this setting from automatic to manual” or whatever the steps are, the easier it will be on them.)
  2. The process from going to feedback-logged to bug-logged is manual. There are tons of #feedback-logged bug reports that are 2+ years old, and it’s not clear to me if anyone is monitoring them.
  3. Even if something is bug-logged, the process is opaque from there. There is a triage process that happens. Bugs for things like first-party Carenado planes goes to Carenado and scenery bugs go to the world team. But we don’t know what happens. And even very legitimate bugs get lost in the mix. Bugs get assigned out to people, but what happens after that is only known to a few people. I do not think it is appropriate for the public to know who got assigned a bug. I think that sets people up to find those developers’ social media accounts and pester them to get their personal cause fixed, and that’s completely inappropriate. But having an ETA for certain bugs would be so helpful. Unfortunately, the system as it is right now is not setup for that kind of thing.
  4. I’ve said this many times before, bug sometimes, legitimate bug reports just get closed as “won’t fix” without reason. Here is a list of about 100 bugs like that; I’m sure that there are more. You know gigantic hangars? It’s closed as “Won’t fix.” The fact that the drone camera tends to roll slightly and for no apparent reason? It’s also closed as “Won’t fix.” To this date, the team has not given a reason for these types of closures, and I doubt that we will ever have an answer.
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What is needed is simply visibility into the bug database. We used to do this (and presumably still are) for customer bug reports against Visual Studio. Customers would report bugs and those bugs would propagate to the bug database once they had been vetted. The customer would receive a link to the bug database entry once that happened. It has been a minute, but when we resolved the bug we just included a comment explaining the resolution and IIRC that comment would automatically be made public. We also had the ability to make individual comments public so we could gather additional information directly from the customer that reported the issue.

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100% agree. We’ve been asking for this level of communication since day one.

A “Solved” report from Zendesk, that doesn’t even mean what it says it says, is 110% unacceptable, and emotionally damaging to the end user.

We at least need to know when our bug reports have been binned, which is one definition of a “Solved” response. It’s ridiculous. Everything you said. And it’s not the first time those things have been said. And yet, here we are, nearly 5 years later. (It is almost Christmas after all).

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From “Welcome to the Public Forums” pinned article:

Please find below the list of official tags we will using from now:

image| The team is aware of an issue and currently investigating

image A Community Feedback is logged in our database, and our test team is working to reproduce the issue.
Note: If the feedback is verified as a bug, the thread’s tag will be changed for “Bug logged”

image|100% The issue reported by the community has been successfully reproduced by our test team and turned into an official bug. The bug is now being assigned, prioritized, and worked on for a future fix.

image|100% Unable to reproduce, need further information

image| A workaround is available
image| The issue previously reported is now fixed on the current version of the SIM

and from Zendesk FAQ:

Can you explain the Ticket statuses to me?

Below, you will find a short description of each status.

  • New: The ticket is in the queue and hasn’t been handled yet.
  • Open: You updated the ticket.
  • Awaiting your reply: Our team contacted you to request more information.
  • Solved/Closed: The ticket has been handled.

Bear in mind, this is the ticket status, not the actual fix for the issue.
It means the info on your ticket is now in the hands of Asobo for a fix.

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There was a recent bug report where the poster basically said nothing — really.

I encouraged them to add some more detail. They were honestly unsure what that meant and DM’d me and I explained what they needed to do.

They revised their post with detail and video explaining the issue.

I get the sense some people really just don’t understand how to post bugs. Rather than leave these just sitting there unacknowledged, they should be tagged straight away with something akin to the need-your-help to indicate, if they want the bug to have any hope being addressed, they need to add detail.

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It’s that last one that’s the problem.

Solved/Closed: The ticket has been handled means just that → It’s been handled. Then… crickets. It only means someone has touched it.

It could have been:

  1. Reproduced and sent to the appropriate team to be put on the backlog
  2. Is Unreproduceable… and typically binned, maybe the user is contacted for more information? Sometimes they do, sometimes they just bin it. We don’t always know.
  3. Working as designed… binned (this one is very often unacceptable from our point of view)
  4. Is a duplicate… binned… Would be nice if the duplicate was communicated so we can determine what the state of that report is, could be any of the above…
  5. I think there are a few more conditions “Solved/Closed” can mean

Our point is, one response for all those conditions is not acceptable from our point of view. I realize in the world of software development, it’s acceptable or at least common practice (and typically/hopefully more information was attached to the result). But, well, we’re kind of emotional and would appreciate if our hands were held. Seriously; “Solved/Closed” leaves us hanging and feeling unsupported given it could mean any of the above. The request is to at least give us one of the 4 states, and not just “Solved/Closed”.

(And, yes, I totally understand that 85% of bug reports don’t contain enough information, and we need to be better)

And, yes, “Bug Logged” is awesome and makes us feel great! For a little while anyway.

And yeah… Yell at us when the bug report is awful and makes no sense. Please. People need to learn how to report bugs.

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Isn’t the issue with “Solved” due to limitations with Zendesk itself (which boggles the mind for help desk software…)?

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Whether this is true of not… Isn’t the issue, per se. All issues are solveable.

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Hello @FlyingsCool5650,

When you submit a ticket to Zendesk, it is handled by a customer support agent, not a developer who is responsible for fixing bugs. The support agent’s workflow when they receive a bug report is to check our internal bug tracker to see if the issue you are reporting is already logged, and if not, to create a new entry for it so a member of the dev team can investigate further. Once there is a bug entry logged, the support agent closes the support ticket (not the bug report!) because their task is complete.

The way Zendesk works is that closing a ticket sets its status to “Solved” (this is how the Zendesk software is coded, and we didn’t choose that language; I personally would have gone with “Ticket Closed” instead of “Solved”). This does not mean the bug is resolved in the sim, only that the customer support agent has processed your ticket to completion. We understand this language can be confusing to some people, but it’s an unfortunate limitation of the Zendesk software. Please note the Zendesk FAQ states the following:

I reported bugs and you closed the ticket but the bug isn’t solved in the sim, why?

The status of your Zendesk ticket does not reflect the bug’s status in-game. Please refer to the Release notes to know if a bug has been fixed.

Thanks,
MSFS Team

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Unfortunately, some bug reports with plenty of detail don’t get logged, either. :frowning:

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At this point I am not even sure if it makes sense to file bug reports outside the beta. Some of the airplanes received already updates, they are just not pushed. We do not know what is fixed there and we do not even know how this interacts with the SU1.
You might ending up with filing a extended bug report for an issue that is already fixed.
Beside this it does also block resources at MS/Asobo to check on something that might be already fixed with SU1. So unless you are in the Beta does it make sense to file bug reports?
Please let me know if I am missing something here?