Hello everyone,
The Community Team has been following the conversation in this thread very closely. I want to address a few points:
Regarding the Development Updates, we view these weekly blog posts as a Microsoft Flight Simulator Player Newsletter. They are comprised of three main sections:
- Updates from Microsoft and Asobo concerning player feedback, top priorities, upcoming features, development roadmap, etc. We try to be transparent in this section and provide detailed information as quickly as it is available, but sometimes we are not yet ready to make a public announcement about an issue that we know is very important to the community. Other times, we have no new information to announce compared to the previous week, so it seems like this section is lacking in content.
- Marketplace changes: this is where we highlight every new and updated 3rd Party product in the Marketplace for the week. We acknowledge the past few Development Updates have had missing or delayed Marketplace sections, and there were also some recent technical issues that prevented the team from updating the Marketplace. We’ve taken steps to improve our internal processes to ensure these we be available in time for the Thursday announcement in the future.
- Community updates: this is where we bring attention to things that are happening specifically because of you, our players. We have our weekly screenshot contest and Twitch streams, highlight a player-created video from YouTube, showcase a freeware mod, and promote any other interesting community-driven events that caught our attention.
We acknowledge calling our weekly blog posts a “Development Update” may be setting the wrong expectations with the readers. “Development Update” implies the posts should solely be about topic (1) above, but that’s only one part of these articles. Accordingly, we get feedback (including in this thread) that we spend too much time talking about community-related topics in the “Development Update” when that information is unrelated to the development of MSFS. We will explore renaming these weekly blog posts to something more descriptive of our intention for them.
Additionally, we are excited to have hired two new members to the Community Team over the last month, me and @iinKWest. The addition of the new staff will free up Senior Community Manager @Jummivana’s time to get more information directly from the developers and share posts like this one where she explains in detail exactly how the new “Offscreen terrain pre-caching” setting coming in World Update VI will function.
As a final piece of feedback, we are going to try to get specific information and provide exact details of upcoming changes in the future. For example, we announced the following WU6 change in the August 19th Development Update:
SR22 performance and fuel consumption has been modified to better match POH
We know this is vague and lacking specifics. Is performance and fuel consumption being made better or worse to more accurately match the real-world SR22? By how much is it changing? This is the type of detailed information we will strive to bring you going forward.
Thank you for your continued feedback,
MSFS Team