Official Discussion: September 2nd, 2021 Development Update

If you want to hear things like this

… you won’t get it. MSFS was made ready for an XBox-release, that was this half year’s main accomplishment. If the sim would have been “messed up” that port would never have been possible. They squeezed a very demanding graphics program in smaller memory and a mid range CPU, promising 30 FPS. But these restrictions and these promises were put by marketing people, not the development team. They were imposed demands and deadlines from upstairs, you can’t expect “the team” to make excuses for complying to these demands. MSFS has served as the flag ship for the XBox release. That was accomplished by the team and I think they deserve respect for that. Coming year, focus need not be on XBox limitations, focus can be directed to issues and improvements again.

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Tell that to the people who cannot complete a flight. This also has to do something with believability. Since Alpha we were told things that never came to pass, yet other stuff was done. If I behaved like this towards our customers I’d have a hard time selling it to my boss. This devupdate was totally worthless. This is the topic of the thread. And I start to believe a bit of a Sean Murray syndrome at play here. It is one thing to dream of a sim, another to actually achieve it.
And there is a lot of white knighting going on, Stockholm Syndrome or genuine excitement does not matter.
Even on the xbox there is crashes and loss of functionality. If that is a goal that is met, I dearly hope Asobo never misses its mark. “A ■■■■ we screwed up, here is the plan to rectify it” would go a long way. Instead we get empty shells of dev plans two weeks in a row eventhough something else was said last week and wait 4 weeks for market place updates. From my point of view Asobo lost a lot of credibility. Great customer service looks different.

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Sure this has been discussed but not sure where it is but did I miss why some of us are all still off line status or will the servers come back online with the update next week??

Wrong. These are customers disappointed with the product they purchased. And complaining about pointless ‘development’ updates.
Nothing toxic here. With ANY company that is the norm when service is not delivered as promised. But with new tech and games this should be somehow different. Why would it be?
There are services promised by a company which are in turn purchased/paid for by customers. Simple.
Nobody has ever demanded ‘communication’ in the first place. That was a well appreciated move by MS. But they are not delivering on their own offerings.

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Even the default UK world update is missing the Thames Barrier and has HMS Belfast replaced with two cruise yachts that belong in Monaco.Then Southampton, whilst pretty good compared to most UK cities has solid sides underneath one of the bridges, making it impossible to fly under.

Many coastlines also have vertical climbing water at many beaches. Surely the Blackshark AI should know that sandy beaches without dunes are typically at a similar elevation as the water unless you see grasses in the sattelite photo, in which case is sand dunes and the elevation is undulating. The two easiest places to land a small plane are either an airport runway or a beach because they are meant to be flat and without obstacles near the water’s edge including trees.

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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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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

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Thanks @Jummivana and @SeedyL3205 - I probably wouldn’t have seen Jayne’s explanation of the pre-caching unless you hyperlinked it, so thanks!

One other question, if you know – at some point when SU5 launched, one of the major feedback items was overexposure and being able to better tweak/define color/brightness/exposure, even in HDR. Has there been any update or expectations from Asobo on when this might be implemented?

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Thank you for the insightful post. I agree it might be time to change the way these updates are titled, since they have been a lot more than that since launch.

If I may make a suggestion, I would recommend dropping “update” entirely from the title. To this day, some people still confuse them with actual simulator updates.

It is great to hear we will be getting more of these useful posts by Jayne more often, and I would also recommend linking to them in these weekly updates for more visibility, especially for those who do not use the official forums much.

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Hehe. No, rather have the Mooney than the money. Loved flying it before it got broke

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@SeedyL3205
Thank you for the detailed update and I also join @moxiejeff for letting us know that @Jummivana had posted in another topic, otherwise I’d probably have missed it too! (for those having read my question earlier in this topic, I’ve posted another follow-up question to the news in the other topic, which concerns mostly VR users especially with Pimax - but not just: Slider to adjust/disable the scenery culling (reduce panning pop-in and stutters) - #123 by CptLucky8 )


+1 This is paramount in VR where user’s can’t calibrate the displays at all (no headset is offering the means for this unlike monitors and TVs):

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The Development Roadmap? Pretty stagnant. Doesn’t mean a whole lot. Not specific enough. And, it doesn’t seem like they are really following it.

We’ve been doing that. A lot. What’s missing is some feedback from the Devs. Like what Beaufortuk stated here:

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These are good steps forward. Thanks for acknowledging the issues and giving reassurance about the comms @SeedyL3205 (Also great to see you in this role. I really enjoyed your cross-country competition over last Christmas.)

I’m strictly speaking for myself, but I think others will agree.

I think that you and @SeedyL3205 both miss the point of what I was communicating, and I have been communicating similarly here for about 2 years now. I’m pretty sure many others did get the correct point of most everything I meant, as there are many other posts I totally agree with in this thread.

The MSFS communications team can communicate anything they wish however they wish, if we are talking strict communication from the communications team. However, my understanding is that the communication team is strictly communicating for the development team with the weekly blog.

So, in light of the response by @SeedyL3205, it seems the communications team is NOT strictly communicating for the development team, and are just considering changing the title, and so we end up in the same stagnant place.

This reaction to the 9/2 update (and no, people are NOT getting confused by the word “update”), is because of the lack of action and “expected” communication (not a lack of general communication) on the part of the developers. My understanding is that the official communication team is a direct reflection of the development team (unless its gone rogue). Surely this is not far fetched. So, as long as the official communication team communicates non-aviation related things like charities and contests, yet not at least 10 times the amount of aviation things, I would say its a waste of time/effort and these reactions will remain.

Flight simmers want MSFS to be focused on aviation, nothing else. If the communication team wants to focus on things not strictly related to aviation realism in MSFS, then that should be plainly stated. If it is stated so, then let flight simmers decide if that is what they want.

Take a vote or poll.

If aviation realism is not going to be the focus here, flight simmers that are here, are in the wrong place.

Delay tactics will not work for too much longer…the stagnation plague has to end. Just get rid of the screenshot obsession…its losing its effectiveness quickly anyway, only then will MSFS have wonderful success…that is what we all want.

Here’s to success!

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Actually, they HAD to know that degrading the PC side quality because xbox couldn’t handle it was going to PO a LOT of users. Someone at Asobo, I am 100000% sure, commented in a meeting that putting the xbox code with the pc code was going to break a lot on the pc side…and they were told to sit down and shut up by someone at MS.

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Totally agree with you on this point.

I have absolutely no interest in the pretty pictures either and I would have thought the focus would be better served, particularly after SU5, on more fundamental issues :slightly_smiling_face:

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This is exactly the sort of improvement in community communication I was hoping for. Thank you for both listening and acting.

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I have not properly read your posts, or pretty much the entire thread for that matter, so please don’t take the post you quoted as a response to yours or others’ complaints. I was merely giving some suggestions to SeedyL for improvement.

Clearly focusing these weekly updates exclusively on the simulator’s development is not something they wish to do, the monthly Q&A sessions serve this purpose now. As such, realigning the community’s expectations on what they’re supposed to be is a good thing.

Yes they do, both in this and another forum. I’ve seen it happen several times since launch.

Feel free to stop reading once you see the big “Community” banner. Of course not everyone will be interested in the community portion of these updates, but I’m sure there are many who do.

Also I wouldn’t say it’s entirely unrelated to aviation. For example, this update featured a tutorial for go-around landings, and a freeware mod for an airport with a challenging landing. Should be of interest to beginner pilots, or those who want to refine their skills.

I’m not saying communication has been flawless so far, and I do criticise when I think mistakes are made, especially when they could have easily been avoided. But it’s way better than what we had with the previous simulators, so I don’t mind if we don’t get tons of information on a weekly basis. And yet this is something they’re trying to improve now that they’ve hired two more community managers.

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Maybe you are not the only one communicating ? :yum:

This was a forum moderator message directed not only at you, it was directed at members submitting here and to the forum in general.

@SeedyL3205 welcome… looking forward to your promise of having more detailed announcements about from the team about changes. Maybe that will make it easier for some critics to focus their comments. It would also be nice toward the community, if unannounced changes are also part of the list.

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Not sure why you think it’s toxic. Quite often it’s necessary to point out shortcomings or areas that need to be addressed.

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You don‘t have to anymore. This question has already been answered elsewhere („News“) with „yes“.