So there are a ton of very upset posts in the last few months. Especially since SU5.
There needs to be a very open discussion with this community.
The reason why people are upset are very apparent and I won’t repeat them. But Microsoft needs to step up and communicate directly with the community and answer many of the issues brought up by the team.
We have all seen the Live Q&As where the execs essentially made a lot of promises. The community feels the leadership team is not listening.
I truly believe the ONLY way the community will settle down is to have an honest discussion. Address heads-on the problems on why people are so upset and concretely have a plan of actions.
We really don’t know what’s happening behind the scene. We just know a continuous, sustained quality problems that kept being ignored.
I think until that communication happens. This forum will continue to have a lot of negative posts.
Honestly - I wish we could turn this into a “Vote” thread. This needs to be more than a general discussion.
And I’m in agreement. I’ve spent the last 5 hours chasing down a CTD. And you know what, it’s NOT an addon. Because I’ve removed ALL of them. So now what?? And I used to come here to LEARN from other great community members. But they, just like me, are unhappy. And with that comes additional angry and sarcastic posts. If the goal of this forum is to help each other, then it’s failed, because right now, we’re all just trying to help each other through a problem that’s not ours to solve.
I have had great suces, in similar circumstances, doing a 100% Fresh install of MSFS (as opposed to a suspect “update”)
Over 36 hours now into a Stress Test Flight over major cities in the USA at low altitude… so far, since Re-Install, no issues at all, with a Loaded community folder, and lost of external addons running as well, like LNM, Navigraph etc etc
GPU maxed out at 100% all the time… but no stutter etc
Even if that were true, which seems to be contradicted with dropping ratings of the title on Xbox Store and Steam ratings, does that invalidate the concerns that the “minority” have?
Even if it is a “minority” and it is surely a large minority, why should this matter? They still count and it is a stinking, festering stool of Public relations
This forum represents a very small portion of the the folks using msfs, that is for certain. Not taking anything away from it mind you, as it is needed. It is an easy place for new users to locate and get help.
I fully support the idea of an more open communication from MS/ASOBO but can actual identify myself with them (I am a developer myself).
Here some of my thoughts on this:
CTDs can always happen, and much more in such big games like MSFS. QA can not test everything and each system is different.
In Forums users are often complain about stuff but do not provide detailed reports (in a case of a CTD steps to reproduce, or the crash report, MSFS is even providing dump files for each crash!), so how should the developers fix this CTD???
Should some stuff be be seens before release? Yes, for sure and SU5 has shown how it should not be done… But ASOBO has already taken the correct steps to fix some of issues provided in that update within the current WU (remember WU are supposed to only incl. major hotfixes and scenery, no feature improvements).
As users we are kind of spolied by the regular updates and might demand to much here. See other games where updates (only fixes) are taking months.
Like with nearly all new AAA games the marketing hype before release is so big that the released game will never catch up to the expectations of the users and many publishers are actual referring to a “bannan-product” (product gets finished by the customer). MS and ASOBO are having long term plans for this game so I guess (I hope) there is some kind of internal roadmap that shows when fixes will get released.
And then there is the Report/Feedback issue, and I think if this issue will get fixed the amount of upset/frustated users will slowly decrease.
Reporting a bug here in the Forum is sometimes marked as LOGGED, but there is never direct feedback on it, so we have to waint and see…
Reporting over at ZenDesk is even worse: You report something and the report is set to “solved” without any feedback, just because it has been migrated to the internal feedback tracker. Why on earth are there 2 different backlog trackers??? Use just one tracker so the user can actual see what the current status is of his report.
→ It is all about transparacy
Whilst I understand that (an unspecified number of) people are upset, I do feel that what we need are less opinions, rants and immediate demands and perhaps more help given to the development team.
I’ve seen so many threads (and I know I am paraphrasing) in here about people demanding fixes to problems but little help (again, in my opinion) to try and identify the issue. I develop web apps and there is nothing more frustrating to a developer than someone being overly vocal about something you’ve poured many, many, hours into rather than trying to engage with you to fix a problem.
What I feel we actually need is a way of recording issues with our machine specs, internet connectivity and more so that the devs can track down issues. Perhaps a bug reporting tool that records this and sends it to asobo. The technology behind the sim is ground breaking in so many ways and never (as much as I can see) been attempted before. There are going to be wrinkles and it will take a time to get right.
We should work together to give constructive feedback on any issues, trying to give as much info as possible. Then be patient, there is only so many hours in the day and so many resources to go around and like it or not yours or my own issues are not the priority.
as an addendum after reading back - We also do not have an innate right for the developers to listen to any of our feedback, they have the right to develop the program as they see fit. What we have (again in my opinion) however is a team that is passionate, and driven to give the best experience they can. They are working and refactoring a lot of the underlying FSX code and I know from my own experience that this is a hard thing to do without breaking other aspects.
That, and logging have been requested many times, and both would be great additions. The perfect tool would upload an automated file to Zendesk, perhaps asking for an already logged ticket number to attach the upload to.
This tool would include all the information about the running environment, both the OS, as well as the sim. It should be no more onerous to run than a DXDiag.
