Stop the voting system - create a good forum!

I do not think that gets too much attention, but who knows …

Speaking about attention:

Please stop the voting system!

I’m beta tester for many years, many addons and tools. And there are good and bad beta tests, of course. One key for a efficient bug hunting is a good system where testers could report and developers could follow these reports.

This voting system here is really, really bad!
Long term and popular issues have reached hundreds of votes and stay there. New bugs will never have the chance to get attention. And bugs, which will probably just affect a small region - therefore not many people are affected - will never get the attention.
Other problem with it is, that is cluters normaly in many different threads for the same problem - votes get cluttered then also. Yes Mods try to merge this, but doesn’t really work.

We need a forum with several sub forums dedicated and splitted in useful sub-categories!
And inside these forums we can see what is worked on, what is discussed about for this specific problem.

As example one forum for every plane, and one forum for every country. And then sub forums for all the systems for that special aircraft, and sub forums for all the bugs according to that country: POIS, roads, bridges, textures photogrammetry nd so on.

This would give the advantage that users and delevopers could easily follow one specific problem. Once reported, I can see if there’s progress, if I can add information, what is already reported etc.

This is currently not possible with threads with hundreds of posts in it.

Please consider it!

2 Likes

While I like your idea with subcategories in general, and I agree that new bugs could be left behind, there are many things that I think are unfeasable.

In my opinion the whole goal of this voting system (and bug reporting in general) is to flush out the major bugs that affect most people and get rid of those. It is not meant for individuals to have a tracking system on the progress of tiny little problems.

Bugs that are localised will (and should) never get this kind of attention. First of all they are only affecting a small amount of people and secondly they’re often easily fixed by the community themselves - as has been done many many times before with missing airports, missing POIs, missing satellite imagery or bad mesh etc.

The whole idea of having the developers chasing after single little things IMHO is not the way to do it. Just imagine a subcategory for every country. There are 195 individual countries in the world!
Having subcategories like “aircraft”, “scenery”, “ATC”, “instruments” or something like that may be an idea.

However I have no idea how to make sure that new bugs get the same kind of attention that old ones do. I guess here also in comes back to the most pressing need. If a bug is major enough it will gather many votes in a short timespan. So here it should be up to the devs to keep track of how fast new topics gather interest.

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Maybe old bugs should either be fixed or moved to a separate “backlog”, making room for less voted, recent threads.
Like a “trending” bug list which received a recently rising number of votes or discussion.

But anyway, Zendesk is the way to go to report bugs to the Devs. The voting system here is just on top of it.

But there are already many subcategories in the bugs&issus section, not sure what you are missing there.

1 Like

what you want is hundreds of forums brrr no ty

1 Like

I just can say that over the years, forums with dedicated sub categories are the most effective way to chase bugs.

But yes, these forums have to be moderated thoroughly by the devs.

I do think, that this simulator has some substantial bugs which should be fixed before moving on … and these bugs are not the ones which are voted on the top!
(mainly everything related to aircraft simulation)

Zendesk is complete useless in my opinion. I reported many, many things there, but as I can’t see anywhere if sth happens or not, except from an automated answer, I gave up recently.

Thanks. Actually I didn’t even know that, since I don’t hang around the bug section. Guess next time I’ll check before I write :man_facepalming:
Mostly I’m pretty happy with MSFS and can work around most of the few bugs I encounter.
I just thought guenseli’s idea in general had merit.

These are the sub-categories for Bugs and Issues:

voted image

As a developer (not MSFS), this is usually handled by the submitter including a “severity” rating. That’s professionals. Consumers will abuse it. Human nature. There is no perfect bug system. Deal with what’s available, remembering what you paid.

And I AGREE ! For instance at my home airport (KPNS, Pensacola, FL) , ALL the bridges in the photogrammetry city of Pensacola have MISSING SPANS… Been there since MSFS was released,
Many bugs reports sent but nothing is ever done. Not important enough. Even the INTERSTATE 10 Bridge has missing spans… O well, Missing bridge spans do not qualify as “EYE CANDY”…

I suppose you are right, we have to remember that the MSFS is only a “SIMULATION GAME”

The voting system is shambolic at best; vote harvesting (see Vatsim users and wanting METAR weather as a prime example), people voting for things they don’t fully understand, people voting for things that doesn’t affect them “just to lend their support”, similar threads on the same subject having their own votes, people just randomly voting on threads because they can etc etc

That whole system needs removing, especially in betas whereby people should be writing about the issues in more specific detail, currently they just click “vote” and the Devs get no full extra information in what the bug may be about from a wider set of users.

Hi everyone,

This is a friendly reminder that forum votes is but one input out of many that the developers use when prioritizing which bugs to fix in each Sim Update and which new features to implement first. Forum votes are not the one true definitive source that guides all development decisions, and the Community team knows when the system is being gamed (e.g. by soliciting votes on external sites).

Thanks,
MSFS Team

My point is the Voting system is a deterrent from actually posting vital information regarding issues, on the subject of harvesting you cannot possibly follow every site, every Facebook group, every discord channel to know when harvesting is happening.

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