Voting top lists do not work well - here is a proposal for improvement

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1

Here is what I suggest:

  1. Accept the fact that good proposals and useful feedback will be fragmented across multiple topics and be voted on in multiple threads.
  2. Community management team to browse the forum, identify threads that discuss similar issues, and in an offline tool (Excel, or something more fancy if available) group them into derived topics.
  3. Prioritize the derived topics list. Number of votes for all threads in the same topic is one metric, and number of threads opened on similar topics can also be a useful metric.
  4. Use the prioritized derived topics list to communicate with the development team, in posted developer updates, and in the Q&A sessions.
  5. For Q&A sessions, to avoid grouped topics from becoming too large and everything being listed as ā€œBacklogā€: Have the development team provide specific improvements belonging to the grouped topics and present which release they are planned for. Remaining elements of each topic is on the backlog, under investigation, or whatever applies. That allows the development team to present what they will be doing rather than being tied to the exact wording of whatever forum thread title ended up with the votes. The result should be a more positive and more helpful message.
  6. No more need for the moderators to spend time on trying to manage similar threads, close what they (rightly or wrongly) believe to be duplicates, and try in vain to educate users on how to post threads.

Why do I propose this?

  • It is not realistic to expect all users to always search for a similar topic and add to an existing thread. In many cases a proposal can be slightly different from existing proposals, or a second solution is proposed to address the same problem. Voting for the initial thread is not a vote for the second solution.
  • Let us remember that the users posting suggestions and concerns on the forum are doing Microsoft a favor ā€“ not the other way around. They are taking time out of their busy lives to tell Microsoft about something that is not working and can be improved, or some idea that would make the simulator better and therefore more competitive. Microsoft should take full advantage of whatever information is provided, and make it easy to provide feedback. Not try make the users do the legwork of finding any potential related topics and determine if they are indeed the same or slightly different.
  • Even threads that are labeled as not constructive, do not get votes, and either devolve into a slugfest or are quickly closed, contain useful and actionable information. ā€œThis sucks, my game has crashed four times today, you are all idiots and Iā€™m going back to X-planeā€ is perfectly valuable feedback that should be leveraged. Add one count to the ā€œGame stability and CTD issuesā€ topic, apologize to the user for their inconvenience and thank them for their feedback, close the thread and move on. If the irate user happened to mention when and where the CTD occurs, even better ā€“ but they might not.
  • The community managers can add their understanding of the sim and of the issues when grouping and triaging topics to add more useful feedback to the development team rather than just going off whatever topic heading the initial poster selected.
  • Experience from previous Q&A sessions suggest the current system is not working well. The topics that get mentioned are the ones that a) are simple enough for most people to understand at first glance without necessarily having to read the topic, and b) for which the original poster happened to select a good heading. The ā€œPress any key to continueā€ fiasco is a great example ā€“ I do not think anyone believed that was ever the most significant issue to be addressed, and it getting up on the top of the list is just an artefact of a) and b) above.

Thank you for listening.

1 Like
2

I do agree something is wrong with the voting system. But I donā€™t think letting the people do whatever in the wishlist section will be beneficial. (by whatever I mean putting a lot of requests in a single topic, creating yet another duplicate, ā€¦)

I really do think the way forward is enforcing a single request per topic, and good titles actually describing the request. (Mods should rename titles as needed)
While you are typing a new topic there are a bunch of topics on the right that talk about the same thing. If you donā€™t look at that, youā€™re just lazy. (not talking about you) These topics should be closed.

I still think it would be beneficial to give the wishlist 3rd tier subforums for the main themes like AI/ATC, Scenery, Flight model, UI/UX ā€¦
The devs are working on these subjects all the time and I bet it would be good for them to see requests within these topics in a glimpse.
For us and the mods itā€™s also better to quickly see what is already requested within a theme.

I really believe the main reason people are putting a lot of requests in one topic is because the wishlist is a mess. Dividing it in themes would fix that among other issues.

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3

I think you are addressing the easiest part: If a user is about to make five unrelated requests, split them in five posts. Not really any issue with that, and relatively easy for the mods to help with.

I think where it gets challenging, and where I see the current system breaking down, is when

  • a user knows something is wrong, but is not sure what beyond some vague symptoms, and opens a vague thread,
  • the user thinks their problem is one that is covered in a thread, but it turns out it theirs is actually a different problem,
  • multiple unrelated problems turn out to have the same root cause,
  • twenty different ATC issues get 10 votes each and donā€™t make the cut, whereas ā€œATC needs improvedā€ would have gotten 200 votes (except it would be requested to be split into separate threadsā€¦)
  • different solutions are proposed for the same problem, such as the other day when a user had their thread closed and was asked to vote on my thread instead, although that user actually asked for a different feature than what I proposed to address the same topic,
  • all the ā€œthis looks funnyā€ and ā€œplease I need some helpā€ threads that donā€™t get counted, although 30 such threads per day can point to serious issues that should be high on the list to be addressed, even though the users did not provide a QA-professional level bug report.

There might be other ways to address that than what I proposed. Since we are the paying customers of this SW and the community managers are paid to manage the community relations it is obviously tempting to put the workload on them rather than on us. They might see it differentlyā€¦ :slightly_smiling_face:

I think you are right about the wish list subforums, that sounds like a great idea.

4

Yeah, I wasnā€™t talking about bugs. I agree thatā€™s much more difficult than getting the wishlist on track.

For bugs the devs need to make some kind of export data button exporting a file with all settings, weather/airliner status, in game location, system specs, ā€¦
Even if you have sight on the code you can be looking at the wrong thing for days when fixing a though bug. So we can do even less then that.

For the wishlist, Iā€™d gladly help the mods with splitting/merging topics. Iā€™m a dev myself and very well know at what point something requires a separate topic, how the title could reflect the request better or what tag it needs.

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5

Where is the wishlist that can be voted?

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6

You can just vote on the topics. Open the topic and at the top left you see ā€˜voteā€™.

7

Got it. Thanks!