At the moment there are hundreds of good or great suggestions and bug reports but only a very few are seen by enough people to highlight them to Asobo or people who may know the solution. Instead the very same topic is spread across many, many threads (often also because people don’t use the search function).
Please change something about that. It is super frustrating to have your serious reports, questions and suggestions not being seen by anyone. (For example the FMS/FMC of A320, B747 and B787 is essentially broken, but not a single topic has enough votes to bring that to asobo, because the votes are spread across so many threads.)
I think they should do both.
If you encounter a problem -> Check if the forum has a topic about your issue. If so, see if it has a solution. If it has not -> Vote up + Report to Zendesk.
I agree. I think the solution is breaking up topics with multiple requests into topics with a single/small request. Essentially breaking up the big topics in smaller ones, giving other smaller requests a chance.
@WrngwyCorrigan no, discussion is a good thing. It sparks new ideas and improvements. It also shows the devs better what exactly we want. Personally I post all my suggestions both on the forum and the Zendesk.
It is hard and we can only help by notifying moderators about duplicate posts. But they do a great job at merging similar posts. Ofc. would be nice without the duplicate posts but anyways.
I just thought of another advantage if we start splitting into individual requests. Perhaps it’s wishful thinking, but it would allow asobo to link specific threads to their todo list and report to the forum mods whether a specific topic is denied, on the backlog, in development, implemented.
Here is the thing about Zendesk tickets. When bug reports are submitted, the first thing that happens is that the person on the receiving end will search the bug database to see if the bug already exists. If it does, then they may enter another a new bug report, but if they do, they will immediately resolve it as a duplicate and close it. Given the tremendous amount of reports being submitted, I would not be surprised if they don’t take this extra step. Even if they do, the number of duplicates typically has no effect on the visibility of the bug. Nor does it typically influence whether a bug gets fixed. While I have no idea how Asobo treats bugs, what I’m describing is fairly standard practice. Bugs do need to be submitted, but in terms of getting visibility, what we have already seen is that Asobo is paying attention to the forum and responding to top vote getters. What we really need is a way to consolidate threads that doesn’t require the moderators to do that work. Maybe what would work is a way to bucketize threads rather than merge them.
There are so many duplicate threads. It is quite irritating as a reader.
Does the Mod team pick up on duplicated automatically do you have to manually review every thread?
When you merge 2 threads are the votes accrued, or are votes from one thread lost? I imagine that they can only be accrued if there is a way of detecting if a forum member had voted on both threads and nullifying one of them.
If votes are lost from one thread, this is an issue…
We find them manually or if they are flagged. I’ve not done much merging personally but my understanding is that merging loses the votes associated with the merged topic.
It is better if we catch duplicates early of course
The search function is quite effective, but I have been put off starting a thread on occasion for fear of creating a duplicate where I believe the topic is too obvious though it hasnt appeared to me through searching.
Others do not seem to worry/ cant find/ don’t use the search function/ or wilfully ignore the “is this topic like another already active” note that appears when you start a title.
Certainly, people who start threads with titles like:
“So, does Asobo…”
or
“What I would like is…”
and then elaborate on the actual topic in the first post are not being very helpful to the process.
For what it’s worth, a stricter policy around the Title of the thread would be very welcome. It would help to save forum member’s time clicking on erroneous threads and might help you guys too?
(I have probably been guilty of the above myself on a couple of occasions, but as time has gone on have self-sensored more as I find the behaviour increasingly annoying)
My point is if it needs to be discussed then find the existing thread with the topic. It’s rare that I see a new thread uncovering something that hasn’t been addressed before.
As moderators and forum members, we’re bound to the forum software that we have, both with its features and limitations. It would be a very, very, very heavy lift to do something drastic like change it.
Yes, when duplicate topics get merged, the votes do not get added up. I just found four duplicate topics today and had to close three of them, each with 6-8 votes. Let’s assume nobody voted twice: If everybody had searched, that topic would have 27 votes today instead of the 8 that it has.
Because votes can’t be merged, when we merge topics, the winning topic is the one that has the most votes. It’s not always the first thread. Some people don’t like having their topics closed, especially if they were the first ones and did their due diligence by searching, and their thread gets closed out in favor of someone who didn’t.
We do want a single item per topic, going forward. This was documented in a recent Community post. Imagine that somebody posts a wishlist of five things that they really want to see. Then somebody else posts a wishlist of five other things they want but three of them overlap with the first post. Do you merge them? Do you merge a third topic into the first one that covers just one of those topics? What if a forum member sees one of these posts and really wants one of the items but doesn’t want the other four…do they vote for it? What if Asobo implements three of the five items in one of the wishlist? Do we close it? This is why we want one issue per topic.
So, this is my long way of saying, the best things we can do right now are:
Search before creating a new topic. Remember to search on a few terms.
Flag topics that you think are dupes. Choose “Something else” and provide links to the duplicate topic(s). If you’re not a Member yet, send a private message to “moderators” with the duplicate topics.
Catch duplicate topics quickly before they go too far.
The Voting system needs either binning or drastically changing, to highlight issues the Devs should NOT be trusting what issue has the most votes to put them higher up the priority list.
It’s a system that clearly isn’t working very well, especially as above if Merged Threads don’t carry over the Votes then that’s a Major Flaw in the system itself. There’s too much emphasis being concentrated on the Bigger Threads with more Votes, purely because people Bounce them, inane conversations happen so those threads remain near the top and “Groups” of people bombard Votes on a Subject.
Yeah I fear smaller requests get ignored because they don’t get as many votes, even though these requests can be implemented by a single dev in a single day. (small UI improvements, small additional settings, even the progressive taxi toggle (about 150 votes) hasn’t been implemented yet which really shouldn’t take more than 2-4 hours?)
The top wishes are massive to implement. If we have to wait until these are done we’ll never get to small UI improvements that don’t receive as many votes even though they benefit us all.
Yes I agree.
I recently spotted a wish list item that was similar to the one I had just created. So, because his was ‘older’ and had twice as many votes as mine, I contacted him and we agreed that he would edit his post to include my specific issues and I would then contact the Mod’s to have my post closed and my votes transferred over.
A good plan you might agree. Unfortunately, in so doing I paid the price of LOSING all my votes!
This is not only very frustrating, but acts as a clear disincentive to any ‘self policing’ initiatives.
Addendum:
And now, having trashed this voting system [like pretty much everyone else in this thread], I shall
now use the same system to vote for change!
And wouldn’t it be ironic if one of us found a duplicate of THIS thread!!!
As for Wishes then the Voting System could work well enough, again the Merged Threads issue is a major blocker. As for Bugs & Voting though, that’s the one area that needs a massive overhaul.
As Tjoeker says above some Bugs could be fixed in quick time and surely the Devs have their own list of fixes to implement, I mean take the Horizon Line bug that’s been in since Alpha - if that wasn’t picked up by the Devs sooner then I’d really have to question the point of Zendesk as that is clearly a visual bug that should’ve been fixed by now - not having to wait for it to be “Voted” high enough up the Charts to get noticed.
…and yes very ironic that we have to Vote for these changes in the first place!
