Yesterday I had a CTD approaching BIRK and it was identified as a bug since SU9.
Today I was approaching EKBI and had a CTD. I searched through the forums and found reference to this being a problem during the Beta testing.
I have seen a number of comments over time that problems found in Beta testing are not resolved before release. So that poses the question, if identified issues are not being addressed, why bother having a wide scale Beta process at all? All this can do is create community frustration and lead to people not bothering to sign up to help in future.
I cannot speak to these particular CTDs, but regarding the beta in general, you can check out the Bug Reports > Resolved category, and most of the last couple dozen closed bugs in there were detected and fixed in the Sim Update 9 beta. A bunch of additional bugs were logged and added to the various other Bug Reports categories.
I am not an official spokesperson for the MSFS team, but I think I can safely say that the team has not finished refining the flighting process, either. The first betas started out small and each one has gotten progressively more involved.
I am sorry that you are experiencing CTDs. I think one problem with CTDs is that they can sometimes be very difficult to reproduce, and to this point, the team has not always had sufficient telemetry data necessary to find the root causes of all of these CTDs, making debugging very difficult. However, in yesterday’s Twitch Developer Q&A, they spoke of more telemetry data in the future and possible dedicated fightings for CTDs. See the Q&A (14:24) for more details.
I don’t have any additional information beyond what what was given publicly, but I hope this helps.
The betas are to test only existing fixes. This is a common misunderstanding of the betas. They are not to find new bugs, but obviously opening up to a greater number of testing environments that’ll happen. Anything new that gets found during the beta isn’t guaranteed to be fixed by release, tho they have definitely tried given that new builds have been pushed during the betas. Anything already known that isn’t yet planned to be addressed isn’t going to be fixed in the current beta. You just can’t always fix software issues in a first-in/first-out order
I have done some further testing and from what I have found, uninstalling World Update 5 - Nordics - seems to fix the issues I have with loading at BIRK and EKBI. This may give Asobo a lead on the problem I and others are having.
What’s crazy is that for the first year + that MSFS launched, there were SO many complaints that we were never allowed to test new code before it was released. Then MSAsobo came out and said hey, we’re going to introduce a new beta platform so you can test our fixes. I honestly never thought that would happen. They listened, and now many of us sign up faithfully to help test their new code before it’s released.
It’s not perfect by any means, but let’s take the wins where we can get them.
agree with this 100%
You can question their methodology, but the fact that MS has open beta testing and an official feedback forum is a huge step forward.
Crowd sourcing is the way.
In plain words it´s cheaper as users are not paid for the testing hours. I´m totally against this kind of recent beta madness as it´s quite clear that they have no time to include the fixes in time for the official release. I think this game needs a pause, a really long debug period done by professionals and less world updates and DLCs. Many basic things are failing during last months (performance, stability, ATC, AI, aircraft systems, etc) and the overall quality is in my opinion is really disappointing nowadays.
We as final users are included in a never ending debug process, every month. And when things got fixed, after months waiting in many cases, they fail again after next update and we have to wait months again for them to be refixed as they come into the list of pending homework again. This is a frustrating situation that can can potentially ruin the entire game. I´m really tired now.
I think it’s so you can be prepared for what may or may not work when it’s released. It’s good that the devs at least let us see which items won’t be working anymore in the future but I personally like to be surprised each time.
Again, wrong. They have multiple releases with every beta, specifically to fix problems that are discovered. The horse is dead, guys, seriously. Time to stop beating it.
wat? No. There is a near infinite amount of variation in PC setups that can cause all sorts of problems. It’s impractical for the dev team to be able to test multiple hardware build environments themselves
If there’s something I learned after 30 years as user of videogames is that when betas or pre-releases appear on scene problems follow next. And unfortunatelly this is the pattern as well now.
There’s only one reason why you make a beta open to public: because you had no time to debug it yourself. If people is happy to participate, fine. But as customer I’m not happy and I think the forums are the right place to say that because now I have to worry about the quality of the game when I had no need to do it until 2022.
Quality is not good now and we are not going in the right direction with this rushing policy and beta programs every month overloaded with more and more new content everytime. I have seen the same in other games and in no case they came to a good result. If Microsoft allows that to happen instead of pushing to address the core fixes in time in game and ensure that they are no longer reproduced over and over again they will fail here.
Please, be realistic. They will only test it under a console environment, a min specs PC setup and a recommended specs PC setup. In the best case together with a Nvidia and AMD setup. There’s no more variation in the market. Do you really think that anything else matters or that they will test it with every single board in the market to debug a problem that one user has in his PC because he is using a different version of a driver? That’s one of the reasons why min and recommended specs are published as part of the requirements to run a SW, so that you are able to give easy answers to customers in case they don’t meet them.
It’s one thing to not fix thing’s that are hard to reproduce, or not fix things that are existing bugs.
But to not fix 100% reproduceable issues, that were newly introduced in this update and that were reported. And then to go on the stream and proudly announce how much you care about VR and that you do 1/3 or your testing in VR…is just tone deaf and shows the team doesn’t read what is reported. It just boggles the mind. Now we have to wait 3 months to maybe hopefully get this fixed, but I’m not counting on it.
Yeah, a LOT of bugs got fixed during the beta including all the major ones. The initial release especially had some bugs that would have broken the sim for many.
That particular bug is likely a regression. Not everyone re-tests specific scenarios. In fact, the primary purpose of SU9 Open Beta was to verify the fixes listed in the Release Notes that would eventually accompany this week’s production push to the public. I myself encountered this and reported it up to the Dev Team.
Regressions happen even in simpler software products. With something this large, it will definitely happen.
Before I even dig in, I just want to say one really important thing — “I am NOT defending MSFS in anything I say. I’m just waking you up to what beta is, vs what beta participants think it is.”
There is a lot to unpack, and I’m not going to unpack it, I don’t have time. I’m going to just keep it short and simple. But I’ve been on both sides of corporate betas (not with this product - I’ve only been on one side with this product).
The point of a public beta is to expose things that internal QA may not have exposed but which are also of sufficient importance that they need fixing like NOW (in the eyes of the company - not you).
Now – of course from that, most beta participants will say “I reported this specific CTD in beta, and I re-tried it in release and its still there, if a CTD isn’t a big deal than what is?”
And you’re right (kinda) to think that. It is a big deal. And it probably went into someone’s notes and a meeting where people talked about what was critical and what wasn’t and it didn’t make the cut so your CTD didn’t get fixed.
However, as the reporter of something like that, you feel like you white-hatted your happy self into the beta for the betterment of all gamers and your advice was not heeded, so the best thing to do is to go to the forums post-release and say “My bro’s, I totally saw this, I totally reported it, and its still borked, and they don’t love us and the end of days etc etc and so forth.”
Beta’s are not about individually reported bugs. They are about large scale user experience. If 80% of participants report a thing AND thing is on the corporate list of critical things, then that will get dev attention. But if 80% of the participants report something that is already known, and not considered a deal breaker by the bosses, then, that bug is probably going to publish.
Thats Beta in a nutshell. Its a large subsection of users using it all at once, and on their end(the publisher/dev), they can see from the server log that you’re running the beta, and they are looking at metadata for stuff you don’t even know they are interested in.
Your personal peeve bug is not the point, and it never will be. And so you’ll always come away from a beta (with a company as big as this anyhow) feeling like you got a little violated. Sorry kids, nobody promised you a hug at the end.
But don’t lose heart. Your bug is logged, and at some point they might even care about it. Just not when you wanted them to care about it. The weight of data over time is what moves the needle, not your personal passion for this one thing.
This is how beta works. It varies only a little from one shop to another. Some publishers/devs do smaller invitation betas and in those scenarios you often do get a better view and better weight on your personal bug (over the last 30 years I’ve been in many of those and they can be quite rewarding)… But a wide open public beta like this one is not going to be like that. Sorry.
It doesn’t mean they don’t care. It just means that their goals and yours aren’t exactly the same.
