What's happening at Asobo?

Since the release of the hotfix, which was underwhelming for most of us with serious issues, there has been no further word from Asobo or Microsoft regarding the next step in trying to resolve the fundamental instabilities that mean many of us can’t actually use the game at all (I’ll start calling it a sim when I can actually use it reliably) because of CTDs and freezing.

Have they turned their back on us now and hope we just shut up and go away? Certainly I’m seeing no response to my bug reports to Zendesk, they’re just sitting there as “open” with no notifications to my email that they have even received them.

I know this thread will probably attract many who will tell me…
a) Their install works perfectly
b) It’s my rig not the sim
c) Empty my community folder
Or
d) Stop criticising Asobo.

The thing is, I was one of you once. From August to December everything worked perfectly, then the CTDs hit me. There’s no telling when you will get dragged into this mess, it’s a bit like coronavirus, or winning the lottery. I don’t use this PC for anything other than MSFS, I don’t fiddle with my setup, once it works I leave it alone. The only changes that will have been made to the setup will be MSFS updates or Windows updates.

I’ve tried all the suggestions that have been made on these forums and it makes not an ounce of difference. Since SU5 and the hotfix my issue now is 100% reproducible and still Asobo/Zendesk aren’t interested. My rig is not highly esoteric but it is AMD based, though there are plenty of people who use my combination of CPU/GPU. I’m sure the instability is probably arising from some sort of combination of my hardware, operating system, the software, my antivirus (although I have tried flying without it) and peripheral drivers (although again it’s just mouse, keyboard and Thrustmaster joystick).

We feel abandoned at the moment. It would be great to see some sort of acknowledgement from Asobo that there is still a problem and that they are working on it but just now there is silence. If Asobo wants to contact me to arrange remote access to my PC I’m happy for that to happen as I can guarantee the game to freeze at a particular point. Maybe it would help them tracking down the underlying issue. Anything, but the silence we currently have.

9 Likes

I agree with all you say. As per the posts from the moderators, they are reading the bug threads and working on the issues right now and will release some kind of statement shortly (no exact time given but I would guess it would be at latest tomorrow in line with their usual Thursday updates)

Edit - surely it would be helpful if the below posts and similar were pinned to the top of the forum? Many people don’t see them

2 Likes

It’s clear to me that this is a problem that people who aren’t daft and know how to troubleshoot and fix things have as well.

AFAICS it’s like Windows itself. The updating and downloading is , shall we say, a bit wobbly ?

If I was in charge, which I’m not I’d do two things immediately, neither of which are technically difficult.

  1. Have a proper log like on X-Plane, saying things like “Loading plane A320 data” “Loading T16000 configuration file”. “Loading Scenery block 1307A4”. It would make fixing things hugely easier (it does on X-Plane) because you have an idea what was going on when the problem occurred.

  2. Have an install verifier. This might not be possible for the basic first executable installed from Steam or the Store for security reasons, but the rest of it should be. AFAICS MSFS downloads fspackages which I presume are composite packages of files and/or patches. Verification would check the files in that package or the results of the fix before downloading it. We aren’t all on fibre broadband. It takes two days to download MSFS here. The only issue, which shouldn’t be huge, is when you have two that are related, one download and one patch, if it’s already been patched then the patch won’t apply.

Just assuming the download and install will work is amateurish tbh. And more to the point, as anyone who has installed Windows a few times knows, they don’t work, even if you do nothing else.

Another alternative, which is wasteful of HD space … of which I have plenty … is to cache the downloaded fspackage files somewhere and reuse those (after a MD5 type check). If people wanted the space they could just delete those cached files.

But it would make reinstalling a lot easier, and it’s not technically hard either.

These things are often tested on direct physical connections, not over some lousy internet connection which disconnects periodically because it’s raining.

It happens that asobo is a video game developer.
There is no more do not ask them to know about aviation simulations.

Do we really need ANOTHER one of these threads. I can’t keep up muting them all.

See this from only 14 hours ago…

2 Likes

They talk about triaging then CTDs and installation issues are at the bottom of the list. I’m sure LOD pops are top of the list because 1. They know what they did to cause it, and 2. It’s the sort of issue that affects XBox users the most.

1 Like

I really don’t think that post was carefully constructed in order of their priority (CTD is surely bigger than altimeter settings!!) I believe she was just trying to reassure that they are looking at many things. Hopefully the upcoming communication will give us proper clarity.

1 Like

I loved FS2020 up until this update. Now some of my peripherals no longer work and the ones that do lock up after 5 minutes or so. Also I don’t like the new “washed out color scheme in the graphics” and the blue “haze” over almost everything. The clouds are no longer “real” and the sim just seems like it took a giant “U-Turn” and went backwards. If you look at the graphics when the game first came out almost a year ago and look at them now - WOW quite a difference. I hope this all gets sorted out. Always hopeful…

2 Likes

Busy conjuring up a public statement that will result in the least amount of damage to their reputation.

Don’t read it then. Easy.
More threads the better in my book.

2 Likes

I marked the solution.
Let’s wait for actual information.