To All FS Community members and Customers: My personal thoughts first: As you know we as developers keep personally involved and informed with the MSFS team. They ask specificly to hear about our projects that we have in the works. This is not for development reasons but more because they themselves enjoy the hobby just as much as we do and care equally about it. These off color remarks towards these MSFS team members who pour their hearts and souls into making FS the best product they can is really starting to get to me. It's not their fault they are not allowed to personally respond to everyone's requests or forum posts. That's the MS policy.Now a quote from Kevin Griffin himself: This is what he told me."We (the team - myself included) monitor all the major forums daily. Most frequently I venture into the bush flying forums, Emma Field, and the general forums. I enjoy the screenshots and most recently, the movies. Some of the work being delivered by PMDG, Flight1, Lago, FSAddon, OSS :-) and the many others simply amaze me. I'm also participating in several freeware projects (most recently Mikko's Maule and Mark Smith's KPWT scenery). I fly flightsim at home several hours a week and have purchased several hundred dollars in payware addons this year alone...I'm an enthusiast (also part time commercial pilot/flight instructor) and an active gamer (simulations, and other genres - affectionately known as 'scratch' in Halo multiplayer). Some team members are more into the specialty development forums; such as aircraft and scenery and provide assistance when they can.We are a small team that exists in a larger organization, which is part of a large division, that is one of many divisions in MS. There are 55,000+ MS employees, of which we are just a handful.What I'm trying to say is that we are real people too that care about the product and our community and are doing all we possibly can to reach out. While it is currently policy that we can't post directly, we are here daily and actively aware of every issue. And if for whatever reason we're not aware, we are informed through our channels in the 3rd party development community.Ok, enough typing already - I need to go fly around my latest download, the new Emma Field 2004. "I hope this helps to dispell some of the "big brother" image that alot of people think they have.I'm sorry this post is short but I have to get back to work as I am home for my lunch hour.Thank you all very much for your patience.

Very cool to hear from someone on the dev team - Kevin, you have our thanks!I do wonder why it is that MS has a policy of non-interaction with the FS community forums though - they could cut down on so much of the speculation and misconceptions about the sim by occasionaly posting here or at a forum of their own making... Look at the PMDG forum for instance - any time something comes up, there's a dev in there super fast with concrete info. Imagine if we had that kind of response on things like the autogen bug, bridges, etc...

"I do wonder why it is that MS has a policy of non-interaction with the FS community forums though"It's not just the FS community- It's anything. Like I said in another post, my company trains MS employees (not strictly- but 20 or 30 a year) and they are not allowed to give us testimonials that say they work at MS. Big companies have to be careful, so they create blanket policies to cover their butts. Like someone else said, MS could be liable for statements made by their employees, so they are not allowed to say anything "officially" unless it is approved by the correct channels.When I worked for THQ (one of the biggest publishers out there) we had the same policies- so what we did was create fake names, and provide helpful insight, but not anything that could be traced back as a leak. I'd be willing to bet there is an FS guy or two posting on here, at least intermittently, under an alias. It's useless to try and figure out who though, as they definately don't want to be caught.

P.S. In case you're wondering, I was the webmaster and one of the developers at Heliotrope Studios (owned by THQ) and worked on Pax Imperia 2:Eminent Domain, and designed, and ran the website. Don't know if there are any space strategy guys here, but I was one of the "official" liasons between the company and the user base, not to mention the guy that leaked all the cheat codes :)

All large corporations try to limit the amount of information coming from its staff. Mostly to save the staff from the time and trouble of having to reply themselves. But also to avoid foot-in-mouth situations. While Kevin and many of the MS crew may well be afficionados, they are entitled to treat their job at MS as just that, a `job`. They should not have to be on 24-hour call to the repetitive and banal musings of a customer base, however keen. Not when it's just a job.When I leave work, I LEAVE WORK BEHIND. Are you suggesting that MSFS staff should not also have that right?How long would it be, I wonder, before the absence of a reply from a MS team member (because they actually have a life outside of Flight Sim and maybe actually have other hobbies) would lead to futile rumour-mongering among the fanbase?Allcott

Hi Jeff, Thanks to post this in public forum and like you, I dont worrie at all about anything related to the Msfs franchise from my last conversation, everything is fine...ThanksChris Willis[link:fsw.simflight.com/FSWMenuFsSim.html]Clouds And Addons For MsFs

From a fellow MSFS Beta tester, thanks Kevin and Jeff for making this public! :-waveFrank CubillosProjectAIhttp://fsgateway.com/frank/fs9paibeta.jpg

Ditto-thanks....and they (the programmers) are a great bunch of people and Flight/Flight Sim enthusiasts. I have always enjoyed talking to them the past couple of years at Oshkosh. http://mywebpages.comcast.net/geofa/pages/rxp-pilot.jpg

I still haven't made it to Oshkosh yet. Can you believe it?

Thanks Jeff for putting a human face behind the development team at Microsoft...I for one can understand the big brother persona that Microsoft has with the FS community. If you can't hear, see, or touch an entity that is behind something that you use daily, it's easy to develop this impression of

Dillon, Frank, Chris, Goefa, and all others. (I hope I spelled you names right..lol)Thank you very much for your posts. With companies as large as MS it is very easy for them to get that image. That's kind of "just the way it is" at that point. I can definatley see your point and understand it myself. I think it's also important that we see their viewpoint as well (which I know you do also). It is more important that the larger you are as a company to make sure all your communications are accurate and uniform. I'm sure this is why they opt to make official announcements through their own channels, chain of command, or however you look at it. If someone was to make a statement and a change had to be made it could cost them millions. You've all seen what errors can do to small companies in the FS community. We get seriously flamed. To a company like MS, an error in communications could not only cost them real money, it could likely effect their stock price or cost them their market position which could effect all of the previous mentioned items. By no means do we want to "slam" or put down people for expressing their own opinions, but when it comes to the point of actually attacking people, someone has to take a stand. I chose do finally do that (before making the MSFS post). I only informed OSS members after the fact. I'm sure they feel the same for the most part as I do. We at OSS take very seriousley are customers, supporters, and even our competition (we also keep in touch with several other developers both freeware and payware and offer help whenever we can). We hope to one day be able to make this our full time jobs also. I have come to "know" several other developers/competitors through these forums and by emails (Ron-Eaglesoft, John T-PMDG, Martin-Fly Tampa, Chris W.-FSW, just to name a few, and a host of other freeware devers, as well as our favorite vendor: Flight1-Steve H.) Some of you I talk to on the phone as well. I also know alot of our own customers personally. You all know by now I list my personal phone number in my singatures as well as my MSN and email. I love talking to you guys (good or bad).The bottom line is this. This community/hobby/job is fortunate enough to keep somewhat of a family mentality. I think we are really unique in that aspect. I think that it's very important that we maintain that family atmosphere at all costs. That means we as a company will pull no punches when it comes to what is fair and what is not.I'm also fairly certain that the team at MSFS would actually love very much to be able to make these posts and talk directly to everyone on all these issues as well as general FS issues. Kevin wanted very much to be able to convey these thoughts to you all. I agreed to help him. This was a personal thing for him and his team.Anyways, thanks for listening to my rants. Keep in touch :-)

Hi Jeff,I don't think anyone who has followed the forums here over the past few years could have been in any doubt that the MSFS team was monitoring these boards. Just a few examples: With FS2002, people were looking for ways to get AI traffic to use multiple runways, they wanted a better weather display, and every other shot in the screenshot forum was of someone landing at St. Maarten... So, out comes FS9, TNCM is now a detailed default airport, 3-D clouds are gracing the skies and AI are landing and taking off from different runways simultaneously.Cheers,Gosta.http://www.hifisim.com/images/as2betateam.jpg

Gosta,You would think that would be the case..LOL :-) It never fails though, there's always a few out there who need to be reminded. As this hobby increases it's customer base, there's going to be more an more people who aren't as familiar as we (the other 99.9%) are.You are very correct about that fact they monitor the forums and take note. I feel lucky that the FS team does that and continues to imporove the product.Glad to hear from you :-)

>I do wonder why it is that MS has a policy of non-interaction>with the FS community forums though - they could cut down on>so much of the speculation and misconceptions about the sim by>occasionaly posting here or at a forum of their own making... >Look at the PMDG forum for instance - any time something comes>up, there's a dev in there super fast with concrete info. >Imagine if we had that kind of response on things like the>autogen bug, bridges, etc...Several reasons:1) prevent the team members from becoming targets of personal attacks by people that don't like the products.2) prevent littigation (frivolous lawsuits) over unguarded remarks by the team members. This is mainly a US problem.3) prevent accidental leaking of company secrets.If someone from Microsoft had posted an official response here on the childish rants about bridges and the supposed autogen bug, there'd have been hell to pay unless he'd promised a "patch". And then there'd have been a massive flamewar unless that "patch" were delivered within a few hours (after all, according to the average Joe it's "a simple problem" and "simple problems" are "easy to fix" right?

Jeroen,Yeah I know what you're saying man... There are big time game developers though that do occasionally post in threads on fan forums etc - Epic (makers of the Unreal series) and Valve (Half Life series) are two that come to mind right away. Even John Carmack, the genius behind id Software's amazing first person engines regularly posts on sites like slashdot etc...