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767lover

Now that most of us are at home....

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Why not accept more or even all of us in the Alpha. 

What is holding them back I wonder. Apologies if this is naive, but the increased home time may also provide them more feedback. 

 

 

 

 

 

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Apologies accepted!

I think they are not in the business of charity or feel the obligation to entertain people locked up at home -  and there is nothing to gain by increasing the number of testers ad nauseam. Every alpha participant is carrying the risk of not buying the simulator later (because some may be loosing interest/find out that flight simulation isn´t for them), loosing a sale.

In addition having more testers is creating more overhead to triage and channel the feedback. There is certainly a sweet spot as for size of the testing team, and "whoever wants to" is certainly not it 😉

Cheers, Jan

PS: Not an alpha applicant/participant myself

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47 minutes ago, Janov said:

 

  having more testers is creating more overhead to triage and channel the feedback. There is certainly a sweet spot as for size of the testing team, and "whoever wants to" is certainly not it 😉

 

Absolutely, alpha testing is a serious business that has to be limited to be useful, specially at a time when the developing team can be smaller due to the quarantine and not even able to follow the present alpha population.

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Dominique

Simming since 1981 -  4770k@3.7 GHz with 16 GB of RAM and a 1080 with 8 GB VRAM running a 27" @ 2560*1440 - Windows 10 - Warthog HOTAS - MFG pedals - MSFS Standard version with Steam

 

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43 minutes ago, GlideBy said:

The Alpha is for testing, not to entertain bored people.  

Whilst that is true, it is potentially an avenue for some good publicity and product promotion for a developer, to be seen to be doing something nice in relation to the current crisis, so there is that to consider. I don't think having given away their Curtiss P40 Warhawk will have cost A2A too much in sales, but it will undeniably have had many people feeling plenty of good will toward A2A and visiting their website too. So it's definitely piled up the good karma for A2A, and that kind of thing is not to be sniffed at when considering corporate identity.

Yes the developers of the new FS sim only want a manageable number of testers for feedback, but there is nothing to stop them only using a limited amount of the feedback they get, so increased numbers in the 'test' would not necessarily overwhelm them unless they chose to have it do so. And as noted, if any company is looking for some good publicity, all it takes is a press release from Microsoft with a positive spin on it and Bob's yer uncle, there's a massive wave of it from loads of news outlets who are currently scrabbling for any corona news stories of note, and especially ones which are - currently hard to come by - good news for a change..

So it's a bit akin to when the UK was collecting pots and pans and bits of iron to allegedly 'help the war effort' during WW2, by telling the populace that they could turn their old railings and pans into a Spitfire. Of course it was nonsense, you need specialised alloys for that kind of thing, thus almost all of the metal which was collected was simply dumped into the Thames Estuary because it was in fact a propaganda exercise to bring some cohesion to the population and ensure that people on the home front felt involved and therefore willing to support other genuine efforts, and it almost certainly did work to assist the war effort, just not in the way most people thought it was doing.

So if I was the PR dude for Asobo or MS, I might actually give something like that serious consideration.

 

Edited by Chock
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Alan Bradbury

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No matter what the situation is, I am not sure companies open the in-development (Alpha) software for the global users to access...

If only by looking at screenshots and videos, the FS community and fans are reporting 10000 feedback, issues, dissatisfaction, glitches, improvements and wishes, can you imagine if they all have that Alpha up and running... It will create a virtual tsunami for MS/Asobo... Simply because so many will forget that it's the Alpha they are using and will live in the natural illusion that it's as a final product...

So I am not sure having access to the Alpha version of the software as an encouragement to stay home is a logical move for MS/Asobo. 

But yes, maybe some kind of something related to MSFS development, technical aspects, how things were done through blog posts or any form of daily update could be a nice move... 

But if MSFS was already released, then yes, MS could have decided to give free access for a limited time so simulation and aviation fans stay home... But then many like me, work from home so... 😆

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LEBOR SIMULATIONS

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35 minutes ago, Claviateur said:

Simply because so many will forget that it's the Alpha they are using and will live in the natural illusion that it's as a final product...

I disagree


MSFS Alpha tester on W10 Pro x64. Hardware: AMD 5900X 12 core CPU. Cooler Master ML360R AIO, Asus X570-E mobo, Asus Strix 3090 24GB gfx card, G.Skill TridentZ 64GB (4x16) DDR4-3600 RAM, Samsung 970 250GB SSD (OS), Samsung 980 Pro 1TB M.2 pcie-4 NVMe SSD (MSFS install). EVGA 850w Gold cert PSU, CUK Continuum full ATX tower.  43" Sceptre 4K display. VR: HP Reverb G2.

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I understand that everyone wants in the Alpha.  But are you doing it for you, or for what's best for the sim?  How many people that want in have written out a test plan?  And I mean more than just fly around.

One of the reasons not everyone has been invited, is they simply are not ready for everyone.  Some hardware just won't work, or they know will have a bad experience.  Take the 16GB RAM, until it was going to work with 16GB RAM, what is the point of inviting them?  It would just frustrate them.  And worse, now they have to deal with them saying it doesn't work, even though they have posted info saying so.  Same if the have 8GB, or video card that isn't supported yet, or sound card, etc.  And it doesn't mean those will never work, just takes time.

And then you have to deal with these people posting in the forums.  Right now, everyone posting is able to run the sim.  But in that case you would be getting feedback from people that never ran the sim.  Sure it could be useful, but it could also cause confusion.  And looking up everyone, just creates more over head.

And there could be other issues going on.  Frankly I am already amazing they have 6,000 people testing.  This is unheard of for an Alpha test.  Yet people are still unhappy.

Why not trust Asobo to setup testing that is best for the sim?  I get the feeling that people care more about entertaining themselves, than testing to make the best flight sim.

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2 hours ago, GlideBy said:

I get the feeling that people care more about entertaining themselves, than testing to make the best flight sim.

THIS ^^^ for sure.

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