Imagine where MSFS will be in 3 years?

[paulscottrobson 10]

12 hours ago, Dutch727 said:

This simulator was obviously done with passion and commitment by the design and development team.  They wouldn't have released it until it was ready, but someone else above them did, and now they are going to have to work long hard hours to fix it in the field all the while taking undeserved lumps from people who unfairly blame them for a premature release.

Absolutely. A good developer who worked on this would know it wasn't ready to go yet.

(I would say that in my experience sometimes developers go too far the other way)

Once worked on a vertical property management package. Manager came in and spoke to me and my colleague Mike (everyone in the office apart from me and Dave was called Mike !)

"Can we make this work on a PDP-11 ?"

..... we didn't know, neither of us had used one, we didn't have one, possibly.

"It's all C isn't it .... I've sold one to run on a PDP-11"

Cheers 😞

[RaptyrOne 1,459]

I kind of disagree that the sim was released way to early. Look at it this way, we could all have waited another 6+ months for beta testers to do their testing and report back to Asobo, and for Asobo to make the fixes. Or we could accelerate that 'beta' stage and get all the bugs ironed out much sooner, while all having access to the Sim. With 50,000+ people flying this sim right now, bugs will be coming to light far quicker. One report today of an aircraft flipping onto its roof if it is taxied up and down a runway a few times at at a local airport. That kind of random but reproducible bug would never be found by beta testers. It takes people going to their own local airports and 'mucking around'. The sim is too vast and complex for even 1000 beta testers to make perfect. We are talking about the entire planet.

[paulscottrobson 10]

10 hours ago, LHookins said:

Hehe!  Hook saw what the end of the Beta was like and wanted to get some feedback from the community after release. 😄 There had been rumors of a Magic Build with everything fixed and perfect.  Hook somehow didn't believe it.

The end of the beta was so close to release you had to have the final build or something almost identical to it. Changing stuff immediately pre-release, even a spelling mistake, is asking for disaster on an end-of-the-world scale.

[paulscottrobson 10]

2 minutes ago, RaptyrOne said:

I kind of disagree that the sim was released way to early ... We are talking about the entire planet.

Basically, no. It makes little difference whether it's the entire planet or a small estate in Basingstoke, and that's to do with the amount of data more than anything else. It's released too early. Any developer can see this a mile off. I'd estimate 3 to 6 months realistically.

[F737MAX 5,745]

1 minute ago, RaptyrOne said:

I kind of disagree that the sim was released way to early. Look at it this way, we could all have waited another 6+ months for beta testers to do their testing and report back to Asobo, and for Asobo to make the fixes. Or we could accelerate that 'beta' stage and get all the bugs ironed out much sooner, while all having access to the Sim. With 50,000+ people flying this sim right now, bugs will be coming to light far quicker. One report today of an aircraft flipping onto its roof if it is taxied up and down a runway a few times at at a local airport. That kind of random but reproducible bug would never be found by beta testers. It takes people going to their own local airports and 'mucking around'. The sim is too vast and complex for even 1000 beta testers to make perfect. We are talking about the entire planet.

And I disagree that 16,000 testers wasn't enough to find the issues people are complaining about now.

The sim was released too early. A 3-week beta test period ought to confirm that, not to mention the thousands of bugs reported to Zendesk still unresolved.

It's a shame, because MSFS has such potential and had built a lot of excitement for our stagnant hobby. Yet aside from the uber fans saying how wonderful it all looks and 'things will get better', for a lot of people it has trashed their ability to enjoy this new paradigm in flight simming. Take a look at user reviews on various websites and see that a lot of these are from first-timers who are supposed to grow this hobby of ours.

What's worse is that it could so easily have been avoided with just a few months' more development to iron-out the bigger issues.
 

[ARCO 245]

5 hours ago, maniamcool said:

I doubt FS2020 will survive beyond a year due to the lack of mass market support.

FS2020 is really dead on arrival, sadly. 

Following the above preoccupying diagnosis, Asobo and Microsoft are in urgent need of:

1. a fortune teller,
2. a mind reader,
3. a spiritual advisor.

Candidates with the relevant qualifications, please urgently apply to any of the two business entities to advise them on what their next business step(s) should be (bankruptcy experts should abstain applying for the time being please).

Edited August 21, 2020 by Jean-Claude

[Marco Manieri 194]

7 minutes ago, F737NG said:

for a lot of people it has trashed their ability to enjoy this new paradigm in flight simming. Take a look at user reviews on various websites and see that a lot of these are from first-timers who are supposed to grow this hobby of ours

PR work was to sell as much at time bosses decided it to go on sale.

PR work will be to bring back people when bosses will decide Asobo improved enough stuff to have a second stint.

That is PR work. And to me MS PR looks to be able do to its job well as much as Asobo does its well...

Edited August 21, 2020 by Marco Manieri

[fluffyflops 1,867]

50 minutes ago, mazex said:

Well - working as a development manager since many years myself I can tell you that people that have good manners and report serious bugs in a structured and positive way without "screaming" always gets better treatment than "the other bunch". I happen to know some development managers at major game studios and forums filled with negative people makes the developers loose interest quickly in reading it themselves but instead let the community managers handle it...

well maybe they should of not released so early.

look i get its not the developers doing, im sure higher up a "money man" told them "we release August come hell or high water, our data analysis is showing the optimum time based on project sales of the target audience is August etc etc etc etc"  or something along those lines.  

If my airline bought an  a/c from boeing and the engines kept playing up from day one as they went not serviced properly or made correctly and flights then kept getting delayed customers would have reason to be angry, we couldnt say, "ah yes but the ceo told us to buy the aircraft without boroscoping the engine first" so "please feel sorry for us"

my heart bleeds for the developers, but they really shouldn't of released it so early(how ever high up the decision was made, like p3dv5) and not expected to get  some gripes.

 

im yet to think of a product for the flightsim community that was ready on day one for at least the last 5 years.  Its the norm.  and its all about making as much as you can regardless of the quality.

Im sure the sim is the bees knees, and im hoping its got potential, my gripe is and always has been this obessive pay to beta way of doing business in this hobby / community.  its a cancer 

Edited August 21, 2020 by fluffyflops

[Novation 534]

27 minutes ago, RaptyrOne said:

Or we could accelerate that 'beta' stage and get all the bugs ironed out much sooner, while all having access to the Sim.

 

I agree with this 100%. I was very surprised with the seemingly early release, and expected some bumps in the road with it, which there is. But, I'm confident this will speed it along in a mature platform quicker than if it had remained behind closed doors for longer.

[LHookins 3,116]

2 hours ago, paulscottrobson said:

The end of the beta was so close to release you had to have the final build or something almost identical to it. Changing stuff immediately pre-release, even a spelling mistake, is asking for disaster on an end-of-the-world scale.

You have to keep in mind that the "Beta", the 16,000, were not the actual testers.  We were there to stress test the servers so they could be fine tuned.  We were given some directed testing, but it wasn't to find bugs; what I saw was to verify airports in some area were correct.  We did find and report bugs, which were then verified by the internal test teams and passed to the developers.  Many got fixed.  All got reported into the official system.

We had no idea what was going on most of the time, and were gobsmacked when the release date was announced.  We soldiered on, reporting bugs, giving our impressions.  Most were sad when it was over.

What we had was indeed close to the final build, but it was moot, really.  Someone else did the actual testing.  It looks like a few bugs were fixed after our last build.

I started my professional programming career March 1976, so do the math on how long that's been.  I have a bit of an idea how things should work. 🙂 

Hook

[LHookins 3,116]

2 hours ago, RaptyrOne said:

I kind of disagree that the sim was released way to early.

I do too.  At some point it needs to be released into the wild.  

I couldn't believe it was going out as soon as it was, and I wasn't alone.  But given everything we knew at the time, it was probably in good enough shape for the casual and gaming market, if not for the serious hard-core simmers.  I think the installation problems took them by surprise.

The developers always want to wait and do it right.  It's the publishers who determine when to release... ready or not.

I think it will all work out.

Hook

[OneOfMany 317]

Asobo: Send us the next submitted bug on the list

Zendesk: Wow, it seems to be empty this morning

Asobo: Team - Quick! Compile this thing and release it now! 

Asobo: HR - Prepare the layoff notices

[LHookins 3,116]

Just now, OneOfMany said:

Asobo: Send us the next submitted bug on the list

Zendesk: Wow, it seems to be empty this morning

Asobo: Team - Quick! Compile this thing and release it now! 

Asobo: HR - Prepare the layoff notices

Could be worse.

"We've got a clean compile!  SHIP IT!"

Or almost as bad, taken from real life.

"We're shipping it Wednesday.  Have it ready."

I don't think we're anywhere close to layoff notices yet.  Besides, if Microsoft pulls the plug, Asobo has other projects.  This ought to get them a bit of publicity, too... not for anything they didn't do, but for everything they did.

Hook

[OneOfMany 317]

1 minute ago, LHookins said:

 

I don't think we're anywhere close to layoff notices yet.  Besides, if Microsoft pulls the plug, Asobo has other projects.  

Sorry Hook. My tongue was planted so far in my cheek when I wrote that, it probably was misunderstood 😋

[andyjohnston.net 618]

I've been using various versions of MSFS for 25 years, and while this one has great visuals, there is so much lacking that I too feel it may go the way of Flight.  There's no map, or any way to look up frequencies.  There's no explanation for the very complex systems or how to use them (FSX had a huge learning center) etc etc.