Expectations vs Reality

[Paraffin 2,197]

48 minutes ago, Heli said:

Why would Asobo release a trailer with a reef looking like this when we already have the sim installed and can see it is false advertising.  Maybe this is one of the planned fixes in the upcoming update and that is why they showed it in the trailer. 

Marketing departments and programmers don't speak the same language and aren't always in sync. We're also dealing with geographic and language differences between the publisher MS and the developer Asobo. It's probably just the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing.

That said, they should stop advertising a feature that isn't yet in the sim. It's probably just a mistake and not intentionally fraudulent, but there are laws in most countries about product misrepresentation.

[RudyB24 296]

Consumer Rights Act 2015

Any product or service, physical or digital, bought online or in store must meet the following standards:

Satisfactory quality – Your goods should not be faulty or damaged, or at least of satisfactory quality. For example, second hand goods are not held to the same standards as brand new.

Fit for purpose – you should be able to use it for the purpose they were supplied for.

As described – your goods or service must match the description, model or sample shown at time of purchase.

[MikeT707 1,181]

The flight simulator forum has quite a few screenshots of water masking that is in game. There is also a thread that talks about it there. I wanted to check some out so I took some guidance by a couple of posts and saw for myself. It looks really nice and I am looking forward to Asobo adding more with their World updates that are to come out every two to three months. 

[Slides 1,552]

9 minutes ago, RudyB24 said:

Consumer Rights Act 2015

 

MSFS checks all the boxes. 

[Elwyn 67]

7 hours ago, wthomas33065 said:

I kind of understand the reasoning why they apparently made the change.   It's to make the water look more consistent.  Most satellite data that has reefs and things have very sharp corners where the picture cuts off.  When you try to inject that photo into generic water, the result is very "pasted on" looking.  I ran into the same problems when trying to insert satellite data when I was working with scenery editors to inject satellite data a Hawaii scenery i was working on. .  The borders of the photos would make it look like the island was just Cut and Pasted into generic water textures.  It looked totally unnatural.  So I ended up trimming the islands myself to make them look more organic and less patchworked.  I missed the reef details, but they were not worth the hard line borders going from the "generic' water to the photographed water.  

I'm actually pretty shocked that they were able to make the islands look as natural as they do.  They just look to be in "deeper water" as has been mentioned.

if the issue was the sharp corner they should cut it gradually from that that angle not on the beach, and on the trailer the scenery looks very natural and nailed it. sadly this comes out to be a false advertisement.

[ahsmatt7 1,201]

6 hours ago, RudyB24 said:

Consumer Rights Act 2015

Any product or service, physical or digital, bought online or in store must meet the following standards:

Satisfactory quality – Your goods should not be faulty or damaged, or at least of satisfactory quality. For example, second hand goods are not held to the same standards as brand new.

Fit for purpose – you should be able to use it for the purpose they were supplied for.

As described – your goods or service must match the description, model or sample shown at time of purchase.
 

Yeah, I'm sure MS lawyers have got this one figured out. Go back to what you were doing before you pressed the submit button for this post Mr. Armchair lawyer.

[Carlosx 48]

Well, it's not really about the law, but more about fairness.

They keep advertising these waters over and over in various trailers and screenshots. And not just in the past few weeks, we got water masking back in the first trailer, that is still not in the final product!.
Seems like a very bad move.

[Alpine Scenery 1,609]

I wouldn't depend on marketing to be fair, that's rare.

Relating to the original posts, well no one in govt / FTC will go after a company for a visual issue in software, they can say or do almost whatever they want in this case. Govt sometimes goes after stock brokers for making false return claims, but even look that up and look how rare it is, and many of those guys lie through the teeth often. Unless your running Enron or the next billion dollar pharmaceutical company, they are probably not going to care if you sell a product with plain looking water compared to a trailer.

 

 

 

Edited August 30, 2020 by SceneryFX

[LHookins 3,113]

3 minutes ago, SceneryFX said:

No one in govt / FTC will go after a company for a visual issue in software, they can say or do almost whatever they want in this case.

TLDR:  See last paragraph.

Once upon a time the government went after breakfast cereal companies for selling large boxes of cereal that were half full.  The result?  "Product sold by weight, not volume.  Some settling of contents may occur during shipping."  Yeah, right.

Next time you buy a bottle of vitamin pills, look inside.  Large containers sometimes about 1/3 full, almost never more than half.  I guess vitamin pills settle during shipping too.  Does anyone but me care?

Once upon a time you could buy tuna in two varieties:  chunk light and shredded dark.  Today, all containers are marked chunk lite but contain shredded dark.  Recently I had two identically marked cans of Bumblebee tuna, supposedly a good brand, both marked chunk light.  One actually had chunk light tuna, the other had shredded dark.  I'd happily pay a premium for actual chunk light tuna.  Does anyone but me care?

Major H, the developer of the Tacops wargame, got a lot of flack from his publisher and retailers because he wanted to sell the game in a smaller box, and retailers demanded the large boxes typical of games in those days.  He also was forbidden to use actual in-game screen shots on the box art.  Those screen shots would have sold me on the game instantly, but weren't pictures of real tanks, which might have sold more copies but were in no way representative of the actual game.

We're seeing promotional screen shots of a flight simulator that look nothing like what we see on our computers and people do care.  I think part of what is happening is that MSFS is reducing the quality of what we are seeing on the fly to keep performance up, no matter what our settings.  This might be due to performance issues on our computers and sometimes due to server limitations.  One obvious example of this is that I have 16 gig of RAM and my MSFS uses no more than 11.  Other people with 32 gig are seeing 18 gig or more used.  I know I must be missing something, I just don't know what.

Hook

[Shack95 2,665]

15 hours ago, Virtual-Chris said:

I agree that this is a major issue that should get a statement from the team on what the plan is. And the marketing people should stop with this... but it begs the question... what version of the sim does marketing have? I want it. 

The team explained it at 28:44 in the Q&A:

Although I wouldn‘t go as far as calling it false advertising (since we do have the water masking tech (just not everywhere) + they have been transparent regarding this issue), it probably wasn‘t the smartest move to release such a video without clarifying that it’s a WIP - and that at a time when this topic was one of the top debates on some fora. 

My guess is that this video had been produced before it became such a hot topic and that the people responsible for its release weren‘t aware of that. It came out on release day if I remember correctly so things might have been a bit chaotic over at MS/Asobo. 

[nonflyingdutchman 40]

remember this?

https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.gamespot.com%2Farticles%2Fflight-simulator-x-hands-on-impressions-new-features-new-audio-experience-and-a-hint-at-directx-10-graphics%2F1100-6155710%2F&psig=AOvVaw0nBnijSLx903NfRNMGfxRJ&ust=1598864279862000&source=images&cd=vfe&ved=0CAIQjRxqFwoTCIiylsDHwusCFQAAAAAdAAAAABAD

[Shack95 2,665]

3 hours ago, Carlosx said:

Well, it's not really about the law, but more about fairness.

They keep advertising these waters over and over in various trailers and screenshots. And not just in the past few weeks, we got water masking back in the first trailer, that is still not in the final product!.
Seems like a very bad move.

While for me personally this isn‘t a problem (because we know that we’ll get there eventually) I understand that others do care. But to be fair, as far as I know all the water masks shown in the first trailer are there (okay, apart from a few metres around Château d‘If). 

Edited August 30, 2020 by Shack95

[Bilbosmeggins 217]

Advertising and reality seldom match each other. Next time you go to a burger bar, look at the picture of what you ordered then look at what they just served you.

[Dominique_K 10,152]

31 minutes ago, Shack95 said:

 it probably wasn‘t the smartest move to release such a video without clarifying that it’s a WIP - 

and that at a time when this topic was one of the top debates on some fora. 

 

1/ it is a school case of false advertising not because it was released - who hasn’t goofed in their professional life ? - but because the promotional material was not withdrawn or a disclaimer added about a WIP.

2/ it puts into perpective their PR narrative about listening to the community. 

[travelabroad 177]

20 minutes ago, Bilbosmeggins said:

Advertising and reality seldom match each other. Next time you go to a burger bar, look at the picture of what you ordered then look at what they just served you.

You mean like this?