After watching today's Developer Q&A with the MSFS team on Twitch today, I had some time to reflect on this community, and also reflect on my own contributions to making it better. As a community I believe we get exactly the product we deserve. If we choose to participate constructively by providing useful feedback to the developers, we are actually contributing to building this product. We become part of the evolution of MSFS. If, however, we decide to criticize and denigrate the product relentlessly we ultimately end up helping to tear it down. Because nothing spreads faster than negativity. 

Just like a fire, negativity needs fuel to sustain itself, and to grow. From today onwards I refuse to engage in negative debates about this product. My ignore list is going to grow exponentially over the coming weeks, and the time I would have spent assisting in the tearing down of this product I will spend reporting issues to the team. My time needs to be spent being part of building something special and not in any way debating those who choose to tear it down.

I don't want to look back in 6 months or a year (or more) and think that I somehow didn't help this product improve because I was too busy debating someone who hated the product or just wanted to tear it down for whatever reason.  

We all know this product has lots of bugs and missing features. That is not up for debate. The central question is...as adults...what are we going to do about it? Are we going to argue and endlessly debate the problems, or are we going to help the team identify and reproduce the issues so they can fix them? Are we going to be positive and supportive, or are we going to attack the team for every bug or failure? 

And...what are you going to say about your own contribution to this product 6 months or a year from now? Did you help build MSFS up? Or did you help tear it down? 

 

I could not agree more with this post.

I could not disagree more with the people here who seem to believe that stamping their feet and bashing the developers is the way to get a better sim.

Dutch

 

I provided several detailed bug reports via Zendesk, including logs and detailed steps how to reproduce the errors. The biggest one - dozens of people plagued by the update downloader restarting endlessly downloading each file. Until last patch I wasn't affected, but finally it struck me. It seemed that the only way to go around this was clicking "Pause" and "Resume" each second a couple thousands of times. I even considered building clicking contraption from Lego Technics. Really - mouse macro recorder was not working with their custom mouse pointer.

Without being able to dowload the update and without the option to defer it, the sim was useless to me.

I finally figured out a solution on the forum (with the great help of one of the forum members) - buy $20 licence of NetLimiter (my trial was over), limit transfer to 3 Mbps and wait several hours for the patch to download. Some people reported they needed to limit to 500 kbps. For some it not worked at all! Have you ever seen or read that they admitted the existence of such basic bug, blocking the usage of the product altogether? Of course I reported this issue with details on Zendesk, took me time and effort.

Did you ever receive any answer to the bug reported via Zendesk? I rececived none. My home airfield (EPWS) is located in 300 ft depression (making the approach quite demanding, into a hole not existing in the real world), one runway instead of three, no taxiways at all, no parking spots - so no option to start cold & dark (and no option to save cold & dark as it blocks weather changing), all frequencies wrong.

I'm afraid what is now visible in the community is not "negativity". It's adequate human reaction to:

- total inability to use the product you paid for,

- no ackowledge from the developer - we are sorry, we are working on this,

- developer totally ignoring the effort of communicty members, investing time to report the bugs,

- each update gradually destroying the hallmark feature of the sim - visuals, no matter how much you invested in your PC upgrade just to handle the FPS and visual quality at the same time.

Edited September 30, 20205 yr by Steku

All I got from Zendesk is the stock answer they were giving with installation issues at launch, i.e. nuke your DNS which emphatically was not the same problem. Fortunately, by resetting my download speed to unlimited within the game options I seem to have dodged the problems with the last patch.

However while respecting the OP's POV, putting your head in the sand when the product we paid good money for has serious problems and a developer that doesn't exactly inspire confidence they know what they are doing is not the way forward either. Just this evening I loaded up a saved flight with the 747. It was nodding and hunting like a drunken dolphin, unable to follow the flight path in a straight line. After eventually coaxing to finals at KEWR, same old issue - hit the APP button, it tracks the GS for a few seconds then switches back to LNAV and ALT (Hold). I mean this is basic stuff - flight sims have been doing ILS approaches since I first played Thalion A320 Airbus and F16 Combat Pilot on the Amiga in 1992.

I still have hopes something will arise from the mess, but putting your fingers in your ears, singing "la, la, la" and pretending nothing is wrong won't achieve that - constructive and dare I say assertive criticism will.

I feel with all those people that bought the game and cant make it run decently, we cant all have supercomputers, i dont mind Asobo dumbing it down a bit until we can all afford some better hardware, it still looks awesome to me.

Edited September 30, 20205 yr by OHN767

Ever since the 1.8.3.0  patch, I have to reinstall the sim every day. Once I reinstall, it will work for the balance of the day. Next day when I go to start it, I get the blue error box, something has gone wrong, cannot repair of fix it. Will have to reinstall. I knew going in that this was an beta release, I expected that everything about this sim was not going to be perfect. This business of reinstallation every day is something else. I bought this from microsoft. I have reported this to them. I have as yet, not recieved an answer from them. Who would have thought that something like this would happen, with an company of this size.

1 minute ago, rrroberttt said:

Ever since the 1.8.3.0  patch, I have to reinstall the sim every day. Once I reinstall, it will work for the balance of the day. Next day when I go to start it, I get the blue error box, something has gone wrong, cannot repair of fix it. Will have to reinstall. I knew going in that this was an beta release, I expected that everything about this sim was not going to be perfect. This business of reinstallation every day is something else. I bought this from microsoft. I have reported this to them. I have as yet, not recieved an answer from them. Who would have thought that something like this would happen, with an company of this size.

You really REALLY need to create a new topic to help you troubleshoot, either here of on the official forums..

To the OP - couldn't agree more.It's not just what you ask for, it's how you ask it.

1 hour ago, RobJC said:

After watching today's Developer Q&A with the MSFS team on Twitch today, I had some time to reflect on this community, and also reflect on my own contributions to making it better. As a community I believe we get exactly the product we deserve. If we choose to participate constructively by providing useful feedback to the developers, we are actually contributing to building this product. We become part of the evolution of MSFS. If, however, we decide to criticize and denigrate the product relentlessly we ultimately end up helping to tear it down. Because nothing spreads faster than negativity. 

Just like a fire, negativity needs fuel to sustain itself, and to grow. From today onwards I refuse to engage in negative debates about this product. My ignore list is going to grow exponentially over the coming weeks, and the time I would have spent assisting in the tearing down of this product I will spend reporting issues to the team. My time needs to be spent being part of building something special and not in any way debating those who choose to tear it down.

I don't want to look back in 6 months or a year (or more) and think that I somehow didn't help this product improve because I was too busy debating someone who hated the product or just wanted to tear it down for whatever reason.  

We all know this product has lots of bugs and missing features. That is not up for debate. The central question is...as adults...what are we going to do about it? Are we going to argue and endlessly debate the problems, or are we going to help the team identify and reproduce the issues so they can fix them? Are we going to be positive and supportive, or are we going to attack the team for every bug or failure? 

And...what are you going to say about your own contribution to this product 6 months or a year from now? Did you help build MSFS up? Or did you help tear it down? 

 

Well said. This is exactly my approach since the release of this sim.

But don't worry too much about the negativity here. It is not representative of the user base at all. The large majority is happy with the next generation flightsim they got a few months earlier than most expected, and enjoy the breathtaking experience this sim provides while accepting some temporary shortcomings which are mostly due to the somewhat rushed release. They rarely visit the forums and even more rarely make a post. If they find a bug and feel the need to report it they do it once, and do not create or hijack dozens of forum threads with it.

It is just a small but overly vocal group of users who are trying to spread all the negativity. You will be surprised that you only need a good handful of entries in your ignore list to make this forum a much more pleasant place for you.

The guys at Asobo and Microsoft are highly proficient software developers and they know how to take this negativity of the so-called community. They won't let it get them down. They are professional enough to take in any useful advice but just disregard the hate and the bashing that is so common today anywhere on the internet.

The haters don't have the power to tear this down. They might imagine being of great importance being overly vocal on the forums and hijacking almost every thread with their negativity - but they are not. MS / Asobo and the large majority of excited flightsimmers and newly interested gamers are much bigger than them. Just look at the multitude of mods by enthusiastic freeware developers and the number of payware addons already released or announced just over a month after release. That says much more about the future of this sim.

 

Edited September 30, 20205 yr by RALF9636

In my case the 90GB of packages also dissapeared, when I activated Steam consistency check. Imagine downloading entire sim (100 GB) with NetLimter set to 3 Mbps (to avoid endless packages download restarts). Fortunately I managed to backup the entire Packages folder before trying to apply the update. 

Edited September 30, 20205 yr by Steku

OP..  I agree with you  however I do have some sympathy for people here, because in each case there are different things that affect different people.   For me, I have the luxury of being able to enjoy lots of different aspects of this sim.. but if my only interest in simming was airliners, I would be upset that the default airliners are not "yet" to the standards I am used to from other sims.  My level of upset would however be more frustration than anger.. but thats me.

I get there is a long road ahead and things will change, but for some people, they have spent money, they want their product.  Now, what is hard is everyones product is going to be different and their expectations are going to be different.

In the Q&A today, MS and Asobo admitted they have tried to go too quickly this first month, and as a result, they are changing their strategy so that each month there is one update just for bugs, and one for updates and they hope this will help..  but what was also important is they stated that in 1.9.3 they fixed 700 bugs..  they also admitted they had introduced some, but they clarified that a lot of these bugs that are reported only happen in certain circumstances and sometimes replicating them is hard but they are working on all of them that have been reported to Zendesk.

The trouble is.. if one of the 700 bugs wasn't your pet peve, then that number is probably irrelevant.

Its also much easier to whine, than it is to be constructive about these things...   personally, every single issue I see or have I report via Zendesk.  Zendesk is like voting.. if you don't vote, you have no say..  if you don't report it to Zendesk, then it didn't happen...  whatever the voting is on the forum.. the real feedback (as explained today on the Q&A) is Zendesk.

So  I agree..  positive attitudes do help, and peoples frustration level will vary, but any issue you have it MUST go to Zendesk, or it didn't happen 🙂

Regards

Graham

What some people here will label negativity, others will see as constructive criticism. 'Twas ever thus, in every flight sim forum I've been involved in.

Personally, I try to avoid labeling posts as "negative" because that implies an agenda beyond simple criticism, and I can't get inside someone else's head to know that's the case. I also have this old-fashioned notion that when you pay for a product, you have a right to an opinion about it.

34 minutes ago, OHN767 said:

I feel with all those people that bought the game and cant make it run decently, we cant all have supercomputers, i dont mind Asobo dumbing it down a bit until we can all afford some better hardware, it still looks awesome to me.

The funny thing is that they just said, that they are NOT dumbing it down.

Something is going on that they didn't intend, and they looking to find the cause and fix it.

13 minutes ago, Paraffin said:

What some people here will label negativity, others will see as constructive criticism. 'Twas ever thus, in every flight sim forum I've been involved in.

Personally, I try to avoid labeling posts as "negative" because that implies an agenda beyond simple criticism, and I can't get inside someone else's head to know that's the case. I also have this old-fashioned notion that when you pay for a product, you have a right to an opinion about it.

I agree with you somewhat. But what is negativity?

"the expression of criticism of or pessimism about something."

I think the key is pessimism. Report issues! Be constructive. But the pessimism from a vocal minority is just not something I will participate in any longer. 

Oh I know where this thread is headed 

This is the approach I have been taking-bugs and what not try and help with where I can; generally remain positive about the overall sim while acknowledging there are bugs and things need to be fixed and call out what should be called out.  But overall I remain optimistic.  But yeah my ignore list has grown from zero to a fair few in just the weekend. Some people seem content to tear it down for the sake of tearing it down.  Bugs and frustrations I can get but some stuff I just don't understand like the irrational expectation that everything should be fixed in a single patch; or that their issue is the only issue that matters sometimes even if its something relatively minor.  This needless infighting in the community and bad mouthing of everyone needs to stop and not just here but on the official discord and forums as well.  I don't know how these developers have the patience for it I would be inclined to just take my ball and go home after a month of this.