Here's the "everything is perfect in MSFS" Kool-Aid...
 

So long as you don't claim that everything is terrible (as that is patently false), *some* less than stellar assesments / criticism / negativity helps to improve the product.

Raising a Zendesk ticket doesn't appear to make as much of a difference compared to 'whinging' about problems over on the Bugs & Issues and Wishlist forums and getting votes on the official site.
And we also know that developers read comments in this forum and over on the flightsim subreddit.

Fan-boy-ism doesn't help improve the sim.
And, given the amount of resource thrown at it, a bunch of loudmouths on here or on other social media won't be able to tear it down either.
 

Edited September 30, 20205 yr by F737NG

19 minutes ago, F737NG said:

Raising a Zendesk ticket doesn't appear to make as much of a difference compared to 'whinging' about problems over on the Bugs & Issues and Wishlist forums and getting votes on the official site.
And we also know that developers read comments in this forum and over on the flightsim subreddit.

They basically admitted on their developer Q&A that they are tracking the bugs listed on the forums. The more votes you get for your bug the the more likely it is be a higher priority fix. 

It also sounded as if the big aircraft / avionics fix is coming in November.

They also want us to share our feedback, as they commented it is a big planet and they cannot be in every place. There are people who know their part of the world better and they want that feedback. Same thing with aircraft and avionics, they cannot know every quirk of 30 different airplanes.

Finally, they are doing a 180 on the Garmin 1000 series. They will make it as good as they can. Not a 100% page by page replica, but they will make the major features work. This was a major request from Carenado so they can just tap into a well down avionics. So it sounds like time to get cockpit or emulator videos ready to post over on the bug subforums to show how a G1000 should work. 

45 minutes ago, Slides said:

Oh I know where this thread is headed 

Yup. But part of why that is so, is the title, with its overly simplistic 'pro vs con' analysis, when not only is it really not as simple as that, but suggesting that it is, is basically inviting people to take sides, as though there could be no middle ground or no other position one could take other than to go all rose coloured specs on the thing.

In view of this, I would suggest for a kick off, that our support comes in the form of our knowledge that software isn't perfect when it comes out, and we knew too it was stated MSFS would be a ten year project, yet in large numbers still elected to buy it despite the knowledge that not everything would be 'just so' on day one. This is an investment in trust as well as an investment financially. Thus our support was more than mere words and pretty platitudes, it was something with a substantial Dollar value, which at the end of the day is why MS are making the thing. So it's money which really talks in regard to whether or not a company decides to keep something going.

It was reported quite a while back - before the release date in fact - that sales had surpassed the one million mark, and I suspect it's seriously well beyond that figure now. And that figure doesn't even include the more difficult to quantify influence on gamepass purchases which MS will undeniably have had.

So even going very conservative on the figures, and conservative on the versions purchased too, that early days sales figure represents at the very least, sixty million Dollars in sales, not factoring in that each sale figure near-doubles in price for a Premium Deluxe copy, which if everyone bought one of those, would mean another minimum figure of sixty million Dollars.  Not forgetting too of course, the healthy percentage cut that MS gets from sales of TPD marketplace stuff, so again let's go conservative and say most people have bought something extra for ten dollars, that's another, absolute minimum ten million Bucks in sales, and I'm willing to bet it is a lot more than that figure, I've personally bought three add-on aeroplanes for the sim, plus two FS2Crew add-ons for it. So that 110 quid for the Premium Deluxe version, plus about another 100 quid total for those add-ons, just from me as one person, i.e. approaching double the cost of the base version, just in add-ons, plus almost double the cost of the standard version too for having bought the super-duper version. So you can see why that sixty million estimate was very conservative.

Now of course not all of that turnover is profit, but remember I went very conservative on that estimate, so I would suggest that 70 million Dollars in contributions entitles all of us who spent money on the thing to point out errors in it, without this being thrown into an overly simplistic 'tearing it down' category, and frankly, to suggest that this would be the only reason people would criticise it is not just simplistically incorrect, frankly it is condescending.

I like the sim, and I want it to do well, and so I have reported stuff to the developer forum and asked polite questions on there for the Q&As and so on. But this does not mean I should feel I have to blow sunshine up the developer's @ss when I observe that they've stuffed something up. And doing so is not in any way whatsoever 'tearing it down', it is criticism intended to be constructive in regard to what I think it is important to fix and what I think should be a priority, as opposed to banging out a shiny new scenery segment for us to download when they should be addressing why the avionics are busted; particularly when they were working fine before it got 'updated'. Because that certainly is deserving of criticism.

And if critical reviews will hit sales potential, then I would suggest that it is far more likely to elicit a response than posting about it on their complaints reporting forum when they already know about it, because prioritising fixes when they are eliciting criticism and potentially affecting sales, isn't a programming problem, it's a business decision, so if we hit em in the wallet, that's where we can guarantee our efforts will get their attention. And so I'm not going to apologise for doing that, nor feel bad about it. At the end of the day, this is a business transaction between us and MS, and we've held up our end of the deal already when we opened our wallets to buy the sim and browsed the add-ons to potentially buy those too.

If someone sells you a busted vacuum cleaner, you shouldn't have to kiss their @ss to expect it to be either fixed or replaced, and that's the top and bottom of it.

Edited September 30, 20205 yr by Chock

I have not yet purchased MSFS2020 for two reasons: 

1)  My current PC is sufficient to run FSX, but I know this rig (now 5 years old) just won't cut it with the new sim.  I'm now taking note of many of the "2020" PC's in this and others Forums to get some ideas of which new rig I will purchase in a few months.   2).  I just knew beforehand that this innovative and complex project would probably have it's fair share of bugs and problems.  After spending countless hours tweeking and problem-solving FSX over the years, I was not in the mood for another round of the same.  

I have no doubt that MSFS will shortly be everything that was promised to us about year ago.  I do not blame the Asobo Team at all for any of the current problems of this sim.  As many of us have been down this road before, the very group I do blame however, is the Microsoft Corporation...  

     

3 hours 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.

They always had the option of winding settings back a touch.

Make the maximum settings "medium" and relabel them "ultra" is not the solution to people complaining they have issues running a game at "Ultra" on their older PC. 

What would actually be helpful for those people is more information on optimising their existing hardware and more detailed info on what settings can save fps at minimal effect to quality (for example close buildings look fine on medium and using high only gives a fraction more more detail on distant ones and adds the very occasional building in the distance) and which settings are essential to keep high or ultra.

That sort of thing is where we as a community can help immensely.

Example- this amazingly useful youtube video which someone clearly put a huge amount of time into:

 

3 hours ago, Slides said:

Oh I know where this thread is headed 

It's only missing the usual suspects.

3 minutes ago, airlinejets said:

It's only missing the usual suspects.

And once they arrive it will be easier to manage my ignore list lol. 

5 hours ago, RobJC said:

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? 

Fell free to do whatever you need to think you are helping to improve the product. 

That said, if that feedback is ignored or misunderstood by AS/MS, you will see yourself tired in 6 months, and all your enthusiasm will banish. Some day you will stop reporting things, because you will think is a useless method. And you just will wait for devs to improve something, or change to another sim. 

I hope you have better luck than me. 

24 minutes ago, aleex said:

That said, if that feedback is ignored or misunderstood by AS/MS, you will see yourself tired in 6 months, and all your enthusiasm will banish.

Saw that some of the (less important) elevation bugs I've reported have already been corrected, others not. Didn't expect these to be looked at for months so goes to show they are working through their backlog list.

I was very happy with this product until this latest patch. Sure there were some bugs, but I found workarounds and was able to really enjoy the sim.  Before the patch I never had a single CTD with over 40 hours in the sim, now I after 1.9.3.0, I get them randomly almost every flight.  It is amazing how quickly your mood changes about the sim when you can no longer enjoy it as you once did.  Updates should move the sim forward not backward and I am finding it extremely frustrating and can now understand where many people have been coming from.  

I am curious, if Asobo who is under fire right now, for the software being worse after three patches consecutively; Claims 700 bugs were corrected, shouldn’t they show us an itemized list of said fixes?
 

The game is in such a poor state right now, from installing, to updates, to server issues, to out of game and in game problems that, starting from scratch might not be a bad idea.
 

Also openly communicating honestly with everyone wouldn’t hurt either. Not just having a fun get together podcast..

 

 

7 minutes ago, breality211 said:

I am curious, if Asobo who is under fire right now, for the software being worse after three patches consecutively; Claims 700 bugs were corrected, shouldn’t they show us an itemized list of said fixes?
 

The game is in such a poor state right now, from installing, to updates, to server issues, to out of game and in game problems that, starting from scratch might not be a bad idea.
 

Also openly communicating honestly with everyone wouldn’t hurt either. Not just having a fun get together podcast..

 

 

I don't doubt they fixed 700 bugs.  The problem is they introduced new bugs or in some cases like the longitude, brought back old ones.

35 minutes ago, SnowGoAK said:

I was very happy with this product until this latest patch. Sure there were some bugs, but I found workarounds and was able to really enjoy the sim.  Before the patch I never had a single CTD with over 40 hours in the sim, now I after 1.9.3.0, I get them randomly almost every flight.  It is amazing how quickly your mood changes about the sim when you can no longer enjoy it as you once did.  Updates should move the sim forward not backward and I am finding it extremely frustrating and can now understand where many people have been coming from.  

I had an overclock on my GPU before the last patch that was working fine, and it doesn't now. I actually have 3 overclocks going (CPU, GPU, RAM) and I started with the GPU OC and that fixed it.  Not sure if you have anything like that going, but that is where I would start. Also, shut down MSI Afterburner and Process Lasso, if you have those running. 

1 hour ago, aleex said:

Fell free to do whatever you need to think you are helping to improve the product. 

That said, if that feedback is ignored or misunderstood by AS/MS, you will see yourself tired in 6 months, and all your enthusiasm will banish. Some day you will stop reporting things, because you will think is a useless method. And you just will wait for devs to improve something, or change to another sim. 

I hope you have better luck than me. 

Maybe because I am a software developer and have my own company I have a bit more empathy for Asobo. They set out to develop an incredibly ambitious product. These guys literally sat down and threw the kitchen sink at this product. There is always going to be some risk to doing something bold like that but I think they got a lot more right than they got wrong. It is a pretty daunting task to track/manage hundreds of issues, many very complex and time consuming to reproduce, let alone fix. When we launch complex systems they go through a cycle not unlike what Asobo is dealing with now. The only thing you can do as developers is throw a tremendous amount of energy at the problems until you break the back of the bug list. I think Asobo is in that early stage where the bugs are growing exponentially, but within a few months I think they will get a handle on them. They might have 200 team members but how many can fix the type of bugs we are seeing? It is going to take them some time and there will certainly be some regression. It happens with us as well and our systems are not nearly as complex as MSFS. It takes time to address these type of issues, and if we give them the time they will fix them. 

I have seen so many game developers take the opposite approach that MS/Asobo have. Take Code Masters for example. They release a bunch of patches but never fix the real problems that exist in any of their F1 games. No line of communication. And then one day they move over to the next year release and that is that. The way Asobo and the MSFS Team are approaching this almost guarantees that isn't going to happen to us. It is actually quite refreshing. I guess I am just optimistic after seeing what they have accomplished, and the way they are managing the project. It is always messy, but I like what I see as a software developer with over 20 years experience. These guys are doing a great job imo, but it is a HUGE mountain to climb. If anyone can do it, these guys can. 

6 hours ago, RALF9636 said:

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.

 

Interesting viewpoint.  A person that tells his or her reasons why they feel they did not get the value for the money...or features that were promoted by speech, or represented by screenshots or produced videos for the asking price they paid, due to a 3 patch  altered RTM version of MSFS, ...are haters...but..., not ones blowing sunshine and rushing to place a bouquet into the dev's  reaching hands, are not. 

Haters, you say?

So...what is a Lover of this broken sim,....to you...Ralf...is that one that puts on a muzzle, or one that ONLY pumps Rah, Rah Dev's GO?   Or...one, that insulates themselves into a blissful silence, by making use of the ignore feature?  Creating a false  self-insulated world of like-mined souls?

Everyone that pumps their hands into the air, while exclaiming, Rah! Rah, no matter what?!?

Interesting post  Quite.  For myself, I never use the Ignore Feature...because I then rob myself of counterpoint, and conjecture...and do NOT want to create such a false self-made surround of 'Yes People',...and only see their posts and comments.   Interesting post, Ralf. If you need that...to only see posts from those that align totally with the way you see things in life....that is of course...your choice.

Cheers,

Ses

Edited October 1, 20205 yr by Sesquashtoo