5 minutes ago, ckyliu said:

@Bobsk8 I think a lot of what you quoted comes from Asobo's multiple development streams (I think they said they about 5 branches) being merged into one for SU5; some bugs that got fixed previously ended up back in the live release. As the workstreams are merged now (and I believe will be going forward), I hope these issues should be fixed promptly and not reoccur.

This was a very recent comment on Upcoming Hotfix thread on the FS forum 

1 minute ago, Aristoteles said:

We can show understanding, and believe me that we do, after one year of betatesting, full of surprises, Sim Update after Sim Update, we really do. But this does not excuse that we bought a simulator exactly 12 months ago which was advertised to be updated, enriched, which in fact has been , but it has also been a testbed, fixed, once and again, broken an repaired multiple times and still lacking many of the things that were either advertsied or naively taken for granted, all of this without the user being able to choose or wait.

If you want to go the extra mile , remove FSX code, swap old code, test new features, bugfix etc, you can´t expect to have  millions of people "understanding", expressing frustration with humility , patience and gratitude. Releasing a product in Beta stage and fixing it on the way, for one year, has consequences. 

I love FS and I am grateful for what Asobo has done. But come on, don´t expect people to feel sorry or guilty about Microsoft  everytime they feel doubt or frustration.

It's impossible to "remove the FSX code". The vast majority of the code in the software is legacy code that was coded 15-20 years ago. 

10 minutes ago, Dominique_K said:

Now, we have had the feeling from the outside, since the alpha, that the beta-tests have been at best telemetry, at worst, a make believe of participation. 

I think, unfortunately, that this will always be the perception unless the product is in an impossible zero-bug state, or that everyone's pet bug got fixed during the beta test.

The actual reality is, though, that the beta team found many things, and dozens of bugs got squashed during this flight, including a couple of pretty nasty ones. Did some get deferred? Certainly, because time is not infinite. It's not an awesome answer, I know, but it's an honest one. If nobody shipped software until their test team stopped reporting anything, no software would ever ship! 😉

-Matt

1 minute ago, MattNischan said:

And, just like a dishwasher, Maytag is coming out and adding new features to it every month or two for no extra cost. That fresh coat of paint from Honda after I used my mower for 8 months was really nice of them!

But did you ask for that fresh coat of paint? And even if you did would you have been happy if it was textured like orange peel? Asobo assumed too much. They thought people would be so happy with the FPS increase they would ignore the degraded visuals. They were wrong. I don't recall any PC user asking for a 70% FPS increase? If I wanted an XBox I'd buy an XBox..

18 minutes ago, MattNischan said:

It's truly hard to say what would be a net positive or not. Oftentimes developers opt to just be quiet, because most of the time you're damned if you do and damned if you don't, so to speak. I am curious as to what kind of statement you feel would be helpful, though.

Ultimately it's about Asobo being open and honest about how we got to the situations of SU5 being released with multiple known CTDs as well as a multitude of other issues that weren't in the release notes (despite many being raised in the beta). And also maybe addressing what went wrong with QA on the original hotfix that resulted in at least two fixes that were in SU5 seemingly being rolled back.

Then there's the issue of the obvious problem with communication about changes with 3rd party devs - you said SU5 was the culmination of more than 6 months of work - but it seems that even devs with a close relationship with Asobo had little to no idea about the resulting changes and their impact until release

It all boils down to confidence and restoring it in both the player community and just as importantly the dev community by demonstrating that Asobo's understanding of what went wrong aligns with everyone else's understanding and that the problems are being taken seriously.

Edited August 5, 20214 yr by Matchstick

2 minutes ago, Tom_L said:

In the end, this "community" consists of individuals with their own expectations and perceptions. The one side fears to have lost what they appreciated, the other fears the loss of what they think they have gained. So it is no wonder the whole discussion gets emotional to the point that it isn't a discussion any more, only insistence. I have given up at some point because it mostly was not about discussing or arguing but about being right.

 

That's an extremely important point when listening to "The Community" - it isn't a homogeneous entity, it consists of as many opinions, priorities, likes and dislikes as there are members in it. You change one thing, and the 10% that hates the change will be all over the place, demanding stuff, starting petitions to revert, etc... And I have the feeling that in an engineering-oriented hobby such as aviation, flight-simming (as well as model trains and many others), the share of pedantic people is higher and more vocal than in the general population, which makes it even harder to satisfy the community as a whole. 

 

6 hours ago, simbol said:

I think it would be great if your AVSIM account and your team are configured as commercial members like the rest of the 3rd party developers here with your signatures also reflecting that you work for working title.

I've thought about that.   I agree it might be helpful, but it might be slightly confusing, too -- I think we're in a bit of a different place from most of the folks with a "Commercial Members" tag here, in that we're not making things for the sim, we're making the sim itself, which comes with a different set of knowledge (and obligations) than a third-party developer has.

I'm fine either way.  It really comes down, in my mind, to what the admin staff here want that tag to mean and be used for.   If they think we should have the commercial tag, it's their house. 🙂  If other forum-goers think it would be helpful, I'm sure they'll take that into consideration.

 

1 hour ago, ckyliu said:

Gaslighting is serious psychological abuse and vulnerable victims are often trapped in the situation; it's not a term to be bandied about because someone replies to a comment saying "I don't have that issue myself".

Thank you.   I've tried to make that point here, too.  Language changes, and one has to accept that -- I've long since given up on challenging the frequent misuse of "begging the question", for example, because the incorrect interpretation is so widespread now that one is better off just accepting it means "making you ask" as well as the correct "assuming the conclusion".   (I do still refuse to use it as such, though, that's one bridge too far for me. 🙂 )

But there is nothing wrong with pointing out that "gaslighting" is a term for a precise thing, a malicious form of psychological abuse, and tossing it around casually -- while totally at the discretion of the speaker -- should be done with the same care as, say, joking about beating one's wife.   It's probably better to just avoid it, and folks who use it casually should be aware of what it means, what it means to trivialize it to just "someone providing a counter-example", and how people may react to their usage.

It can actually be helpful to the speaker, if they are actually compassionate individuals and simply unaware of the true origin and meaning of the term.

Edited August 5, 20214 yr by kaosfere

Pet bug, I'll remember that, that's a good one 🙂

In all seriousness, there are people with little emotion in this stuff, but i am not one of them. You need those emotionless zombies to read the forums, and the developers to write code. That way no-one gets offended, again though no-one was critiquing the code as much as the processes that led to the faulty release state. 

I could probably make a list of every detail that I think needs changed to make people happier, but I'm not sure it would be in the budget anyhow, or make any difference.

5 minutes ago, jarmstro said:

I don't recall any PC user asking for a 70% FPS increase? 

Really? "Dreadful performance" has been among the top 10 bugs since the release of MSFS. 

 

3 minutes ago, jarmstro said:

But did you ask for that fresh coat of paint? And even if you did would you have been happy if it was textured like orange peel? Asobo assumed too much. They thought people would be so happy with the FPS increase they would ignore the degraded visuals. They were wrong. I don't recall any PC user asking for a 70% FPS increase? If I wanted an XBox I'd buy an XBox..

Improved performance was one of the most requested bugs to fix for months on end. Not sure where you are getting your numbers from.

Just now, pstrub said:

Really? "Dreadful performance" has been among the top 10 bugs since the release of MSFS. 

 

Yup.

5 minutes ago, kaosfere said:

But there is nothing wrong with pointing out that "gaslighting" is a term for a precise thing, a malicious form of psychological abuse, and tossing it around casually -- while totally at the discretion of the speaker -- should be done with the same care as, say, joking about beating one's wife.   It's probably better to just avoid it, and folks who use it casually should be aware of what it means, what it means to trivialize it to just "someone providing a counter-example", and how people may react to their usage.

It can actually be helpful to the speaker, if they are actually compassionate individuals and simply unaware of the true origin and meaning of the term.

I agree with a lot of the points you guys brought up, but this is where our agreements diverge and divest. I would suggest watching some Russel Brand on Youtube about sacrificial PC tricks used to make people look like the bad guy by taking words out of context. Oh trust me, there was psyhcological abuse in here, people have the "banned for now" tag on them for sure for some stuff that was said. If any term could be used to describe it, then not sure there is any better term, maybe there is, but it's certainly word parsing at best.

Edited August 5, 20214 yr by Alpine Scenery

The bottom line for me was that with SU4 up until SU5 was dropped, I had a very good looking, smooth running sim, with pretty good performance, great realistic  looking scenery, and really no major issues. I figured since they got it to this point, the next update would be no big deal. I loaded Su5, and couldn't believe what I was seeing. It didn't  take me 2 hours, to figure out something was drastically wrong, or 1 hour, or 20 minutes, or even 5 minutes. I could see immediately that many things had changed for the worse. 

Now sort of in simulator shock, I get on the forums, posting what I am seeing, and some  people are telling me " It's great, looks good to me, big improvement, tons of FPS more than I was getting, blah blah blah. " 

Then an entire week later, Asobo gets on their horn and admits that the update has many issues that have to be fixed, some will be fixed in a few days, and some the end of the month, and who knows, some maybe the twelfth of Never. Yet there are still posters running around telling everyone how great SU5 is and they love it, and those that don't feel the same way are whiners and tin hatters. .    

Edited August 5, 20214 yr by Bobsk8

18 minutes ago, MattNischan said:

One of the biggest complaints, even here on Avsim, have certainly been stutters, and plenty of folks about FPS. How many comments have there been about glass cockpit perf? Maybe my perspective here is skewed, but I certainly have not gotten the sense that folks were fine with performance. If so, then I don't get why everyone was so hyped about _more_ performance.

No, much of the community has been complaining of stutters and low FPS for the longest time.  You are not paranoid, lol.  Dominique_K is just one user and doesn't represent the entire community.

Even people with very expensive and powerful computers are trying to get more FPS out of the sim.  My guess is, when Asobo implements the slider to reduce the pop-in and reduce the amount of culling, there will still be some people with those very expensive and powerful computers who will still set the slider for maximum FPS so they will have to tolerate more culling and more pop-ins.  But of course, there will be some other people with expensive and powerful computers that will reduce their FPS so they can reduce the culling and pop-ins - the morale of the story is, everyone has their own preferences, and a slider will let everyone customize their own preferences.

Edited August 5, 20214 yr by abrams_tank

1 hour ago, Krakin said:

You can sometimes tell when certain Avsimmers only play flight sims on their PCs. Nothing wrong with that at all but it can lead to them putting their ignorance of the gaming industry on full display.

I've noticed this as well -- there seem to be a good number of users here who have little to no contact with the modern PC gaming environment.   Folks acting like always-online games with forced updates are a console abomination that Asobo is forcing on "simmers" are a prime example.

There's nothing wrong with that, people can be flight simmers and never play any other game all they want without being judged for it.  But at the same time, they should realize that the gaming ecosystem is very different from how it was when FS9 was released, and perhaps be ready to accept some culture shock as a part of that if they also want the modern benefits it brings.

I think that "culture shock" may also be one of the prime contributors to some folks using Xbox users as a scapegoat for everything they feel is wrong with the sim.