Dear Asobo,
As per the title, how can we vote ideas? my current votes are ZERO… and ideas cannot be liked either… So what’s the new procedure to support other developers ideas, etc.
Best,
Raul
I had 1 vote left on the old platform and it now shows zero… I really valued my last available vote!
Hello
So all users have 10 votes. (I know you want more but as this is used to single out the most requested ideas, it does not make sense to have more than this)
There was some criteria related to Discourse “trust level” limiting the votes you can use.
I have removed that limitation and everyone should now be able to use their 10 votes starting from trust level 1 (trust level 0 is basically an anti bot level).
What’s left to check for us is that implemented idea topics are closed so that the votes are granted back.
Regards,
Sylvain
Hi Sylvain,
Thanks for the response, I just checked and I still have zero votes to use… was trying to vote this idea for example: 2nd UV channel for AO
Maybe I am confused, are we going to get 10 Votes fresh now on the new forums system? if so, it is not working for me yet…
Best,
Raul
No these are not 10 new votes but 10 overall.
Since we imported votes from AnswerHub, I assume you already have upvoted more than 10 topics.
Regards,
Sylvain
Well, I think this makes no sense… I had more votes available on the previous forums and accordingly I had many votes left… now as a result of this change, I have zero votes left… don’t you think is a bit unfair?
Also many Ideas that we have voted 2 years ago are still pending or waiting to be approved or closed… which penalises the vote system since we never get those back.
I think the vote system needs to be reviewed, I am one of the most active members on the forum and basically now I am unable to vote any idea at all…
R.
3 Likes
Yes, I agree, I’m sure I have voted 10 times in the the last 3 years, and these “ideas” are still not implemented or are not set as accepted/whatever and my votes are not returned. You need someone to manage this forum, more efficiently - I don’t expect ASOBO devs to be managing this forum.
3 Likes
Hello @Simbol @DA40CGDFQ @runshotgun @OMGEDSON and everyone willing to participate.
The goal is not just to know what ideas 3rd party developers like or not. It is to build a 3rd party developers prioritized feature request list.
Most ideas posted here make perfect sense, would be a nice addition to the sim and I would probably upvote them if I was a user with unlimited votes.
But do these ideas have the same level of priority? I don’t think so.
Then, how do I rank them then as a user? Our response is limited votes so people have to make choices and upvote only what they consider high priority.
If this was presented as a table with 10 lines where you are expected to provide the feature request to prioritize, would you ask this table to have more lines?
This is definitely not perfect.
Discourse vote plugin is probably not the most appropriate for this and maybe we’ll end up developing our own at some point.
Some ideas have been at the top of the list for a while, because whether or not an idea will be implemented also depends on if it fits our own design, if we have enough bandwidth, etc…
However, I think the current list we have when sorting ideas by vote is not so far from the topics that are the discussed regularly on this platform.
I expect lifting the vote restriction, although making it way more comfortable for you as you no longer have to check your vote page to reassess priorities, will not help if we are aiming at what I have described above.
I think it will increase the bias in favor of ideas that have been posted a long time ago as they will accumulate votes and it will increase bias in favor of most active users.
That said, in the end this list represents your contribution to our roadmap so if my arguments fail to convince you, we will lift the vote restriction.
Regards,
Sylvain
1 Like
Hi Sylvain,
Thanks for your explanation. I think we have some points to address here:
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If the vote system is staying, then at the very least we should have the same votes we had before, we coming from a forum where we had 20 votes, we used many of these wisely as you describe above and then now after the migration these votes have been effectively halved to 10. I had 5 votes left before the migration and instead now I am on negative and I will remain probably on negative for the rest of the lifecycle of MSFS 2020 / MSFS 2024 considering the speed some of the ideas can be implemented. It would be easier to just create a new account on this basis to start from scratch… which just shows, the move is just flawed.
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I just went ahead and hunted down my votes… I found out many topics I voted are completed… and the system did not return my votes back… I had to go manually to the idea and remove my vote… surely this is counter productive to Asobo… you will lost the stats of what was voted because people will have to remove the votes to be able to use them again despite an idea is completed… That needs addressing, it is difficult for users on these forums since we have to go and manually manage the return of votes, in addition I don’t see how it could be on the best interest of Asobo to lose stats of how people voted vs how you guys used that information to implemented an idea.
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We could argue, the entire objective of voting ideas is to measure how useful and interesting an idea is for 3rd party developers in relation to MSFS ecosystem. Preventing 3rd party devs from expressing this because they cannot upvote an idea will not help Asobo to understand the needs of the overall 3rd party community in relation to a new feature request.
And in any case, just because we all voted an idea, it doesn’t mean it would get implemented. Take the most voted requested feature on this space as an example… it has over 75 votes and we still waiting… so in reality the way I see it, the vote system is a means to an end to allow 3rd party developers to express interest in a new functionality, it has no weight into when or how Asobo will or could implement it… we understand the dynamics of how you guys can fit or implement new features, what we asking is to let US 3rd party developers to have the ability to express how much we would like to have new futures so we can improve our projects and workspace, at the end of the day, Asobo / Microsoft will always has the upper hand on the decision about these… but having at least the capacity to express our interest is crucial.
Limiting our votes doesn’t help towards that end from my point of view.
Thanks for opening the discussion and listening to what we have to say on this matter.
All the best,
Raul
A few problems here:
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From my perspective at least, it doesn’t feel as if there is a connection between how we vote and how things are prioritized on the Asobo side. It actually feels like everything Microsoft needs gets to the top of the priority list and pushes everything else down. Fortunately, sometimes it overlaps and we get something useful. Sometimes we end up with Reno air races instead of something with 77 votes.
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Our votes don’t get cleared out when a feature gets implemented or when a bug gets fixed.
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Some of us are more active than others. While someone can have a dormant account with 10 votes available, there’s also @Simbol (who’s input is incredibly valuable to us and your team) with 10 votes that are stuck on important things that have been posted years ago but not implemented/fixed yet.
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In a lot of cases, if a feature or bugs is blocking something on our side, it is considered high priority from our perspective. There might be more than 10 things blocking us from doing/fixing something at any given time and if we can get a chance… any chance… of getting any of them fulfilled, it deserves a vote.
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Some requests have been posted on the first day of this portal being open, have received a lot of votes and haven’t been implemented or given a clear outcome. Are we expected to deprioritize older requests in favor of newer ones even though the older one might be more important to us?
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The lack of transparency on some requests makes it hard to strategize our vote bank. Getting a clear outcome would allow us to re-focus our votes elsewhere.
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We’d love to spend our time making things instead of managing how many votes we have left.
Just addressing some of your feedback to make sure there is no misrepresentation of how we proceed:
1 - Saying the ideas we implement are only the ones that overlap with our own needs is simply not true.
- The Blender plugin is not used internally.
- SimConnect is not needed internally so any additions like the Facilities API, Input Events functions, benefit only to 3rd party developers
- WASM gauges are not used either so all VFX, Network, Communications APIs that were exposed were added based on your feedback only.
In fact, most of the ideas that are listed as “done” in the current list are not needed by Asobo
2 - The Discourse vote plugin grants back the votes when a topic is closed or archived. We just double checked and it works as expected.
Raising the vote count to 25 would not solve the problem as people were already raising this issue on AnswerHub.
3 - Now regarding the ideas with an important vote count that have been there for a long time but have not been implemented yet.
First, I think we always tried to be clear here or during Q&A that this idea system was proposed as an additional source to help shape our roadmap and contribute to our internal discussions, without offering any guarantee these ideas would make it into the sim past a certain delay or vote count.
Then, it would be wrong to assume that such ideas are ignored by us. The Camera API suggestion is actually something we discuss on a regular basis but that involves a lot of people and requires to redesign a significant part of the code for it to be added easily to our roadmap.
The VFX API has a lower vote count but has little consequences on the sim core mechanics, only required one programmer from the SDK team to work on it and matched the available time for additional development we add at this time.
Now, I fully understand this is becoming too much of an annoyance. You have better ways to use your time and so do we.
This restriction is now disabled.
Regards,
Sylvain
3 Likes
I’m not saying you only implement overlapping ideas; I’m just saying that the prioritization appears to be 2-tiered and that, frequently, we see APIs and features prioritized because they are needed internally or by close partners rather than it being highly voted here. Again, this is from an external (my) perspective with the information we have access to from the outside. It might be erroneous but that’s the observations I’ve made.
And I thank you for those and much more that has been done in the past 3 years. A lot has been done during that time and specially in the last few months, we’ve finally seen those mentioned above.
Sounds good to me … Thanks Sylvain … a win-win situation for all - we are all grown ups here…nobody is out to abuse the vote system.
Great move! 