A 'Big Please to the Community'

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There are an awful lot of near hysterical statements on these forums. Please, be constructive in your comments and if you have problems, tell us what the problem is in detail and provide:

a. Your system specs
b. Have you modified the sim
c. What location have you installed the sim - I would always advise not to install it in the Windows drive
d. How did you install the update? using the Store?
e. How fast / reliable is your internet? This will impact how succesfull your downloads are and also the quality of the terrain - over the last few days, I am sure the servers have been under stress which resulted in poor terrain depiction.

From reading all of the comments, many have modified / tweaked and then had problems or they are trying to run it on too high a setting, go with the recommnended settings initially and then compromise.

Also try going into window mode and changing the size of your sim window - you can then run at higher settings if you wish to.

If you want to know how hard your system is working, enable developer mode in settings and display FPS - this will also tell you where your bottlenecks are - play with window size and setting until you get an FPS that suits you.

This sim appears to need a day or so to settle down. I updated without an issue (I installled in my D Drive), I rebooted as I always do, ran the sim and on my first flight the views started doing there own thing and then I had a CTD.

Today, I loaded up, couple of circuits at my local airfield, no problems (high/ultra settings with live traffic and weather). I then loaded up the Japan Tour and flew for 2.5 hours - no CTD, beautiful scenery and my only issue was the FPS degraded over time - this has been a long-term bug for me.

Keep things in perspective - this is a project with enormous scope that will us great pleasure for many years. It will probably take a year to get all of the elements working as we would hope, if a company does not make money on a project - the project dies and our hopes with it. I intend to support this fantastic sim, I will buy content and I will try and provide constructive feedback and help the community.

Thank you Microsoft and ASOBO for bringing Flight Simulator back to life and working hard to give us a great product (and no, I donā€™t work for either company!!)

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And when you make posts about the problems/bugs make it descriptive enough so that others can try and replicate it. It might help getting the bugs reported.

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Exactly. And honestly thatā€™s okay for me.

The technology of this sim is incredible and itā€™s very understandably much more complicated than all past sims

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And most games I guess.

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Yep. And I would ad, please make a topic research before creating the exactly same topic for the exactly same crash problem (Iā€™m sorry because i did the mistake)

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Oh yeah definitely.

This is leaps and bounds ahead of anything else in technology and obviously that comes with issues.

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Thank you for this. I have been debating with myself whether to start a thread with the title ā€œPlease take a deep breathā€ with content very much along these same lines. I am one of those that really have not experienced any problems and I am enjoying the game/sim immensely. And I DO understand that there are people that are experiencing issues and that are frustrated.

But I must say that the flood of strident and vicious post have been wearing on me. I initially enjoyed coming to the forum to learn from other people and better understand the game/sim. The excellent Beech Bonanza mod thread is a great example.

But recently I have really not enjoyed coming here and I have been thinking of staying away from the forum for a while. Things that I have found particularly wearing:

  • This has been mentioned: People creating threads of subjects that already exist. An example: this morning I saw FOUR threads in the first 20 or so at the top saying the same thing: there is a problem with servers. Guys, please check before starting a new thread.

  • In addition to starting a thread on an existing topic: the amount of vitriol and insulting content in these posts is distressing to see. And yes, I know I can ignore them. But (grabbing a wrong/inaccurate number out of thin air so please accept this number as a ā€œfor instanceā€ number) if 50% of the threads are all in the same nasty vein it takes away a lot of the pleasure and value of the forum.

  • It is also upsetting to see people bitterly criticising the software only to have someone explain to them that it is operator error. I find these posts are often in one of two categories:

    • People that do not understand flying. Example: trying to get the autopilot to have a Cessna 152 climb at 1,000 fpm at 7,000 ft , complaining that the AP is ā€œcrashing the aircraftā€ and then stridently criticising the developers. And then not apologising when shown the error. Could we not please ask politely when we have a problem like this before becoming fiercely critical?
    • People that have computer issues on their side and blaming the developers. This frequently relates to hardware, setup issues, mods, installing stuff in different/wrong places, third party content in wrong places or that ā€œbreakā€ the original content etc. Also fiercely criticising the developers for not natively having bindings for their specific favourite peripheral etc. OK, so they have not mapped controls for a 15 year old Microsoft Force Feedback 2 joystick. I have this joystick so I know that it IS recognised if you have it installed correctly and it only takes a few minutes to map the controls.

As for the fact that I am very satisfied with how the programme has worked for me from day one: I was wondering how many people fall into that category? Because (for understandable reasons) it is not uncommon for people with problems to be the principal posters on forums, I would suspect that there are quite a few happy users out there. I was tempted to use the old term ā€œsilent majorityā€, but that would of course have been pure speculation on my part.

And please people: I understand and respect the fact that there are many of you that are experiencing issues. But please bear in mind that a) nothing is perfect and b) there are some (many?) of us that are having an excellent user experience, so it is clearly not a case of it being all bad.

And you catch more flies with honey than vinegarā€¦

Happy flying to all.

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Well said!

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Iā€™ve seen developers for plenty of other sims/games state outright that they arenā€™t interested in reading bug reports for people with mods installed. They canā€™t debug other peopleā€™s software.

If you find a problem, move absolutely everything from your community folder, and see whether the problem persists. Not just mods that you think might be related, but everything. Test with an empty folder.

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I would add that there appear to be some people creating threads for issues that are already listed in the ā€˜Known Issuesā€™ category. Several of these known issues have workarounds that are in place until a formal patch comes out.

One of the problem with programming, especially for a project this technically complex is sometimes you donā€™t know if the fix breaks another part of the system and there isnā€™t a way to catch all of the use cases that a user may be implementing.

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Excellent posts. The voices of maturity, intelligence, reason, and common sense. We could use a bit more of that around here.

If this forum is a representative cross-section of humanity, weā€™re all in trouble!

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Its is and we are.

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I am glad that I am not a ā€˜lone voiceā€™ in trying to be positive, constructive and appreciate the efforts of a development team that will undoubtably be under pressure to deliver unattainable perfection, whilst being lambasted by so many!

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What grinds my gears is someone experiences a bug and their title is: ā€œFS2020 is Broken!!!ā€

What about : ā€œIā€™m getting this bug, anyone have an idea?ā€

So much assumption that your bug is being experienced by everyone and the whole sim is broken. 99% of the time this isnā€™t the case.

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I honestly wonder if the developers or forum mods might be able to pin a general thread outlining some Standard Procedures users may want to pursue prior to creating threads in the ā€˜Bugs & Issuesā€™ Category. Maybe something along the lines of ā€˜If an issue is encountered, prior to creating a thread:ā€™

  1. Check the ā€˜Known Issuesā€™ to see if it is documented and if there is a known workaround
  2. Check the Bugs & Issues Section to see if another user has encountered the issue and found a solution
  3. Run through basic troubleshooting actions to see if the issue is recreatable (e.g.: check stability of Overclocks, Mod enablement, graphics settings, drivers, etc.)
  4. Submit Zendesk service request outlining the Issue, Computer Specs, Version Information and actions that you have taken
  5. Submit a new thread or append an existing thread with the information submitted to the Zendesk

Include a reminder that while it may be frustrating to encounter these issues, a detailed message that isnā€™t just bashing the devs and MS is more likely to see the problem resolved.

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I fall into this category. Iā€™m enjoying MSFS although Iā€™m aware that there are some bugs. But rather than complaining, Iā€™m trying to help find solutions by finding a workaround or at least reporting it to Zendesk. That way I have been able to fly mostly IFR with the G1000. Kind of like in real life: You are faced with a challenge, then you have two options: complain (and feel miserable) or find a solution (and enjoy the process).

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Great guidelines. I think the mature, respectful simmers would comply. Most already do.

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That would have been even MORE funny if it wasnā€™t so true! :smile:

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thank you for this post

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Thank you for this post. Glad to see some pushback in similar topics to this one. Feedback is great, but this (mass) hysteria is not helping anyone and quite frankly is making reading this topics quite unattractive.

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