When I load the sim, it checks for updates…Because full functionality of the sim is heavily dependent on online services, I would suggest an addition, check for internet status or system status as well.
This way, you can setup some generic messaging informing users, that online functionality is not available, with a link to something…say, the xbox status page. You can also have a link allowing users to continue, with online functionality disabled.
It’s chaotic at the moment when there is an outage, and I believe a lot of users get confused, and think the issue is with them, and not the sim. A lot of users don’t visit these forums or twitter or whatever, so when an outage occurs, they are in the dark…I mean, people were actually uninstalling and reinstalling the sim after this last outage, simply because they had no idea what was going on, and assumed they broke the sim in some way…Being a little more proactive and informing users, when they load the sim, would go a long way in these situations…
Absolutely! I am not an inexperienced flight simmer, but spent about 45 minutes 'troubleshooting" recent add ons before I checked the forums. I had tried a repair (fail) and figured I was headed for a re-installation before I checked the forums. Even then I had my doubts since the symptoms aligned perfectly with an earlier experience that WAS an add on. A status message at start up sure would have saved me some time.
This… I couldn’t second this enough, I’ve been here since the alpha and sunk several thousand hours into this sim but last night spent a lot of time troubleshooting and if not for knowing where to look here and the discord I’d have began taking unnecessary steps to resolve an issue that didn’t exist on my end as I did not know that was the case, I’m sure many did soo, it was only luck I was playing with a friend who also encountered it to make me have look at the wider picture and realise it’s not a me issue
This isn’t an ideal solution, but I wanted to suggest two things, and you can feel free to do either one of these:
Subscribe to News and Announcements. Click the category link, click the icon and choose “Watching First Post”. You will be notified every time a new announcement comes out (this will also come with more than just outage announcements…you’ll be notified with development updates, too).
Go to the Online Services Monitoring topic, click the icon again and this time choose “Watching”. You will be notified every time this gets updated.
The forum software will send a certain number of emails a day, so if you’re not getting a lot of emails from this, you should receive an email when one of these notifications happens. However, if you’re receiving a ton of other emails from the forums, then you cannot count on an email. But you can always count on a notification if you login to the forums.
Again, I know this is not an ideal solution, but I hope it might be useful to you or someone else out there.
Apple had a similar outage not long ago - when you open any app on macOS, the signature is sent to Apple (believe it or not) to check that it is valid and not tampered with. I think it’s called Gatekeeper. But that server went down (expired certificate, I think) and for about a day, no Mac user anywhere could open any apps! Of course they have improved a graceful timeout / fallback since, so if you or the server are offline you can still open the app.
If MSFS is going to depend on online connectivity, then you need to have clear messaging that is accurate for each scenario, and offer the user to open in offline mode or not.
Apparently there were many outages yesterday, to do with updates. Twitter had an outage, and did inform users it was due to an update which they rolled back. Also Aug 9 was MS “update Tuesday” and there was an outage affecting O365 services due to a Cisco update.
Since MSFS is depedant on online connectivity, it needs to have a better system built in to detect when there is a server connectivity issue (distinguished from a user’s connectivity issue, easy to distinguish by adding a separate server to ping, ie a time server, dns, anything), and then graceful options for the user: Open in offline mode, offer more accurate info to users.
icon and choose “Watching First Post”. You will be notified every time a new announcement comes out (this will also come with more than just outage announcements…you’ll be notified with development updates, too).