So I was super exited with the career mode everything was going fine with every single mission until I reach the VIP charter missions. Suddendly after a perfectly good flight following the flight plan I received a NEGATIVE SCORE on “Airline Procedure” with brought me down like 2 levels of hard earn reputation.
Can someone at Microsoft be so kind as to explain what excatly does “Airline Procedure” take into consideration?
I am loving the sim and the career modeand I am having a blast. Apparently I am part of the 1% you have had just a few minor issues just like this but I would like to improve my scores and continue with my career with as less issues or set backs as possible.
When operating, be it flying or taxi, keep one eye on the upper right corner of the screen. When you violate procedures, you’ll get a quick notification up there. And by quick, I do mean easily missed. It should stay on longer, be placed better, or have an option to close at will, but I digress…
Chances are you will see what you missed there. The other problem is there is no added instruction on when a new required procedure is added. For example, I got into the bad habit of not using taxi and landing lights properly early on because the career mode starts out not caring about that. At some point I advanced enough that it did care, and I got two or three deviations because of it, which reflected as an airline procedures fault.
Even when following the upper right it’s completely bugged out. Multiple people have commented on it. They should honestly remove this requirement from the game and replace it with something more controllable. They will never get this to a point where they can account for all flight plans, mid flight changes, etc etc etc.
I’ve done several flights where I’m pretty sure I received no notifications at all but still had points deducted for Airline Procedure. They definitely need better clarification as to what this takes into account. Possible I missed the notifications, but they’re pretty big and obvious.
I wonder if the taxi and strobe lights requirement during the night checkout are part of “airline procedures”. I’m going to file a bug for the strobes, that’s a lineup item. We never taxi around with strobes.
On the VIP charters you are supposed to be making cabin announcements. Yes, even in an 172. But it sounds more like that of an airliner, which is the epitome of silly.
Open up the communications window, and the intercom tab. You’ll usually see a welcome, takeoff, cruise, approach, and after landing announcement available to make at those times. Make sure you keep checking it because it doesn’t seem to show up in the missions window.
I think this means procedures that the game expects you to do, even though it is not required by regulations but your employer expects you to do.
One thing I keep forgetting is using the Landing Lights even though I fly during bright daylight. I don’t think this is a legal requirement but the game wants it or you get punished.
Why doesn’t it have a report at the end of all the things we got gigged for? It needs to go beyond just saying “landing lights,” but exactly how many times and maybe even where/when. Show why is it gigging us for adherence to taxi procedure, etc. Show the metrics so we can fly the metrics.
We could also use that info in a reverse manner to show why the goal metrics are wrong. Hmm… maybe I just hit on why we don’t get to see them.
My working hypothesis is that the ‘Airline Procedures’ compliance is based on how closely your flight path adheres to the flight plan specified in the EFB. This is shown by the magenta line in the external view mini-map (and visible nowhere in-cockpit except the EFB). The Garmin avionics magenta flight plan path will be similar but not identical because of differences in departure and approach paths.
Its not the silly floating blue brackets either.
Taxi, airspace etc violation don’t seem to be correlated (and are penalised separately in the end-mission screen).
It will be good to know for sure, and pretty poor this (and so much else) was not better explained at the outset.
Edit
That hypothesis is complete b.locks. Sorry. As pointed out here it’s radio comms and explained on the Help screen for the mission (‘G’ on accept mission screen).
I’d also like to know how I got 125% Airline Procedures a few times. Didn’t do anything different from other times when I would get 70-80%. I would say clarification and a detailed breakdown is mandatory at this point.
It is also possible to get negative percent. Not sure how it is possible to do something negative percent? Ignore passenger satisfaction, that was correct, I was testing something to see if the game would react to it and it did.
So I tested out a theory someone put in another post and so far it has been true on several flights.
Airline procedures appears to be merely the number of successful interactions you have with ATC and THAT IS IT. Negative scores are from accumulating bad interactions, like failing to acknowledge. If you spam cancel IFR and request flight following, or requesting direction to next waypoint, you will get a high score.
It’s worked for me, but I would like others to try it to verify. If true, this would be a monumentally stupid metric because short flights could never get a high score without abusing the system. Not only that, they would be using a percentage for something that is a nominal value, which is also so far beyond silly and makes absolutely no sense. I am starting to wonder if this part of the game wasn’t outsourced or done by interns. Whoever designed this metric does not understand game design at all, nor do they understand extremely basic mathematics as not even a high schooler would use a percentage to represent a nominal value.
EDIT: For those confused about what I mean when I say nominal value. If you see my photo above where it says -38%. that is nonsensical right? How can you do something negative percent? Well the game is counting in discrete units ATC interaction failures and successes. So if you fail to acknowledge ATC say, then it subtracts a value from a base score. This is not how percentages work. They are translating a nominal value to a percentage which boggles my brain.
An example is a theoretical flight with 1 ATC interaction. In the game, if you fail this interaction, you are 0 for 1 successful interactions. That is 0% to anyone with a basic understanding of math. This is basic arithmetic, not even algebra. However the game says it’s a negative percentage because of this translation from a nominal value total (interaction score = -1) to a negative percentage value (-%).
This should at the very least be updated to reflect the actual percentage of positive interactions compared with the total number of interactions. You know, an actual percentage!
I was regularly getting 80% to 100% on ‘Airline Procedures’ however, for my last 10+ flights I get exactly 75% every single time.
I don’t think that I’ve missed an ATC call, I’ve cancelled IFR and I’ve kept IFR plans, Ive changed from ILS approaches, to RNAV to Visual or kept the same filed approach yet every time I get 75%.
So I wish I knew what I’m consistently doing wrong to lose 25% every time when my procedures/actions haven’t changed since the start of my career.
I think they have a lot of interns at Asobo doing programming of the monkey level. This whole ATC interaction is so bugged I want to throw up over the amount of times I have wasted a whole flight only to not be able to park and stop because the interaction system has gone to sleep.
RESTART and then the VFR flight has now turned into a IFR flight.
QUIT TO MENU
RELAUNCH SIM
Pray.
Try again.
Since last patch, on VIP missions i always have 80%+ airline procedures using auto pilot on navigation and respecting the ATC altitude. If you fly on manual it’s way harder depending on your controller. Don’t blame the devs for your fails
I feel like the thing you are being rated for should be transparent. Now you have to guess and if you do everything you are told, you still get 80 percent max.
