Are many of the performance issues actually network related?

Just a thought that I’m putting out there.

Instead of thinking of this as a flightsim that is connected to a network, think of this as an online game which relies heavily on network activity for most of its functionality.

Now throw some latency connecting to servers in the US from Europe, a bunch of packet loss and…how much actually stops working? how much works a little bit but gets horribly slow?

While checking through Glasswire and resource monitor during an episode of particularly rubbish performance this evening I was surprised to see how much of my traffic as an EU user was with servers in Seattle USA. - and there was associated high latency and a lot of packet loss on those trips.

Even turning all data off and going “offline” there are still connections to USA present and active. Does the game really require constant validation to verify my profile and validate all my marketplace purchases? (yes boys and girls…those things you buy in the Marketplace? they require validation every time you play and if they don’t validate you may not be able to access them. - offical from Zendesk support)

You can see performance impact easily correlated by turning off “Live” services in the Data menu. You’ll probably see more shutting off Bing Maps and PG, at the expense of world appearance.

The rest of it is obfuscated by XBox Live Services, where you’re authenticated but also get routed and receive those same above feeds based on geographic load balancing for the most part.

Then the other parts that affect you are the traffic sliders, but that’s more self-induced load on the sim with the exception of Live Traffic and multiplayer.

So some of the performance is network related. But not all.

I’ve been thing the same thing for some time now.
My internet is 300 mbit and seems to be very stable, and I never have any of the issues that so many people report here.

In particular the problems with the installer and the long stutters in the sim sound to me like lost or delayed IP packages could be the underlying cause. But I wouldn’t presume to know…