I think this is exactly the kind of thing that would help.
I’m not asking developers to come into the forums and explain every technical issue, and I don’t think that would be particularly realistic either. We don’t need a developer livestream every week.
What I do miss is something much simpler: a clear and regular way of seeing which major issues have been acknowledged, which are being investigated, which are actually being worked on, and which, for whatever reason, are not currently a priority.
In that sense, the old Lifetime Bugs / Lifetime Wishlist snapshots did that job quite well. Even if they only came back once a month, they would already provide much more visibility into what is happening and answer many of the questions I raised in the original post, without anyone having to promise dates or organise major communication events.
For me, the problem is not that Microsoft or Asobo need to be talking constantly. The problem is that users cannot clearly see what happens to their feedback once it has been reported.
Because without that visible follow-up, it becomes very difficult for users to tell the difference between “we are reading everything” and simply silence.
Laughing. While there may be a new version of MSFS slated for around 2028, it most certainly should not be called MSFS 2028 or any date. One of the reasons we got a rushed, unfinished product with 2024 is that the year was quickly slipping away at release time.
I believe those in this thread who have said that “they won’t get my money” if and when MSFS 2028 or whatever they call it is released. That’s a commendable position and I respect that.
But you know how it’s going to go, right? When it’s released, there’ll be people who fold their arms and insist that they’re not buying it. But when they see those YT influencer videos and hear about how much greater the new sim performs and how much better it looks, they’ll eventually buy it. They’ll fall for the promises of better DLSS and VR performance, and someone will say that it runs great on their potato. Of course just like there’s a lot of people still on 2020 today, some will remain on 2024. But MS has the time and the $$$ to sit back and wait for the masses to fall into line, and they have an army of accountants who know that too.
Well said! I currently use only FS2020 and in the past I was adamant I’d never buy FS2024 until things improved by leaps and bounds, and it’s not quite there yet, although there is light at the end of the tunnel. Yet I now find myself seriously considering the switch, because the 3rd-party addons scene has shifted to mostly 2024 and is heavily pressuring me.
I don’t think anyone would rush to get 2028 on Xbox unless the new Xbox is out, and even then it would be a sit and wait for me.
2024 broke a few trust barriers on console and still haven’t been fully rebuilt. Communication, transparency still very poor, EA levels.
The streamers and youtubers were part of the problem in 2024, pumping it up and on release day nobody could fly for hours and when we could it was so bad
I bought MFS2024 a few weeks ago after a fairly hefty PC upgrade. MFS2020 worked after a fashion on my old machine which didn’t meet 2020’s minimum specs, so perceived that buying 2024 would not be at all practical.
Now with the considerable (for me) upgrade which meets 2024’s spec requirements, I’m on the flight sim trail.
I have the following observations after two or three weeks…..looking better is irrelevant as with the upgrade, it was always going to look stunning…
-
Love the new flight planning system. Bit overwhelming to start with, as their’s no perceived help within the sim itself. This is bound to give inexperienced folk a chance to gripe. With the help of a couple of you tube vids, I’m getting there, and enjoying it.
-
Biggest concern from me is the control. Particularly rudder control. Aircraft are doing the dosie-doh all over the runway at times, unless my rudder pedals have suddenly worn out. They seemed ok in the 2020 sim.
-
Can’t comment on career mode, as I haven’t tried it. Can’t see it working too well with inconsistent control. This part of the sim seems to elicit the most serious gripes from users who really want the career mode to work. By all accounts, missions fail when erratic control generates a scenario that fails the mission. I will try career mode soon to see it for myself.
-
Video stuttering for me has all but disappeared. The only stuttering I’ve experienced was on a night flight last evening approaching Leeds airport. Having said that, the ground lights in 2024 are great! Stuttering cleared before landing, so jury’s out for me on this one until it happens regularly.
I agree with the OP’s original post. Excellent appraisal of just about everything.
From my chair, control is everything. Put out aircraft that are in a worse state of control compared to 2020, and yer asking for trouble. And I perceive folk not purchasing a new version of this great sim if they’ve gone through both 2020 and 2024 with the issues we’ve all seen. Because unless 2024 is sorted the way we’d like it to be in the way 2020 clearly wasn’t, I think enough folk will say enough’s enough.
I hope the required fixes happen. It remains the best sim out there potentially.
I think your point about trust barriers is bang on. We need - and have - to put a lot of trust in the development team on Xbox. That trust looks to have been misplaced. As the game has been degraded severely since the SU4 release - a tantalisingly short glimpse of how the game should function on Xbox - by a set of large backward steps, it will be very difficult for the devs to win back that trust from this point..
I think there is another aspect here that is easy to underestimate: ecosystem pressure.
Nobody is formally forced to move from MSFS 2020 to 2024. But if third-party developers, tools, services and new content gradually move their support and development towards the newer platform, staying behind becomes increasingly costly in practice.
That changes the nature of the choice. On paper, the user is free to remain on the older version. In reality, the ecosystem itself can create a strong pressure to migrate, even for users who are not satisfied with the state of the new product.
And Microsoft is in a very different position from the customer. It has the financial strength, the market position and the size of the ecosystem to wait. Individual users do not necessarily have that same leverage if the products and services they use begin moving on without them.
I am not claiming that this pressure is deliberately engineered. But the effect exists, and I think it raises a legitimate ethical question: what responsibility does a company have when it knows that the ecosystem surrounding its product can gradually turn a formally optional migration into something that feels increasingly unavoidable?
That is one more reason why transparency matters so much. If users are going to be pulled towards a new platform anyway, they deserve an honest picture of its current state, its known limitations and what is actually being worked on.
There is something about this whole discussion that I find uncomfortable.
We, the users, are the ones spending our time documenting problems, comparing versions, trying to distinguish configuration issues from genuine regressions, asking questions about Microsoft’s responsibility, and even discussing the pressure that the ecosystem itself creates to migrate from one version to another.
But frankly, many of these are questions we should not have to be asking ourselves.
That is also what the specialist press is there for.
Its role should not be limited to reporting on new aircraft, upcoming updates, roadmaps, trailers, interviews or announcements. An important part of its job should be to ask uncomfortable questions of the companies it covers, especially when persistent problems are affecting a significant community.
What is the real state of the product? Which problems does Microsoft acknowledge? Why do certain regressions survive update after update? What responsibility does it accept when a product sold as finished continues to depend on its own users finding workarounds? And what happens when the third-party ecosystem starts turning a formally voluntary migration into something increasingly difficult to avoid?
I do not expect the press to attack Microsoft. I expect it to ask questions.
Because a user writing on a forum can be ignored fairly easily. A specialist press doing its job properly should be able to take those questions to places that we, as individual users, can hardly reach.
And perhaps we should be asking why, so often, that does not seem to be happening.
So perhaps the broader question is this: is the specialist press really doing its job properly? Is it asking the questions that need to be asked, or only a small part of them?
I wonder if it is the job of the “specialist press” to highlight problems and then ask questions and indeed if those with the answers would be any more responsive than they are now.
In the UK, the press have become sensationalist and each newspaper runs its own biased version of everything.
In reality, it is best to form one’s own opinions, rather than choose from a selection of other peoples’.
As before, there are some fundamental problems with all simulators.
Some are things that the user would like to have, but they are simply not possible.
Some are perhaps able to be fixed, but not without other undesirable consequences.
Some do indeed seem to recur, often returning after having been fixed.
No one knows whether this is because the fix wasn’t applied to the next build, or, if
the fix has been undone as an intended consequence of a later fix.
It goes back to the developers not making a running commentary and preferring to
release known working versions, rather than make promises that turn out to be
impossible to keep.
I think we may be talking about two different things here.
I am not suggesting that the specialist press should tell users what opinion they should have, nor am I asking for sensationalism. Quite the opposite.
Forming our own opinions is important, but journalism has another function: investigating, verifying, providing context and asking questions on behalf of its audience that individual users may have little chance of getting answered.
Whether all simulators have problems is not really the question. Of course they do. The relevant questions are what those problems are, which ones the developer acknowledges, why some regressions reappear, what is being done about them, and how the company evaluates the actual state of the product it is selling.
In fact, some of the possibilities you mention illustrate exactly why those questions should be asked. If nobody knows whether a previously fixed problem returned because a fix was omitted, because another change broke it again, or because of a deliberate technical trade-off, that uncertainty is precisely something a specialist journalist could ask the developer about.
And asking does not mean demanding promises or release dates. “We know about it but do not yet know the cause”, “we are investigating it”, or even “we cannot fix this without creating other problems” would all be useful answers. They provide information without making promises.
So my point is not that the press should decide what users should think. My point is that good specialist journalism should help us obtain the information we need in order to form those opinions ourselves.
That is the distinction I was trying to make.
I do agree with you that more information about what is happening would be a good thing.
I am not sure that the developers’ reticence would let a response to a press enquiry be any
more forthcoming than numerous customer enquiries.
My guess is that there is a strict Non Disclosure Agreement in force.
I am well aware that a breach of such a thing can have draconian consequences.
Let me quote the recent silent remanufacture of the three Local legends again.
I can’t imagine that that was ordered from different developers out of the blue.
Far more likely, it was a reaction to the customer feedback, which I imagine must
have been universally expressing dissatisfaction, particularly with the iconic
Boeing 707, which was certainly a disappointment.
All excellent points made here. It would be great to receive an official response on here from Asobo, but it was clear from the initial beta of msfs2020 that simply does not happen. There is little actual acknowledgement that things are noted or actioned.
Hopefully development continues and lessons are learnt, but I am in a position of doubt.