I don’t know what planet you flying on.
After the debacle of the first 24 hours I have played 2 - 4 hrs per day virtually avery day since. Yes I have had a few CTD’s and if I leave the game for a long time running without activity it seems to stop communicating with the server ( understandable) and yes there ate things that need tweeking, especially haven to cnt alt del to end task because when I exit to desktop it freezes, I am enjoying what is essentially a very impressive flight sim. Best yet. And at 64, I have played them all.
Either you are very unlucky, or you are playing 24hrs a day, which case I can only say. “Get a life” its just a bit of personal entertainment.
If you want to experience the best real world simulation just look around you. We are living in a computer simulation right now and it has some seriouse bugs that need fixing.
Did you fly any employee based missions? Your crew only generates money while you are flying career missions, so you either need to buy another plane to fly for a company you own or fly as an employee for someone else.
No, only flew as an employee for everyone else. Left my company plane completely alone and have been doing completely other types of missions (SAR exclusively). I have now bought a second plane and have that as a crewed plane. Will see what that does. The new problem is the mechanic is in red and will not maintain either plane.
Its not been a great day, just tried to do missions 3 times (all different) and it crashes with each mission ca 80% done. As I play more and more my opinion of the quality of this releae is dropping considerably.
Same here; have a VIP company set crew on. The next day, I got a passive income of -440 CR
I disagree. In games with excessive grind, it is often the case that the grind is made enjoyable and a key part of the game. I will use dynasty warriors as my example. So let’s look at this game.
Outside of beginner missions, a normal flight is 4-8 hours (without sim rate). Sitting there with autopilot on occasionally answering ATC for center transfers is not overly engaging from a gameplay perspective. We love flight sims, or we would not be here, so please do not suggest that maybe people don’t like them. You might also suggest to fly it manually for more engagement, but such an argument is not a realistic one. No one, is going to manually fly a flight that long, or at least some very extreme minority would just to do it.
So in this game, there is excessive grind with very little engaging game play. If there were not so much grind, one could ignore the latter. I don’t think you can look solely at the amount of grind in a game without the context within which the grind exists. There are games with A LOT more grind than even this, but the gameplay is also a lot more engaging. I don’t think many people statistically are going to want to sit in a 172 for 40-60 real life hours in career grinding the same unengaging missions.
Although this is called a “game”, the nature of activity is to simulate the flying experience.
It was never intended to provide anything other than the experience of flying an actual aircraft within the simulated world. That is what I interpreted it to be, and its why I “play this game”
Clearly, many people want more of an action type game, and it is not uncommon for people to post that they want MSFS to be a combat flight simulator or to have action like Ace Combat. Those are different genres.
You continue to identify an excessive grind? What do you identify as the achievement you expect for that grind? I was able to achieve all the available certifications within a week and with more than half of the specializations in both Airplane and Helicopter branches.
The type of missions one selects dictates what rewards and effective progression one will have in their “career”. Also, the “professionalism” dictates the bonus one can receive.
I don’t question that if one chooses to only do the “easy” flights or never flies outside of the region they want to fly, the grind can seem enourmous. There are different levels of experience that might temporarily limit one’s ability to fly advanced missions. However, it is a person’s choice if they want to learn and progress in “their career”. The opportunity is there. The resources and information to facilitate this have been available for the last 30 years - both from IRL and simulation sources.
I’m only a casual simmer. In my opinion, the level of grind is dependent and different for each person. And, it doesn’t have to be excessive. I don’t consider one week to unlock all available certifications and most specializations excessive.
And no, I don’t use cheats or those crazy time hacks. I want to fly. I don’t need anyone’s validation that I’m a succesful virtual pilot or a sucessful Company CEO. So, I can see.how some people might consider the efffort to achieve whatever goal they want to promote themselves as acheiving can and might be excessive. It depends. It’s definitely arguable.
However, a legitimate path to achievements exists without any skipping or other time cheats.
I think you an I approach games differently. What I hope to achieve is having fun and nothing else. The metrics or stepping stones in the game do not matter to me if I did not have fun getting them. My attempt to define different types of grind was an attempt to put them into categories of fun (for the majority). As you said, career mode is for people who want an objective and the “game” part of this flight sim.
I wouldn’t say the career is really grindy, not from my experience, there’s enough variety in both missions and areas to fly in to keep it from becoming like that (for now). I used to play Elite Dangerous, now that was a grindy game!
I agree with you. We have a completly different perspectives and references of what is enjoyable (within MSFS).
Career mode, all of it’s achievements, all of its specializations are just things that happen while flying in MSFS. Career mode is just a mission generator for people who already fly routes like the ones generated already.
Admittedly, the Company part of career is somewhat gamey. I haven’t actually seen it work passively and it locks you to the type of missions relevant to the company. I just continue to fly the other types of missions in employee mode.
Flying an aircraft and enjoying the scenery along the way is fun, at least to me.
Ok, so think I have it now. It’s not super clear but you MUST buy a 2nd plane and have the 1st one set to crew ‘ON’. You can either fly other missions in the 2nd plane or just ignore it but the first crew will go off flying. So it seems to work but that has introduced me to the 2nd issue :).
Off goes the crew flying their missions:
1- They earn 20k income for a cargo mission (quite low I believe).
2- They trash a good landing gear causing 30k in maintenance.
3- They incur another 12k insurance (I chose the middle option).
It’s only one days data point so I will patient and see how this develops but I somehow don’t think making a loss leading career mode is a particularly intelligent bit of game design.
At least on the good side, I have figured out the pilot mechanic. I have seen some people on forums say they got it to work with only having one plane but must admit to be somewhat sceptical of that given my experience.
I really don’t understand how ‘Passive mode’ actually works within the career mode.
I have created a cargo company, brought a plane and have set the mode to ‘Crew On’ and have only flown ‘Employee’ missions but still not had any income even though I’ve completed a number of ‘Employee’ flights.
According to the FAQ webpage - https://flightsimulator.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/17123300945052-Career-mode-FAQ
It states the following:
Q: How does the Passive Income Mode work so I can earn more income?
A: When “Crew” trigger is set to ON, you need to launch missions with other airplanes or in Employee mode if you only have one freelance aircraft to trigger “passive income.”
Passive income calculation is based on how much time you spent in one or more career missions without using aircraft with “Crew On.”
I should be generating passive income with just a single plane as stated above but this isn’t happening. I created my company on Monday so I would expect to have some income by now.
Does anyone else have the same issue? Is this a bug or do I just not get it.
It is believed to be a bug. Confirmation would be nice, but it is getting discussed heavily in a few threads so I would bet the devs are aware.
So whether it is a bug, or not, I think they will address it when they have an answer of a fix or changes.
… or some instructions? 
So this is the way it really works? And the insurance costs (insurance bug) dont add up all day every day, even without flying? Would really like to know!
From what I can tell from reading everything I can find, insurance is definitely broken and passive income is probably broken.
So, for the time being, I’m just playing in career mode simply to fly into lots of different airports.
Hi Duck,
As to my post above it, I had the same as you but bought a 2nd plane, set the crew on it and am now getting passive income. I don’t think it works if you have just 1 plane. At least that is my experience.
It should at least work like the Microsoft/Asobo business model - Market and get paid wheather or not you did the job “correctly” or as promoted. Their reputation seems to have taken a devastating hit like we see happen to us in game though. Asobo has demonstrated that the reputation part of career mode is coded similar to IRL by setting the example.
However, I still enjoy using the the career mode - as frustrating as all the incomplete features are.
Everyone is putting blame on Asobo for releasing the game too early. Rarely does the developer decide on the release date. It’s usually the Producer that decides. In this case that would be Microsoft.
It is common today that people need to assign blame to a specific entity. In the case of MSFS 2024, it doesn’t really matter to me - even though I temporarily still can’t log in and play the game for enterainment. I can see where the game is heading in the near future, and I believe in the sincerity of at least Jorg, Seb, and Martial regarding the planned direction of the game. I am fully on board - albeit with frustrations.
Assigning blame to either Microsoft or Asobo is unneccessary in this thread, as it is mostly commenting about features in the game. I mention them to submit a possible comparison to Microsoft/Asobo revenue and included a reference to the reputation system presented in game - in jest.
It seems that payments have started working more or less normally. But now I would like to know how it is calculated. I have 4 companies and 5 airplanes. Yesterday, I flew exclusively on a Cessna Caravan with DenAero Cargo and spent only about 3 hours in the air and this flight ended in an error. But the flight time in the table is 8 hours. At the same time, the Cessna 172 Cargo flew for 19 hours, and in the VIP and Jumping divisions only 3 hours.
question for the insurance. Only three of the five planes that flew for more than 8 hours were reimbursed. Those that flew for three hours were not covered by the insurance
UPD:
after diagnostics and repairs, the net profit from the five aircraft was 91,689 credits