Career mode is teaching me to be a worse pilot

Discussion Hub Activities, Career & Challenges
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Career mode teaches me not to plan my flight, and instead fly through boxes in the sky. I can’t turn off the boxes, which is good, because I get punished when I stray too far away from them.

Career mode teaches me not to do pre-flight checklists. I get punished for checking the flaps.

Career mode teaches me that it’s okay to start the engine with airport workers standing next to the propeller, and to taxi “through” people or vehicles, because it frequently doesn’t give me any other option.

Career mode teaches me that it’s more important not to exceed 20 kts during taxi (while not giving me any indication what my current speed might be until airspeed comes alive and I get dinged immediately) than to stabilize my approach before landing. It will congratulate me for the most haphazard landings, as long as I pass through the “final” checkpoint and somehow manage to stay on the runway. (Of course it will also sometimes patronize me after a perfect flight with a smooth landing, because it arbitrarily decided that, during take-off, I “overflew” the departure airport (!) without the expected radio call.)

Career mode teaches me to fly dangerously close to terrain (mostly during sightseeing missions), or enter clouds under VFR.

Career mode teaches me to treat any plane as if it was a rental and gas was free. It simply doesn’t care if I aim for best economy instead of best speed. It actually encourages me to punish the plane on every trip by telling me frequently that missions are time-critical. It’s unclear why the C172 is often considered the appropriate choice for these urgent missions.

Career mode teaches me to make useless and unrealistic radio calls (“taxi to parking” at a grass strip, or “overflying airport”) and to ignore ATC best I can. If I interact with ATC beyond what career mode wants me to do, I risk breaking the mission, and not being able to complete it.

Remember “Aviate, navigate, communicate”? Career mode teaches me to prioritize communication over anything else. If I delay my response to ATC because I’m busy with something else, I risk getting punished.

Career mode teaches me to ignore the placards telling me about gear or flap speeds. I get punished if I use the flaps at the correct speeds.

Career mode teaches me to do a 180 on the runway after landing, even if there’s another exit in front of me. I don’t think I would get punished if I use the correct exit, but at this point I’m so used to follow the blue arrows that I’d rather turn around than risk it.

I’m sure any career mode player can think of more examples.

Please see this insightful response for solutions or workarounds to some of the issues I mentioned:

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I never do anything other than free flight because of it in 2020 or 2024.
I wish it rewarded safety and procedure. But it doesn’t.

I get that it’s a game, and I am happy for those that treat it as such. But I can’t be proud of a score or success in s simulator when the scoring is absolute non-sensical from a realism perspective.

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My plan is to try career mode while I’m waiting for my FSEconomy aircraft to get updated to MSFS2024. Career mode is like playing a Bethesda game, you expect jank, you learn to tolerate it, and you play the metagame of trying to avoid game breaking bugs.

The most interesting decisions in career mode are not about flying.

They are about which mission to pick, not based on where you would like to go, what you would like to see, but based on which mission types are broken, which planes are broken, which airports are broken. And about which parts of the mission to skip because they’re for some reason impossible to complete without getting dinged. Taxi instructions include a “cross runway”? Alt-N is my friend.

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IRL in commercial flying your career is based on hours of experience, not mission completion. This is also true of free flight in MSFS - a virtual pilot with 1000 hour of experience across a variety of types will normally - not always, as in IRL - turn out to be the better virtual pilot than one with 50 hours under their belt.

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Yeah the career mode isn’t realistic, the checkrides make no sense. It’s a game, don’t consider it to be anything else, don’t use it to learn how to fly, use it to have fun.

Could it cause bad habits for those interested in a real flying career? Maybe, but you run that risk with everything you do unsupervised in a flight simulator.

Just remember it is a game, you can get a quite good understanding of how an aircraft works and flies, but you can’t learn to fly an aircraft at home behind your desk.

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I’m just a casual simmer, but here are just a few thoughts and perspectives I found helpful in the Career mode thus far.

  • Yes, plan your flight. Keybind “Toggle Visual Assistance” so the boxes go away and you can enjoy the scenery. I also have removed the route visual boxes from the G1000 through the setting buttons on the bottom too. Fly your planned VFR or IFR route. Yep, we have to call on final or acknowledge landing clearance.
  • With time (if you are just starting) you will be able to judge your taxi speed without a “speedometer”. Just like you will with approach and touchdown altitude approximations with your eyes outside and not on your instruments.
  • You are the pilot in command and you own the plane. Allow your decision making skills to validate the right choice for your safety and equipment. People will always pressure you into accepted deviation. Make the right choices, and live to fly a full career.
  • Fly your plane as economically as possible. The fuel and maintenance costs are outrageous otherwise. Don’t listen to those voices that don’t care about you or your planes best interest.
  • After landing, exit where you want to. The Hold short will typically auto switch to your nearest exit on larger runways. You may still have to back taxi on short fields.

All of the other things you mentioned are valid and I also agree. Hopefully, the game will mature hastily in the next few weeks and months.

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TIL. I tried using my keybind for taxi ribbon, but it didn’t work in career mode, so I didn’t even try alternatives.

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I really wanted those boxes to go away, so I referenced the “2024 Transverse Keybinds” to find the keybind to turn them off, as well as a few other helpful things.

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I think it’s possible whoever designed the career mode, probably never qualified as a real pilot and possibly designed the career mode for a ten year old!

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Or when frantically pressing enter key to quick reply, and the AI is so slow to respond, you get knicked anyway for not replying to ATC. Or stopped at the hold short put your flaps down. Then get warned your exceeding flaps speed. I gave up on career mode. And since most of the new Airbus’ cant even use the new planner, efb or charts. I guess im not sure why i bought this game. New trees?

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The Inibuilds Airbus EFB has Navigraph/Simbrief integration for robust planning. I like to do my planning in Navigraph and/or Simbrief on an actual Android tablet, then just download the plan in the Inibuilds EFB. Most of the higher fidelity addons have this feature.

I also like to run Navigraph SimLink, so I can view my current position, telemetry, and route progress on VFR, IFR, and world maps that include my aircraft position icon overlay from my tablet when I take a break and walk away from my computer for a minute.

Viewing charts in Navigraph is significantly more intuitive and user friendly than the Working Title EFB. Navigraph automatically syncs the airport and procedures charts to the route you create, then displays those links on the map for easy access as you the fly through the prodedure. You don’t have to keep selecting your chosen procedure maps from a list each time you switch back to your map view.

The inibuids Airbuses may not be Fenix or PMDG level, but they are fantastic “default” aircraft that incorporate the more advanced and estabished Navigation and planning resources available - and the data does link to the MCDU.

The default planner is absolututely fantastic to have shipped with the game. It really does mitigate any need for any payware Planning software. However, it doesn’t have as robust a feature set and ease of use as Navigraph/Simbrief … yet. IMO

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As someone who has almost exclusively done career mode… you’re right. There does need to be a balance struck between simulation and game in career mode, I think, but it leans almost entirely towards game right now. I, too, wish they rewarded proper planning, navigation, and didn’t hold my hand at least in later career stages, but unfortunately the “fly through the blue boxes” (these can be disabled, by the way, helps with immersion!) and super simplified requirements continue to be the norm all the way through the career thus far. I’d love some kind of “advanced” career mode that has limited, if any, visual assists and actually requires you to know your way around the airport, know how to utilize ATC, and expects you to follow accurate procedures to some degree

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I have already given up on career mode. I need to earn 10.000 more credits to do the instrument rating. I won’t do any more boring missions to get to that point, I have better things to do.

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I don’t think the career mode is there to teach you how to fly. It’s basically a gateway with two doors: one to bring new players in the sim giving them a proper progression system; one to bring everyone ( 3D party devs included ) in the Marketplace ecosystem. Now, the so called super pilots or ultra hardcore simmers known every single bit of a plane, every procedure or checklist. But basically nothing about game design. There is a lot of friction about the topic “game vs sim”, but the problem here isn’t the gamification of the sim ( which actually is a good and necessary thing ) but how they gamefy it with a lot of missions built around structures taken from games like GTA ( which from a mission design perspective are absolutely terrible ).

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Even if it’s not the intent, no doubt many aspiring pilots and new simmers will be taught all kinds of bad things going through the career mode, from specifics like holding short on the wrong side of the line, to more general things like bad aeronautical decision making.

…which I always thought was utterly silly. Flight Simulator has always been what you make it, be it a serious simulator, or a casual game. But working through career mode I was self conscious about what I was doing for the first time ever. I asked myself several times why I was playing this game.

Since then I’ve tried a couple missions with blue boxes turned off, the mission objectives window closed the entire time, planned the flight using ForeFlight, and used real world procedures as best as I can. And man what a breath of fresh air that was, and I was surprised at how well it actually worked. Even on First Flight and Flight Seeing, where you seemingly must fly through the blue boxes, that isn’t actually the case. You can plan your flight ahead of time, and then fly a turn around a point maneuver using visual reference to the ground alone, and it totally works. So the potential is there for a rewarding simulator experience. Unfortunately, there are specific missions and mission types where turning arcade mode off is going to utterly break the game.

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You can see your ground speed on EFB during taxi

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As an XBox player, career mode is teaching me to uninstall. Lets not talk about the horror story that is the controller implementation and UI; I got past that battle.

I ground out a warchest of 50k and the pre-reqs to get going with a cargo company; first flight went well, second flight, was crossing the channel … when the battery in my controller died. Watched in horror as the 172 dived down into the sea.

I’ll be ok, no profit, will lose some of last flight’s money, but at least I paid for the premium insurance…

And sure enough the premium insurance coughed up 40% value to help with repairs … 40% of the discounted price the 172 is given to us for. Slightly under the $400k needed to get the plane flyable again.

So…400 hours of employee grind coming up before I can progress in the company side again … really?

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This is a bit weird indeed. Maybe they don’t understand themselves how hold short lines work.

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I abandoned my career entirely. I still have three 172s in VIP, Flightseeing, and Transport companies, but I got fed up after too many crashes, bugs, and about a thousand other idiosyncrasies. Far too much frustration, with very little player reward.

I can see why MSFS wanted to build a career mode. 3rd party platforms (I re-subbed to OnAir) are earning money on the back of MSFS, so it makes sense to build something that scratches a career itch to keep players in-game.

Unfortunately, Asobo built something that can’t currently compete with any other 3rd party career platform - free or otherwise. There’s promise in the MSFS career, but it seems like a long time before it’s realized.

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It would be faster to restart your career. 400 hrs? That’s almost 24 hours of playing time each day since launch.

Once you unlock your instrument rating and the light cargo transport specialty, just fly 3 of those missions and make 30-50k in one flight. If you can then stand a 3.5 hour flight not too long from there, just one medical transport flight will pay you 130-190k per flight.

Use the knowledge you’ve “demonstrated” that you have by earning your certifications to advance your career.

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