Haha, what’s wrong with skydiving ops? I did it for almost 2 years IRL, and it was great fun.
Fs2020 has never been better right now.. they messed up almost everything. Controls.. key binds.. its insane how simply sh*t the experience has been. Fs98 is more reliable than this right now. Over-complicated things that didnt need changing. Yea.. visuals are nice. But in fs2020 i have local files for scenery and it runs and looks amazing. I paid £130 and no refund available.
aurel42de, I think you are loosing sight of the fact that this is NOT A TEACHING TOOL. Yes it is a flight simulator but is it not approved by any federal authorities in any country around the globe as a flying teaching tool. It is first and foremost a game and as such it has to appeal to a wide range of audience from the one who have no clue how flying works to the retired 747 or A380 pilots and anybody in between. As a former airplane pilot myself, I can attest to the fact that this simulator as well as others is as close as you can get to the real thing without having to spend millions for a real flight simulator or flying a real plane.
In an aeroplane, you can’t stop on the side of the road with a dented fender.
If you foul up in an aeroplane, you die.
To get this out of the way: I can’t get a PPL or any other license IRL, because I can’t pass the medical because of bad eyesight, and I can’t afford flying where I live, in Europe, because I’m not rich. So, no, I’m not looking for a “teaching tool”. If I was, we wouldn’t have this conversation because I would be busy training in X-Plane.
If you, as a real pilot, are uncomfortable with me using the word “pilot” in this totally different context, meaning “simpilot” or “person playing a flight simulator”, I apologize. Just search-and-replace it in your head.
So, yeah, I was really just talking about the in-game experience, and about bugs and design decisions that make the career mode conflict with my personal flight simming roleplay. At some point in my flight simming career, I learned to hold on the correct side of the hold short line. If Career mode forces me to hold at the wrong spot by drawing the box in the wrong position and only rewarding me with mission progression if I do “the wrong thing”, if I don’t vacate the runway before I make the radio call to get a parking spot, that’s something I should be able to point out, even to complain about. Putting the box at the correct spot doesn’t prevent a casual player from completing the mission, they might even wonder why the box is “behind the line” when exiting the runway and learn something about aviation. [I think this has been fixed with the latest patch, thanks, Asobo!]
This shouldn’t prevent Asobo from doing simple things correctly, however.
I was just going off Reddit posts and some accident reports, but it sounds like some companies were really cheap… they hired the cheapest pilots they could find, or cowboys who would nosedive with the prop in beta or take other unnecessary risks. That on top of not adequately maintaining the abused planes. Most of the accidents were pilot error (more than a few fuel starvation cases) or engine related.
Not sure if it’s still like that today, and I’m sure there were and are plenty of reputable companies out there based off other comments I read from current or former skydiving pilots, but if you’re not familiar with the industry it’s hard to know what you’re getting yourself into.
Definitely having fun with the skydiving missions in the sim though, and I bet it’s a blast in real life as well! (and if you were a cowboy, no disrespect intended… I know it’s how a lot of pilots operated but from what I’ve read it’s less common today)
A lot of players want some guidance instead of a sandbox sim and career mode does deliver this. Making the “toggle visual aids” more visible would help a lot because as you progress, you need fewer helpers.
But if you understand that each mission comes out of some kind of generator software that does its best to find places that can support one of the mission types. It’s either going to generate too few good missions or it will generate some really wacky ones. I guess it’s up to you to decide to take one.
All true. The generator has started picking some weird pairings for me since patch 3, though. I’m seeing super long Cessna Caravan flights and super short Vision Jet flights - all seem to be about the same. Anybody else getting this?
It’d be so cool to have some transparency as to how this all works. If there’s some sort of rhyme or reason of intent expressed, we might be less inclined to wonder what and why the heck it’s doing what it does.
It’s a simulator but that isn’t to say there aren’t limits to what you can program. Improvement is incremental but you can’t deny these aren’t the procedures that pilots follow. I think there so much room for improvement and I look forward to their updates.
For what it’s worth, I’ve never followed the blue boxes in the air - have them disabled. I’ve had flights with 100% so I don’t think you’re measured on this. I’ve ignored the entry pattern and just flown right in if that’s appropriate.
I do adjust my EFB route and flight level before flight sometimes. File to ATC and send to avionics before my flight. This tends to see me not end up.
But, yeah.. some elements are still forced. I’ve announced final, landed and something in the logic hasn’t worked right and I’ve ended up not triggering the exit runway and parking to be able to finish the mission. I’ve had to take off again and that has affected my rep.
It’s not perfect, but I think as you said, have come accustom to the issues and play to work around them. My only issue is planes I buy do not have missions for them so I can’t progress beyond my C208!
I’ve flown more than 100 missions in career mode, most of them in the transportation campaign, and I can confidently say that watching the blue triangles is not necessary - turn them off. All that matters is the condition of the aircraft, cargo damage, and negotiations with the dispatcher. Medical missions are about gentle flight and radio. Search missions - I don’t fly by rectangles either
to sit down without a framework, especially with this ■■■■■■■ weather, which puts seven on missions, 80% of it is very bad weather. On the screen, a glider, 1000 feet high
For all the Jank in career mode(it needs a lot of working on and patching), I like that they have tried to think of all the different types of flying that exist. Doing things like picking up and flying a banner or firefighting adds to the depth/variety.
I’ve just accepted this is essentially an “Early Access” title. Not acceptbable for a full price game but I know Asobo will work on this game to update it for the long haul just like 2020.
I have not yet encountered any missions at night, nor do I have any missions with a search aircraft, although I have bought a search company and an XCub aircraft
I still think that the FS24 career mode does not match the fun and excitement of the FSX missions. Some of those were really great, flying a NDB approach into Dutch harbor with bad weather. Dual engine flameput over the ocean, flying to resorts and then limping home on one engine at the end of it. Those are still more fun, more variety and have more educational value. In the end the career mode is getting boring very soon.
Because career is not the same as custom missions. I can’t imagine a pilot being so unlucky that they’d have to deal with catastrophic failures on every flight 
Career missions are supposed to offer infinitely different replays because they’re randomly generated, whereas FSX scripted missions offer a few hand crafted experiences that don’t change.
The irony is that that the randomly generated career missions are so tightly constrained in their parameters, and always use the same details and procedures, such that they wind up all being exactly the same, except the backdrop changes. Now you’ve got the worst of both worlds: the missions feel generic like they were made by AI, and they don’t have any variety, like you’re playing the same handmade mission over and over again.
It’s funny you say this, because I’m going through Sporty’s “ground school” course videos now. I haven’t taken any actual flying lessons yet for a variety of reasons (soon!) so I’ve been using MSFS to work my way through the lessons. Doing the Flight Seeing missions in the C172 G1000 with the PFD wind option set to 3, the “turns around a point” maneuver suddenly clicked! I could tell the difference it made thinking things like “oh, I’m going from crosswind to headwind now so I need to bank less and turn less than 90 degrees due to already having a little crab angle”.
The mission helped the lesson make sense! Before that clicked, I remember thinking “these rings in the sky must not be perfect circles because I’m constantly having to aim to the inside or outside to get back in the middle of the gates.” Haha. Now that I think of those parts as turns around a point, I’m much better at them.
I agree with the topic of this thread, overall, but I think some of the stuff in Career has value (when it works correctly and doesn’t bug out, cause crashes, or give janky instructions from ATC.)
Congratulations on beginning your aviation career. 
Not that I’m that old man yelling at you kids to get off my lawn, but you have the potential of becoming a “glass cripple” (tongue in cheek). If it helps you grasp the concept great, you still need to do them looking outside at the ground (smoke, dust drift).
FWIW I’ve been a HUD and glass cripple too. Fly safe. 