Same here, and I’m kinda losing my patience for having 5hr+ flights erased from my logs because one broken feature (misrouting, missing procedures, and ATC just generally being trash) caused another (CTD). Missing features I can handle, flat-out inoperable features and software that crashes to the desktop because you looked at it funny…not so much. Trying to play whack-a-mole with which half-baked feature is causing the issue isn’t really my cup of tea; I do that for a living and I’d rather not in my downtime. I should be able to run the software as-is from the developer and leave the tinkering to those who want to install two dozen mods to the Community folder and troubleshoot through which ones conflict with each other.
“But-but-but it works fine for me!” the defenders cry. Cool. Good for you. Software that works some of the time for some people is not fully functional software, nor is it a compelling marketing pitch. To be honest it’s in a great state for the Beta it actually is, but if it’s not going to work consistently or reliably for 1-2 years then it should have been marketed and sold as early-access and properly launched in 1-2 years when it’s ready. I agree that they’ve built the most beautiful Google Earth clone I’ve ever seen, but if I can’t explore it without it crashing, that’s meaningless.
So if Azure Live ATC is a bug-ridden mess that causes a % of their players to CTD every time they try to change a procedure (or maybe it’s only with the TBM930? Or maybe it’s because you have a custom livery? Or maybe it’s your antivirus? Or maybe, or maybe or maybe or…), maybe it shouldn’t be on me as the player to figure that out, and go disable that feature so I can enjoy the rest of game, then check back periodically to find out if it’s safe to re-enable the full experience again, but on MS/Asobo to simply patch out their non-functional code until they’ve managed to fix/test/rewrite/whatever it into a working state. I mean honestly, how hard would it be to just have an error pop up that says “ATC unavailable” and let the pilot do whatever they want with that information instead of the whole friggin program crashing? I know this is a complex piece of software, but error handling is a thing in software development and they appear to be really struggling to implement graceful failures. Errors in audio rendering or texture stitching causing cascading failures and complete program shutdown is just evidence of sloppy code and/or development practices.
It’s abundantly clear that the sim was launched in an unfinished state (and I don’t mean unfinished in the “it’s a 10-year project and it’s got room to grow” sense but in the “not ready for launch” sense), and marketed as much more “feature complete” than it really is. Of all the planes included (even in the “Premium Deluxe” version that costs 2x as much!) there are what, 3 that are actually flyable in a somewhat realistic manner? And they’re all just GA C172-alikes. None of the airliners perform consistently, and all the glass avionics suites have bugs ranging from annoying to crippling under many circumstances. So that leaves a couple steam-gauge GA prop planes as the only ones that are reliable for more than a few minutes of messing around. What remains to be seen is how quickly they can fix the CTD and AP/flight model bugs that are making the game unplayable for many, and get on to the business of building out this amazing platform they’ve promised us.
I expected some stuff to be missing, I wasn’t anticipating study-level aircraft at launch, but I did at least expect to be able to run the game to the completion of a flight at launch, which hasn’t turned out to be the case much of the time. I for one am certainly disappointed I shelled out for the Premium Deluxe version on the assumption it would be stable but feature-incomplete.
As far as I can tell, the best way to actually enjoy this title right now is to turn off virtually every feature that made it cutting-edge and putter around offline in a 172 with no ATC and no other planes in the sky. It’s a nice view, I’ll give it that, but I and many other buyers obviously expected more.
/rant
tl;dr
Yup, I have that issue too 
