I’ve been trying to wrap my head around the current situation with FS Flight Control and how the sim handles “cheating,” and honestly, some of the decisions feel a bit backwards.
FS Flight Control works perfectly fine in Free Flight, which is strange considering Free Flight is the closest thing we have to multiplayer. If anything, that’s the mode where exploits or unfair advantages would matter most.
But then in Career Mode, where everything is purely single‑player, the plugin is completely blocked. That’s the part I can’t understand.
On top of that, career credits are stored server‑side instead of locally. Why?
Career Mode doesn’t affect anyone else’s experience. It’s not like you can use those credits to cheat your way into the marketplace or impact other players. So what’s the point of locking it down as if it’s some competitive economy?
It raises a few questions:
• If FS Flight Control is allowed in Free Flight, why is it disabled in Career Mode, where it can’t affect anyone else?
• What’s the reasoning behind storing single‑player credits on the server?
• Are there any plans to allow plugins like FS Flight Control back into Career Mode?
• And could credits eventually be stored locally, since they don’t influence multiplayer or marketplace systems?
Right now the logic feels inconsistent. Free Flight is wide open, but Career Mode—arguably the most personal, offline‑style part of the sim—is the most restricted. I’d love to hear the developers’ thoughts on this, or if others in the community see a reason I might be missing.
Admins please amend Tags as you see fit, i was unsure which one to put it under.
Free Flight has always been an open sand box. Spaceships, Godzilla, dinosaurs, historical scenery. No rules, or all the rules. You decide and anything goes.
The vibe I get from Career Mode is that it was intended to be semi-competitive or (maybe better) self-competitive, and the “this is for real” mode. If users were able to manipulate the game mechanics at will, they’d quickly lose interest. Career Mode seems to be driven by the need to grind to earn points and credits, rather than because it has interesting missions that motivate users to accumulate hours of flying. Remove the need for points and credits, and it cuts the legs out from Career Mode.
More cynically I think they also were keeping open the option to monetize Career Mode with additional content and game modes, or even add competitive elements later. In that case, they’d have to lock this game mode down. It’s just that the software released in a pre-alpha state, and more than a year later is still not even what I consider ready for release. The simpler explanation is that it was ill designed mish mash where they thought they needed to lock down the game like other competitive games do.
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I get what you’re saying about Career Mode aiming to be the “serious” or self‑competitive part of the sim, but I think the grind actually works against that goal for a lot of players.
For most people, forcing a long progression curve doesn’t create motivation — it creates drop‑off. When you lock aircraft, missions, or meaningful rewards behind hours and hours of repetitive flying, players end up not flying the planes they actually enjoy, just because they’re trying to unlock something else. That’s the quickest way to make people lose interest in a mode that’s supposed to keep them engaged.
A good progression system should enhance the experience, not restrict it. Right now Career Mode feels like it’s built around the grind first and the flying second. If the only thing keeping the mode “alive” is the fear that players might skip the grind, that’s not a sign of a strong design — it’s a sign that the gameplay loop isn’t compelling enough on its own.
And that’s exactly why locking down plugins or external tools feels unnecessary. Letting people tailor their single‑player experience doesn’t undermine Career Mode; if anything, it helps players stay engaged by letting them fly what they want, how they want, while still enjoying the structure of missions and progression.
If the mode can’t survive without strict limitations, maybe the issue isn’t cheating — it’s the design philosophy behind the grind itself.
I agree, and think Career Mode needs a ground up redesign, which is doubtful seeing how much they’ve already invested in it. I also thought it would be a flash in the pan with users getting bored once they exhausted the ability to progress and their earned money becomes a meaningless big number with nothing more to buy. I know a lot of folks have already abandoned it, but apparently lots more are still playing it. No idea what the percentage is as Microsoft won’t publish usage stats like that either. Many seem to be playing just to see their bajillions of credits increasing, like the joy in Career Mode is just watching that number go up. There’s a whole thread about it even. If you could just trivially edit your credit count, I bet many of these users would get bored and stop playing.
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Personal Comments and Observations
Careers was always intended to provide motivation to fly beyond Free Flight. It was also a means of providing mission and specialization gameplay while integrated into a Qualification Process that resembled to an extent the journey of a Student Pilot → PPL → Instrument Rated → Multi-engine → type qualification. Then from there, Rotor, ATP, etc.
Participation rates per Jorg from one of the H2-25 Dev Streams indicated somewhere along the order of over 70 percent of registered sim players were using Careers to one extent or another.
It’s not everyone’s cup of tea. There’s no way Asobo could recreate the real level of the blood, sweat and tears of a real pilot’s journey to specialization beyond a PPL, but they gave a reasonable facsimile - while taking out the real costs - insurance, medical waivers, tuition. Myself, along with others who do have varying degrees of actual aviation experience often joked in 2020 days that we could really figure out who the hardcore players were by imposing real-world costs. Insurance, ramp fees, hangerange, fuel and bunkering, maintenance, medical requals, the whole works. Someone was listening, because Careers has some of those aspects.
Gamifying the experience means leveling the playing field - so I agree that the credits shouldn’t be easily manipulated (or at all for that matter). People keep saying “I’m not hurting anyone.” That’s incorrect - you’re impacting the gameplay reference and framework - and trivializing the efforts of others who legitimately and honestly participated in the Careers module. In much the same way the Landing Challenges and other Leaderboards are a reward and incentive process for players to excel, that’s the same reason for Careers to safeguard the earnings and fiscal management component of the module, and ensure integrity of play.
I think a significant portion of that famous 70 percent plays career mode only because they are forced to, as missions aren’t available outside of the career mode. I am one of those, I couldn’t care less about credits or reputation, all I want is to fly challenging sling load, rescue, firefighting or agricultural missions.
Not sure what the OP’s use case is, but maybe the solution is just unlock the missions from the career mode, keeping career grind and economy for those who enjoy that and give the rest of us what we expected when we first saw the 2024 trailers …
You’re the first person I’ve heard say this, so I’m curious about your take that people who say “we aren’t hurting anyone” are wrong and actually are hurting someone. If you don’t mind, could you please elaborate?
I don’t understand how me doing anything in my single-player career mode impacts you in any way. How would you know I was using something like FS Flight Control? How would I know if you were using it?
If you did know, I’m still don’t understand how it would trivialize your effort. It would be like you saying I trivialized your efforts when moving apartments because I used the elevator and you took the stairs. It would still be impressive that you carried all your heavy boxes up/down the stairs even though I used the elevator for my boxes.
As far as I know career mode doesn’t feed into any of the leaderboards at the present moment, but even if it did there is an easy solution. Give us the choice to opt out of being part of the leaderboards in exchange for being able to use plugins like FS Flight Control. Lots of games already do this, where you can enable mods in exchange for disabling achievements.
Edited for paragraph breaks in support of readability.
I am specifically speaking to the sub-point: career credits are stored server‑side instead of locally
While there is no Career “Leaderboard” - one of the few ways players can share their excitement and achievement is by screencaps of their Career Progress - which includes the monetary loss or gain they’ve made. That’s trivialized when anyone can manipulate the credits made locally, and detracts from the overall Game Experience.
What motivation does anyone have at that point if there’s an easy way to cheat the economic portion of the game?
Someone is good at managing their fleet - they didn’t buy too much or too little, they managed the idle time of their aircraft and crews, they struck a balance between insurance coverage and risk-taking, and worked long missions to get the margin positive.
Then someone comes along, drops five Bajillion credits in and absolutely does none of the above - bleeds credits, keeps adding quarters into the machine.
They both post screencaps of their progress. How can you tell? Server side enforcement ensures game integrity.
It’s much the same way single player action games that have a multiplayer aspect also prevent cheating. If there’s no real reward for achievement, why play?
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I think that would be true if your credits were an editable textbox in the native game. The feeling of reward for earning them would be removed and many users would lose interest. But for a third party hack you have to install? There are lots of single player games with hacks and cheats, and players continue to play through the game without the existence of such things ruining their experience. Of course there are already ways to cheat in Career Mode, so it’s almost kind of moot anyway.
I get what you are trying to say however.
I enjoy the mission aspect of the game, but I don’t necessarily have the amount of spare time in order to progress to Airliners. even with Sim rate increasing it would still take a large amount of time. so in that aspect i don’t agree with your motivation statement, In fact I believe its the opposite the motiviation is already dwindled when you need to do almost 100 hours to afford something like the Boeing.
At the end of the day why police something which overall doesn’t affect anybody else? take No Mans Sky for example, its single player but also multiplayer you can still edit your credits in that.
futhermore if someone does drop “five bajillion credits” what affect does that have on you? you may of already got to a certain point. the playability wouldn’t be affected and i think the retention of players will be more if it would be allowed.
Furthermore you’re on about managing the fleets.. Ok that is easily doable when you have like 10 aircraft.. but when it gets to a higher number it becomes unrealistic, you spend more time going through the menus to maintain and repair. shall we also mention that there is no damage model, if a part is 1%, 10% or 90% depreciated it costs the same to repair..