An open letter to Jorg Neumann and Sebastian Wloch:
I was one of the alpha testers and to say that I was excited about this simulator when it was originally announced and released in Alpha was an understatement. I must have been one of Asobo’s strongest ambassadors on how great the prospect of this simulator was going to be for our community.
I had followed all the unhappy comments from the community on how Microsoft were going to betray them like they did with FSX/ Microsoft FLIGHT and Aces Game Studios when they pulled the plug on the community. I was the guy who kept telling my simulator community - please trust them! They have come out with the “next gen” simulator!
Sadly it appears that the last laugh was on me!
I went out and upgraded my PC to be “state of the art” - a 5900x cpu with an incredibly premium priced RTX 3090 graphics card. I then upgraded from the Rift S VR headset to the Reverb G2 because Asobo advised that the Reverb G2 would be their supported VR headset.
Well Asobo/Microsoft, you have let us down!!
Yes, you have improved the smoothness of the sim in the Sim Update 5. However, this is where it starts and ends.
The Sim Update 5 is clearly nothing more than a realignment of a Flight Sim Enthusiast PC Simulator to a general gamer teenager Xbox user. We PC flight simmers have been used as lab rats to get the hype up for Microsoft before it could be dumbed down for the Xbox Community.
Now to the finer details of my complaint:
Asobo/Microsoft :
- You released this last update with clearly very little consideration to your BETA testers who warned you of the problems that we are now facing in this update.
- You clearly did very little quality control testing on various PCs before releasing this to the public.
- The number Crashes to desktop are nothing short of embarrassing for a company of your size and stature to be considered acceptable.
- I get crashes to desktop whilst in VR every time I go back to the main menu.
- Main menu GUI - There are times where the menu structure goes completely corrupted and you can see multiple settings (repeatedly) in the VR section for graphics options. This creates a slow down in the PC to a crawl and requires a restart.
- Significantly reduced LOD - popping of scenery and textures appearing at the last second in flight (In VR). You basically have to be within 200m of an object before the full LOD textures are rendered.
- Very poor anti-aliasing issues - It appears as if 100 render scale of SU5 is equivalent to 70 render scale of SU4. Menus AS WELL AS objects in the scenery, buildings etc are very poorly rendered showing flickering textures, shimmering and jaggered lines on edges. Some tiles in the distance flicker to the point where the tiles look metallic as a result of the flickering. How on earth is this not picked up by your quality control team?
- Broken 3rd party planes and scenery - Although I can appreciate that this requires the input of 3rd party developers, surely you would allow them to work with you in parallel for them to update their addons at the same time so that it is all in line with the release of the update? What is the point of the community guessing what works and what doesn’t after investing in 3rd party addons only to be told to “empty” the community folder all the time there is an update?
- Washed out colours and overexposed clouds in VR - everything in this update is more washed out that Simupdate 4. I am sure you have read in the forums how clouds appear to be of a lower quality?
- With a 3090 and a 5900x, I only got 3fps more with the same settings as I had in SU4 - how is this a performance improvement. Sure - mid level machines got big performance boosts - but why would people who have invested in high end machines suffer with very little improvement and quality degradation?
- Multiplayer - VATSIM - now unplayable. It is impossible to be on serious multiplayer networks like VATSIM because your altitude readouts do not correlate with VATSIM anymore - there is over 1000ft discrepancy.
- Cross Play with Xbox users - Have you ever considered that the flight sim community who take simming seriously might NOT want to cross play with Xbox users that consider your simulator to be nothing more than a global version of GTA V??? At least give us an option to exclude them in our “all players” should we choose to do so.
- Switching into VR - the whole sim comes to a grinding halt - your headset goes black and flashes for about 30 seconds before it stabilizes. We never had that in SU4.
- Micro stutters for the most part are removed (although in cockpit panning in VR is still stuttery), but they have been replaced with MACRO stutters…stutters so bad that you can pause for between 5 seconds and 20 seconds with a black headset whilst something or nothing is happening in the Simulator. Sometimes, you will get to carry on in the flight and other times it will crash to desktop.
- I heard a rumour that in your upcoming Q&A Twitch video that people must not ask questions about bugs etc in the SU5 - Please tell me this is just a rumour - you would not want to “silence” us would you?
Jorg, I have watched all of your Twitch engagements with the community and needless to say, I always walk away motivated and proud to have someone like yourself leading our simulator into the future. In your videos and interviews you are inspirational and motivating and it is clear that you have a love for the simulation world as much as we do. You speak of transparency with the community - however, unfortunately, the output of this last updates and the quality control is poor. So far, the community is clearly of the opinion that this update has dumbed down the simulator for Xbox. The experience I have had in this update completely confirms this.
You guys had started off so well and had really gotten the whole community behind you. You now have a number of disgruntled people who felt that you have let them down and that their pleas and suggestions and bug testing has fallen on deaf ears. I implore you to please help us restore faith in this simulator and in your hard work. We all want this MSFS to succeed.
Please will you address the above issues in your Q&A Twitch and make us PROUD again?
Thanks
From a Simmer who has been there from the very beginning since FS 5.0!