Does the Tornado mission serve only to hurt my reputation?

I suffered through this painful and unrealistic mission, listening to that camera lady complain about the bumpy ride for 30 minutes.

We survived, even though the plane was pitched into stalls by wild wind shear several times, while she continued to admonish me that her precious gear didn’t like it.

In the end I had the filming at 78%, ok, fair enough… But then I got brutalized in scoring for “Smoothness?”. Its pretty hard for me to contain my four letter words about that topic. Smoothness? In a tornado… Uh, huh, right… I’ll try harder or something perhaps. So incredibly stupid.

I also got smashed on my rating because of speed excursions (also caused by the windshear). Ultimately it trashed my S tier reputation down to B, I don’t think I got any money, and the game crashed to desktop to put a nice cherry on top.

This is ‘S’ tier garbage level design. This is exactly the opposite of good gaming. This is the kind of thing that will chase people away and cause them not to look back. Its atrocious.

Career mode in general hasn’t at all lived up to the hype, but winging on about that is just a drop in the sea of user tears anyhow, so not gonna get into that. But this mission specifically is the worst scripting and play I think I’ve ever experienced in any software (and I’m in my mid-50’s and been a gamer since I was 10). It is like it was designed to be punitive and nothing more than punitive.

Don’t take this mission if it is offered to you, you’ll get nothing from it. I should have known better than to dive into the ‘game’ side of things.. I’ll return to my “simmer” lane and we’ll not speak about this again… ever. :expressionless:

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As a ‘yellow’ starter mission, it opens up others in the future. I suspected it would hit my reputation (which it did) but done is done. I can’t be scared of reputation knocks or I won’t learn new aircraft or new mission types.

I feel like you missed the point – Getting marked down for smoothness in a tornado is very much like getting marked down for getting your shorts wet while snorkeling. It’s a stupid metric to be looking at in this mission.

Totally. The thing is, I had executed the mission perfectly until it crashes.

Same here, reputation hammered and a CTD for good measure. :roll_eyes:

Although, at least we had wild weather, a lot of folks who did this mission shortly after release had no wind at all!

Huh.
So this “bug”, which did cost me valuable lifetime I’ll never get back, isn’t a new thing (update related - or maybe they disimproved it further).
Whoever wrote the prompts for the “A.I.”, that resulted in this wreck of cringe dialog lines topped with robotic auto voice overs, must’ve been tasked to “prompt” the level parameters, too.
The permanent “special” to tornado mission in Arizona was somewhat playable, but the other time limited popping up somewhere in the eastern part of the US is a pure reputation wrecker & waste of time.
The Cessna 208 sky caravan is usually a reliable flight model, but in this crooked mission it behaves as if the aviation got hacked, e.g. thrust levers that jump directly into reverse during the outbound flight, nearly crashing the plane (as I had to increase the sim rate or else the looped two lines of dialogue by those scientists would’ve ended with them becoming sky divers), but even with full thrust reverse I wasn’t able get the plane to the wanted “98 knots” for the circling around the tornado (flaps 50% was also ineffective, flaps 100% resulted in instantaneous reprimand for over speeding). The plane got tumbled and tossed around (quite realistic), because the “mission developers” must’ve never talked to actual pilots from the NOAA what distances they use to study storm and tornados (and they fly flimsy single engines)¹.
Anyhow, somehow I finished the circle and the grumbly response (“we didn’t get what we wanted..yaddayadda”) was enough for me the rage quit into the main menu (thus, the mission aren’t counted).


¹) CBS did a story about them a few years ago [CBS mornings] Hunting tornadoes from the sky: Inside NOAA’s “flying laboratory”