I’ve been thinking about how the ‘live’ aspects of the MSFS experience could be improved.
At the moment we have a ‘live’ multiplayer environment where everyone shares the same weather, but not much else. It can be great fun for lots of reasons, but you definitely get to see the full range of player behavior and ability. As a result, a lot of core simmers interested in the more realistic aviation procedures avoid multiplayer completely as other player behavior can simply be too disruptive.
PC players have the option of going to an online service like Vatsim or IVAO if they want a multiplayer experience with realistic procedures. But Xbox users have no such choice and also it’s a pity that there is no more structured multiplayer experience native to the sim.
This is where the simulation might benefit from a ‘real-flight’ multiplayer environment. It would take significant development and would require upgraded ATC, but this would be a live multiplayer environment where there would be rules.
Features of such a ‘real-flight’ environment might include:
Shared weather and time
Shared ATC (an essential, truthfully, covered in many other threads)
No runway starts
Completion of the in-sim training to qualify for flight conditions and aircraft types (eg so no IMC departures if you are not IFR qualified)
Merits and demerits (points/rewards/penalties) for following the rules and good airmanship…or not. And associated league tables - its a game after all, so why not lean into that and ‘gamify’ the behavior.
This would also provide the basis of a native career mode.
Bit of a pipe dream at the moment, but wouldn’t it be great to see a true native realistic live aviation experience? The free-flight option would of course remain for those who like to get their kicks or just wanna go have fun without all the procedural hassle.
I’ve not made this as a wishlist item as it’s a bit too expansive for that. But whadda all think - would we like to see a ‘real-flight’ option?
I believe some of those were the intention for ‘live players’. There’s wishlist topics for disabling runway starts and slew mode on live players mode.
Shared ATC, restrictions and points/penalties might have come up in the past as well. Use the search function on the wishlist section and add your votes to existing topics, are create your own if you can’t find anything.
Hi, yes I’m familiar with (some of) the individual wishlist items and have already voted for many of them (I’ll link some when I have the time)
But the limit of one item per wish limits discussion of bigger concepts or systems. Which is specifically why I did not post this as a wishlist item. The purpose of this post is not to wish for any one single change, but to start a conversation about how these elements could fit together to offer a different kind of live player experience.
Currently each person can create their own training schedule and restrict themselves from flying into IMC until they are “qualified”. IRL surprisingly a pilot who hasn’t completed IFR training can file an IFR flight plan and launch into clouds. Clearance delivery doesn’t ask for pilot certification on flight plans. And MSFS is the same. Any user can file a flight plan for a 747 and take off. But there are no consequences for bad flying like IRL. This makes MSFS a “game”. (Have any users been fired from a virtual airline?)
Some users have created their own groups or communities with specific rules or guidelines like no spawning on a runway. Many of these groups use Discord as a community communications tool.
I think enabling aircraft collision detection would be necessary as well, to prevent aircraft from just taxiing through each other and to add some consequences to “see and avoid.”
Yes, but maybe rather than causing a crash, it would be a point deduction (otherwise you would have people crashing into other aircraft deliberately for their own malicious reasons)
All of which is true, but we are discussing what a native set of rules and functions would be like. Right now if you want realism there are plenty of external options.
Regardless of what IRL is (and what it is, is the proverbial 178 seconds to live…for the non-IFR rated in IMC, which is perhaps why it’s a rule that doesn’t really need any sort of enforcement other than the pilot’s own sense of self-preservation), this is a game and it could be interesting to link the training on offer to what you are allowed to do - plenty of other games have similar tests and preconditions.
As I understand, in XPlane multiplayer, someone volunteers to be AFIS at the small airfield where flyers agree to meet. General Aviation day out.
Arrivals and departures are controlled by AFIS.
Partcipants NEED to know the pattern for the airfield, taxiways, ramps and fuel area.
I like what the op is suggesting. I’m avoiding multiplayer because it doesn’t seem realistic at all. What your proposing builds more structure around the multiplayer experience which sounds more appealing to me. I wonder if there could be a virtual fbo where you’d have to pass levels of training in a specific order (with your virtual examiner) to earn an endorsement to unlock flying certain aircraft of different types and complexity (?). I suppose like shooter games that unlock weapons? The premise of what I’m suggesting might be that you already have your license but are new to the fbo, so you’d fly with your virtual instructor to get an endorsement for that aircraft you want to unlock that the fbo offers for rental. It could score your overall flight like the landing challenges do in order to pass(?). As for the multiplayer aspect, not sure how that would work. I wish Pilot2ATC was more integrated into FS to better recognize multiplayer and ai traffic. I don’t play multiplayer so I’m not sure if p2atc already recognizes these types of traffic. Anyway hopefully you can capture some developers attention!
So pretty limited then? As already noted you can easily do this right now, but using Discord or similar as the ‘radio’. The ‘group’ function in multiplayer allows you to exclude all the randomers.
I think some of what you suggest is more akin to the features of a ‘career mode’. I think the two could be complimentary’. Take ‘Unlocking’ an aircraft (aka IRL ’ type rating’): that could be a feature that would determine what aircraft your career avatar (aka ‘pilot’) could access in their career and then use in a real-flight multiplayer environment.
To continue with that example, gaining type rating could be linked back to completion of training, or scoring a certain minimum in a relevant landing challenge.
My wider point is that in terms of design, it should seek to leverage as many of the existing game features as possible (which atm work in isolation to one another) . Heck, it could even give value and purpose to the badges & achievements which right now sit in a dusty digital display case effectively visible to no one but yourself! Lovely if you like collecting these things, but if they were to unlock things or score points in a career mode, then it would give them so much more meaning and value.
This is the main reason I stopped using Pilot2ATC: the lack of interaction with AI traffic.
The bedrock of any more realistic multiplayer experience will be the in-sim ATC. I know Working Title have long term plans for this. Let’s hope it represents something that can fully take advantage of the cloud-based nature of MSFS.
Somewhere along the way, P2A seemed to lose interaction with AI planes. At one point, it would get you to hold short for incoming traffic, or tell you to go around if there was a plane on the runway. You’d get line up and wait commands when other planes were taking off, etc. This seems to have gotten broken a couple of updates ago. The latest betas claim improved awareness of AI traffic, but it’s not working at all for me.
Still though, I’ll take P2A over the broken, junk-tier ATC in the sim. It’s much better all around, and the fact it has voice recognition for the commands is awesome.
Live ATC networks are by far the most realistic, but some of us just can’t use them for various reasons.
And its that which gives rise to my thinking about the need for improved native multiplayer. How awesome would it be to have players attempting to follow ‘the rules’ and with rewards and incentives for doing so. I doubt anything will come close to Vatsim or one of the online networks, because, you know, humans. But something more than we have right now would be cool.
Such developments cost money and would it equal increased sales? Maybe if it actually becomes more of an MMO than it currently is. I shell out my subscription for OnAir, but truth is the MMO aspects of that are actually not that great at all.
The issue with this is the lack of a shared ATC amongst live players. Unless Microsobo can crack that nut, that’ll never happen.
And it’s more than just ATC. The ability to control who you can and can’t see in the world and block other players is something that needs to happen. It’s already needed, but would be even moreso in a rules-based environment. Wherever you have such a system, griefers whose sole purpose is to wreck the enjoyment of the game for other players will follow in droves. They’re already in MSFS as it is, buzzing planes on final, trying to wreck things for live streamers, etc. There would be even more of them in said rules-based environments.
Then some method of enforcing the rules. Otherwise, no point in having rules! And like the rules in aviation, they should be very strict when it comes to interactions with other aircraft (if you want to interact with the terrain, then that’s up to you!)
Would there be more in a rules-based environment? Perhaps, at first, seeking to test the limits. But if the rule enforcement were done right, this would soon fall off (think automatic disconnection from the environment and accompanying time-out). Like all these things though, it would need careful design and thought to strike the right balance (and even then there would be those who would not be happy - but that’s never been a good reason for not attempting things)