The original OP āreviewā provides zero help and assistance to anyone and is an excellent example of chest unloading and frustration sharing, which no doubt they have found cathartic.
Underpinning it, there are elements that I agree with, but on the whole (i.e. 90%+) I am having a great time with MSFS. My Steam account thinks Iāve closed it down as Iāve barely touched it since mid August.
Maybe Iāve been lucky, but here is my experience:
Instal/updates - flawless. Zero issues. However, the process is a little cumbersome (run the sim and then it pushes you into the store app and then back again) but it works for me.
CTDs - essentially none since the USB issue was fixed and I avoided opening the VFR map as the patch notes said that would crash it, so I didnāt do it.
IFR - in the TBM (my aircraft of choice right now) this feels to me to be 90% there. There are issues adding approach procedures and the rerouting back to last waypoint issue (which is relatively easily worked around) and pressing the down button on the MFD at the end of the flight plan can cause a CTD (my only other CTD experience - so I donāt do that any more and have no more CTDs). Iāve flown 21 legs of my round the world trip, thousands of miles, in many different ways - full IFR, full VFR, a bit of both, ILS manual landings, ILS auto landings, I fly the plane by hand and with AP and had zero issues with any of that.
Controls - I canāt say it enough (I didnāt listen to myself and I screwed this up last week!) but you need to make sure you donāt have controls duplicated. This (not unreasonably) confuses the sim. 2 quick examples - the xbox controller that I use for flying the drone camera has, by default, flight controls mapped. If you donāt fly with the xbox controller, then make sure these are unmapped. Also, if your plane (e.g. the TBM) doesnāt have a mixture control, then make sure you donāt have one bound. Moving it will tend to cut the engine off. So if you donāt have any duplicate/unused mappings, control issues will be minimal. I would like the Honeycomb yoke bug fixed if possible though, but itās not a big deal for me. Sensitivities are fine although the curves could be a bit more flexible.
Scenery - Iāve seen so many threads saying the scenery is downgraded. My experience of this, and Iāve posted lots of screenshot comparisons before/after patches is that this is not the case. I think the perception comes down to a few things. Alpha/Beta testers frequently claim it was better before release - Iāve no way of knowing. Maybe it was, but maybe that wasnāt scalable to 1m+ users worldwide with the server ecosystem. Who knows. Also the community literally screamed at Asobo to make the trees smaller. So they did. Iām pretty sure that is at the root cause of many of the trees issues. Many threads and requests focus around LOD issues. Personally, when flying, I just canāt see these issues. If I pause, zoom in, peer closely at the screen, maybe I can see a tree that isnāt there that should be, but to be honest Iām not seeing it. In the real world flying scenario, the issue just isnāt there for me. I also donāt get the āpop inā that others have mentioned.
FPS - my FPS has never been so stable and high. And, as noted above, this is not because the graphics have been downgraded. I think considerable optimisation has gone on. There is still a lot more to go. I deliberately max out my GPU usage so that it is the limiter because my CPU runs at c. 50% and if I turn the graphics down, I donāt see FPS improvements because Iām limited by the CPU. If that can be fixed, I think I could get 60+ on high-end or ultra (I have a i9 10900K, 32Gb ram, RTX 2080 super). I normally get 40+, sometimes 50+ depending on where I am. In the airliners, 30+ near cities and sometimes down to 25 in the cockpit there. Thatās OK, but not brilliant.
So I really like the experience and the sim. There is loads I would like fixed and improved though. Iāve tried to log as much of that through zendesk as I can, providing detailed notes where possible.
A few additional thoughts:
Lots of people assume things should work a certain way because thatās how they would do it if it were up to them. Bottom line is that it is up to Asobo. We need to help them see alternative ways or give them options. Shouting at them because itās not how we would have done it is unhelpful and arrogant. Live weather is a case in point. People assume it is broken because it doesnāt do what they think it should do. Asobo may well think it is doing exactly what they designed it to do. My personal experince is that it is pretty good and personally I donāt need it to replicate every cloud in the real sky. I do think that it would be really helpful for Asobo to set out how some of these more complex systems are intended to work. That would help us all manage our expectations and understand if what we want is a missing feature or a bug.
The other thought that I have is that this sim is an ecosystem. It has many moving parts - the instal on your hard drive is only a small part of that. There are the servers, the internet connection, the data flow from MeteoBlue, NavBlue, Bing maps, the Azure voices etc, then complex calculations to be done before it is all served up and rendered on our monitor(s). And thatās before you consider multiplayer.
The whole system needs to work together - and when it does, a little bit of magic is created. But this is a double edged sword - any one of these components might have a glitch - finding the root cause of that and fixing it is more complex than ever. So I think that makes the sim a little fragile and prone to issues that might be quite temporary caused by an internet hiccup here or a temporary data flow failure there.
It must be tough debugging this especially against the further complexities of the infiinite hardware configurations and the infinite variety of mods and hacks the community is prone to jumping in with. If youāve rasied a zendesk ticket lately, youāll see that they are now capturing controller information and mod information to help them debug better. Definitely a good thing.
Whatās my conclusion? Itās great, but can (and I believe will) be so much better. The devs commitment is clear. It is more important than ever that this community plays a part in helping the devs to get their as quickly as possible. That doesnāt involve assuming they are lazy/incompetent/idiots etc - as some of the early posts above would suggest. The fact they have delivered the incredible achievement they have already should tell you that is patently false.
well said on that!