General Feedback --Two Months Later -- My MSFS 2020 Review

I think that you are right that 3rd party support are a key ingredients in creating a successful sim. It keeps interest alive with new apps popping up all the time catering for mainstream or niche demands.

You are also right in that if Microsoft wanted to kill off 3rd party developers they quite easily could do so, but it is not in their interest to do so or financially a sound proposition. Over time the sim community will change focus from default sim, default aircrafts etc and towards new existing 3rd party products.

Microsoft can then sit back and make a buck or two launchingā€¦helicoptersā€¦glidersā€¦you name it.

Medium, long term(5-7-10 years) however I think that they will need to move to a paid subscription to cover cost of running/updating servers and program. Take that as a prediction!

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No, it wonā€™t. Adjust your expectations and focus on the right things. Each time I jump in, I know I will enjoy it, because I know what I can expect at this time and I know why I start the sim. We know the issues that are present.

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I jumped from FSX:SE to MSFS.

After getting wowed by the visuals for a while, I stopped playing and went to building a new P3Dv4 from scratch.

Sure, many find MSFS wonderful. No doubt it is,and I love it. But for my own requirements flying airliners, the good environment visuals donā€™t matter as much. P3Dv4 is sufficient for my purpose as well. Going beyond actual simulation of the aircraft (which I have PMDG), I need the airliner-capable airports to be as accurate as possible. Nevermind a bit outdated.

With P3Dv4 I can get that. Itā€™s a lot of trouble to install scenery for every airport, but at the end of the day I get airports with accurate taxiway and gates. For everything else, I can populate with my imagination.

Ohh also, I get a full suite of AI traffic based on real-world schedules from Alpha India Group, updated to Summer/Winter 19, and all the hustle and bustle of pre-COVID 19 air traffic. The world feels alive. I know there are people working on this for MSFS, but from the sound of it, I donā€™t think itā€™ll be solved quickly.

The weather in P3Dv4 may be outdated visually, but still superbly modelled with Active Sky. I donā€™t get lightning everywhere or excessive icing. Iā€™m not saying the weather in MSFS is bad, but it still needs some work. Until then, I am fine to work with visually oudated weather in P3D.

Did you guys also notice that several parts of the world in MSFS have UTC timezone issues? Like really obvious ones. Tibet and Xinjiang should be UTC +8, but shows up as UTC+6. All of Malaysia should be UTC +8, but some cities in West Malaysia are in +7. Bali should be +8, but shows up as +7.

I know this ainā€™t a big deal to most people. But to fly for a virtual airline that checks flight time based on origin-destination UTC, this is important. With P3Dv4 there are 3rd party fixes available from the FSX days.

MSFS is indeed next-generation revolutionary, and Iā€™ll jump right back in now and never look back if everything works for me. But with the outstanding issues and the speed at which the development is going, looks like itā€™ll take quite a while before the advantages for me outweigh the ills. Until then, Iā€™ll stick with P3dv4 (and eventually P3Dv5 once the kinks are ironed out) where the visuals may be more than 10 years old, but has all the things that I need.

Iā€™m sure some will flame or even be agitated by this. No matter. We all have our specific wants from flight simulation. Iā€™m not here to convert anyone to my point of view. Just sharing what works for me and what not.

Happy Friday guys.

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The whole discussion about MSFS being a ā€œgameā€ or a ā€œsimulatorā€ or whether it works well or not becomes relative when you notice the many questions about how you turn on the autopilot in the Extra or Pitts. :man_facepalming:t2:

There are sooo many people here who MAYBE should first learn to control an airplane with their hands on the sticks before they start to do any ā€œIFRā€. But if all you can do is program an FMC and hit the AP button then itā€™s pretty obvious and important if the plane flies a circle. Anyway, you are totally right but those who have not a slightest idea of flight are those with the loudest voice. Itā€™s become pointless to reason with them, let them scream.

Iā€™ve done a (real) 4 hours flight with a 1970ā€™s twin turboprob last weekend and I laughed my aā€¦ off deep inside thinking of the drama in the forums when the autopilot was simply not doing what I was hoping it to do. It simply has ā€œbugsā€ by design :rofl: :rofl: :rofl:

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The varying opinions about MSFS fascinate me.

I have long been a hardcore sim racer, and a slightly more casual flight simmer. The same debates exist with the car crowd. Sim or game. The new sim has too many bugs. I miss my old sim. AND a key one, if you have been driving or flying your favorite sim for years, switching to a new sim with a different performance model is ALWAYS disconcerting no matter HOW GOOD the new model is, because we get used to how something else feels.

X-Plane handles differently than MSFS with wheels down, and the ground effect is different too.

After a few months, I have grown to like the MSFS ground effect even though I thought it was nonexistent to start. Now I go back to X-Plane, and I struggle to get wheels down on my first attempt. :joy:

It only means I am getting used to MSFS, as I swore by X-Planeā€™s ground effect modeling for years.

MSFS is drawing me in, but I know there are simmers who demand polishā€¦ they were complaining when X-Plane 11 came out too, because it was entirely buggy to begin as well.

And it certainly depends on what you do. I mainly fly GA VFRā€¦ and MSFS in spite of some flaws, really excels at that right out of the box. Makes X-Plane feelā€¦ trite. But if I loved IFR with tubeliners? I might still prefer X-Plane.

Neither is a game. Neither has you fly to win as your primary focus. Yes, I know we have landing challenges but that isnā€™t the main focus of MSFS.

Folks are going to complain. And MSFS will be patched over time to quell the complaints.

I wish sims were easier to make bug free, but that just isnā€™t their nature. They are all rough when released. Doesnā€™t matter if it simulates cars or planes. Sims bring bugs.

I have flown every MSFS since the first one (in grade school, 1983, computer lab day). Sims were smaller then. We like to think they didnā€™t have bugs. They did though, the bugs were just baked in so we had to deal with them or work around them. Otherwise the sim was broken upon release, with no means to patch it.

Patching makes us dwell on bugs because we know we can get a fix eventually. But we wouldnā€™t see a sim like this if we couldnā€™t patch it. It is impossible to release something of this scale and scope that is relatively bug free without a lot of community feedback, and extra tweaks. That always takes time past release.

Donā€™t like it? I donā€™t blame you. Give it time to mature, and use your most mature sim until MSFS patches itself out a bit more.

Iā€™ll be flying VFR bush trips in MSFS while you wait.

As long as you are flying, itā€™s all good.

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my third party aircraft from the marketplace have disappeared overnightā€¦ so ā€¦ try to guess whatā€™s up with that one!!

Only if they are deluded. A very well written post.

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The most spot on and mature, positive response ever. I love how you say it as it is and respect the others opinions :smiling_face_with_three_hearts::smiling_face_with_three_hearts::smiling_face_with_three_hearts::smiling_face_with_three_hearts:ā€¦sooo refreshing. Thats what we need!!

Yes!!!:cupid: well said on that!

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This is your problem, not a general one for all players. The Microsoft Flight Simulator already has more than one million players. Even if only one percent had CTDs permanently, we would have 10,000 complaints here in the forum. Just because always the same people, again and again, complain about CTDs does not mean that many have this problem.

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Nope, when Trolls appear im not a nice guy, try to find abother game to thrash, you know nothing competes with msfs2020

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First, this is untrue.

Second, the demeanor of someone might make it less than desirable to read their comments, but nonetheless does not invalidate their complaint or opinion, if otherwise valid.

Collectively, there is apparently a very large base of users - many of which have purchased full versions- with legitimate issues and entirely valid opinions.

OMG, can we all just agree that this sim has a lot of bugs and move on? Time will tell if things will improve. Letā€™s just focus on filing usefull bug reports to zendesk. Weā€™ll just have to be patient. Itā€™s clear to everyone that FS was released too early. It is what it is.

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And imagine if businesses expressed this philosophy to their customers when the customers questioned the products or services they bought.

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First, I donā€™t think it comes even close to being a majority, itā€™s likely just a very noisy overwhelming minority who think squealing like stuck pigs on the Internet without even submitting a proper bug report is somehow magically going to help. Itā€™s not.

In fact, as time goes by and I read more reports from people suffering from CTDs, the more convinced I am becoming that itā€™s a hardware issue, not a flaw in the software.

The only time I experience CTDs is when Iā€™ve been playing with trying to OC my GPU farther than it should be OCed. When I put it back to the OC I know is completely stable (which thanks to some luck from the silicon lottery gods is still a pretty beefy OC) the CTD problem vanishes into thin air.

I think too many people are trying to run the sim on old i3s paired with a GTX 970, or similar potato systems, and trying to run pert near everything at or near Ultra settings, and then acting shocked when it breaks. However, I regret to inform you that this is a beefy application that requires a beefy system to run at higher settings. You might get away with it for a period of time, but eventually the CTD god is going to get upset and bite you in the culo for breaking the rules.

Try backing off on your settings, upgrading your system, or even both. I think youā€™ll find that if you do that, like me, your CTD issues will magically disappear.

There may be some highly situational problems that are still causing crashes independent of overtaxed hardware (as a purely pull it out of my butt example, say flying the ILS at XYZ airport RWxx at precisely 2.4nm DME from the threshold, my sim crashes every time regardless of what settings Iā€™m using), but Iā€™d bet those are few and far between.

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Nicely rebuttedā€¦

Iā€™ve had every version of Microsoft Flight Simulator since I purchased my first PC in 1988 or so and even had subLOGICā€™s Flight Simulator II on my Atari 800 before that. ALL OF THEM had teething issues in the first few iterations of the simulator until the developers and the community sorted them out.

Unfortunately, we didnā€™t have such a spiffy venue such as this where we could spew our opinions all over the place with little or no substantiating evidence for our claimsā€“although there were a few BBSs around that could be accessed to find superlative reviews such as this. I usually waited for the next issue of Byte or Compute! or PC World, et. al. for the professional reviews.

And if you recall, the ā€œstockā€, built-in aircraft were very basic and many of the photo-real buttons and switches on the dashboard werenā€™t active or modeledā€“we used the keyboard inputs to increase VS or trim the elevator or ailerons. And we were amazed when the joysticks arrived that could help us maneuver our craft through the bit maps that made up our scenery.

And life was good! I know I was far too busy flying and exploring to sit back and pick apart all the ā€œflawsā€ that I encountered.

This is just my opinionā€¦ I could be wrong.

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Strange isnt it. i fly the A320 constantly, even a Autoland last night at Cancun due to visabilityā€¦ and it works!!! (or should i say it works with both the default A320 and the Flybywire upgrade version)

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The original OP ā€œreviewā€ 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 Iā€™ve closed it down as Iā€™ve barely touched it since mid August.

Maybe Iā€™ve 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 didnā€™t 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 donā€™t do that any more and have no more CTDs). Iā€™ve 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 canā€™t say it enough (I didnā€™t listen to myself and I screwed this up last week!) but you need to make sure you donā€™t 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 donā€™t fly with the xbox controller, then make sure these are unmapped. Also, if your plane (e.g. the TBM) doesnā€™t have a mixture control, then make sure you donā€™t have one bound. Moving it will tend to cut the engine off. So if you donā€™t have any duplicate/unused mappings, control issues will be minimal. I would like the Honeycomb yoke bug fixed if possible though, but itā€™s not a big deal for me. Sensitivities are fine although the curves could be a bit more flexible.

Scenery - Iā€™ve seen so many threads saying the scenery is downgraded. My experience of this, and Iā€™ve 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 - Iā€™ve no way of knowing. Maybe it was, but maybe that wasnā€™t 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. Iā€™m 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 canā€™t see these issues. If I pause, zoom in, peer closely at the screen, maybe I can see a tree that isnā€™t there that should be, but to be honest Iā€™m not seeing it. In the real world flying scenario, the issue just isnā€™t there for me. I also donā€™t get the ā€œpop 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 donā€™t see FPS improvements because Iā€™m 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. Thatā€™s OK, but not brilliant.

So I really like the experience and the sim. There is loads I would like fixed and improved though. Iā€™ve 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 thatā€™s 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 itā€™s 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 doesnā€™t 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 donā€™t 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 thatā€™s 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 youā€™ve rasied a zendesk ticket lately, youā€™ll see that they are now capturing controller information and mod information to help them debug better. Definitely a good thing.

Whatā€™s my conclusion? Itā€™s 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 doesnā€™t 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.

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lol no.Ironically the best IFR experience I have gotten in the sim was hand flying IFR on the steam gauge version of the 172, Takes out most of the terrible avionics from the equation, and just leaves you with your core IFR stick and rudder + instrument scan skills :wink:

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IFR is in a terrible state, this is compounded by using a nav database from 1932.

It is like the person(s) that implemented the flight plan didnā€™t know what they were doing.

Disclaimer: I am a total IFR beginner, and it just frustrates me how the basics are broken like this.