Just a general feeling but are more and more people becoming more and more dissatisfied with the state of this game?
Or are the numbers proportional to the early days as there are many more players?
I’ve been on this forum since ALPHA and I’m getting the impression that there’s an increasing groundswell of opinion indicating general unhappiness.
In my opinion, the visual aspect is pretty good considering the amount of data that needs crunching. But the flight model, which is the most important aspect for me, is seriously lacking.
No, that is the simplest answer to your question. Trying to measure such things by forums is a never a good way. As VBHBAU said, those who complain will always be loudest.
If you buy a bottle of milk and it tastes fine, do you send feedback to the shop or the dairy company that the milk was good? If the milk was in someway bad, you would be much more likely to voice your opinion by bringing it back to the store or writing the dairy company, right?
Personally, no, I love the sim! It’s been stable since launch for me and at every update I have seen many more improvements. I am also really enjoying developing for it!
As has been mentioned there is always going to be a wider number of vocal players who are dissatisfied as these will come to the forum to vent their frustrations, where as someone who is generally happy with the sim will just get on a play it.
Agree…forums generally are a place to get support and help/advIce. By their very nature that means lots of posts are going to be a grumble about something not working whether that’s sim or user error
But there is no point in spending time on these forums talking about how much fun it is. There are many problems with the sim they need to solve. We as a community are the ones that need to tell them what we want. Better performance, better stabillity, better weather, etc.
We need to express what we dislike to push improvements.
Saying everything is fine doesn’t improve anything.
I still love the sim, but my enthusiasm has died down. I’ve been disappointed with how slow everything has moved. I often find myself wondering how the sim would be if Microsoft had partnered with a larger developer.
Some of the new people into this niche’ will be dissatisfied with the bugs present.
But I guess those who comes from the old MS Flight Simulator franchise, including P3D, will be more patient and pragmatic.
MSFS 2020 has been said to be a project that will run many years from know.
Those who experienced the initial MS FSX release will know that only 2 or 3 updates where made before MS closed further developement.
It took almost a decade before Lockheed Martin got hold of the source code (Actually not FSX, but ESP) before real progress was made again, but with a base that had a limitation on what could be done further.
Despite many of the step backs we have seen with the various SU’s for MSFS 2020, it´s progressing and SU’s are release quite often.
So from my perspective, the future looks bright.
Hick-ups are irritating, and some times seems unnecessary, but overall this project moves forward.
for me its a group of discord users i fly with, they/we have not become less satisfied.
in fact we have tons of fun with events and flights for a wide range of users
In general the mood in gaming forums generally tends to swing to the negative side. Never had differing experiences that differed. Here in the MSFS forum I got the impression that the perceived “mood” changes in waves.
After every SU the mood has been worse than before. Mainly because people were expecting fixes noone ever promised. And also because some fixes didn’t live up to people’s expectations.
In general after WUs the mood was better apart from people grumbling that the WU didn’t fix any SU issues (which of course it isn’t supposed to)
But overall I didn’t get the impression that the mood today is either worse or better than one and a half years ago.
OP asks “Am I off the mark here?”
I think Yes, in two ways: his feeling about the level of dissatisfaction is wrong; and his post does not help anyone enjoy the Sim more, or learn anything, or fix anything. Just more “noise” and division on the Forum I think.
Cheers.
I spend 1-2 hours every day on this forum and have done so since launch.
I have the exact opposite impression!
The massive and very verbal dissatisfaction prevalent during the first 6-9 months have in general died down and now there are a more mature ambiance where people complaining about specific issues or seeking advice regarding how to use the sim or tackle problems they encounter.
You still get the " sim stinks, not a finished product, other sims do this and that much better" general not specific attacks, but they are IMHO fewer and less vitriolic compared to launch and first half of 2021.
It was really hard to deal with that back then, now for me a more relaxed and enjoyable experience, and I feel there are a more appreciative and cooperative tone in general.
I am chronically ill. I couldn’t afford a new pc, so I bought the Xbox Series X for flight simming. Other advantage is that I could lie on my couch if I have not enough energy to sit. If I would be a PC user would probably be ok with the state of the sim. It runs very well on my old gaming PC, without crashes and fbw. But I prefer the console, it is less noisy and has theoretically much better specs. So I decided to buy some airports. Tested for Xbox… Perfect (just loaded a flight on them and hey, why shouldn’t they work, they are selling them especially for my console) But the most of them are leading to crashes. Even without them I have a lot of stutters and ctds. But for me it isn’t as easy to understand the term that the 3rd party has nothing to do with Ms/Asobo. Because I bought them in their shop. And they adding new airports every week. The default planes. The flyback bug is there since alpha. And I have no FBW on Xbox. But new world updates and updates that fix bugs I never heard of or pretend to fix bugs but their still occur. So if there are people who complain, try to understand them, please.
Maybe to no. First, yes things which should have been fixed before release are still broken. New things seem to arise as WU’s and SU’s release. BUT in general, things have seemed to get better in the planes I fly. I do not fly GA or Business. The F-14 has always done well, the 747-787 are better. It took two years supposedly for FSX to improve. If you read the x-box forum, people are having issues there too, not nearly as often, but some do. The squeaky wheel gets the grease. I personally would hope Asobo/MS would halt any more world updates and get the sim rock solid first, the once quarter release new WU’s if wanted. I would make those subscription or purchase updates, because if I don’t want them, I then have that choice. However, in XP you can choose which parts of the world you want to install, and then get the others later on, another choice for the developers. It may be the way this game is developed, that one part is dependent on another part, which is not smart. The core Game should stand alone, and scenery should not be the driving force.
It is in my opinion that this is possibly one of the best in flight simulation to date. We know the other is coming but for me I have been a fan since FS5 and have stayed with this platform through P3d. I think some people are very demanding in what they want and want it now. For the ones that have been using the former and now MSFS platform just have more patience. I really like this game (Only played 30 hours since Aug 2020), but every minute I can play it is a joy for me. Prior to this release I never used the MCDU or FMS, I just flew the plane. Now I am more educated and satisfied and I can better relate to what people are talking about during flights. I want to say thank you Microsoft, Asobo and this wonderful community for teaching me and everyone else how to fly, virtually that is for me. It will only get better and sure things will break but they are not leaving that problem out in the wind for to long.
While it’s true that the unhappy voices are typically the loudest and will be disproportionately represented, I think the OP’s overall assessment has some merit.
The 2 loudest groups of voices on the forum had typically been the people experiencing issues that weren’t being dealt with by Asobo, and the group of “white knights” that would make it their mission to praise the sim through thick and thin - even going so far as to flag posts that they deemed too critical to try to suppress “dissent”.
The interesting thing I’ve observed over recent month (particularly since SU5) is that several of those white knights (not going to name names) have either gone silent or started experiencing issues they formerly defended and have since “switched sides” and are now complaining about the issues as well. I have to admit, there’s a little schadenfreude on my side seeing that now. People who were horribly rude to others now furious because they’re experiencing issues.
And of course, there’s the Xbox users now adding to the overall air of dissatisfaction due to their perception that they’re being ignored due to Xbox issues, lack of 3rd party Xbox add-ons, etc.
So while I don’t think the overall shift is huge, I think the OP is correct in his assessment.
This is true. And I have to say, as for the first forum I participate in I am quite stunned by the language that people use. Very rude to my eyes. Very impolite often. I think I am seeing a society change reflected here that is most unwelcome.