I’ll jump in here. I have spent way way way more money on P3D than MSFS to make it fly able. I have not spent anything extra on MSFS other than upgrading the ram from 16GB to 32GB. The freeware scene is amazing and the next purchase will probably be PMDG 737-800.
7 Likes
Not trying to insult, but rather making a moot point of benign relevance that has nothing to do with anyone including you. Nothing satiric implied.
Don’t know, but this is for sure not a scientific sample. I think that the most observant, detail oriented, obsessive, most interested, may be on this forum, but they may also be the most desirous/ambitious and most critical. I’m not as knowledgeable about flight models but have an engineering and medical background and am an old time programmer (tried to write a simple flight sim in early 80’s)and love simulations, graphics, and computer hardware. I like the incredible depth and complexity and flexibility of this “system”. It is like gigantic living being. I get into reading about and watching the conferences about updates, and like to tweak a lot.
It still feels “new” to me, especially with updates. Its always changing. I started in the mid-late 1990’s, with FS95, Flight Unlimited, Combat FS, etc, and lots of Megascenery for FSX.
I was quite disappointed after SU5(?) with the great drop in FPS/quality, which then was mostly corrected, and the lesser drop with SU7 … I think I’m in a pretty good place right now though. Running mostly 25-40 FPS (eg Paris - higher in less urban areas) with all settings on Ultra and DLDSR at 2.25 (nice) on a 1080, RTX 2070 Super, I7 9700K, 64 GB DDR4.
2 Likes
Just keep in mind that happy people don’t often take the time to review anything. They are having too much fun to take time off to praise a product.
This isn’t just in this sim, it’s just the way life is.
2 Likes
MSFS gets better all the time. So much content available out of the box puts the competition to shame, and more than enough free and paid add-ons of good quality if you need more.
The flight UX is aok, and there is far too much whining over this too - very much like the constant fizziks whiners in the simracing community, who sound like broken transmissions .
It has issues, like any software, but the caterwauling is way over the top.
Expectation management is a problem for the users who have unrealistic expectations.
1 Like
sim is completely stable for me and i am having an absolute blast. i fly the aerosoft crj often, waiting for the new a320, pmdg 737, and md 80 coming soon.
all of my ga flights i do in VR and it is an awesome experience.
no complaints from me other than the time it is taking to get new airliners… but it is to be expected!
1 Like
I don’t think the mood is changing as much as the people here are settling in. I have my favorite plane now (the Longitude) after trying a few others. I’ve found my part of the world (southern California) and have learned to fly IFR the way I want. As such, I find myself needing less help. I visit the forum all the time and try to help people if they’ve encountered problems that I have seen before, but I do ask for help myself on occasion.
I imagine some people who have been repeatedly asking for changes to the sim (Live Weather, ATC, jittery performance) may have in a sense given up posting because they’ve read numerous threads that state their situation and therefore don’t need to post anymore. And since the “Live Weather crashing every day at the same time” was fixed, well that saved about 7,500 posts per day (I exaggerate, but barely).
Also, there is some kind of logical limit as to the number of “new” mods that can be created. After awhile, to me they just appear to be variations on a theme.
As for the side conversation regarding whether this is a sim or a game, I think it’s both. While I consider it a worthwhile sim, when my nephew comes over, he fires it up and pushes down on the stick to go down, pulls up to go up, and turns left or right. He doesn’t know an aileron from his landing gear. So yeah, it’s a game too.
2 Likes
Tbh, there are issues with the sim that do need to be addressed and it seems that they are somehow being put on the back burner. I enjoy flying GA, and I do. I also enjoy flying commercial and I’m hoping one day I will be able to…not a big fan of Airbus. However, for me, I find most of the time I’m tuning the graphics (shimmering)…or rather trying to and there are other problems also. I’m hoping that one day they will address them. And, trying to keep up with the updates as to what’s working now and what’s not. Oh yeah, seems that after the last update, sometimes I can’t exit to desktop…It will just hang. Overall, the sim is good, there are just issues that I thought would have been addressed by now.
1 Like
People are far too sensitive on here, good grief.
1 Like
Personally I’m happy.
I’ve said this time and time again but one thing I love to do is hop in light GA aircraft and fly around under VFR on VATSIM. It’s really neat to able to pull out a terminal area or sectional chart and know that virtually all VRPs are there. TrackIR makes this so much more fun, I’m constantly searching looking around for landmarks and other traffic.
When it comes to IFR it’s fun to spawn in and look around and see the weather. During last nights FNO on VATSIM I filed IFR and departed. Eventually found myself above the clouds and cruising during sunset, it was beautiful. So many people talking and aircraft everywhere on the network, it felt really immersive.
In front of me were avionics I never thought would make it into a stock sim (eventually) and that is the G1000 NXi from Working Title. Who would have thought we would get such an avionics suite in a stock sim that does a very well job of replicating the real deal even in it’s current state (with more to come)? Remember the days of FSX where aircraft inappropriately had a Garmin 500 (that was highly limited)? Working Title also plan on overhauling the Garmin 430/530 (and a mod already exists for it).
I really, really look forward to the future of MSFS. I’ve been keeping a sharp eye on FSElite and Threshold for addons that are coming. MSFS already has an incredibly strong freeware community. Not only are they adding content but overhauling stock content in major ways. Addons are almost the entire reason I still have the other two big sims installed. At some point I will get rid of them for good.
I’ve been in the hobby since 1997 and I think we’ve come a long, long way.
2 Likes
I’ve been flight simming since wire frame days and came from FSX to this.
FSX generally just worked and with a fair bit of hardware and software add ons invested in I used it regularly.
Then along came this.
Comparatively speaking, even with scenery add ons purchased for FSX, when MSFS arrived the scenery was spectacular and made time spent worthwhile even if the flight model and general usability left a bit to be desired.
Now, while the scenery is still the sims best feature, other problems and regular software crashes make all but a brief experience to look at the scenery just too frustrating.
That rather depends on what ‘anything’ is!
There’s another transport related sim that I enjoy and have been enjoying for many years. It is just as immersive and just works. If only MSFS could be like that.
Maybe one day?
@WellREDBarron Great post by the way.
3 Likes
The Sierra ,and Sundowner were great airplanes to fly and would be a nice addition to the sim .
This is one of the few forums that never was toxic from day one 
Yes there was a lot of hate for some weeks after the… hmm… SU5 I think was the culprit, when the photorealistic Flight Sim and the gorgeous clouds were suddenly severe downgraded to become a console-game. But this hate is not targeted towards users but pure frustration that such a marvelous masterpiece and the most sophisticated and visually advanced piece of software was so mishandled. Now for some months graphics luckily is getting upgraded again.
Now and then a dispute comes up between a few users having a heated discussion about a topic, that´s all I have noticed.
Interesting that some users think the mood is changing. No because us virtual pilots are probably too civilized and friendly and adult to spit stupid hate and mockery, to attack people personally and spend the day with infantile cyber bullying against our own kind. 
3 Likes
I have to wholeheartedly agree here.
I have never invested myself into a forum until this one. I’m usually the first person to eyeroll about them and list off the various reasons I avoid them like the plague.
This has been an incredibly well managed environment, but I’ve also felt the age range of a significant amount of the userbase has also brought with it a maturity that eliminates much of the tension.
1 Like
Obviously I don’t have access to analytics but it actually feels to me like there there is less activity in the forum overall than there was previously.
I’m not as active with this sim as I previously was and therefore not as active with the forum either but I do drop in frequently enough to look for new threads
It just seems there aren’t as many as there once were.
This isn’t entirely true. There used to be quite a lot of positive posts of “happy people” very happily reviewing new things. There was at least a couple of folks who bought every new plane (often even knowing it was a dud) and posted long well thought out reviews. There isn’t as much of this as there once was.
I think the tone of discussion of technical issues did change but it was at its worst after SU5 and for a while after that.
The number of posts that framed an issue in a positive “looking forward to this being fixed” declined and seemed to be replaced by a lot more “seriously, is this still broken?” type sentiment.
2 Likes
I’m very happy with MSFS! We are lucky that Microsoft/Asobo are willing to continue to improve the title. Aircraft handling has improved greatly since MSFS came out. A groundbreaking sim is going to have some hiccups along the way and I’m OK with that.
3 Likes
I’ll use an example of a major feature that used to work but now no longer does…
AI co-pilot ATC on VFR flights
First, VFR flights are the first thing that any gamer (it’s a game… simulation is the type of game) will want to try to do. But sometime way back when, the copilot stopped doing anything after a few flight following requests. Flying the Icon A5 at least, the AI copilot does NOT contact the airport at any time for landing. It USED to but now no longer does. Even though you set up the arrival airport along with the runway number, all that goes out the window now if the copilot is handling ATC on a VFR flight. If you want to land (with permission), you have to (a) find your airport in the airport list (sometimes several pages long), select the runway again, etc. Flying the A5 with no autopilot, clicking through three pages of clustered airports to find the airport and runway that I already set up on the World Map, when the reason I’m doing all this is that AI copilot ATC stopped working at some point and doesn’t seem to be on the fast track to get fixed.
That’s not a minor distraction like cars driving up the sides of buildings. It’s a MAJOR part of the program that just flat out doesn’t work. For anyone, but for a new-to-flight-sim gamer, having the copilot ATC you from airport A to airport B is pretty basic. But even though it used to work, it doesn’t work now, hasn’t worked for I don’t know how long, may not ever work. It’s not as advertised, not as designed. Won’t be reverse engineered by XP12 engineers to see how it’s done.
We can argue all day long about the look of the clouds, the annoying ever present tug driver, but I don’t see how Asobo/MS or anyone can be fine with a major part of the program not working. Yet there it is. AI copilot no longer has the capability to ATC anyone from airport A to airport B flying VFR. If somebody releases a spreadsheet that works, and later they update it to include the ability to do charts and graphs, I expect bugs in the new chart/graph section. I don’t expect to lose the ability for the spreadsheet to divide numbers.
Recently they released their new Marketplace and guess what? The whole “airport” thing doesn’t work. At all. Nothing. Totally blank. It’s not like HTML in 1993 when you could only see what you did when you put it up on the web. Somebody said “Didn’t they see this in beta?” Beta? Forget beta! How about when it didn’t work before going to beta? Again, not like developers can’t see the results of their code. If they’re free to upload something like “New Marketplace!!” that has a whole feature set completely missing rather than releasing it when it does work, I’m free I believe, to draw my own conclusions about their quality control. Especially when the latest thing that they released that flat out doesn’t work is designed for nothing more than increasing sales in the Marketplace. Yes, they are VERY capable and at the same time, it seems that they are also VERY unorganized.
One thing, their communication internally seems abysmal. Jorge or whever his name is standing out there in front of everyone saying the 1 hour disappearing weather was fixed, only to have to have the forum moderators make an “adjustment” to that statement. How embarrassing. Or if wasn’t it should have been given that was a major issue and that he took time to address it completely wrong. That’s a pretty basic communication thing. It’s fixed. It’s not fixed. We don’t know if it’s fixed. But he chose to communicate to everyone that it was definitely fixed because someone communicated that to him. Except it wasn’t fixed at all and nobody with any clout had any clue.
The word “fixed” seems to be used as a substitute for the word “recompiled”. It’s been “fixed”, in hindsight, seems to be more in line with reality if “recompiled” is used instead.
6 Likes
That is a very well-reasoned argument and one, I suspect, will resonate among many of us here, both new and old.
1 Like
I do wonder sometimes if Asobo just start the sim and look at it to see what is actually happening right in front of their eyes. Weather is a good example. It still suddenly changes cloud and light levels and all I have to do to make this happen is to start a flight with my aircraft parked, switch to showcase view and just watch an airport for half an hour. Do these guys do that, just watch it running? I do wonder because if I can spot things within half an hour of starting the sim, why cant they? Sometimes just observing the product doing its thing reveals a multitude of problems.
1 Like
“Someone’s got a case of the Mondays!”