Pardon the rant, but this pertains to long-time bugs and issues which have been there for a LONG time - some even since the beginning. They are glaring, obvious bugs that have been there for years, they’ve all been reported multiple times over the years - but somehow they never make it to the top of the priority list to get fixed. These bugs absolutely RUIN the long-haul airliner sim experience.
The big ones for me are the AI Pilot behavior and problems with ATC.
AI Pilot STILL does not climb to the correct assigned altitude, which causes ATC to repeatedly go into the “Please expedite your climb” routine over and over again. SUPER annoying. From what I can tell, I think the bug is related to the altimeter settings - it appears as though the AI Pilot ALWAYS flies as though the altimeter is standard (29.92), and when the altimeter is lower during the initial climb-out, then it levels off well below the correct altitude. ATC will not assign a higher altitude until the aircraft reaches within approximately 250 feet of the correct assigned altitude, and therefore it begins the dreaded “Please expedite” cycle. To solve this, I can deselect AI Pilot and instead manually use the autopilot instruments in the cockpit. But why can’t it just work?
On the ground, AI Pilot STILL does not apply brakes during taxi when “hold position” instructions are issued. Instead, it simply disengages and continues to roll in whatever direction is happens to be going, without steering or applying brakes. Sometimes this causes a runway incursion, or a crash into a building or object, ending the session. AI Pilot will not regain control of the aircraft until ATC instructs to “continue taxi”, at which point it will need to make dramatic steering changes to get back to what is supposed to be the correct taxiway. A LONG time ago, it used to work. What changed? Why hasn’t it been fixed? And what takes so long to fix it? Will it ever be fixed? Who knows.
ATC stops responding mid-flight. This seems to happen frequently when the AI Pilot has control of communications, and changes frequency during a hand-off. It seems that if it happens to change frequencies in the middle of another aircraft communicating with the new ATC frequency, it causes this issue to start.
When ATC communicates, it is no longer audible, and the text no longer appears in the ATC window. However, you can still hear and read the AI Pilot respond to these “invisible” ATC instructions. The problem is that when you want to disengage the AI Pilot, and you can’t hear the instructions from ATC, it makes things difficult (or impossible) during critical flight phases (like descent, approach, and landing, for example). This isn’t a new bug, it’s been there a long time. So why hasn’t it been addressed? Will it ever get fixed?
Other issues include the AI Pilot missing the airport / crashing during approach and landings, a building at Amsterdam Schiphol located directly adjacent to a taxiway that causes a wing strike / crash, and many more.
ALL of these issues have been reported to Zendesk, many times over a long period of time, but for some reason they are all still there.
Somehow, they never seem to make the top of the list of bugs, and therefore get zero priority for getting fixed. Update after update come and go, and more often than not, these same bugs remain, and usually alongside new ones.
These issues literally RUIN the long-haul airline sim experience, and I’ve been waiting and waiting for them to fix it - and they never do. Why? What’s the problem? Why is there no priority for this? When it launched, I bought the top-tier bundle specifically because it included the 787, and handcrafted airports like Amsterdam Schiphol - both of which have been bugged SINCE LAUNCH DAY.
This doesn’t even touch on all of the add-ons I’ve wasted my money on, because they are incompatible with the sim and cause additional problems and game CTDs.
Is the game so fundamentally flawed, that they are unable to get these basic features to function properly? Are there so many issues with the sim that they are unable to handle the workload of getting them fixed - even the basic ones? Why do they keep introducing new updates and features that introduce so many new problems, before they’ve had time to fix the old problems? I don’t need more World Updates - and the plethora of new problems they bring - as much as I need them to get these basic core sim features to work correctly. Once they do that - THEN roll out new features, and then maybe they can keep up with the workload of keeping everything running smoothly.
I’ve reached the point where I only try the sim out once after every update, with dim hopes of these core functions working properly. But I always end up disappointed, as I simply cannot complete a long-haul airline flight without running into some sort of issue that completely ruins it, and I end up just turning it off.
