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Awful. It’s all Captain SIM and no dc-6 for Xbox?
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Holy hell! The Cowansim MD500E is finally here! Never thought I’d see the day.
Also wondering how Deimos’ (yeah, I know) take on the Warthog will be. He did do a solid job on that Franken-Gripen though.
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Cool looking A320. Not the worst update. Good stuff coming, folks.
CaptainSim stuff is prevalent in these updates because obviously that studio has streamlined the process by which content gets submitted and approved in the marketplace.
I don’t (think?) I own any CaptainSim stuff so I can’t speak to the quality. Enough people complain about it. It’s just really easy to scroll past it and not buy it. Like, so easy!
PMDG put out a note that the DC-6 was coming for xbox in this release? I can’t get near my xbox now, has anyone confirmed if it is available?
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Not available. There is a precedent for aircraft dropping in the marketplace on days besides Thursday, though. I dunno. Maybe soon?
It wouldn’t be available right as soon as the update notes dropped anyway but since it’s not mentioned in them except to say updated on pc i assume we got shafted again.
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Thanks for the heads up @NixonRedgrave. I can absolutely understand PMDG taking the time to make corrections, I can live with that. The thing I can’t live with is the Marketplace ingestion process holding this plane up at all, especially for more Captain Sim garbage.
Looks like its back into to the Blackbird 310 I go.
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I’m kind of surprised that we didn’t see a larger haul of items this week.
I’m wondering when we will see changes from the new intake/QA process reflected in the volume of new products and updates. At this rate, it’s going to take years to get through the backlog.
866 new items divided by 18 released (this week’s total) equals 61 weeks! And that is if nothing else new is submitted to the Marketplace between now and then.
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I confess that I was very sad with the release news of March 30 Development. Xbox friends were frustrated by these Captain Sim planes that are patches of standard aircraft. And nothing grand yet. How long we’ll wait is anyone’s guess, but we yearn for quality aircraft on Xbox.
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In response to above, Or a SIM that actually works past the check for updates screen!!! 
Time spent testing one of these releases must be considerably lower than testing an actual aeroplane or even airport implementation. If there’s no cockpit there’s not much to test right? Or even if just reusing an Asobo cockpit, much the same. Some of these are little more than glorified livery packs.
For anyone who was running a team that was being measured on the length of the backlog, it would be logical to push through the easy ones as often as possible to keep the number down.
Another trend I’m noticing recently is so many excursion add-ons arriving for xbox. I think these are little more than flightplans with some prompts and audio so again likely very simple. Personally they’re not my interest at all, I’ve done hardly any of the discovery flights, I prefer more freestyle.
Hopefully with this priority and add-on type breakdown, which I think is a great way to give us more insight, there will be less incentive to just push the easy stuff.
Of course, since testing goes to developers now it could have the opposite effect. Testing time is correlated with development time, if it takes CS a couple of days to make a product it won’t take them long to test it, and I’m sure they’ll get on with it and not waste time since their whole business is on the marketplace. Meanwhile the 737 is going to take a lot more testing time and PMDG have a lot to focus on outside of xbox and marketplace.
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So looking forward to that ATR. Can’t wait to island hop across the Caribbean!
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I absolutely agree.
With WASM for Xbox being released, the marketplace changes taking effect and many third-party devs of high fidelity aircraft getting ready to update their products for Xbox, I honestly thought this was going to be a much larger update.
Maybe I just read into things incorrectly but I really had my hopes up, I honestly thought “This is it, the first real marketplace update since WASM and the changes, there’s surely going to be some decent stuff here.” I was refreshing the blog posts page all day, and was just generally really looking forward to today.
I’m just so ready for there to be quality aircraft on Xbox. The A310 is holding me over but as a “hardcore” simmer whose primary platform is MSFS, it’s been a hell of a wait for WASM and the waits gotten even harder now that WASM is here and I know that we should see some high fidelity aircraft… eventually.
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In defense of the Marketplace’s offerings, we need to remember that the developers that build the WASM products we so desire for Xbox first need to make sure they are up-to-date and compatible with the Xbox.
PMDG is clearly taking this approach and I cannot imagine they are alone.
Let’s give it some more time, before we get too frustrated by it all.
Believe me, my 1.5 year-long wait has been long and I’m tired of waiting further, but I’m also a rational person and understand that these things just don’t come easy.
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I purchased a captain sim plane several weeks ago and wished I hadn’t
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I think the new marketplace policy came into effect one week ago? It’s going to take a while for the new processes to bed in, for developers to get properly set up for and familiar with the new testing process. And it will take time for them to actually do the testing and I’m sure MS still have work to do for each package.
I’d say give it a few weeks, I’ll be disappointed if we’re not seeing a large uptick before the end of April.
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The arrival of the LVFR A320CEO is great. They really did a great job of improving it over the default NEO. If your’e on Xbox and love to fly airliners, it’s a no-brainer while we wait for PMDG.
90+ livery’s, just wow.
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@UnitedArt Did they improve the systems modelling over the standard 320neo? I’ve seen reviews of some of their previous airliners that infer that the improvements are mostly eyecandy and it’s putting me off getting it at the moment.
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