MSFS Complaints: "Seek the donuts of the day"

I originally wrote this as a response to a post after seeing the irony of people complaining about Asobo planes in one topic and complaining that third-party planes don’t compare visually to Asobo’s in another. It got a good reception elsewhere, so I thought I’d share it here as well, as it’s good food (donuts?) for thought as we think about how we post about our hobby.

God, I’d hate to be a company involved in creating products for flight sims.

Third party brings out airplane: “Flawed! You can tell it is made from polygons! Why can’t the textures and modeling be as perfect as the Asobo planes?”

MS brings out an airplane: “Flawed! These are terrible. Why can’t it have all the niche-appeal features of my favorite third-party plane?”

Those lucky enough to have actually flown real planes know that none of these planes is anything approaching the experience of flying a real plane, no matter how detailed. Many are more temperamental than the real things because sim fliers demand “realism (sic)” without accommodation for the lack of physical and environmental feedback.

The best approach is to realize this is a simulation of flying and find the joy in that. Sure, send (kind!) feedback to devs about obvious issues, but also appreciate what we have. Yes, Asobo hasn’t replicated everything that’s in P3D and X-Plane, and there are some missing things. There are bugs that frustratingly are taking a long time to address. Nobody’s saying that shouldn’t be acknowledged.

But there’s also so much that is so much better than before. There’s so much realism. There’s an entire planet to explore, and way more than 50% of it looks awesome! Find the joy, y’all. As a wise child once said, “Seek the donuts of the day.” (IE: Look for the treats and things that make you happy.)

I’m not dismissing anyone’s feedback on any product. But if I was a newbie thinking of getting into flight simulation and I came across this forum, I’d come away with the impression that our hobby is flawed and most of the products are junk. Which is so not the case.

Nobody’s saying that we shouldn’t point out bugs, request missing features, or express frustration. But we should do so in a considerate manner that keeps in mind the people who make these things are real people too, enthusiasts who likely could be making bigger bucks doing shooters or IT development but have passion just like us. When I see forum rage, hyperbole that planes are completely broken, complaints that a $60-120 program doesn’t replicate an actual aircraft perfectly, I just shake my head and go back to enjoying the absolutely amazing experience MSFS allows. I look forward to future enhancements and fixes, but in the meantime, instead of finding my fun enumerating flaws, I find it enjoying the heck out of what I can experience now.

Those of us who started in the C64/Amiga/MS-DOS days realize how spoiled we are compared to not that long ago. :slight_smile:

TL;DR: Feedback framed in a civil tone is wonderful, but flying sims is more fun than rivet counting.

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This isn’t addressed to anyone who offers constructive criticism. Just trying to reframe things for people who get emotional and sometimes let those feelings ruin their fun or cause them to lash out against devs, other users, and the Xbox fliers who are helping to expand and fund our hobby.

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Post of the year, and it’s only February.

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People who like getting emotional and/or don’t always provide constructive/common-sense criticism and/or enjoy sharing vitriolic arguments, these people won’t change anyway. So what’s the point? To defend Asobo and MS? What for?

This doesn’t stack up. Back in the C64 days this was fine, as our expectations were adjusted and we knew that was the best you could get at the time. Comparing something that runs on 64k of memory to something thats uses (at the moment for me) 250gb is a waste of time.

I think people do appreciate what Asobo/Microsoft do, however these things are not free and when people pay for something or you sell goods, theres an expectancy on quality.

I think things rankle when you first update something or use something and immediately problems present themselves and you think how could these things be missed in testing?

The latest Aus update, apparently Orbx didn’t see the PG which is why their sceneries don’t work. Really? Did they not know that if a city was being converted to PG that they would have several clashing landmarks like Sydney Bridge? Seems obvious to me. If they are crafting POIS for Asobo why couldn’t they see it working in tandem with PG and the other work? Its just a really weird way of working.

It all just feels a bit sloppy. Like the time they made an update and somehow missed that night lighting had completely broken over the whole sim! Bonkers.

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All complains will end forever when finally the PERFECT Fenix Airbus and the PMDG737 (which will probably be perfect too) are released.
This will satisfy everyone.

Currently simmers need to daily somehow ventilate their despair about not having a study-level airliner in various strange ways, and the targets are mostly innocent Cessnas or Carenado planes :smiley:

But low polygon and angular objects in all games, and having pop-ups and LOD pop-ins with switching a 3D object to a lesser quality 3D mesh in front of the face when walking two steps backwards are an absolute no-go in 2022.
The wide-spread hate for these cheap immersion-breaking and ugly kind of “FPS-optimizations” is fully justified.

You gotta give props (pun intended) to the simulators of old. Despite the 8 colour wireframe graphics, you can easily tell this is San Francisco.

You make some great points in your post that I can only agree with. However, there’s this reply that to me rings pretty loud…

Graphically speaking, MSFS absolutely annihilates anything that came before it, and probably stuff that will come after it as well (like XP12). It looks incredible. Asobo has managed to build the entire world in a sim to a shocking degree of fidelity. And that’s an achievement that to me deserves recognition and appreciation.

But outside of the eye candy, it falls short on pretty much everything else compared to the competition and even its own predecessors dating back to the 90s. Yes, it’s improved in many ways since launch. Many broken things have been fixed. Many missing features have been added. And much will be improved in the next few years or until MS decide it’s no longer profitable to support. We’re still very much waiting to see the “sim for simmers” that was sold to us at launch.

Despite what I just said, I love this sim and fly it a lot. I’m about to break my 1100 hour mark. And that’s despite having suffered terrible performance and stability issues through the first half of 2021. And I’m not ready to give up on it any time soon. This is the sim I’ve been waiting on for almost 30 years. And despite the issues I’ve had (it’s running well for me now btw) and the sim’s shortcomings / missing features, I’m still loving it.

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Perfect quote in a further also brilliantly written post. Fully and 100% agree with anything you have written!

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Constructive criticism is a lost art. The majority just complain, sometimes aggressively, sometimes sarcastically, without really understanding the nuance of proper, reasoned criticism.

This is across the board with a lot of people in general, not just in the world of MSFS.

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All well and good, but wait until you experience non-stop CTDs after the next update, rendering the sim completely unusable :joy:

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Ha! Spoiled! Those are filled polygons! And I bet you get more than 5 FPS, too!

When I started with flight simulators I had white lines on a black background at best. Ha! Or even better: PETSCII art for C64 gems like Jetflight!

grafik

You spoiled kid, you :wink:

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I should add, that I have had a fair bit to complain about myself. But I try to do it in a constructive, reasoned manner as best I can.

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The Asobo planes I have (Husky, Ju52) are rated highly on the Marketplace.

But 1% of customers always complain loudly while the others enjoy what they purchased.

I’m sure experienced developers know how to handle this.

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Most of the complaints are constructive and relevant in my opinion. What I hate more is the denial that occurs among fanboys when people are rightfully complaining about something wrong about a paid add-on. It must be embarrassing when even the developer acknowledges the problem.

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This, this this. 100% This!

The signal to noise ratio here on the official forums is so out of kilter. It’s difficult to find threads where people are being constructive instead of destructive.

I get it. Something isn’t working, and you want to tell the world…but jeez, we get so many negative threads covering the same thing these days. Trying to find some decent discussion or (gasp) a positive thread is the proverbial needle in the haystack.

Like @Editer said - the beginning of the flight sim world wasn’t that long ago. For me it was F-15 Strike Eagle on the Commodore 64.

F-15_Strike_Eagle

Yeah man. Soak THAT immersion in. If I remember, the enemy MiGs were comprised of just triangles with no texture. Wireframe spaghetti jumbles in the sky.

Look where we are now! I have a device that is a little bar (Tobii Eye Tracker 5) on my desk, that without any other “stuff” will track my friggin head and eye movements. How cool is that? Of course for the ultimate in look-around stuff, there’s VR, which still just blows my mind.

I actually worked on the assembly line at Alcoa Electronic Packaging in the mid 90s when the Pentium 60 was made there. Now… jeez… I’ve got a 12 core CPU (AMD Ryzen 9 5900X). Technology, and all the gadgets that let us fly our virtual planes is just amazing. The core sim is growing by leaps and bounds, and the third party developers are knocking it out of the park!

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Anyone who thinks I’m saying “don’t complain” didn’t read my original post closely.

(I will add, though, that coming to a forum and complaining and not actually reporting the issue to the support email/website of the add-on manufacturer is a very poor use of time and energy, because reporting it directly to the maker generally is dramatically more effective at getting the problem recognized and fixed. Also, if the maker isn’t on the forum, you’re [insert gif of Abe Simpson yelling at the wind here] Posting about them publicly is also useful for other people considering the product, but official channels should be the first step.).

It’s not about “not complaining,” it’s about the tone, the overall attitude, the hyperbole around small issues.

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Geez, I actually remember this gam^w… sorry… “simulator” :wink:

That’s funny: I just clicked on the screenshot in order to enlarge it - and I was suddenly reminded that this is the original resolution already! 320 by 200 pixels! Duh :slight_smile:

Good times, good times…

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I think the sim is great.
There is always work to do.

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Isn’t it crazy? It wasn’t that long ago…I mean…I’m not the only one that thinks that, right? :slight_smile:
New SSD arrived today. I can finish my new gaming PC tonight. Then it’s time to start the install / download game!

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Yes, to OP, and I’m guilty about complaining too. That MSFS is graphically so far advanced even from FS-98 through FSX is a fact. But, for me, some of the CTD’s I have experienced I may have caused on my own. I was testing a freeware plane and VCRUNTIME140.dll was causing the plane to CTD the whole sim. After I posted that, other folks said Yep, that is what is causing mine too. SO, providing information on the forum is beneficial to all, again, in a nice way. But sometimes the problems and things still broken 19 months after release (logbook for one) are madding to folks who in this day and age, just some of this stuff could be fixed. No, XP-11 is not graphically as stunning but for most part the underlying code in XP and FSX work so that is why people still use them. XP-12 will have bugs too, and how long that takes will be the kicker.