I absolutely agree. I had a vague memory of this, for the previous city update, so I found it rather quickly. Still…
But then I couldn’t find the Dakota. It wasn’t featured in the store, tried to search for it, but no luck. Then I had a thought, that maybe it was automatically activated, so I went to My library, to search for it there. Couldn’t find it there either. Went to start a flight, and there it was, in the aircraft picker.
So, it was automatically claimed anyway. Why I couldn’t see it in My library, I don’t know. Why I couldn’t find it in the store either, I don’t know. Shouldn’t it show up as “owned” there? But also, why do we have to claim city updates, when we can be given planes automatically? Couldn’t the city/world updates work the same way? The inconsistency is just confusing.
True, though I did get a big pop-over banner when I got to the main map screen the first time. Almost full screen size, and had to be clicked away. That “window” could do with a shortcut to the MP page where you could “buy” it.
The market place holds a confidence issue for me. When I decide I should look for a new plane, I look at, but do not buy 2020 content because it is for a legacy system. Then I look at the 2024 content and think 2024 remains a mountain to climb in terms of fixing what is broken. I have a nagging doubt about them pulling the plug and giving it up as a bad job, so I then think, no point buying that. Whilst I did buy a single plane since the release of 2024 (2020/2024 version), my threshold for a purchase is now so high, I have gone from (at times) multiple purchases a month pre-2025, to what will probably end up being one a year unless something drastic happens to build my confidence.
I have no idea how anyone else feels, so people could be potentially spending a lot of money on 2024 content, but I cannot be alone in not yet gaining sufficient confidence in 2024 to start spending.
Has anyone else had difficulty with the marketplace search function?
I’m on a PC and through Steam. Marketplace will only allow two letters to be typed into the search bar and then it takes search away and displays all of what the first two letters could be.
When trying to delete letters in the search bar delete doesn’t work and I have to backspace and the cursor is always one letter in from from the string.
I don’t think anyone at Asobo had actually tried this function.
Am I alone with this problem?
You are not alone. I have the same problem especially when typing the letter a in the search. More often than not I can get the search to work if I clear the search by pressing the X, but it can take several attempts and is frustrating.
I tried just now and search is working. But it doesn’t always work.
I played around with this the other week. Essentially the search box does dynamic searching as you type, which is annoying enough. If you allow the mouse pointer to move away from the search box, it actually does a click through so that text entry is no longer confined to that search box, which is why it will sometimes stop responding.
You also cannot navigate the list with the arrow keys, and sometimes the text entry cursor will appear in the middle of you search term(s) with no way to navigate left or right.
Once the box has been clicked in, not just moused over, then it should become active. Moving the mouse away from the box should not take focus from it. I would also disable the dynamic search, for efficiency purposes. Only begin a search when the user has pressed the enter key.
I’ve been buying some 2024 content. For me the sim works almost flawlessly. I can’t say I’ve never had a significant problem, but I have made multiple 2-3 hr flights lately with no issues.
99% of the problems I encounter are with 2020 products that weren’t made to work with 2024. And they are a huge mess at times.
I 100% agree with the general consensus that the Marketplace could be better laid out. It’s a pain to look through. I used to browse the 2020 Market a lot, but in 2024 I mostly go there looking for specific things then buy it, or not. I am pleased to see they’re being fairly competitive. The last plane I looked at was the Harrier and I believe it was $8 less (not on sale) than JF.
Yea for sure. Every time I hit space (or other keys) it jumps somewhere else on the page. Almost all the time when I go to look at airports on the earth map, it shows none unless I click list first, then go back to the map.
I think what you’re seeing is that you hit keys that are used elsewhere for navigation. I suspect if you go rebind those you won’t have near the problems but, frankly… I’m too lazy. I just get momentarily annoyed and move on!
According to this, it would seem it would be a completely random timeframe. It appears to be on the developer of the product to test, and that would be the bottleneck.
We can gain some insight in the back-end workings of the MS Marketplace from pubic developer posts.
PMDG posted on Aug 6 they would be pushing the 777 200LR to marketplace “late next week” and that they expect “it will take 7-10 days to work it’s way through the intake process before becoming available.”
In an earlier post on July 17… speaks for itself:
MS informed us on Monday that they appear to have forgotten to provide the methodology that allows us to offer the new 2024 livery packs as a free/discounted upgrade for users who already purchased them in 2024.
To put it a different way: When a product is created native to MSFS 2024 using the 2024 toolkit it can be sold as an upgrade from the original MSFS 2020 version, but the same is not true for livery packs.
This gets confusing as [heck], because 2020 livery packs are able to be ported over to MSFS 2024, provided the product with which they associate was not entirely rebuilt to the 2024 native standards, so MS Marketplace is full of livery packs that came directly from 2020, but carry 2024 badges on them. Marketplace also contains numerous products that contain multiple liveries that were not actually built using the “pack” system in 2020… and thus they can be offered under the ugprade program in 2024 because they are seen by the system as a “product.”
We have been going back and forth on this topic with MS for months, and their inability to give us answers tells me that there is just as much confusion on the back-end of Marketplace is there is on the front end.
We pressed again on Monday for a solution to this issue, and asked for clarification as to why so many products appear to be badged as 2024 native when they can’t possibly be according to the MSMP definition structure. On Tuesday they explained that in OUR specific use case, (upgrading our 2020 packs with the 2024 toolkit and getting them to you as a free upgrade) wasn’t possible. They offered a couple of solutions, all of which would require that we offer the livery packs as “new” 2024 products and charge for them.
We asked when a fix for this oversight will be available and were told “no ETA is available.”
This is shameful on Microsoft’s part. After all the marketing and reassurances from Jorg, how is it possible they can’t employ common sense in building the Marketplace - which presumably is central to the business model of MSFS.
Could it be like how my parents used to behave when I was a little kid and they wouldn’t allow me to do something, such as go to my friend’s house to play. When I’d ask why they’d say, “Because I said so.”
In other words is this response just a total cop out, because it would take actual effort to figure out a solution, so it is simply easier to say they can’t do anything about it?
Yes, and to your point, Microsoft has a B2B (Business to Business) culture, is effectively a monopoly, and that combination never translates well in to consumer-facing services. If they haven’t even thought through the various upgrade paths for premium developers like PMDG - after 10 months - how would anyone expect smaller developers to fare? Microsoft’s incentives are not aligned with developers or customers - as evidenced by the total lack of responsiveness to the straightforward plan to offer customers upgraded liveries.
Everything with MSFS always feels as though it was created for some other purpose, and haphazardly macgyvered to sort of work in MSFS. With 2020 I attributed that to the “old code base”, but 2024 was supposed to be a more purpose built Marketplace…
I think there are only 2 scenarios where Microsoft’s culture and incentives might align slightly more with customers and developers: Stiff competition in the flight simulation market, or enough developers and customers just give up and walk away.
I feel that a management change at Xbox Game Studios is in order, but I hold zero hope for a culture change. Reading that PMDG post had me questioning why I’m bothering to build a home cockpit around MSFS. The Dev Q&As always seem to reassure me - but as we approach a year since launch, I’m growing more critical. I will be installing X Plane for comparison of the experience.
Someone mentioned Contrail Order Transfer previously, but after some investigation, I realized that MP seems to be only platform that supports streaming content. I’m I missing something? I wouldn’t want to download all my add-ons every time they got updated. Instead, I don’t even need to worry about updates because MP handles it automatically?
