Allow me to voice a counter-opinion:
I also want to voice my strongest objection to the idea that spawning wherever you want as being “arcade” or “game” centeric, which I feel is demeaning toward those of us who are not necessarily sticklers for absolute, down-to-the-rivets realism. And so what if a particular user wants to treat it like a, (somehow lower-life-form), “arcade”? Isn’t that the inalienable right of the person who bought the game? What’s important is that he bought the game and wants to participate with the rest of us, at least IMHO.
Maybe he feels overwhelmed by the idea of flying? Letting him ease into it could convert him into a hard-core simmer later on. If you talk down to him and make him feel somehow inferior, he’s going to tell us to eat a rock, leave the community, and we may well have lost an important contributor.
Of course, you don’t spawn on a runway when participating in multi-player activities, but that’s not the only way to play.
When I run MSFS, (or X-Plane-11/12), I almost always spawn on the runway.
Why?
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My most difficult part of flying the plane is NOT taxiing around, it’s maintaining my aircraft centered on the runway and leaving the runway straight-out without curving - mostly to the right. So this is what I emphasize.
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Likewise when landing, I like to practice a 3 nm or 10 nm approach on the runway heading, where I can practice hand-flying a smooth let-down and a landing down the center-line instead of drifting off to the left or right. And spawning in mid-air is no more unrealistic than spawning on the runway.
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Spawning in mid-air over a body of water and slewing downward is the ONLY way to take-off from something that isn’t an official sea-plane base.
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I also disable multiplayer and ATC since I don’t need the chatter and distractions.
Sometimes when I am working on practicing a particular skill, I’ll set the realism settings to mask other aspects of flying - allowing me to concentrate full-time on the essential skill I want to practice. (i.e. maintaining altitude, level flight, or other things like that.)
For example, if I’m practicing takeoffs and transitioning to level flight, I will often kill the simulation and return to the active runway once that is done. Rinse and repeat until the skill is knocked ice-cold. Is that realistic? No. Can it be an effective training and practice method? Absolutely!
Please understand that one of the essential strengths of a flight simulator is that it allows you to tailor the simulation to your particular requirements - instead of having to concentrate on a multitude of things at once - which is something you CANNOT do IRL.
Additionally, (using the example of a 6 or 8 year old flying for the first time), throwing everything at them, all at once, is a recipe for failure, frustration, and disaster. You need to learn to roll over onto your tummy before you learn to crawl, crawl before you walk, and you need to learn to walk before you learn to run, so an incremental approach to learning is not a bad thing.
In summary, just because person “X” doesn’t fly the way you do, does not make his efforts or contributions less than your own - and as a family oriented game, I strongly object to demeaning others, even if only by implication, because they don’t meet your standards of excellence.
Please, let’s all play nice in the sandbox together and let’s strive to appreciate and encourage the contributions each and every one of us makes.
OK?