Yeah, that would be great, but I doubt Asobo has the vision, motivation, imagination, skills, resources to pull that off.
They just have to open the mission SDK for third party devs and in a few weeks we’ll have hundreds of exciting, fun, interesting and bug free missions.
The biggest design flaw to me is this whole punishment system built in. Every other game you play you can fail but often you can save before you go into something dangerous and, if the monster kills you, you just respawn and start over. Your reputation and funds don’t go to zero. This is a SIM not some competitive game so the goal should be educational and enlightening. And who came up with the snotty whiny passengers? I think in its current state you have to have some sado-masochistic tendencies to enjoy it.
Ill look out for that. Thanks for sharing 
Agree with all. And it would be a lot less bad if it didn’t smack of judgment and superiority while getting it so, so wrong.
That it exposes the poor ATC, the poor stock airports, the flawed aircraft, and the entire parameterization system by subjecting us all to it is another in a series of own-goals by Asobo.
But at the bare minimum, even for the sake of education, or testing, whatever, at least let us know exactly why we’re being deducted. Completely turn off the penalty system as it affects your career/reputation/money until it’s fixed to a large extent. Maybe have a section in the logbook or profile page that keeps a running count of our errors so there’s at least some sense of balance and competition, at least on a personal level.
How is it that NEOFLY is in many ways superior?
Or. That the career in Flight Sim World was superior?
Or. Mission in MS FLIGHT were more fun?
I was expecting Asobo to blow them all away.
Maybe in time. But. Not right now.
It’s one thing that it’s shoddy and buggy, but the SU1 4 months after the release solved about 10% of the issues. I waited until SU1 and the Dev Livestream to see what gets better and what to expect and I’m more pessimistic than before.
At this rate, I don’t expect Career Mode to improve significantly in 2025. I did a 47 minute rant about the issues before SU1, but I could do another 30 minutes after SU1.
It’s just not worth the effort and the frustration. Probably NeoFly is the best alternative that actually creates engagement and has a proper set of features.
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Great, your video. It describes with almost scientific thoroughness highly detailed what is fundamentally wrong with the FS 24 simulator.
I didn’t start a company in career mode. For me, flying is the most important thing, not chasing money and managing crazy and annoying things. So I’m actually amazed at how much you had to suffer before you quit career mode.
I’ve posted my FS 24 opinions here under “StrohSchema7980.” My conclusion:
On my PC FS24’s graphics isn’t any better than FS20, fps is lower and GPU load is higher.
“The next generation Flight Sim” is significantly worse in many areas (e.g. annoying UI and streaming issues are some of many others). Career mode is hard to improve due to its basic design (because missions are created by AI?).
Now I’m only flying FS 20 and waiting for MSFS 2028.
Respectfully, after reading a bunch of responses it’s clear to me why career mode is in the state it’s in. In fact, I can see them outright getting rid of it. Why am I saying that? It comes down to “you can’t make everyone (or anyone)” happy?
One reply gave the impression they wanted to micromanage the aircraft like kicking the tires, dipping the gas tanks before each flight, checking the flight control freedom… Let’s suppose they implemented that feature. How long would it take for people to start complaining:
“I don’t want to waste my time draining off a quarter of cup of fuel and dipping the fuel tanks bla bla for every flight when it’s always the same automated result (i.e. gas is always fine, tires are always fine)… I want to fly the plane.”
Valid complaint? Sure. I think so. I mean at some level of real world flying, you get to shirk off some of the checks to techs and maintenance (i.e. you won’t find a 737 pilot checking the fuel tanks by hand). However, when you’re your lonesome self flying that little Cessna 172, it might make sense to learn to do a complete walkaround. BUT, then the programmers NEED to incorporate failures (i.e. maybe the altimeter fails on pre-check, maybe there is an issue on run-up requiring you to return to the FBO). Now, that would honestly be fun… “oh shoot, I have a faulty magneto… my fault I didn’t check it… now I have to make an emergency field landing”. However, knowing HOW to do a proper walkaround and a proper run-up would require lessons in the game to properly demonstrate this and mention why and the consequences of what happens if (for example, switching off one of the mags doesn’t result in a drop in RPMs, what does that mean?). Do people really want to learn all this stuff? Because it seems to me, you either do it full-■■■ or not at all. Half-■■■ (the current state) doesn’t seem to be working.
Other replies were in favor of maximal punitive and reputational damages for failures, errors and omissions. That would be great - if the game worked. Right now, you get dinged constantly for things that aren’t your fault (e.g. landing on the “wrong runway”, “flying into restricted airspace” when you’re following the pre-determined flight plan, …, …, …, …). So, the way it is, the incurred damages by not following the “rules” are useless because they are inconsistently applied and somewhat random. Someone else said "well if I crash my plane I’d be in so much trouble in the real world”. Yes, in the real world, you would be. But, in the real world you wouldn’t have two trees in front of the runway threshold or a flight plan that takes you into the side of a mountain or a random crash for no reason whatsoever or a forever-moving stop-short point or assign a jet aircraft to takeoff from a Podunk, 1500 ft runway. So, again it’s half-■■■. How can you punish someone who is playing by the rules but then the game is completely at fault for the error? Then are you talking about incorporating an appeal system to Microsoft for incorrect punishments? Ain’t nobody got time for that. Already the consequences are bad. Initially, I lost my “starter” C172 (read: crashed) and it took 3 weeks to grind out enough credits to acquire a new one.
I think overall, the concept of a “career” mode is awesome. I think the implementation in its current state sucks. It also seems to me that part of what wasn’t thought-out was “whose career are we actually following here?” Is it an individual pilot (the simmer)? Is it the simmer’s corporation? Is it a complete fantasy where the player just arbitrarily controls corporations and happens to be an owner and a pilot? It seems to me that there needs to be at least two different ‘lives’ that need to be tracked; the individual pilot and/or the corps. How in the, current state, does the entire corporation get punished for the mis-action of one pilot (the game player) but the other pilots who fly for the company never make a mistake? I mean wouldn’t ‘reality’ dictate a human resources side to this with training and retraining etc? And, if part of the career that is being followed is “us” ( the simmer/pilot), why don’t free-flights or employee flights count? Isn’t that part of our flying career?
Finally, as if there wasn’t enough above, the training sucks. If you’re going to make this in any way true-to-life, the flying lessons would have to be in some way, shape, or form realistic. It usually takes at least 30-50 hours to get a private pilots license IRL. How about some type-rating training? Who here, without looking at online videos, would know how the switches, buttons, knobs… etc are or how they work in any of the planes (unless you know them IRL). I’m saying that as a student pilot IRL. Nobody is going to say “okay well you have enough points” or "you landed 10 “A” missions so you’re eligible to fly this Cessna CJ4 or Pilates. Maybe if people had to train and understand these aircraft, they wouldn’t get bored so fast?
In terms of “what is the point of the career mode?”. Exactly. What is the point? It seems like you’re supposed to just get enough missions to get to the next plane then the next plane then the next plane. That’s it.
My hope was that it would simply be a set of activities to give you a reason to fly a particular class of aircraft to a particular location. And you would have to obtain certification on those aircraft in order to accept the job. I never expected it to be scored.
I would prefer that I be given an objective, then choose my own aircraft and route to meet that objective, perhaps within a given time limit but with everything else left up to me. Isn’t this how it would be IRL?
I feel like by adding a scoring system, they painted themselves into a corner as to how that score was to be earned, and the mission is now totally on rails with the slightest meaningless deviation becoming overly significant. That has made the whole concept unappealing to me and I’ll likely never use it again, even if they do work all the bugs out of it.
I’ve been thinking this to myself for awhile now too. People are click farming passive income for a bajillion useless credits, and grinding points to make it to the next level, an utterly pointless way to use a flight simulator, and I imagine folks are going to get bored with this sooner or later as they realize there’s nothing on the next level and you can’t buy anything else with the credits, making all of these points and credits completely meaningless numbers on a screen. And it’s going to be sooner rather than later if Asobo doesn’t step up here pretty quick and deliver the rest of missing game modes. I imagine that’s probably only going to temporarily stave off this disinterest because, as you and others have said, Career Mode is flawed in design and implementation on every level. It’s going to wind up abandonware like Reno and the Bush Trips.
Will never ever use as is. As been said, give me freedom to choose my goal/trip with the plane I want the way I want. Certifications are fine - they help with learning. Tailor things to teach and broaden flight sim knowledge not how to grind away at meaningless scores.
I really wonder what approach or path the AI has dreamed up for you to fly into Split runway 23 
.
The problem with these missions is that as soon as you’ve flown one of each category, you’ve flown all and everything after that becomes a drag.
The FSX missions were a lot more interesting in that sense, a lot more variety and some kind of decision making involved on some missions.
rather than circle to land it’d be circle INTO land (in the sense of CFIT).
It’s utterly frustrating and you can tell a “gamer” mindset came up with Career mode and not a pilot or even bona-fide flight sim “pro”. There should be two branches of career mode: One for the actual pilot (you, the simmer) which follows my career and one a different for companies (maybe). I was sort of excited at first when they had you flying your first solo (sole occupant) flight after “flight school” but then, it became monotonous. Why not follow the actual lesson plans from real world private pilot’s license? Potential? Yes.
And, for God’s sake, let us use third party aircraft and other aircraft in general. I was sooo excited when the CJ3+ was just released but then I found out it won’t be compatible with Career mode. Instead of requiring the third parties to report whatever Asobo/MS needs, maybe Asobo/MS needs to change their requirements or develop a scheme to read what information they need (i.e. I can’t see all these third party addons conforming to the career mode niche part of the game). From what I read in general, I think two things are largely killing Career mode: 1) inability to fly your own missions and, 2) inability to fly your own plane. As mentioned above, who cares about credits other than it lets you access planes and missions. But the planes are few, boring, pretty bare-bones and the missions are run-of-the-mill typical flights that are limited to and from huge mountainous areas (e.g. Utah) with approaches that don’t work. I’m sorry but you don’t make missions “exciting” just by making people fly into mountains into airports which don’t offer guidance with a flight management computer which tries its hardest to fly you into a hill or mountain. I mean sure, there are people who report “I flew plane xxx and had no problems”. Sure, if you fly to and from an airport of your choosing with a departure, arrival and approach and runway of your choosing, then things likely will work out and that’s most of the battle right there.
What confounds the frustration is the deafening silence (yes, I hate this term too) from Asobo and Microsoft regarding their intents or upcoming changes in career mode. Like, should we assume they are killing this game mode? Should we assume they are making changes in some sort of direction? Very annoying!
Hello @Marcusdoc,
We have absolutely no plans to end Career Mode. As Jorg mentioned in a recent interview, Career Mode is the most popular way in which simmers are engaging with Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024.
“Right now, Career Mode accounts for about 56% of all time spent in Flight Simulator 2024. That’s more than Free Flight, which honestly surprises me. When we were initially forecasting, we expected Career Mode to take up around 30%—but it’s at 56% right now. That’s crazy.” – Jorg Neumann
Sim Update 2, which is currently in public beta testing, contains numerous bug fixes and other improvements to Career Mode. Beyond that, we are carefully reading all the feedback from players on how to improve this mode, but we don’t have any specific plans we can share at the moment.
Thanks,
MSFS Team
Again, no information.
I found the percentage surprising, too. However, I think it doesn’t tell the full picture.
This version of career mode is the worst of many worlds combined, and it is not a fun experience. I needed to resort to 3rd party software which gave back my enthusiasm for the sim.
The number doesn’t tell WHY people are flying more in career, though, so maybe it would be smart to consider the other possibilities.
From a game design standpoint, career mode does not fit the definition and lacks value, and not just because of the bugs.
As a user experience, it’s frustrating, and not just because of the bugs either.
Jörg should probably survey the community to find out what percentage of that 56% is using it for the actual career mode features, and how many are out there, like me, who are just forced to use it to access the missions.
I bet if they make the missions available outside of career mode, that number will drop significantly.
It would also be interesting to see how many people stuck with 2020 because of the stability, mods, shared cockpit and Vatsim. And group flights. Because in 2024 the bugs and the model matching makes even group flights underwhelming.
I don’t think career mode is THAT popular, in fact, I found it miserable and fundamentally broken, it’s just there’s little else to keep the people there.
My bad, 51% of that is probably me.
My OCD means that I cant go to bed until I have finished a flight. With all the false starts ‘aka - missions failing because you moved your AC even though you hadnt had time to turn the apu on yet’ and for some reason that destroys your landing gear :\
Or, crashing into invisible things, again this happens in the first 30 seconds of 70% of flight attempts.
I also found I get memory leaks (but not all the time) it seems to be on ‘good days’ were you can string 3 flights in a row together (rare but satisfying) sadly part way through the third flight I run out of memory (I have 64gig and the best hardware money can buy)
The FMC’s are fun, using VNAV to adjust your speed can cause a crash on hitting the very specific button 3 on the left hand side of the panel.
Sometimes you have a succesful flight and then get zero reward because your success depends entirly on the broken ATC system. If it gets lost sending you on contiki tours around your desired destination and you choose to go rogue. Say good bye to the millions you would have made on that flight. Dont be alarmed though, the tax man and insurance guy still get their cut of the flight.
A lot of damage was done to a trusted brand by releasing this sim 12m- 18m early, and for what? So someone didn’t need to change the cover art to 2025.
As a solution architect and systems engineer trained in agile, this release gives our profession a bad name.