Playtime gone missing [Packages out of date]

@LockedFir76798, you are correct insofar as those hours don’t seem to be lost. At least they have not been for me. However, where you are wrong is thinking those times are used for achievements. If they were, I would have that 1,000 hour achievement, or at the very least, a 500 hour one. For reasons that are far outside the scope of this thread, there was a point where I switched from the Steam version to the MS Store version, and in that case, those so many meters under such and such a circumstance were indeed lost, so I may not have enough of those either then, or now, to get me to 1,000 cumulative hours. But certainly enough for 500.

And yet I have neither achievement. Because only actual logbook hours count. And even then, only some. For example, I had to have like 110 hours logged before I got my 100 hour achievement, but I have not figured out why 10 of those hours did not count.

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I lost more than 600 hours, now it’s back to 0 hours

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If smth went wrong (ms side) … system image backup is a must in some cases.

It’s always a good idea to keep a backup of your msfs settings.
Below default msfs 2020 settings folder location (ms store ver).
C:\Users\YourUserName\AppData\Local\Packages\Microsoft.FlightSimulator_8wekyb3d8bbwe

When I closed Online Functionality and opened it again, I was prompted to log in to MSFS again. After I logged in again, my flight duration and logbook were all lost!



I don’t believe you can “recover then” (or Asobo can recover them).

In Hindsight, you “may” have been able to backup the Logbook file (if indeed that was possible), and you “may” have been able to restore it, when you found that your Logbook had, effectively been overwritten, with a new Blank Logbook.

Would make a nice 3rd Party App. A “logbook backup/restore” utility.

There are two kinds of people: those who backup, and those who have never lost all their data.

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My logbook was entirely wiped, and my achievement for 50 hours still remained.
I should have said “my 50 hours flown achievement”

But yes, it won’t add the 50 to the current one … Love to know what it’s going to do when I get to 50 again … probably melt the SSD in a fit of rage.

June 3, 2021: Another packages out of date warning. Surely they would have fixed this? Nope.

Another 890 hours lost. Back to 0, and the climb to 1000 starts again.

I will not be going online or doing another packages update ever*.

*Until I get the 1000 hour Achievement.

It’s always a good idea to keep a backup of your msfs settings.
Below default msfs 2020 settings folder location (ms store ver).
C:\Users\YourUserName\AppData\Local\Packages*Microsoft.FlightSimulator_8wekyb3d8bbwe*

Restoring that folder didn’t work for me.

Why is everyone so worried about the achievements? Its a flight sim, the real achievements are flying a plane as close to real world conditions as possible. I know where I have flown, and my achievement is to finish flying GA planes around the world. I don’t really care if MSFS tells me how many hours I have been flying for. As long as that error doesnt screw up my flying experience with stutters, low FPS and more scenery or flight performance bugs, then I dont really care. But, each to their own. :smiley:

I know it may not make sense, but some of us are what you would call Achievement Hunters. Part of (not all of, for me anyway) why I play games is to earn the Achievements. I am also a Completionist meaning I like to complete all the games I start to 100%. There are websites dedicated to this (see TrueAchievements.com).

I play MSFS partly for the Achievements, but I also play it for the flight simulation aspect. I have been on MSFS since FS98 and have over 6,000 hours logged on VATSIM. It pains part of me to have to get on here and post about it, but the fact is that they elected to make stats and Achievements part of the game. Objectively, that part of the game is broken if it zeroes you out with a routine “update.” Will I reach 1,000 hours eventually? Sure. But if I can’t go one month without this getting wiped out, I just want to get it behind me so I can enjoy the game purely.

If you think these posts are bad now, wait until this gets on the Xbox proper.

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I could be facetious, and suggest the unlocking of hats a la Team Fortress. :wink:

What’s important to one, is not important to another, and vice versa. I for one enjoy seeing my logbook as a form of personal achievement. I don’t fly airliners, I don’t leave it running overnight on >8 hour flights. I hand flew the vast majority of them, and for me that is achievement, despite what the AP on/off stats appear to suggest.

It’s not the end of the world obviously, but I would have been really annoyed if my logbook had gotten wiped out by that bug.

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How do you guys get the ‘your packages are out of date’ error message? For me it happens when I turn online off in the data menu (save), then turn it back on (save) if I then click on the welcome screen I get the error message.

Remember to issue a ticket to Zendesk to get this issue prioritised ; )

Just a thought exercise…

  • The majority of settings, achievements and logs are saved to your profile on the server.
  • If the sim is started OFFLINE then the profile is not available and therefore anything saved to the profile would necessarily also NOT be available.
  • If uninstalling the sim, the ONLINE PROFILE is not destroyed and controller setups, game settings and user data is preserved when reinstalling and logging in.
  • When returning to ONLINE the authentication routine must check the system credentials for a login that matches a saved profile. If the profile is corrupt, no login should be possible and starting the sim should fail resulting in the user having to create a new profile with the proper credentials.

This would direct my understanding to two possible choices…

  1. The profile is corrupt and therefore invalid and a new profile should be required to start the sim.
  2. The profile is not corrupt and therefore all the data stored with it should be intact.

For there to be a third scenario in which ONE specific piece of data is deleted from the profile is completely counterintuitive. As someone that has had years of mucking about with SQL servers and stand alone databases, I am having a really hard time getting my head around this. I can understand a pointer to the data being lost but the data has to still be there. If the pointer, index or even the field name was changed in the database then it would affect EVERY user profile stored in the database.

If there was a failure of the database files then ALL the data would be lost and profile would be pristine like a new user’s.

Of the users experiencing this corruption, how many of you have done a COMPLETE (including all cache files in Steam and USER files/folders) removal and reinstallation of MSFS?

Asking because, in theory, the data has to be there. I get the feeling that a reset of the profile indexes may be all that is needed to recover it. The fact that Asobo has not found a fix for it on their side would indicate that they are in fact NOT seeing an issue with the data. It may be an index on the client side just not pulling it from the server.

Before anyone stomps on me for again “blaming the user for Asobo’s ineptitude”, I am not placing blame. I am looking at the data and the data doesn’t match the logic. One of them must be wrong. I am trying to reconcile the discrepancy.

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I think the consensus is that the data on the server has been overwritten by an “empty” local profile. The data is intact, it’s just been overwritten by new data, in this case a “zeroed” profile.

But oddly not all. Achievement’s don’t seem to be reset. So perhaps only a single table got wiped, perhaps even a single attribute?

And therein lies my conundrum. That should not happen in a relational DB. For a single field to be removed, when that field is referenced by other fields and queries, that would trash the whole DB or more likely throw an exception and the process would not be allowed to continue.

This is why my small brain is fixated on an index in the query that is not looking in the right place for the data. For that to only affect select users it would have to be a client side error. Otherwise no-one would be able to fill the logbook table, if it was a server side query that broke.

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I started having this issue today after foolishly deleting a profile on my PC which the game was initially installed. I did a good deal of troubleshooting, reading posts from various places about this issue. In my case, this was a re-install and I had already set a 5Mb/s download limit while I was playing the game. I ran some packet traces, disable some TCP IP Auto-Tuning, and even added dead end routes to the Azure servers involved thinking maybe the Azure servers (13.107.246.51 and 13.107.213.51) were having issues. However, I found that those two IP’s are it, you stop those, you get zero updates. So, I started searching for how to disable the bandwidth limit setting because the game will not load far enough to get past the update screen.
I took a couple tries, but, ultimately, following these steps, seems to have dislodged the setting for now. To clarify for others, in my case, with MSFS 2020 closed (Not running at all in Task Manager) I removed the folder as written, then started MSFS 2020. It threw an error but did load the Accessibility menu. With that menu showing, making no changes, I re-enabled my wifi (Disabled following the steps), then clicked “continue” which took me to an ominous looking screen about licenses errors, with only an option to Quit, even though I had re-enabled my wifi once I was at teh Accessibility settings screen. Anyway, when I clicked quit, it tool me back to the XBOX login, where I clicked sign in/let’s play. From there, it went right back to checking for updates and so far, no more download looping issue. I’ve gotten almost 1GB just while typing this, so, in my opinion, MS owes LockedFir76798 a bunch of money for doing their job for them.
As a note, I will never, and I mean, never purchase anything else from the MS store. This is the first and LAST, absolutely ridiculous.

Most of mine were not reset, but a couple were. The one that comes to mind is the 50 hours in IFR conditions that, in reality, I’ve earned multiple times over, but it reset when my logbook went haywire. There were one or two more, but I don’t remember what they were, and don’t feel like chasing down at this moment in time. But it’s not all that important, my point is that while most achievements survived my logbook resetting, a small handful did not.

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Correct, but there are achievements that fill up automatically, like 50hrs IFR, 500hrs with one profile, and others, that need to be filled up intentionally. Unfortunately “Completionist” and “Jack of all Planes” belong to the latter category and have been wiped out with the logbook. So you won’t get the back unless you repeat the achievement activities.

Which I will certainly not do, because it would be just tedious, esp. when you already had completed the activity.

Quick update, I let the download run overnight, another assumption gone bad. It did download nearly 82G of the 85G but, hung on one of the packages. This hang was different, wasn’t showing the “pause” symbol between restarting, just looked like it was perpetually trying to download the same file stuck at 95 percent. So, I just rebooted and restarted the sim and it is trying to download the last few GB now.

Pitiful.

Today this happened to me. “Packages out of date” and logbook wiped.

Unbelievable they didn’t fix this issue yet. It seems so simple to implement code that prevents the online logbook from being overwritten with an empty one.

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