The haters say we have the skip option if we don’t want to put in the seat time. Once you skip the cruise the payout is next to nothing and not even worth doing the missions. As I said before, I just about quit playing this game after I crashed my owned aircraft and had a 400k repair bill. At about 8 hours a week of game time I’d lose motivation very quickly. Finding out about the sim rate increase led me to pick it back up again and keep me entertained, which is exactly what a game is intended to do!
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I’ve intentionally missed “skip to NNN” option in my previous comment since I was talking about player who would like to get to the end game sooner and actually fly the planes.
In case player loads a mission just to press Alt+N a few times, it has nothing to do with “playing the game” term. It’s not about flight simulation either, it’s a waste of time.
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Someone got it logged as a bug and the reply was that it was unintentional.
The team is investigating best possible solutions according to the thread closed message of the linked thread.
This issue is currently marked bug-logged as it was not originally intended to have the sim rate available in Career Mode. However, the team hears your feedback on the issue and are investigating the best solutions in order to keep the Career Mode fair but accessible.
EDIT: Hit post to soon.
I don’t know why there is a concern about Career Mode, a singleplayer mode, needing to be fair? I don’t care how anyone else plays the game. It’s not competitive, unless they intend to make it into a multiplayer contest mode, which seems unlikely and pointless.
It’s like someone playing Skyrim, why does it matter to anyone else if they cheat and give themself uber weapons and gear?
I don’t see sim rate as cheating and I haven’t actually used it.
Just imagine. All these shenanigans could have been neatly avoided if they had not hidden away the fun activities behind an XP grind, and let you do them on demand in the free flight mode. The whole thing appears to be designed from the ground up to sell credits on the MP to avoid the grind they designed. They are not unique in this. Many developers have used this somewhat cynical technique to generate revenue, and those games have been rightly slated for those business practises.
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Ugg, it’d be grind city without it.
Gatekeeping content behind mindless wastes of time is poor game design. I guarantee even the most anti sim rate people in this thread are using autopilot on their career missions. FS2024 will let a person set the autopilot after the initial takeoff and not require any player interaction until the descent phase begins hours later. Even under the “intended” game mechanics a person can literally spend less than ten minutes in front of the screen on a mission and still get full credit simply because they have the ability to leave their computer running while they do other things. In the final results, what is the difference in player contribution between that and in using sim rate increase? The answer is nothing but time.
A good design would reward consistent skill. Using another MS game as an example, the Forza series of racing games makes you progress through classes by winning progressively more difficult competitions. And the player has to actively participate the entire time as there is no way for the system to drive the car for you. Sure there is a grinding aspect to it too, but at least the races are relatively short and can be completed in an easy, enjoyable gaming session.
FS2024’s attempt at a career mode is poorly implemented. Every mission is nothing more than “go from point A to point B” while requiring massive time sinks without any player engagement to cover up its complete lack of skill based progression. The game should appeal to the broadest player base, and sim rate increase allows more casual or time-limited players to enjoy the game at no detriment to those that want to play in real time.
I hate to see FS2024’s career mode turn out to be nothing more than the grind fest favored by MMORPGs from the turn of the century. I thought game design had progressed past that, but I guess there are still those that view gatekeeping content as their purpose rather than broad player engagement.
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How can you visualize your current sim rate? I cannot see any indicator, so its always annoying to get back the real sim rate back after manipulating it.
I saw someone mention a mod to display it on Windows, but there’s no indicator in-game. There’s a separate wishlist post (from 2020 
) asking for a gui element to be added.
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There is no indication of that being a possibility, so why the hard push on what amounts to pure speculation?
I hope they never do that, that would be insane.
No, my argument is that they have not shown anything that would hint at doing so. The reasons you list are circumstantial at best. Given the general sorry state of the sim, Occam’s razor would suggest the more likely scenario is just more poor implementation, especially on the financial side of the equation. That would also fit nicely with Hanlon’s razor.
The encryption issue may be viable, but also has a couple other explanations. I’ve mentioned one a while back, about how the missions have custom objects, passengers, and such that likely have to be programmed on a per plane basis. Using a third party aircraft could break it. Another reason could be to prevent people from modding goofy things like flying a 172 at Mach .99 to speed run the career mode. If the ability to adjust sim rate was unintended, then this would also make the most sense.
True, but that still doesn’t translate to adding an option to buy extra credits with real money.
Many, many games have accelerators, boosters, in-game premium currencies, and a number of other assists to make your game less tedious. Buying credits here would be no different.
Essentially money replaces time. You could fly 10 missions, or you could fork over £10. Instant gratification dopamine fix.
You can open up EFB on the page which has stopwatch in it.
Then you launch the stopwatch and compare it to real-time clock near your gaming rig. When these two match, you’re at sim rate x1.
As a side note, I’ve seen you can’t use G1000 UTC timer at the right lower corner on PFD to measure time against it. It doesn’t update seconds according to the current sim.rate (at least on C208B). So at the moment the sole reliable time source to figure out effective sim.rate is the EFB stopwatch.
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A point was raised on Discord that I hadn’t fully considered, and I’d like to expand on it.
From a mechanics perspective, career mode already offers two distinct pathways. The developers seem to have understood that players have different preferences: some want immediate access to missions, while others enjoy a more gradual, immersive career experience. To cater to both, two clear options are available.
- Employer Missions - Players can engage with various mission types sooner, without the added complexity or responsibility of managing planes and a company, by earning certifications for those preferred mission types and then quickly diving into their preferred mission. This provides a more streamlined experience focused on mission participation, rather than requiring the long-term progression elements of company and plane ownership as a means to eventually acquire access to their favorite mission type.
- Freelance Missions - These missions require players to take on more responsibility, managing their own aircraft and facing a higher entry difficulty. In return, they offer greater rewards, depending on the company selected.For players who prefer the grind of owning a company and accumulating credits to unlock other mission types, they can chose this pathway.
For those who rely on time acceleration to experience their preferred missions more quickly, a pathway to do so already exists without needing to speed run missions.
Perhaps a balanced solution is to allow time acceleration in employer missions but not in freelance missions.
Also, perhaps this two pathways could be suggested at the beginning for players to consider.
“Quick access to missions” is hidden beyond certification costs and specialization requirements.
In case player goes just for employee missions, it’ll be long way before this player acquires 50+k required to get to jets certification.
Player has to save cash to get first plane running which can bring you about 80-120k per cargo run mission to cover certificate costs.
With profitability margin of 100k per 1:30 real life time player is able to earn 2 certificates within two days on owned plane. However this profitability isn’t available immediately at the start of career.
Player has to earn about 1-2k per mission for a while, so it’ll take about 10-12 hours of real time to get a company running.
With the same profitability margin player will have to spend 25 hours to buy his first 50k certificate. And when he does, new missions won’t increase profits dramatically. So another 50k certificate will require player to spend another 10-15 hours.
Obviously this can’t be labeled as “immediate access to all sorts of missions”.
There is no way to quickly get to passenger airliners no matter what path you choose between two listed options.
In case player doesn’t get company he’ll be struggling to acquire certificates for longer time.
In case player gets company, he has to care about his plane which is his new workhorse that earns credits to cover certificates costs.
First plane allows to get certificates quicker in the long run compared to grinding related to employee-only missions approach.
It’s balanced by developers. No matter what path you choose you have to spend about 15-20 hours of real time to get required certificates, even if player chooses the most profitable strategy.
When company ownership has been established, player has to grind through certification requirements, like for private charter specialization player has to complete 10 passenger missions with rating B, for VIP charter specialization player has to complete 10 private charter missions with yet another rating.
At the moment passenger missions are quite hard regarding related bugs which prevent player to properly communicate with passengers via intercom, and this leads to low passenger satisfaction at the end of the flight. So getting B and A ratings becomes some sort of dice roll for a player.
Obviously it’s designed in a way that it’s necessary to switch between employee and freelance missions. Freelance missions allow player to cover cost requirements for certificates, employee missions have to be completed to satisfy specialization requirements, since player is unable to reconfigure his plane from cargo to passenger modification (and vice versa) and has to keep planes separated in different companies (e.g. passenger C172 from flightseening company can’t be applied to private charter missions for some unknown reason).
There is no “take bank loan” facility in the game and there is no starting capital except for initial 5k which are spent on PPL and CPL exams.
In case player had starting capital of 75-100k, he could think of two pathways:
- Spend money on certificates and get to various missions sooner.
- Buy small company and grow from this point.
However if player is aware of the fact that two options have 10 times difference in profits margin (e.g. 5k per mission as employee vs 50k per same mission as freelancer), there would be no players choosing 1st scenario.
Bottom line is following - at the moment there are no pathways to choose from, it’s not possible to bypass 20-25 real-time hours time investment to unlock majority of missions types in career mode. For rotorcraft side of specialization tree it could take longer, since these have lower profits and at the moment have more bugs compared to fixed wing.
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At this point it feels to me like you are just trying to win an argument, or you haven’t read this thread in its entirety.
The answer to your above solution or question has been covered here exhaustingly.
Why should I not be able to enjoy freelance mode because you want people to act/ play/behave in a certain way that has no effect or bearing on your game or play?
I don’t want to do employee missions, I want to own companies and fly planes with a little bit of purpose and progression.
By no comparison is sim rate speeding this up to the point of cheating. I’m 100 hours in and have nowhere near all the aircraft unlocked. (currently medium cargo in a 208), not that this is relevant.
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Sim rate is not some magic button. I just flew a 3.5 hour mission in 2 hours.
Its hardly a “skip option”.
On top of this, it would have been much easier to set autopilot and keep it real time and walk away for 2 hours during long legs. That would have required zero management, which sim rate requires in any type of weather constantly sim rating up until next direction change and down again, or sim rating no higher than 2x for instance. It still requires your constant attention, much more than just waiting for the flight to finish while watching tv.
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I am probably repeating stuff that already has been said (including what I myself have said), but this post has progressed quite a few posts and I still can’t see any case being made that comes closer to making more sense for several things.
Fairness:
I am not going to repeat the whole “competition” thing. To even argue at all that a single-player campaign has anything to do with competition is already beyond me honestly. But I also don’t understand how a feature that is available to anyone (no strings attached) is considered to be unfair.
A user’s choice to not use time acceleration doesn’t put an “inop” tag on this feature. If he/she feels that mere real-time and energy consumption has any more value to the successful operation and completion of a flight that is his/her personal problem.
No sense of accomplishment:
As said before the real “achievement currency” in my opinion isn’t the real-time duration of a flight, but the number of flights I have done. Doing five 10h flights within 12h feels more of an investment (yes even time investment and the passing of time is subjective) than doing a single 10h flight within 12h.
I have been using time acceleration (up to 4x) since using career and have used it almost on a daily basis for the past 2+ weeks and a private charter company with five vision jets is all I can “brag” about. So as several posters have already mentioned, things do NOT progress significantly faster when using time acceleration. It just accelerates the bits you’d be “wasting” on your phone or YT. No real pilot will be sitting there staring at his instruments doing nothing else, while cruising over the pond for 5h.
Then just use the skip-feature:
As mentioned many of us still want to experience the whole flight. Most of us don’t use time acceleration for the sake of skipping things. We use it to accelerate parts of the flight we would otherwise be using our phones or reading the newspaper, eating breakfast/lunch/dinner (you know the stuff real world pilots do as well). Letting these parts run in real-time is just pure and unnecessary energy consumption and strain on your hardware.
There is no learning element in using time-acceleration:
I am curious in knowing the increasing learning value of completing “work-idle” parts of a flight in 4h vs 8h. Yes I will agree that patience is a value and virtue that many haven’t learnt yet, but there are many other settings that we can teach that lesson. We don’t need the career mode in a flight simulator for that and again don’t need to waste energy and hardware resources for that.
Time accelerating is an assistance:
Depends how you look at it. It’s not assisting me in any way of operating an aircraft. Real assistances are auto-rudder or auto-mixture. Even autopilot is more of an assistance than time acceleration. Although rewarding the none use of that (albeit making more sense than sim rate) would be silly as that is a real world assistance feature.
There is no skipping of tasks and flows with time acceleration. Aircraft are still used the same way without it. They are powered up properly, they are flown properly. Mixture management, rudder use, ATC communications, flight planning, system monitoring, problem solving scenarios, etc… are all very much present with or without time acceleration. Again that’s why the “skip” feature is far less appealing than time acceleration.
Time acceleration is merely a real-time management feature. It doesn’t make flying easier. It also doesn’t make progression easier. If anyone feels it does then it’s their personal choice not to use it. If others want to use it, because they want to progress in the limited time they have, then it’s also a personal choice.
As mentioned before the real “mileage” in my opinion isn’t the real time spent, but the number of flights that have been done. And why limit time limited users to short flights only. I mean the whole philosophy of Microsoft Flight Simulator is “Accessibility”. It would just seem strange to construct a flight simulator that can be run on Xbox and enable users to fly an aircraft with an Xbox controller to make it available for a much larger audience and at the same time introduce a set of “rules” (like disabling or penalize the use of time acceleration in career mode) to then again limit the accessibility.
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