Please focus Sim Update 12 on stability and functionality

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Dear Microsoft / Asobo:

Congratulations on the 2-year anniversary of MSFS 2020, and 40-years of MSFS.

Please consider focussing Sim Update 12 on fixing stability and functionality of the base sim and base planes.

As a new user (on Xbox) the first-time experience is breathtaking. I’ve told everyone I know all about it. To learn how to fly, all over the world, in any any weather, in all kinds of planes, is not only eye-opening, but can be life-changing for people who will never have the opporutnity to fly, or to travel.

The optimism and hard work, and the size of the challenges, are evident in the interviews you give, and thank you for being engaged with the community and open to communication.

However… as a new user my enthusiam is muted by my experience of pretty bad instability in the sim over the past 3 months. I have hesitated to invest in the marketplace because of the crashing and bugs. But it’s not just that – there is an ever widening gap between the fantastic details of new features, and the more mundane features of the sim that don’t work very well, and break the immersive experience for all new users.

There is also a knock-on effect that when the sim is unstable, so are 3rd-party planes and scenery, and it undermines confidence to invest further as a customer.

I have participated in all the stability and beta tests since joining in May, because of this instability, and I see and appreciate the effort and progress being made on the most urgent aspects, but it still leaves that growing gap. So I’m requesting that Sim Update 12 prioritize all of the aspects of the base sim that affect many, are problematic and immersion breaking for most new users:

  • Crashing (CTD)
  • Memory optimization
  • Error capture, error handling, and error reporting (to both the user, and to MS/Asobo)
  • Bandwidth – distinguish server issues from user connection
  • Multi-monitor – there should be a special spawn location to calibrate, so developers and users all have the same reference.

And in the Sim:

  • ATC logic is sometimes… broken
  • Ground services, can’t find the plane, walk through propellors, etc.
  • Taxi and Landing ribbons that don’t match runways or flight plans
  • Bing map refresh?
  • I’m sure there is a much longer list of things you never get to.

Today you have announced fantastic new planes that would normally be for-purchase, as a gift to users – thank you! But as a new user, what I would value the most, is that the overall stability and functionality of the base sim and base planes be improved.

Thank you, I look forward to many years enjoying and participating in MSFS.

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That is what all sim updates are here for.

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Huh, a bit pointless now that focus on SU10 is exactly on the first five points (Also who of the official MS/Asobo members blames the users for bandwidth problems)?

And the other things are planned to be tackled in Winter by now.

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You are preaching to the choir, as we all have repeatedly asked them to fix core issues ad-nauseum.
First, if they do not continue to make money, this will go by wayside, as development/updates are manpower expensive and time consuming. They have to continue to expand world and draw in new blood because the rest of us, (me since release) are mostly sick and tired of bandwidth issues, terrible ATC, syntax, and a host of issues not fixed since release.
Had DC Designs and PMDG NOT made planes available aftermarket, I would have chucked this thing long ago. Those are (only two purchased-may be others-I don’t fly them) in my opinion the only two planes in this whole game (it’s only a game) which fly close to if not almost like their real counterparts. Yes, some parts of both are modified to make them easier to work in this sim (game). But you can take F-14 to its ceiling limit, and coast down to landing, and you can start both cold and dark, and create flight using the FMC in 737 and go where you want. In fact, on one flight ran out of fuel in F-14 and followed air start procedure and got them going after extending probe and getting 25% fuel load. Was down to around 20K feet I think, that was unnerving.

It was close to 18 months for me before I could plan flight and execute the ILS approach in the 747, I refuse to fly the 787, it’s just in my opinion hard to fly (sure it’s the FBW parameters). Personally, I do not believe any of the planes provided in sim (not aftermarket) fly like the real thing, nor even close to the real thing.

Whan Asobo started this project, they blocked and did not bring over any of the great planes in FSX, which was wrong. The 737 in FSX was good, the DC-3 was good (for this one-copyright issues prevented it possibly).

My largest complaint is NO MANUALS, OR ANY SETTINGS TUTORIALS PUBLISHED so they can be printed out. That the bulk of this sim is “on the cloud” is a travesty, too many people who have slow internet, which further bogs down the sim, and in many cases prevents updating/or even using it.

I did not want to have X-plane on my system believing it was way more difficult to use. but in desperation I purchased it, and low and behold, “all the code is locally installed” the provided planes are much better than MSFS, and I have not had but two Crashes to desktop and both of those were in an aftermarket plane which I had to fix. Yes, ATC is messy, but X-plane is FAA certified if, proper hardware is purchased and some code updates. MSFS will NEVER be FAA certified, it’s just a game, and having to wait over two years for basic functionality is just poor planning and deployment on MS part. It’s better today than at release, it still has a very long way to go, and it’s a hardware hog/resource hog, and takes way more resources to operate than anything I have ever used before. That this game is to justify expensive upgrades for many peoples is just wrong.

Only the 737 and F-14 keep me on this game. Otherwise, I would have left it. I could care less about all the world updates. I can fly all over the world in X-Plane and in FSX. I used my C-17 and flew from Kabul to Jackson, MS in FSX, without a hitch (except for the B-52 on the taxiway at PMDY in aftermarket scenery). Cubi Pt, Philippines is the old US Naval Air Station which used to be there and I spent month at. I could go on and on.

DO I EXPECT PERFECTION - NO - NOTHING IS PERFECT - BUT this game should be way further along and much more stable than it is now, in some cases its way worse. Of late, CTD from many users by the bucket load, not me fortunately, but lots of them. I cannot say, if NVIDIA has a bearing on this or any problems present, I am running the latest driver release and not having issues that way. That I have to turn up my cooling fans to max just to play this is just wrong, my graphics are at 50% or set to low.
Intel I7-9750-Nvidia RTX-2070-32GB system ram, so I should be able to run this fine.

Yes, new PC in the offing, but going to be next year, desktop, and prices are going to kill me.

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I totally agree. Tried two different routes today, both times CTD prior to take off on Xbox series X. For the past couple of weeks my first route of the day always crashes. Stability has only gotten worse since the beta test.

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Yes, but SU9 was supposed to be all about stability, too. I’m on the SU10 Beta, and I acknowledge the progress, which is significant. Today’s announcements were exciting, and I know WASM is coming for Xbox, and Working Title’s avionics refreshes are coming, and so on… but I’m trying to point out the growing gap between amazing new things, and the neglected underlying stuff that is undermining the experience. That’s all.

As for the bandwidth “warning” messages, the wording is always, “Your bandwidth is too low…” when more often than not it is a server load issue. My larger point about this is that it’s possible to distinguish and find the root cause of bandwidth (and many other errors) and error handling and messaging really needs improvement. When errors are attributed lazily to the wrong thing, they don’t get fixed, and pile up.

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Imho you mix some topics as the stuff announced has not much to do with the core sim :wink:

Performance and stability are related to stuff like memory management, thread management and CPU priority which is done by Asobo.

The stuff previewed today is, besides the Guimbal helicopter completely done by third parties - even the photogrammetry cities are done by a different team within the team (Bing likely)

What I try to say is that there is one entire team focusing on just fixes and improvements to the simulators core application - the other stuff is just layers on top of that core :wink:

it’s a pretty generic message on which I agree the wording is misleading. It should be more like “the connections quality is low” as there can be several factors leading to a low download rate. Bad ping for a fairly long chain of servers routed through could be a reason, a bad DNS on provider side could also be a thing which is all not the customers fault :wink: anyway the real cause is hard to tell from within the client application.

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They can test and test but the problem with a streamed sim is Asobo can never be certain until MSFS is actually out there. Even worse for Xbox is that Asobo are pretty much forced into emulation on computers because otherwise they can’t easily test offline. This is far from ideal and IMO is why xbox always seems to be an update or hotfix behind PC.

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Since my first reply was blocked, I will just say, sim for me was almost unflyable until SU5, and ILS in 747 was fixed in SU5, but WU9 killed my system with memory error. I removed MSFS after that for 3 months. If I had not gotten faster internet, it was going to stay off. But were able to get 50MBPS so downloaded it again. PMDG-737 was kicker, great plane.

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Lets get through SU10 and SU11 before we start thinking about what we want for SU12 (which i might add based on the feedback by OP, these issues are nothing new)

Who knows? Maybe all these issues that have been brought up will get fixed in SU10-11?

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I’ve been in the stability and SU10 beta testing, and acknowledge the progress which is great. But I’m trying to shine a light on the pile of issues that are being put aside while new things are created (with their own new issues). It’s a balance - fixing and adding new - I’m just asking for a significant push to bring the base sim up to the quality level (and stability) that stop breaking the experience, and investment, for new users.

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Yep, what he said.

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which is great and i agree i wish some of these long-standing issues could finally get fixed. Asobo’s problem has been explained before in previous livestreams:

  • An issue on PC comes up and a ticket is submitted via Zendesk
  • The appropriate dev takes the ticket and tries to replicate it in order to gather data about whats happening in the game or on the server side
  • This is where obstacle one occurs, they can’t replicate it. This was the primary obstacle for fixing FPS drops for long hauls for example
  • By some miracle, they fix it. Great! Hotfix is dropped and life goes on
  • But wait! Now Xbox users are having an issue not quite the same as the PC users, but still an issue along the same lines. A ticket is submitted via Zendesk
  • The appropriate dev takes this new ticket, attempts to replicate it, oh! It’s an easy fix. Great! Add it to the fork so it can be added for the next patch and move on.
  • Hold on a sec! Now this thing is now even more broken for xbox AND PC users. What will we do?!

And so on and so forth. Xbox and PC share the same code and progress on fixing any given issue is slow because now they have to make if the bug is only happening on specific platform or on both and that by fixing the issue for one platform, it’s not going to break it on the other. That’s after they’ve replicated the issue and gathered appropriate data.

And because everyone’s system is effectively different, this can be slow. I think they mentioned once they have a big room with like a dozen PCs with different components and like 20 xbox’s to try and replicate any given issue with any given configuration. Or something…

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I believe they are committed - and capable - of making MSFS completely enjoyable on Xbox. They have solved several major hurdles: cache corruption (SU9), memory optimization (SU10 Beta) is looking much better, and they delayed SU10 release to solve some remaining issues with DX12 (which affects Xbox S/X and PC). Also, the big one, they’ve solved how to implement WASM on Xbox, which will allow more, and more complex, planes to be available on Xbox - it is expected with SU11. Combined, those are huge steps.

So don’t get me wrong, I’m a fan, I’m patient and engaged in testing. But I’d rather have a stable sim, and see lots of old bugs get fixed before having more new things. The better the base sim, the better the new things will be - and developers will have a more reliable platform to work on. Just my personal opinion, others may disagree.

Since SU10 is almost baked, and the list of items in SU11 will already be locked at this point, I’m asking for SU12, which seems reasonable.

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it’s hard to say what SU11 will have. Before SU11 they have to release the next World Update, which will likely break things they will need to fix for SU11. Maybe MS Azure or Bing gets updated independently and manages to break something in the sim between now and post SU10 release? What I’m saying is that there are known knowns and that there are known unknowns. But there are also unknown unknowns; things we don’t know that we don’t know.

And i agree with you 100%, i prefer the longstanding issues to get fixed before they start adding new content. But there are only so many people working at Asobo working only so many hours a day.

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I’m tired of the ctd… I never know if I’ll be able to start and finish a flight because when it wants to close the sim, that frustrates me a lot…
I have invested a lot of money today I bought the new 737-800 I did two flights the second when landing it crashed on the desktop and so on day after day too…Please focus on the ■■■■ stability of the sim

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SU 11 will have: WASM for Xbox (per Dev Q&A video), plus the new stuff announced today - functionality for helicopters and gliders, and a study-level airliner. That’s a full plate plus any fixes on their list. So I’m asking that for SU12 (or the next point in time where they still have a choice about what to focus on).

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This is why I stay in “offline” mode permanently. I’m a casual simmer and the offline eye candy is enough to wet my palate and keep me using it. I find myself using Aero Fly FS2 more than MSFS these days because it just simply works flawlessly. I’ve said I’m gonna abandon MSFS several times but keep coming back only because of the scenery, nothing else.

There are only two things that are the bane of MSFS’s existence and cause of all its problems.

  1. Its built on old FSX Architecture
  2. Server dependability

I know of no other SIM that relies on server dependability to function. And if its out there I’m not aware of it.

MSFS for me is fast becoming a love hate relationship. :smiling_face_with_three_hearts: :angry:

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And of course the most important feature should be implemented :slight_smile:

th-1396953556

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I was just like them to fix what they broke, still waiting for VR SU7 regressions to be fixed that worked perfectly fine pre-SU7, SU11 release would be an entire year of unfixed bugs that they introduced and that’s just in VR.

This Sim doesn’t just need a stability update, it needs a regressional fix update.

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