Please Asobo, I love this new sim and have had a great experience over the last two months but now I grounded (see uncontrollable screen flicker posts.
Please just advise us of a new update, but don’t make it mandatory. Give us the option to continue as we are until it is convenient.
Imagine the scenario of a group of flyers had planned a flight together, possibly even taking a day’s holiday or cancelling some other appointment only to find that you have an hour or more to wait for an update before you can fly.
Enpower users by giving them choices.
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Mandatory updates are necessary because this is not a standalone program running on your PC. It is an ecosystem that incorporates the Bing terrain and photogrammetry feeds, weather, cloud based ATC etc. All these need to be co-ordinated and in sync. If you didn’t update your PC, the server side changes would still affect your game or even break it completely if the complementary PC side component wasn’t present.
Hopefully you can see that mandatory updates are a necessary side-effect of a cloud based simulation environment.
The only way this could be mitigated slightly, would be for the update to be split into mandatory (cloud feature related) and non-mandatory (game objects like aircraft and airports) - similar to the Japan world update.
But then Asobo would need to contend with people hitting problems because of out of date installations. We already have lots of errors every release because of community mods that get broken by Asobo updates to files and systems they have been built on.
Removing mandatory updates would make the situation 100x worse.
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@Dreaming1982 thanks for your response. It makes sense now I look at the bigger picture. I guess from a personal point of view the only option is not to use the sim until an update is deemed stable.
I have to wonder about the testing process of the updates so far and think even though Asobo delayed this current release for a few days perhaps a more thorough testing is required as broken updates are worse for their reputation than delayed updates.
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No just no. That would make things worse. Updates should be mandatory. It’s just they need beta branches which is easily doable on steam with a single click of the button. Just like xplane or many other games.
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This sim has a lot of moving parts. I come from a corporate IT background and can appreciate the level of complexity they are dealing with. This is an ambitious project.
Test is an area that’s very difficult to get right - it always gets squeezed at deadline time and it is difficult for the development/test team (who know what the expected result of each change is) to move beyond ‘happy path’ testing - which is where you test that it does what you expect, but misses errors not on the test path.
Hopefully bringing community beta testers back into the loop will weed out a few more issues before a release hits our machines.
The good thing about end user testing is that if something can be broken they’ll break it; the bad thing about end user testing is … you get the idea!
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No, updates should remain mandatory… To stop piracy for one example…
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Hmmm, Piracy protection again. Where a 1000 honest users have to suffer constraint because of 1 dishonest person. I always dream of a perfect World, in my mid seventies I should know better!
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It has nothing to do with piracy. The game was already pirated. Piracy is no concern for games anymore. It’s the same reason as with all the games. Everyone should be on the same version otherwise it creates confusion for users and developers.
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And continuing with mandatory updates will ensure that piracy fails… I wonder why your so confident in your claim …hmm
It doesn’t ensure that. Updates are meant for fixing the game. Everyone being on the same branch means that everyone will have the same experience. Imagine people being on different versions and spamming support with bug reports which doesn’t exist anymore? That wouldn’t be a wise decision. Thus all the games require you to update. So as i said it needs a beta branch on steam (don’t know how it would work elsewhere). You download a beta patch at your own risk, report the bugs, devs fix them and updates the stable version. That would be a good compromise.
I’m confident because i’ve seen this game on torrent trackers i use. And before you start blaming me even more, no i have not pirated this game, i bought it day one and i don’t promote piracy. Honestly i don’t think that MS needs to be concerned about piracy at all. It’s an always-online game and that ensures hurting pirates because they lose all the online features.
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This^^^^^ MFS isn’t a simple program like X-Plane, that’s has basic graphics, etc… that is self contained in a small folder.
Well, if updates are for fixing the game, I believe Asobo has missed the mark with 1.10.7.0
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There’s always a very vocal minority who are not happy with anything and there always are people when in comes to any game who complain that newest patch broke the game. But lets pay less attention to them and look at what’s good and real issues instead. Maybe updates are too slow but asobo so far is doing a good job.
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I don’t usually reply to topics but I feel quite passionate about this one. For years I made my software optional update but in time there were more versions in use than users. Fixed bugs got reported again and again. We got error logs from versions powered by steam (the hot stuff that comes out of a kettle) to the latest solar powered. We also had to maintain code that was obsolete.
Mandatory updates mean we have a better chance of replication and knowing what the users environment is. That’s the upside. The downside is it is disruption to a users environment, the problems with downloading and so on.
There is also a bigger responsibility on the developer for a smooth update which, as we know, is sometimes not the case. My pet hate was the release followed by a bunch of something broke followed by hot fixing. My program has several hundred thousand lines of code. I can guess how many there are in MSFS.
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That’s easy for you to say… After this update I can’t fly… The clouds and terrain stutter and move around. Totally not usable. Was just fine before yesterday. You keep cheerleading and I will watch and see how Asobo fixes the issue THEY caused.
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Mandatory updates are here to stay, the solution is to have a beta rollout parallel to a stable rollout. You then limit to only 2 active iterations of software and lots more testing can be done.
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the question was about mandatory updates. They are a MUST for this Simulator. The way it works and is contructed, not having mandatory updates would be a complete nightmare for Asobo which in the end would result in a bad game. Although I do think that purely seeing this simulator as a ‘Game’ is somewhat simplistic. Mandatory updates. a MUST (says a retired ICT manager)
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It’s really amazing to me how this topic returns every time. It should be pretty obvious that on every online platform everyone has to run the same client version. It’s a technical requirement for pretty much all online games for obvious reasons if you’re willing to think about it for a couple of minutes.
The backend of MSFS is very complicated with a lot of different services running server side. It’s already complicated enough, they would have to integrate backward compatibility which will complicate things even further to a mind blowing level.
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So what your saying is the game is not “completely unplayable” like some are claiming? 
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I also cant load the sim at all so your comment it quite unfair and Im sure if you weren’t just wondering if the changes were good or not and wondering when you would be able to load the sim again, perhaps you might be a little more understanding of those SERIOUSLY affected