For me, using Steam, I not only lost all my settings and controller profiles, but now there’s also a 24GB download that just appeared out of nowhere. I’m just bummed thinking about all the work I put into making all those adjustments and bindings. As a casual gamer, I think I’m going to uninstall and hope for better luck with FS 2024, after making sure it actually works as it should, unlike 2020.
All the add-ons that were in the Community folder were OK, the folder was still there and nothing was lost. But all the add-ons installed from the Marketplace were gone. I just re-installed them all. My understanding is that the official folders were destroyed and re-created.
All seems to work fine again but it took a significant time for un update that was not absolutely necessary. I hope one day the updates will stop.
Yes Xbox live is up again and i can start the sim, but, only offline! No multiplayer or Marketplace and Activities are available?
I have logged off xbox and Microsoft store, rebooted the pc and logged in again, but this does not help!
Any sugestions please!
That is very unlikely. As long as there are bugs, there will be updates. As long as there are new content to be added, there will be updates.
Launch msfs
turn off multiplayer
apply and save
turn off Online functionality
apply and save
Click your avatar > sign out
Sign in
turn on Online functionality
apply and save
turn on multiplayer
apply and save
for testing purpose select West Europe server
The whole thing is so odd.
The wgs directory, user.cfg and, presumably, other first-run generated config files exist on the local machine (no idea how the Xbox is setup in terms of this), so what is wrong here that the application is somehow missing this fact when being started in a not-able-to-authenticate with Xbox Network scenario?
It seems like some massively bad bug or defect in the way the sync code works.
What, exactly, is happening that the application completely ignores the fact that the files created during a first-run startup are already present on the local machine? Why is it, then, re-creating them and overwriting what is already there?
It seems like the crux of this entire issue somehow lies in the answer to this question.
That fact that it affects the Xbox, too, when no other Xbox games have this issue seems like a key thing to investigate here by the developers.
Spend some time on this. Block a network port or block the Xbox Network authentication server via a firewall and simulate a downed Xbox Network situation and start looking for an answer to this problem.
As I wrote here, no other cloud-based service or Xbox (on an actual Xbox) game has this problem:
I could see Jörg and Asobo, on the Dev Q&A, jokingly trying to apportion blame to one another, but the fact that this is the only game that this happens to on an Xbox makes me think the issue is with Asobo and not MS’s cloud save system.
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And users who have tried playing it offline have presumably not lost their local copy of their profile. How “offline” those tests were, though, I can’t say. Like setting it to offline, then disabling the network adapter, for example.
If it can cope with that, then perhaps something else is triggering the wipes accidentally.
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My case exactly.
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this is MS,not asobo,to be fair 
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Microsoft can’t maintain data on cloud reliably, Asobo is overwhelmed by this complex client-server architecture and for some reason overwrites correct local config files with incorrect cloud config files.
Ive never had a sync problem but im not using steam. Maybe there is a sync conflict with steam and ms sync when something goes wrong?
As the largest cloud provider your comments arent valid. Of course they can maintain data in the cloud. Its the sync process thats broken somewhere.
The issue may not be coming from the cloud if authentication is failing.
I’m Azure certified IT guy and I assure you that there is no 100% reliable cloud service. Cloud is just someone’s else computer (very complex one, and complexity means risk). You can read it clearly in Azure SLAs. The issue was probably triggered by the subsystem storing the user identities, which is definitely on the MS central/cloud side. Reading this forum I would certainly recommend to Asobo/Microsoft investigating the sync mechanism implemented for Steam user. And the mechanism for overwriting local config files with those centrally stored/corrupted during this incident.
But there is one positive outcome of this incident: I’m a real world pilot and recently I was “flying” too much in VR. As my sim settings are now broken I will be rather not investing hours in bringing my complex VR multi-panel system to to life - I will go back to some real world flying.
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i use the ms store version,
there we get the same problems,if not more…
Never claimed anything is 100% reliable. As am I cetified in Azure as well and M365 security and worked at Microsoft for 15 years. I still think its a fundimental sync issue that gets worse if you are a steam user. I suspect they are using a sql db of some type behind the scenes (rather than blob storage) and i suspect this is all operating ok. The challenge is with the sync is that at no point when a conflict occurs does it offer you options on what you would like to keep (e.g. cloud or on prem data) it just does its own thing probably based on a time stamp.
Why they overwrite perfectly fine local config files with cloud based ones without even asking? I would say this is the same mentality which is now leading Adobe to court - make users more and more dependent on the cloud. Then apply subscription-based charging (in Adobe case at very steep prices). Same applies to Spotify, Netflix, Amazon Prime/AWS and the others.
Hopefully MS will not switch to subscription based model with MFS 2024.
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As I wrote above, why does it even need to do this?
Why is it overwriting all the first-run files that exist locally when there is some hiccup or network issue affecting authentication and/or sync?
Shouldn’t the application itself or the cloud save service be capable of recognizing that the user has data present on their local machine rather than acting as though the application is in a first-run scenario?
This seems like it is beyond a cloud sync issue and is some weird issue with the application itself when certain variables come into play.
The issue isn’t that the user ends up with an outdated sync of their data, they end up with a first-run situation with zero data.
This seems like something beyond a sync issue.
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Consider the cloud service as just a storage container, doesn’t really matter if its sql db, blob storage, etc. The intelligence as you say needs to be built into either the application or the sync service the application is using. I suspect (and I don’t know) its up to MSFS to determine how it writes data to the cloud, so the application needs to have that redundancy built in. Normally (like steam sync for example) it will write some sort of timestamp and metaphor so it can determine the last profile used, and give the user the option to choose of there is a conflict. What appears to happen is in offline mode MSFS writes a new profile rather than ignoring anything to do with your profile in this mode, overwriting your cloud profile as this has a more up to date time stamp.
Whatever the technical issue, it’s really insane that 4 years into this (more if you include alpha/beta time) we are even having this conversation.
There is no acceptable excuse for wiping user data.
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