Servers Offline January 30, 2022 - Having to Use a VPN to Connect to any Online Functionality

Wow, if I could just make a simple reply to someone’s post that would be great.

I agree, Marc.

REX Weather? Always works. How comes MSFS Live Weather doesn’t?
VATSIM? Always running.
Other always online games I either own or have played? Apart from regular maintenance and the odd DDOS attack or whatever, always there, constantly working. This includes other highly ambitious projects such as The Crew by Ubisoft, which uses a miniature version of the continental United States scaled down to something about a half or 2 thirds the size of Wales, or Elite Dangerous with it’s Galaxy-sized play area and added storylines etc. People always throw the excuse out there that MSFS is a very ambitious project as if that excuses all the stuff that goes wrong with the game.

MSFS is not the only game with ambitious scope with an always online presence, it only partially explains all the issues, and other, similarly ambitious titles tend not to have such problems, certainly not 18 months post launch. I feel like flight simmers are often not general gamers and they lack the context that other games and what’s going on there provides. MSFS does not stack up too well from a bug catching standpoint.

What grinds my gears the most is the silly little bugs that even 2 minutes of light playtesting would have caught, which give the game away that someone is either not testing properly, or testers are doing their bit but there’s no one acting on what the testers find.

Annoying little things like how the lights went all weird for those who had the render scaling at anything except 100 - This shows everyone that Asobo are not testing the sim with render scaling anywhere other than 100, or not testing at night, or both.

Or that bug early on after release where people starting from parking had engine failures before they could even take off, yet those starting from the runway could fly just fine, which told me that testing involves simply starting from the runway, doing a lap, then landing and calling that a proper test.
How about the one where our controls appeared to be hijacked by some unknown force…but it did not happen in offline mode? So are Asobo only testing this game offline?

Things like that.

It grinds my gears because I love the ■■■■ thing so much. I want it to be the best it can be, but someone somewhere in a position that matters doesn’t, or else these things wouldn’t be happening.

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Yeah.

There are just a LOT of servers that need to work together for MSFS which makes it more complex than a typical MMO. You can lose a bing data streaming server, the marketplace, the always online server, or the multiplayer.

That makes things at least 4x more likely to have some kind of issue than say a simple multiplayer match in a typical game. And players will ALWAYS notice this kind of issue.

I think as we see more titles take this partial streaming approach to data, we will realize these MSFS issues will be common among similar titles. I suspect it is a flaw in the whole streaming the map to you in real time design… but those visuals…

Just completed a flight from EHAM to EHBK with live weather, no issues everything works as it should. Location Netherlands

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I just want to make a flight but it looks like no servers are available as also I get no live weather when i start a flightserver

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Not getting any servers down in South America either - seems to be everywhere, has Asobo even acknowledged this yet?

World is a greenish FSX-like blob, no servers appear on the username-button list, just as shown above

Asobo guys, Do something, or at least say something so we know you’re on it!

Oh please… they’ve acknowledged it several times in this thread… and in the service monitoring post
https://forums.flightsimulator.com/t/online-services-monitoring/486800

Good info - I wasn’t able to find this before, hence my perplexity at the seeming lack of intel on the problem.

Last time something similar happened there was a blue bar notice right on top of the forums though, something like that would surely help a bit in this case.

Well no, not really.

The forum mods (on this thread) & community manager (only via that generic link you posted) have acknowledged it. Beyond an acknowledgement there has been no further information, like a likely time to have it all back up and working, or what the problem actually is.

The mods acknowledging it is not the same as Asobo or Microsoft actually officially explaining why their flagship title has been all but unavailable to play for close to 24hrs. Remember, it’s highly likely that only a small fraction of FS users come anywhere near this forum. If you’re going to build your future strategy around cloud gaming etc then it kinda goes without saying that the infrastructure needs to be bulletproof or people just won’t buy into it.

On top of the fact that the game is unplayable, is the WU7 release going ahead today given this mess? The servers normally fall over when an update is released anyway, yet this time we’re going in to it unable to actually play the flippin game because of them.

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From what mods have stated, Asobo/MS has been informed. I’d rather they fix the servers than communicate on this forum.
Also, nobody outside Asobo/MS knows about SLAs regarding server availability. Maybe everything is still fine from their point of view. Anyway, we have to live with what we get. MSFS has always been an exercise in patience.
By the way, has WU for today been confirmed? Updates usually come on Tuesdays or Thursdays.

You’re assuming it’s an either/or. To not even make mention of it on their SM channels seems a bit weird to me. Writing a short acknowledgement of the problem takes seconds.

Anyway, absolutely everything has pointed to it definitely being today, although 2100Z is an odd time to push it out.

https://www.flightsimulator.blog/2022/01/31/sim-update/

You’re right, I am assuming someone is working on this. I can’t really imagine otherwise.

OT: Sorry for further straining off topic, interesting link. But who is flightsimulator.blog? Are they in any way affilated with Asobo/MS? This doesn’t seem to be an offical statement.

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From this very forum then…

Blimey, I read that post serveral times and managed to skip over this part, my bad.

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No worries, I agree it seems a random time to push it out but there you go.

Back on thread, having logged out of XBOX live and restarted the sim a couple of times before logging back in I’m back online and it actually seems to be holding steady.

Fingers crossed.

….Azure voices have just disappeared again :disappointed::face_with_raised_eyebrow:

Yes… Yesterday in Belgium also… Around 15:00 CET It did connect eventually, But online weather was not working between San Fransico and Salt Lake city.
Then the Azure voices went offline. Then mid way through the flight the online weather started to work and the voices came back…
Indeed its always not working when you want to play it the most :frowning:
I hope you managed to get some fun out of it. I know I did. Hopefully it will be online again soon.

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Okay so I can now connect, in my usercfg.opt file I have lod’s set for 4 and 3, the file is set to read only, and I just spent 40 min’s scanning the disks to make sure I only had 1 usercfg.opt file , and I did.

Fire up the sim, connects straight away, take off head to the east, 1st thing I notice is that everything looks kind of ‘grainy’, so I jump into the config menu, and find that even though its set to 4 in the opt file Terrain LOD is still at 2 in the game.

Set it to 4, still no change…looks terrible. I can fly but the immense ugliness of the sim at the moment makes me want to uninstall and say to h3ll with it…

almost 2100 hours, is it to late to ask for a refund? hahahaha?

What if… they did both? Its not like if they communicated to their customer base, there wouldn’t be any time left over for a fix

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Seems to be online for me ? West Europe server

I also did a flight EGLL-EHAM on West Europe server without issues.

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I fully understand that the current situtation isn’t satisfactory for simmers/gamers. Online services monitoring says investigating/partial outtage, what else is there to communicate?
Explaining the inner workings of the server network wouldn’t help anybody, and giving time estimates is only a source of further frustration should those estimates turn out to be wrong. I can’t really see, what kind of further communication would help.

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