The achievements in this sim are completely broken (Xbox)

Unless Asobo doesn’t review the forums and community feedback, and I know they do, there’s absolutely no way they’re not aware of the ongoing issues with achievements. It’s therefore incredibly frustrating that the Achievement bugs have not been acknowledged and as of right now, there seems to be no plan to fix the issues. What do I need to do to get Asobo’s attention? I’ll fly to Bordeaux and picket with cardboard signs if that’s what it takes to get attention to this issue.

I shouldn’t have to spell this out: achievements are part of the modern gaming experience across all the major platforms including PC. It’s reasonable to expect that they work properly, and if they don’t that they are quickly patched.

Microsoft/Xbox invented the concept of gaming Achievements; well before Sony/PlayStation ripped off the concept entirely. It’s beyond the scope of this post to explain why achievements matter to some people, but what is important is they do matter.

Yet here we are in late 2021 with Microsoft Flight Simulator (a franchise 8 years older than the Windows Office Suite) unable to deliver what hundreds of game developers can easily accomplish as mandated by Microsoft before a game is released. If that’s not ironic, I don’t know what is.

Where to start.

“My Way”

More an insult than an “Achievement.” My Way requires something thousands of sim pilots do on a daily basis; complete a flight of 300 miles or more from parking spot to parking spot. I’d love to hear Asobo’s explanation for why only 0.07% of Xbox users have completed this achievement. Here’s a hint: it’s not the users. The achievement is broken.

I’ve personally attempted this achievement several dozens of times. It was bugged before SU5 (Xbox Launch), and the only fix then was to land and have the AI pilot park the plane. Since SU5, this no longer works because it’s considered “assistance.”

In summary:

  • Pre-SU5: The achievement can’t be achieved without AI Pilot assistance
  • Post-SU5: The achievement can’t be achieved with or without AI Pilot assistance

This leaves everyone in Flight Sim hell as we go back and forth and debate clouds looking too soft, or mountains not being pointy enough, or the moon looking too big in VR, or boats not leaving wake in their trail. ■■■.

Please do something to fix this. I’m not a coder. I didn’t create the achievement, so I don’t know what code went into it, but the code DOES EXIST. Maybe there is a lack of detection at the point of arrival? Do the wheels of the plane need to be within an inch of some imaginary line? Does it need to be completed in a specific airplane? A specific time or season? Can the achievement only be completed in a category 5 hurricane? Do I need to sacrifice an animal to an unknown god? Please let me know. I’m willing to do whatever.

Here are some quotes from other frustrated sim pilots:

“Looks like this achievement is not working. I should definitively have it by now.”

“No go. Thanks for trying to help us though. Flew from ATL - DFW via high altitude IFR. Let AI taxi to parking, shut down, completed flight but no achievement.”

“I’ve done two 400NM flights now without any assistance, other than talking to ATC and using the autopilot on the A320. I didn’t unlock the achievement. I even have the taxi ribbon and checklist evaluation options disabled.”

“I guess it’s glitched for most people… Hope there would be a hotfix from devs, or guides, or explanations etc…”

“no luck here. Did a 300+ nm trek from Tucson to San Diego, gate to gate nothing popped”

“Still no dice for me I’m afraid. Made sure I had a ramp spot selected at my destination and made doubly sure I was parking at the correct one - still no achievement after shutting down. I am on the Xbox store version FWIW, the guide seems to have had success with Steam.”

“The achievement is definitely glitched. I followed the TrueAchievements guide basically exactly as written, but with the A320 (Hoping not to do this with a Daher). Went with a high altitude IFR. Started and ended in parking, no gates. IKK to ICT. No achievement.”

“Just did a 340 mile trip in the TBM930 and it didn’t pop. Did True to Life, ran through all the checklists, selected a parking spot on each end of the flight plan, handled all communications, no joy.”

“Working for the Weekend”

“Complete a Weekly Activity”

I’ve been online virtually every day since Xbox Launch. I have not seen a single weekly activity. I don’t even know what they look like.

Why is it called a weekly activity if activities are not available weekly? If you don’t want to do that, then please change out the achievement for something else, or…release weekly activities.

If it’s too much trouble to make new activities; please release “old” Weekly Activities so that Xbox users can catch up. Is this too much to ask? We’re not asking you to paint the Mona Lisa. Just re-release what you’ve already done. Is it so difficult?

“Decathlon”

The frustrations above X10. Literally. We need 10 “Working for the Weekend” achievements to get this. There is not a single Xbox user that is not an Asobo employee that has this achievement. I guarantee it.

“Journeyman”

“Accumulate 500 hours of flight time in a single pilot profile.” (0.09% achievement rate).

After flying 249 hours; this achievement has progressed 49%.

Because of ANOTHER glitch with the Bush Plane Achievement (Patagonia; I could not start the first leg of the flight…I would spawn in a forest in the mountains, slide downhill and crash), I deleted all my flight data and reset my logbook, therefore resetting the achievement.

I restarted my progress and flew another 256 hours, 30 minutes, and 38 seconds.

I’m not a mathematician, but 256/500 X100 = 51%. Why is the achievement not updating?

Wing Commander”

Same as above. It’s not updating. What do I need to do?

Bush Plane Flights

I haven’t even seriously attempted the bush plane achievements given the current chaos, but from what I’ve read, they’re also broken. Personally, I’ve tried to load them and have spawned into a forest and instantly crash and die. Not fun. Not polished.

In summary:

Asobo, PLEASE…IM BEGGING YOU…PLEASE AT LEAST AKNOWLEDGE THIS POST AS “BUG LOGGED” and commit to looking into achievements within the next several updates. This bothers me more than you know. Please do something to fix this.

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Moved to General Discussion. The category Bugs and Issues is dedicated to bugs & issues And require one bug per topic.

errrr 249 hours is 49% of 500 hours… so it does work

As stated in my original post: “I restarted my progress and flew another 256 hours, 30 minutes, and 38 seconds.”

" 256/500 X100 = 51%. Why is the achievement not updating"
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Achievements system is far from being important in this game IMHO… Should be fixed after everything else.

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Define “everything else.”

Ah people like hearing bleep bloop and adding numbers to their profile score as opposed to gameplay performance improvements…

I do agree, achievements should lower in priority in my opinion.

All jokes aside, eventually, yes, fix them. I would very much like to complete my remaining ones that are seemingly bugged to hit 1000/1000 myself. But let’s stabilize everything else first - and SU6 has been a wonderful start as things are in their best state yet.

What would you prioritize above it?

CTDs, FPS drops, new world updates, aircraft bug fixes, etc.

Also, this may all be moot anyway as they have said that they want to focus SU7 on bug fixes so we may very well see many achievement fixes then. If you had seen the QA a few weeks ago they said their goal is to catch up on their backlog of bugs.

Also, they don’t always respond to zendesk tickets but if it’s closed it means it was logged to their internal tracker. These are exactly the bugs they said they want to catch up on.

I bet we will see fixes in SU7. Just be patient. Obviously their focus has been stabilizing the sim on both platforms - of which SU6 has done an absolutely fantastic job (in my opinion at least).

Why are you attacking everyone who is responding? You raised some valid points, but other people may not agree with your saying that the sim is broken because achievements aren’t working properly.

Telling people to learn how to read, or to take a xanny isn’t going to magically fix the sim. I get it, you’re frustrated, but we aren’t the developers and attacking us won’t help. Attacking the devs won’t help either - they are aware it’s broken, and hopefully they’ll fix it.

I encourage you to read the Code of Conduct here - Code of Conduct - Microsoft Flight Simulator Forums

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I am not dismissing your concerns, I am disagreeing that they break the sim, and provided my opinion (as you asked me to immediately prior) of what I thought should be more of a priority which is actual core sim performance based.

As I mentioned in my post above, yes the achievements should be fixed, and I believe they will be - and tried to provide some context to that as Asobo did say they are committed to getting through their backlog of logged bugs.

I was not attempting to “mitigate” your points. You asked, I answered.

As another already said, I am not your enemy nor am I a developer. I disagree that broken achievements means a broken sim, but don’t disagree at some point they should be fixed. I don’t know why you’re being so demanding and angry at everyone though, honestly including Asobo. This doesn’t foster a productive discussion in my opinion. I’m sorry that it’s so frustrating, I can’t fix it, but everyone wants their specific issue fixed immediately. They have to pick where to prioritize at some point.

Take care.

I know they said, sim update 6 and 7 were going to be devoted to bugs, and then sim update 8 was referenced as an update that was going to be exclusively focused on bugs. But now sim update 7 is GOTY Edition, with Reno races released the same day. So GOTY has new planes, new tutorials, new cities, etc. I imagine there will be some bug fixes in it. But the focus will not be stability but new content. So technically, sim update 7 will really be the sim update 8 that they were talking about, but that is going to be a couple months from now.

Respectfully, and in the nicest way possible: Can I not bring attention to glaring issues that have not been addressed in over a year? After dozens of threads and unanswered tickets; yeah, it’s incredibly frustrating. Do I not have the right to be frustrated?

How do you know they’re aware of achievement issues? They should be, but it’s an assumption. I haven’t heard a whisper about it and i’ve been looking for any hint they care. Meanwhile we’re getting lots of updates about Reno Air Racing; something no one asked for. If they could simply say they’re working on it, i’d be happy to wait. That’s not the case. Sorry for not waiting for someone else to voice my concerns.

And yeah, if you’re going to go out of your way to say 256/500 X100 = 51% is wrong, I’m going to call it out.

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OK, I’ll respond in the same spirit in which you asked the question.

  1. Of course you can bring attention to this issue, or any other. We all do that. That’s not the issue - just don’t attack other forum users while you’re bringing attention to this issue. You have the right to be frustrated, but don’t take it out on me (or any other poster here) - we aren’t responsible for this.

  2. They are aware of achievement issues because your Zendesk ticket was marked as solved. “Solved” here means that the devs have added the bug to their internal tracker. Yes, they probably shouldn’t say “solved”, but that’s just how it is right now. Also, I could be wrong, but I seem to recall them saying something about achievements in a live Dev Q/A (don’t hold me to that, though). Regardless, the achievements issue has been raised before, and the “solved” status is your indication that they are aware of it.

  3. If you want to “call” people out, you’ll just end up killing the discussion and people will simply not respond. There are all sorts of people on this forum, from all over the world. Instead of assuming that the person who posted that may have been genuinely confused by what you said (which, to be fair, wasn’t super clear - I also read that a couple times before I got what you’re saying), you assumed ill intent and decided to “call them out”.

The best threads are the ones where everyone assumes that we’re all here to have a fun discussion, and not to run people down. In this post you again call them a “buzzard who’s been here 30 years” - which is rude, and you have no way of knowing anything about them.

Anyway, I’m going to leave it at that, you do you, but don’t be surprised if people don’t want to jump on your bandwagon if you just call everyone names.

Who am I attacking? I’m literally just asking for Asobo to acknowledge issues that have been voiced since PC launch. If that’s attacking people, then okay, I can’t help you.

I never got a response to my Zendesk tickets. Much less a reply that anything was “solved.” Why are you assuming I did?

While I’m listing my frustrations: why is it that I need to assemble a troop of people to agree with me and vote on a bug? What an odd triage system. Can Asobo not just do their jobs without getting direction from end users? The priority list seems to be set up so that the earliest complainers get first priority. Can Asobo not just take note of issues and then fix them without the end users needing to run a campaign in the forums? How exhausting. What kind of backwards development process is that. I mean seriously. I never thought I’d have to get this involved in a forum to beg for basic features to get acknowledged. Unbelievable.

Frankly: because without you assembling a troop of people they are just YOUR frustrations and you alone are simply not important enough to warrant any action by Asobo.

And since this forum us not meant to anyone’s personal ranting outlet, the voting system is suppoed to show Asobo that the problem is important to many people OR that many people actually perceive it as a problem. And the stuff with the most votes wins.

  1. In general I agree that the achievements are bugged and/or their requirements are poorly defined.

  2. I completed “My Way” long before SU5 and I did it 100% manual. No Co-Pilot at all. I handled the ATC, I taxi’d to and from my parking spots. I’m pretty sure that touching any AI assistance at all invalidates this.*

  3. Because of #1 and #2 there is a lot of rumour/superstition in the community. Nobody really knows why an achievement popped for them. Everybody is guessing + the best Asobo support have to offer is “ask the community” (where we are all just guessing)

  4. Specifically “weekly activities” (Decathlon) - they have not been weekly as long as I remember. Didn’t they even change the phrase to “spotlight activities”?
    I also haven’t seen an activity since Xbox release (unless “discovery flights” are actually “spotlight activities”)

  5. Journeyman popped for me at 600 hours. And my progress towards Wing Commander hit 50% at 600 hours.
    Have the conditions of the achievement been changed? Does it count Sim Rate increased flying time at a lower hourly rate? (Seems reasonable, but then why not reflect that in the Profile flight time amount?)

  6. To add to all of the bugs with the achievements in general there is the ever present risk that all of your progress will be wiped.

Finally.

Very soon Asobo will release a multiplayer DLC which will cost the same as a full AAA title.

Presumably this DLC will be built on the same buggy foundation as the achievements and rely on many of the same mechanisms.

I honestly hope that the work they are doing towards the Reno Races release includes a major overhaul of the way user data is stored (to avoid wipes) and whatever other bugs are impacting achievement progress because I honestly can’t imagine a $60 DLC that is fundamentally flawed and full of bugs leaving anything but a sour taste in the mouth.

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This is my biggest concern - I really want Reno to be a success but the foundation for stat tracking and achievements needs to be solidified.

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Actually I believe the voting was intended for “wishlist” items and bugs were triaged based on ticket #s. But I may be mistaken.

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Personally, I could care less about achievements but they should ofcourse work given that this is a requirement, yet again, for Xbox games and this is an Xbox game now.

Picketing over achievements not working is extreme, I understand the sarcasm. But the issues this game is going through now needs to be dealt with before they spend time and effort on fixing achievements.

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