+1 for the OP
The most fun in sim soaring is multiplayer and we have a very active 2000+ member group Sim Soaring Club
Yesterday’s ‘Wednesday night’ flight was a 385km blitz around Taiwan and we had over 20 pilots rock up for the meet. We all load the same weather, yesterday’s had good thermals and a 15knot wind blowing from the SE which provided lift on most of the mountain slopes on track, load the same ‘task’ (i.e. PLN flightplan) and load into the sim at the same time and fly a coordinated start. From then on it’s a heady race in fairly close proximity all the way around the assigned course.
Here’s the killer. although we’ve ensured we have great gliders, soaring weather & tow planes in MSFS 2024:
We flew that task yesterday in MSFS 2020.
Note we ALL bought MSFS2024 pretty much as soon as it came out - MS got our revenue but we had no idea they had made naive but catastrophic errors moving from 2020 to 2024. We thought we were going to get MSFS 2020 with better graphics (great!) and career mode (meh).
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Overwhelmingly the worst new feature introduced in MSFS 2024 is every player gets randomised clouds - the rising air is under the clouds so as a soaring simulation MSFS 2024 has a colossal fundamental flaw. Please UPVOTE the bug report as given in the Sim Soaring Club post a couple up from this one.
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The inability to load a PLN file in MSFS 2024 absolutely kills our ability to share a common task among multiple players (sure, there are plenty of buttons in the EFB, but they don’t work). It is not possible to have a 300km+ multiplayer soaring task with players just looking at the task sketched on a piece of paper. We have some workarounds to shoehorn our ‘PLN’ flightplan tasks into the glider nav instruments from outside the sim, but this is a serious pain, and pilots have to be warned NOT to enter the EFB which will mess up a task even if it’s already loaded.
So in summary, 1. & 2. above are just unexpected regressions from Asobo/Working Title moving from MSFS2020 to MSFS2024 which have had a catastrophic effect on multiplayer gliding.
The other points from the OP particularly affect the stability of MSFS 2024, which in the main affects everybody. Worryingly the major stability issue we now have if multiple players spawn into the same airport seems to be NEW as of SU2. We sometimes develop workarounds, like for this we’ve started spawning at random distances a long way away from the start airfield and SLEWING over to where the task is going to start, but that is yet another painful workaround.