This Triggered Me

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Hi, please do not consider this post as:

 1. bug reporting
 2. staff reporting
 3. general complain

Consider this post as a ‘consumer/client’ personal opinion.
I’m a brazillian person, live in Brazil, work hard with development since my 16 years (currently I’m 32 years old).
I’m with MSFS since the so called ‘release’, I didn’t bought it because:

1. I knew it wasn't ready
2. It is not cheap, price here is 249BRL (the simplest version) which currently is something about 46USD, the BRL value is like 25% minimum country wage, for a unfinished/buggy product, this is HIGH

That is why I used the Gama Pass version, I had xbox and used it before, it was cheap at the time, 1BRL first month and 5BRL next months, paying this for a entire year doesn’t get even near the total price of the simplest MSFS version. For a unfinished product, was worthy at the time.
Sadly after some months, microsoft changed/increased the price to 29BRL/month which made me cancel the subscription, doesn’t worthy anymore, then I took a break of MSFS to let them have some time to fix the problems and complete unfinished/missing features.

After some updates/months, I got my Game Pass subscription again to check the state of the product.
For my surprise, not even the launcher/downloader is fully fixed/working, the same problems me/and other consumers had when it got ‘released’ still exists today. Sadly.
Just an example, some airport with bugged terrain level (one of many I saw) I reported last year still exists today, even after many SIM and World updates, the easy to fix problem still exists.

I was working some addon to have charts (PDFs) loaded directly in-game, from manually loaded charts/and or external official providers like FAA Video. With the current product and SDK state this was being surprising hardly and with the many product problems was talking a long time.

This last week, after working hard in my job, Friday night arrived and then I thought “Finally, lets take the rest of night just to boot up the SIM, let it update, download and install the latest SDK version”. My surprise, It didn’t wanted to update but download and reinstall the entire product, I didn’t wanted to stress, just let it do its jobs and went to sleep.

Saturday, I went to computer, download/installation was finished then I started it. Some ‘welcome/startup configure default settings’ screen showed up and asked my to configure initial settings all over again, so, my previous settings was gone. Configured it, went to manage the content to remove all useless airports/aircraft I don’t use and free up some space, restarted the product.

My surprise, one more, it started to download/install all the useless content I removed and then it again showed ‘welcome/startup configure default settings’ and asked me to configure all again. So, I thought, must be some problem with the installation, I removed entire product, all directories related to it and settings and used the entire Saturday to do a clean install again just to get the same loop problem after it finished, then I saw many other consumers also had the same problem UI broken and reset user settings

I don’t think the current covid situation plus being weekend is an excuse to no have an answer from the creators of the product, at least a “We are aware and investigating the issue” but nothing, we can see many other small companies not from “AAA” product which does have better consumer communication/response.
Lost my weekend on this.

Sunday morning I saw this post, Might be time to abandon MSfS which I didn’t saw anything bad on it, at forum category which is targeted for community ‘General Discussion’, no support request. no bug reporting, just some consumer with his own personal option about the product.

Sunday night, I saw that some staff moderator closed the topic because it seems the topic is not ‘constructive’:

“We value constructive criticism about MSFS as it helps the developers further understand, triage and resolve problems within MSFS.”

The topic wasn’t support request, bug reporting, the forum has its own categories/areas for this and also the zend helpdesk, the topic had no complains about the product, about the support team, about the forum staff, and no swearing on people, was at community ‘General Discussion’ which makes no need to be well ‘documented’.

With the current state of the product, the current state of how the company manage the product (additional content updates without first assure the existing things are fully working/fixes), with that topic (which was a clean consumer opinion) being closed, all this makes me think the MSFS is just following/being turned into the same way StarCitizen is, which for me is just collect revenue/money without delivery a minimum fully working product (focus on minimum, it doesn’t need to be complete, just needs have the current features fully working).

My forethought for this topic:

1. will be called non-constructive
2. will be closed and/or
3. will be removed

I think it is time for me to again, sadly, cancel the Game Pass and take a long time away this time. Sadly.

I probably forgot to write more other things, anyway, thank you all.

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Shame to see you go.
Only some have issues and most seem happy. You are in the smaller group of not happy.
Perhaps your pc is the issue, basics like settings, even overclocking can cause issues.
Anyway, good luck and hope you find the sim suitable one day.

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Yours is a very heartfelt comment and mirrors many things already said and noted by others. I agree with a lot of what you say.

I think a few people are beginning to realise development is heading towards fitting all of it into an XBOX, hence being forced to make compromises. The current LOD problem of scenery popping in late is a typical game scenario. Happens with Satisfactory and other games with fog. Give it time and there’ll be a mist effect in MSFS before long. They’ll call it atmospheric effects or something.

Thank you for your post and well done for struggling with a non-native language to write your thoughts down.

Best wishes.

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Man dont mention the mist, they obviously havent thought of that yet and I for one would hate to see it in-game. I have seen what appears to be other things get dumbed down especially during peak hours that makes me think they under estimated server load / net bandwidth.

To op: Keep checking back things seem to go from good to terrible to better to worse to almost perfect with this game. Right now it running pretty good for me here.

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Question: Why? Removing items isn’t going to increase stability or reduce loading times.

If your HDD/SSD/M2 is short on space then I recommend getting a bigger one rather than removing parts of the software product you don’t think you’re going to need.

Does it work ok if you don’t fiddle, leave it alone and just do a vanilla install?

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Great post and as a Star Citizen backer from day 1 on the basic package I couldn’t agree more. I also started MFS with the Gamepass version and then when the price changed for Gamepass I decided to buy the Premium Deluxe. First mistake was buying it on Windows Store. Second mistake was buying the Premium version which just contains a bunch of unfinished unsupported un moddable extra planes. It’s actually kind of sad. Microsoft says they are listening but they aren’t. You can see the eyes rolling on stream and it’s just getting old.

You know why commercial flight simulators have bad graphics? Because they are flight simulators not scenery barn arcades designed to sell 100’s of cosmetic DLC at insane prices. While I do appreciate the fidelity of MFS I essentially still to this day had a better working simulator on launch day. After six months of patches almost nothing works including key critical elements of the simulator like oh flight planning and the actual simulation and physics. Now Asobo is actually telling me to edit every plane flight_model.cfg and change two functions which I then have to divide their values by 2 haha. I mean seriously this company doesn’t even hotfix their own mistakes. WHO DOES THIS? What good is all the eye candy if it’s also marred with technical issues like terrain spikes and teeth and tears in texture seams and the list goes on and on.

On top of that the QA level is so low I am having all kinds of issues this update again and to be honest I just said to hell with it. The sim is still installed. It’s actually too much of a pain to reinstall so I will leave it installed but yeah I’m done for now too. It all sounds great on paper but the core product should have been finished first and sold as early access in the current state. IMO Premium Deluxe model should be abandoned and all players should be given the Premium content FREE. I say this as someone who already bought it because it’s no use if it’s unsupported and locked behind DRM. I can’t even edit the aircraft.cfg to remove a copilot model.

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Sorry you’ve had so many issues OP, hope one day you can enjoy the Sim.
Personally FS2020 is the best ive ever seen a sim this early on from release, performance, stability, aircraft and visuals, i couldn’t be happier.

best of luck bud!

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Thanks for your post! We are sorry to hear your MSFS experience hasn’t been a good one. Especially with the new bug, “UI broken and reset user settings.” This has been escalated up to the entire team as we too, think it is a big issue.

However, just want you to know that your frustrations are being heard and we are here to build a sim that the community will love. While the sim isn’t perfect and we have plenty to work through, I personally can see a lot behind the scenes and can tell you with confidence that they care so much about building something great for the community. We spend a lot of time capturing feedback and listening to the voices here when making decisions.

Of course, actions speak louder than words, so I hope this year will bring lots of great bug fixes, new features, and more refined processes the more we go on. Cheers!

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If it’s about the money, how about this?

For the money I spent for this sim I could have had the half-hour discovery flight at the local airport.

Or,

I could buy the sim and fly an XCub, a plane that costs far north of $300,000, around the world.

And,

I have all the free fuel I need. I can go anywhere and stay anywhere I want. I can pick-and-choose the weather and time of day. PLUS, I won’t get hurt no matter how badly I mess up. I’m approaching 20,000 miles, 80 countries, and 140 hours.

While I find some of the teething problems bothersome and mostly my own doing, it’s been worth every cent.

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But but, how about flight model?

I’m just kidding though :joy:. Agree with you totally.

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How can you say “you’re in the smaller group of not happy” – do you have actual numbers?

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I agree that there are plenty of amazing opportunities with this sim. I also have found my 2 or three favourite aircraft to use and I spent around 200 hours with them discovering a truely beautiful world. I’m one of the lucky ones who haven’t experienced a single CTD (as opposed to P3D) and who have a decent performance with high to ultra settings with a rather oldish PC.

BUT: I annoys me terribly that I payed a LOT of money for two additional content versions and most of the aircraft there are barely usable, not because they would crash the sim but because they have been done terribly wrong and can not be corrected by those skillful modders we have in the community. And the plane that WAS usable and well done, the Da20, has been broken in December and still is unusable. Have a look at releases like Cyberpunk what happens if games like these get released in a very comparable condition. MS/Asobo can only deal with it the way they do because we are a niche. And on top of that we can’t do anything except completely boycot the marketplace. But this won’t happen for the same reason why most strikes today are barely effective.

So crying won’t help. I believe Jummivana that Asobo really wants to create something great eventually. But right now the sim is a huge compromise between discovering the scenery and ignoring terrible aviation flaws. And rethink these awful (non existing) hotfix politics should be at a very high priority.

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Slightly off-topic but i do not understand the comments about mist.

With live weather enabled I get patches of mist and fog across the runway on a regular basis in the mountains.

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Don’t need numbers, those who complain are a minority.

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If you had a wide-spread haze everywhere it there is less for the sim to draw therefore making it run faster/smoother at the expense of seeing mist in the distance instead of landscape. Sometimes companies will use this to smooth games out.

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What I get is more akin to tiny patches of light cloud scatted about at ground level. Only in live weather though.

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@ByMaximus, I think you forgot a lot of things. Like specifics on what problems you’re having, except for the UI being broken which has apparently been fixed by an update to the gaming services app. So what else do you have?

And whatever it is you want to claim about your post, it most certainly is a “general complain”. You start off with the premise that the game is too expensive, and that you “knew it wasn’t ready” (a statement which needs an explanation, as how can you “know that” about a product you haven’t tried? A self-fulfilling prophesy perhaps?), and then go into bugged terrain at unnamed airports. There are what, 47 THOUSAND airports in this sim, give or take? That’s simply too many for any QC organization to test every square foot of every single one of them.

And yes, you say you reported them (good for you, many people complain about “bugs” they haven’t even bothered to file a report about), but how many other people did so as well? Now, obviously neither of us knows the answer to that, but what if, out of well over 2,000,000 users (a number which is several months old at this point), you were the only person to report that particular bug? They get a lot of bug reports, and they definitely need to be WAY more transparent in how they’re dealing with them, but at the same time, they have to have some way to prioritize what’s important and what isn’t.

And there’s always the angle that they released an SDK a long time ago, you just happen to be a software developer, so I’d think you could knock out fixes for those locations in a matter of a few minutes, and contribute those fixes to one of the freeware distribution websites (my personal favorite is flightsim.to) for others to enjoy.

One thing I’m really left to wonder about, especially considering how you emphasize how you need to pinch every penny until it screams, is what hardware are you running the sim on? It’s not always true, of course, but in my experience many people offering up non specific complaints such as yours are trying to run the sim on older, slower, potato rigs, and then left wondering why it didn’t work out. And considering where you live, I’m also left wondering if you are able to get a robust enough Internet connection to handle the game properly.

Anyway, I’m left after reading your post with no real information as to what your problems are, or what expectations you have/had that aren’t being met.

Anyway, that’s all I’ve got. Good luck, I guess. With your general attitude, you’re gonna need it.

Oh, one piece of advice that you’ve already received I would also recommend, and that’s to stop selectively deleting portions of the game. If you don’t use it all (and let’s be real, who even can?), then just leave it and ignore it. If you don’t have enough disk space, get more. You can get a 1TB SSD SATA disk for under $100, and give the whole thing to FS2020. Boom, space problems solved!

How am I doing so far??

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I can’t ignore all the aircraft I never fly in the aircraft selection menu!
That said, I’ve never had the problem of MSFS re-installing items which have been removed via the content manager

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Unfortunately the moderators seem to all have been drawn from the Church of ASOBO and it seems that any discussion being critical they use the COC to close it down .

There is little diversity of opinion among them other than the company line, sad but true.

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Well have a look at the star rating on the MS Store for this Game now and maybe the people that are peeved don’t visit the forum much or at all and those that are here are in the Church of ASOBO ?

Maybe its now the silent majority because those that speak up about their disappointment are flamed here just like what you are doing.