I deal with uncertainty by waiting to buy things on sale. Almost invariably, when I do end up buying the things on sale I love them and can’t imagine my hanger without them. If there was a 24 hour test drive I’d probably buy half the stuff on the marketplace just because I’d know what I was missing out on.
Side note, I’ve been avoiding first party planes because I don’t have premium deluxe and its discount so somewhat illogically I think of them as “bad deals”. Again, if there was a 24 hour test drive I’d probably not be able to keep myself from buying a bunch of them. I’d instantly go from “I’m paying $5 more than I have to!” to “what’s $5, a coffee? This plane is awesome!”
I get that , I’m the same now.
guess I’m fortunate to not suffer from FOMO, I’m more than happy to wait for reviews and sales to buy higher priced, hopefully better quality add ons , a test period would just reinforce my decision to buy or not .
Quality over Quantity for me now, there’s plenty of deleted 3rd party products cluttering up my content manager
Do you realize how self contradictory this is? On the one hand you tell us to do our research, which will be of limited and questionable resources. You also assume that the info found during this research will be reliable and accurate, while in a later post acknowledging that isn’t the case.
On the other hand, you are saying the company holding all the cards, with all the resources to effectively do the same research and deliver working products, can’t be expected to do so.
I say this as someone who has a knack of heavily researching a product before purchasing, only to be negatively impacted by some obscure flaw that renders it useless for me. A flaw that doesn’t come up with run of the mill research, and can only be found if searching for the exact specifics. My most recent case is a problem only I seem to be having with the preview of AMD’s frame generation in the sim. I had looked into it a fair bit before giving it a shot, but there were no reports about my game breaking problem associated with it. At least that was free, so no money wasted and I’m happy with my performance anyway without it.
To avoid derailing the thread, I won’t go into specifics here. That’s not the point and you can read about it in the one of the FMF threads if you really care to. My point is that it’s very possible to do what you suggest and still get fooled. So is that a problem of just not doing the right research (and if so, how does one ensure infallible results?), or proving your own counterpoint that it’s ridiculous to expect research to be enough to determine if an add-on is worth the risk?
What about when you get an addon that just causes your specific game to really struggle.
Like I bought the Mig29 a while back, no one else had problems, but I went from like 45-70fps each time I used it, down to like 5-15 fps. Totally unflyable. Waste of like 20$+
This is a noble thought. But the reality is that different people have different ideas about what makes a product ‘worth the money.’ Sure, there are obviously defective items being sold on the marketplace. And for that reason I wholeheartedly agree with a trial/refund policy.
For me, the ease of mapping controls to my peripherals in SPAD is of prime importance. Good luck finding a comprehensive and reliable source for reviews of how a developer handles that.
Fair points. I guess my thoughts are based on my own experience. I’ve never bought a sim product on Day One release. Most devs seem to have a Discord during development I can track progress and see shortcomings upon release, and how they seem to perform with timely updates. YouTube has been another source of info. Most posters list the specs of their pc, so I can get an idea of what my system should do with a particular product. I’ve yet to get stuck with a plane I don’t enjoy using.
I’m not here to defend MS and their refund policy thru Marketplace, but 3 years in I think it’s safe to say they’ve looked at this from all angles and decided the current policy works for the most part for MS and the majority of users. Perfect? No, but good enough for most.
I admit that I have made some impulse buys that haven’t worked out. In fact, there have been a number of planes I said “Day 1 purchase for me” that I’ve been disappointed in - not because they were ‘bad’ planes, but because they weren’t what I expected, in terms of mapability (is that a word?) or performance on my system.
I agree that it’s smarter to vet these planes using Discord, YouTube, and this forum. Unfortunately, that doesn’t always work, for various reasons. And in my case I just write them off as a fairly small financial loss. It’s the ones that surprise me in a good way that keep me coming back.
A thread where several of us laid out a request for a fair and equitable refund policy that had the positive attention of Jayne (lead CM) has “disappeared” from the forum.
I also asked Jayne, during a live Q&A session via Twitch chat to ask Jörg about it, which she did (the recorded Q&A session still exists where this occurred.) and he said they needed to discuss it afterward, but that was the last of it.
Steam has a perfect “try before you buy” strategy which seems to work pretty well for buyer and seller.
You just buy the game/dlc and if you don’t use it for more than 2 hours you can always refund.
I already got refunds for a couple of disappointing games. Always within 48 hours. No questions asked.
I think this partly was because of the legal discussion in that thread, which is why I caution anyone from bringing that into the forums if we want to have a constructive discussion here.
It’s very possible that the MSFS team would like a different marketplace/refund policy, but broader MS policy is what they have to work with unless they convince many folks in other parts of MS and the Xbox Gaming division otherwise.
I see the OP point. On steam you can just try anything for a limited amount of time. It gives you more freedom to try things without risk. It’s a great feature. One reason I don’t see Microsoft doing this is because a good amount of the aircraft in the market are just eye candy with little real world functionality. Those planes would have massive refunds if they let you try before you buy. On the other side of that, it would help weed out the poor performers and maybe they could use the refund statistics to remove the money grab products from the Market.
I’ve said it before! There should be standards for add ons released in the market. The minimum acceptable quality should be on par with the Asobo default aircraft as far as textures, system functionality and flight model. That would help thin out the sub par offerings and there would be less disappointing purchases. Or maybe have an arcade category of aircraft. They would be price fixed and labeled “not realistic and for arcade use.”
If they refunded Marketplace tokens instead of cash, then Microsoft could keep the money, and the users wouldn’t feel cheated as they could use the tokens on a different add-on they like more. It would be a win win.
I don’t see why they can’t redo this system for FS24 too. The Marketplace seemed pretty half baked when it first appeared in a Sim Update, and I was surprised it wasn’t fully fleshed out given how large of a revenue stream it could be.
DCS is a perfect example of how a trial system could work.
It’s not available in all modules but I wonder which ones get the purchase afterwards.
For example, there’s a really bad rendition of the F-5 Tiger II just released to MSFS. Watched a couple of vids and immediately felt it was garbage by FS2020 standards. If I’d purchased it tjst would be my money down the drain.
In DCS I was able to not only trial the F-5 (a fairly old module) but also a terrain module as well for 2 weeks, the F5 being far superior to the MSFS version. Found i liked both and purchased on the next sale.
Why is this so hard for MSFS to emulate….it isn’t. Developers will need to opt in and those that don’t will probably loose sales as a result.
I’d like to chime in on this without breaking a moderator NDA… @ArchBlizzard278 touched on it as to the reason and this is one of them among several others.
I do want to mention that that topic was going great during the time it was first created as it brought up some good issues and points. Thus, why Jayne responded.