Too Much Negativity Around the Webs Lately! Let's Take a Moment to Have a Think!

General Discussion & Community Support General Discussion
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It seems that there are a lot of newbies to the simulation world! As such, perhaps they aren’t familiar with what to expect from a flight simulator. Simulators are always evolving (X-Plane and Prepar3d are the same)… As they evolve, things break! Give them a minute, and it will get better, but expect every update that fixes 10 things, might break 5 to 8, but hotfixes and future updates will address these.

Have a bit of respect for the complexities of the software and the work ahead for the developers! Think of how it was at release compared to now! Now compare it to the other simulators out there.

I’m not usually the ‘Keyboard Warrior’ type, but really after 33+ years of simming, seeing the best, worst, and everything in between… This has to be put out there to give some perspective. If the people who aren’t happy with what’s come from FS2020 were around in 1988, MSFS v.2 would never have (excuse the pun) gotten off the ground… X-Plane wouldn’t have had a snowball’s hope in hell to even gain the cult following it initially garnered, etc.

I was a fan of MSFS all that time right up to around 2011 when it seemed apparent, at least to me, with the failure of MSFlight and dissolution of Microsoft’s Ace Studios. Microsoft were out of the FS game. I begrudgingly adopted X-Plane 10.03 and all its buggy, laggy glory… Forsaking the software investment garnered over the years and the computer which mostly ran FSX (fair amount of CTDs from Out of Memory errors) okay as long as it wasn’t overwhelmed with add-ons.

X-Plane also required more memory both onboard and in the graphics card, so I would upgrade and follow along the updates and changelogs religiously, updating what was pertinent to my setup, and ignoring what wasn’t. I had to learn to use a more archaic menu based UI rather than the point/click of the older FSX. not sure how much of today’s simmers would have the patience for that, never mind the reconfigurations of hardware/software to customize it to your preferences.

The release of X-Plane 11 brought an updated UI, but also a relearning of many of the aspects of the software as well as some aircraft which had to be updated (a few repurchased to stay compatible). Again, software was buggy and laggy… Even though they had created a new plausible world, graphics were cartoony at best with horrible grey clouds, not much for shadows or reflections until later builds.

The two saving graces (first of which FS2020 doesn’t have yet) were the excellent flight model and one could get MS2020-like (Same occasions even better than), but you either had to put in days of work, or use someone else’s and bring the effort down from days to hours. But then you had to have a beefy HDD to store anything… For example, Orthophotos, elevation mesh, and 3D buildings to match FS2020 quality (ZL16-17) for Washington, Oregon, California, Nevada, Arizona, and New Mexico, plus higher resolution (ZL19) Las Angeles, San Fancisco, Las Vegas, and Grand Canyon (into which is great for flying an F-4 Phantom or F-18 Hornet)… Would be about 600GB on the drive.

I was a Beta tester of FS2020, and I don’t think it necessarily gives me more merit than others who had to wait for release, but the quality of the sim at that time was much better in its beta state than many already released titles in terms of appearances and stability! It was, and is the best full world simulator out there today!

Jay

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Different kinds of people have different expectations.
You are a self described 33y+ hardcore simmer who enrolled as a Alpha/Beta tester early on.
Voluntary Alpha/Beta testers have a high tolerance for bugs and broken software, and that’s OK.

The vast majority of customers do not enroll in Alpha/Beta testing and have higher expectations of stability for the software they purchased.

People who work hard during the week, and whose only hobby it is to open up MSFS on the week end and enjoy a few hours of flying … are not happy to find a 50G mandatory update that does not want to download followed by a storm of CTDs.

By all means let us celebrate the complexities of the software, and be patient wrt functionality/realism.
But not at the expense of some basic quality assurance and quality control.

I for one would not mind trading faster release cycles for longer intervals and a more stable product that I can enjoy without spending countless hours debugging issues after each new release.

Thank you.

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Amen. I still have high hopes for the sim but at the moment I am using it merely as a game. For the time being I am fine to go low and slow and enjoy the scenery. Not exactly what I expected, but hey. Still, I put a stop on payware buying until my trust in Asobo is restored. Having witnessed plenty of world updates and hotfixes, my patience is spent.

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(Almost) totally agree. It’s important to remember that MSFS was never intended to be a finished product but a 10-year project. So the devs concentrated on VFR flying because that’s where they could privide the largest difference to P3D and XPlane.

That not everything went without a hitch so far is undeniable. But remember P3D and Xplane weren’t That brilliant 10 years ago and there the devs didn’t warn in advance and then charged customers for newer versions and improvements. Asobo IMHO have very good feelers for the Community and respond quickly.
So I guess the main problem is the monthly deadlines which leave the devs little time for testing and most likely produce a tremendous amount of pressure.

The only similar project I have witnessed was Elite:Dangerous and there the big updates came yearly (and had to be paid!). And while this one ran pretty well from the beginning too, there always were complaints. And the devs didn’t have to consider that prople might gave actually flown their spacecraft and would complain about realism :smiley:

So if people would see MSFS more as a work in progress life would be easier … for them and most others as well.

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It’s a feeling of exasperation. For many of us we’ve been experiencing CTDs to some degree since January, been sending in tickets, been told endlessly to just empty our community folder, and otherwise have had no sense of anything being addressed until now when it’s beginning to affect more and more people, including XBox gamers. So pardon us for not being too optimistic when we’re told that the game we’ve been unable to play at all now since SU5 will be fixed by the end of the month.

My fear is that a patch is released that only addresses the issues suffered by those for whom emptying the community folder was the answer, Asobo declares victory and goes back to releasing more and more superfluous content that breaks something else leaving the rest of us still wallowing in CTD/freeze purgatory.

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I assumed they meant that it would be supported for 10 years, not that it would take 10 years to get to a stable product.

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I believe there is more disappointment than negativity, users had high expectations from MSFS. Now after a year these expectations are not answered yet.
Downplaying a concurrent product is never a good thing. MSFS has to go forward on it’s own strength!

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Along these lines, I also don’t seriously expect them to actively develop the product for the next nine years. My assumption is that world updates will go on for a few years and several paid DLCs will come (helicopters, gliders, trains :-)). Once five years have gone by, sales will inevitably decline. The serious simming crowd will make up for the majority of users left. 3rd-party add-on developers will have a good business with them, but there won’t be much money to make for Asobo. Only backend costs will remain. So I assume it will enter a maintenance (i.e. bug fix only) phase in the second half of that 10 year timeline.

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LOL, got to admit, this is more than reasonable comment.

I think they have been managing multiple significant branches and that now the big X-Box push is out of the way, some of the things the simming community have been clamoring for will now start getting properly addressed… maybe…fingers crossed…

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I have to agree on the op’s post. There is a contradict on the expectations of hardcore simmer and a curious xbox user, which does not need explaining.

One has to keep in mind also the complexity of these softwares, our multi-million full flight sim of airbus has lot of bugs, and it’s used professionally every day. Our Airbusses themselves has lots of bugs and temporary erroneus behaviours on their software. Yesterday we were wondering why the heck do we keep having a ”LS tuning disagree” message on the MCDU until we remember it could sometimes be triggered and how to reset the system.

Flying isn’t hard but the software around it is increasingly complex and needs a metric ■■■■ ton of patience to operate.

Cheers.

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I have been using simulators for a long time, maybe 20 years or so, and I have been happy with MSFS until the recent SU and the hot fixes. It worked rock solid, no CTD, acceptable performance, it simply worked for me.

I know that MSFS (or any kind of simulator) is a very complex software project. A large part of my job is also software development, and my engineering software is much simpler than MSFS. I understand that things break. I understand that it takes time to fix them.

Right now I am a family man with two small kids around me. This seriously limits my free time for anything. I just want to start MSFS when everyone is sleeping finally, and do a quick flight, maybe 30 mins before I get interrupted by a screaming child. Right now I don’t have time to read forums, trying workarounds, hacking things myself, hoping that the sim will not crash just before I land. I will just get more frustrated after a long day, instead of getting my mind off the everyday problems.

The value of MSFS is getting close to zero for me in this situation.

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I agree with everything the OP has said but with one reservation.

I used X-Plane 11 for about 3.5 years and, yes, it was in a constant update/enhancement process during that time with addons being broken all the time and needing to be updated by 3rd party devs.

The main difference I see with the two sims in this respect, however, is that when Laminar released a beta to final it was very well tested and pretty much rock solid. When ASOBO have released an update it has mostly been buggy and has created a lot of new issues for the sim.

ASOBO’s testing methods and procedures are absolutely appalling and nowhere near at the same level as those adopted by Laminar. They just want to get the update out of the door as fast as possible and tick another box on the ‘to do’ list. This lack of inadequate testing is why a lot of us here almost dread any new update.

I personally think that FS2020 is fantastic and I definitely won’t be returning to X-Plane 11. But that doesn’t mean that I am blind to a lot of the things that ASOBO are doing wrong. And inadequate and rushed beta testing is most definitely one of the things they are doing wrong. They really need to make significant improvements in this regard and ‘up’ their game.

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Being critical is not being negative and it annoys me that there are some people here that don’t allow others to be critical.

Asobo have chased the money and have not delivered in many areas of this sim and chasing the gamers on X Box has caused them to lose focus on the sim IMHO.

The complicated update process where it can update through the store or the X Box app and the fact that there are all these other subsidiary apps like gaming services and the store app that need to be up to date is very frustrating .

Asobo have created the negativity with their hopeless implementation of this software and have brought it on themselves by not listening to people being critical.

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Or perhaps they now have twice as many branches to maintain and debug. Personally I think they have bitten off more than they can chew for such a small company.

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Do you ever get the days when you get in the cockpit and suddenly the plane disappears and you’re back sitting in the departure lounge? Bugs I can live with. Game breaking instability less so.

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Well the product is stable (mostly). With a complex product that is unusually demanding on the hardware, there will always be people having problems. We don’t even know how large a percentage of people are even having CTDs. And noone knows how many of those CTDs, people are having, are due to a slightly unstable system, overclocking, driver issues etc. I’ve had CTDs with Photoshop for a long time until I realised it has something to do with the graphics settings.

What I meant is that MSFS didn’t have it’s full range of functions from the beginning. And undeniably functions and content have been added every month over the past year.
And as I wrote above: XPlane and P3D weren’t that well received 10 years ago either.

Back to Elite:Dangerous: they had several small updates during the year where they addressed bugs and gameplay issues and then have been offering a (payable) DLC every winter with new content. So this game wasn’t finished either. In the beginning you couldn’t land on planets, had no storyline, very few ships etc. etc.

I see parallels here: the differences are that Elite:Dangerous has little modding potential and no 3rd party developers and no marketplace (apart from liveries and merchandising). Secondly all DLCs so far have been completely free of charge. And thirdly people expected MSFS to be on the same level with P3D and XPlane and that was due to the marketing that promised a kind of perfect sim. And for for the majority of the people out there, who simply want to get a feeling what flying is all about, it probably is perfect enough because they have no point of reference. Even for me who’s been around flight simming for 40 years, MSFS is better than anything I have ever known (because I skipped simming after FSX)
For the hardcore simmers who know everything about aircraft, systems, IFR, ATC, programming flightplans, navigation and weather or are even real pilots themselves, MSFS is still a little lackluster.

But in the end MSFS has to make money. And sales and marketing is mostly about getting the largest crowd possible to buy your stuff as fast as possible. And sorry to say that: the hardcore simmers simply ARE NOT the largest crowd: but they are the most demanding crowd, the moodiest crowd and of course the longlasting crowd who won’t get bored and thus won’t quit fast (and even if they quit they might come back)

So you will always cater to those who bring in the most money in the shortest amount of time first. After that most companies then simply drop the product altogether.
MS/Asobo seem to have a long-term strategy introducing more and more complex things either themselves or through 3rd party developers in the marketplace. That’s were they will hook the hardcore simmers and then make their money with 3rd party add ons, when sales of the sim itself will dry up.

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When people are still taking the time to lodge complaints it means they have not given up yet. Even a threat to go back to a previous sim means they have not given up yet.

When they really do give up they wont bother posting here any more. It might be my imagination but that’s exactly the trend I kind of see going on in the forum. Not a good sign for the sim.

edit didn’t mean to direct that specifically at you Dal

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Could also be that people are having less problems now. People without problems post less.

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Lets hope so

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Agree with kido007dz. I work like a dog during the week (surprise!…I still commute 3 hrs a day). I have maybe 2 hrs max at the end of every week to grab a beer and go flying. I do t have the time or the energy to be tinkering with LODs and config.ini files 12 directories away from my MSFS directory. I shouldn’t have to use regedit to change a setting. Like my iPhone, for $160 it should just WORK. (I’ve been using every iteration of MSFS since Bruce Artwick for the Apple IIe, Xplane since 1995, and P3D since 2016.) I want the eye candy and FPS I paid for to use on my i9000x and 3090. And mandatory updates?….don’t even get me started.

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