Wait until casuals wreck their first 2024 career mode airplane (details and spoilers)

Discussion Hub Activities, Career & Challenges
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For those that do not know, when you start your company in career mode, you are able to buy a plane at a discount. You then choose some insurance for it. None of the insurances offer 100% protection. Currently the highest tier of insurance is broken and offers 0% like the lowest. If you crash your plane, you lose it forever, or get a hefty repair bill. All subsequent planes after the first one are full cost.

This means, that for most players (casual ones), they will get that first plane for 20k or so credits, wreck it, and have their career mode end immediately once they realize they will have to do sightseeing missions for 100 real life hours to get another 172 if they got the cheapest insurance. Keep in mind, there is no indication on the insurance screen how much you get for missions, or if you can be profitable with the highest level of insurance (you can). So I think a lot of casuals will pick the cheapest option.

The punishment for career mode is so brutal itā€™s like late 80s game design. With the highest insurance, you get 80% back (currently broken and you actually get 0%), but even then you will still have to play for around 20 hours or so real time to buy another 172.

Iā€™m calling my shot, the amount of rage is going to be intense once casual players get to this point. I honestly canā€™t fathom how that passed a game design meeting. Anyone who wants a hyper hardcore career mode is already going to play one of the 3rd party ones, or probably already is because progress transfers from other games. The entire draw I would think for Asobo would be casual players who need more than just a sim to keep playing (and spend money on the store).

Please donā€™t flame me, I know many people have attached identities to being hardcore and getting good, or whatever else. I made this post to have an honest discussion about this. Should there be a safety net for crashing your last plane if youā€™re out of money? Is the solution really to delete your career mode and start over?

It should also be noted most casual players fly at max throttle while cruising, this will rapidly damage most planes, and you also have to pay for that. Iā€™m not sure how I feel about all this because I think Iā€™ll be fine, but I know itā€™s gonna get spicy when people catch up.

EDIT: It happened to me. I hit ALT + N to skip to take-off from the ramp and went straight to a you crashed screen. It never loaded in, just straight to that sceen. I attempted to open task manager and close the game and did not hit ok on the screen. Didnā€™t work, when I loaded back in the damage was done. Also, insurance is broken and covered 0% even though I had the highest tier which is supposed to cover 85%.

Buckle up, I called my shot and Iā€™m sticking to it. These brutal punishments, combined with casuals and bugs are going to result in SPICY rage.

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Having just gone down the route of not buying first plane at first opportunity non-owner missions do start to pay more after only a few more missions - medium cargo with C208 return 20-25k per flight. It will be fine.

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As I type I just got the discounted plane and am flying it to destinationā€¦ Iā€™ll be back here in a couple of hours after I crash it on landing to complain. :wink:

Naturally I got the cheapest insurance.

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I mean your right, but I like it this way. I mean if you lose your plane to a bug, than thats going to enrage people.
So question since I have not got that far yet, are you not aloud to restart the flight from the start in case something odd happens? You can do that in the early missions I done it, when my mouse stopped working in VR. That not an option when you have your own plane? Because also, there is suppose to be wear and tear on your own plane too. So you might want to watch out for that also.

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I think piloting, even in digital form, should reward care.
Itā€™s not Grand Theft Autoā€¦ :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

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Education is the key. As it stands, the emphasis in the tutorials is light on the kinds of details on which players are being graded/penalized. To be fair, I donā€™t know if itā€™s truly capable of recognizing good or bad airmanship, just deterministic outcomes of a plan-on-rails using modules that contain too many bugs and unchecked errors at the time of this writing. This includes flight objectives that are vague, unchangeable, and when revealed, often border on suicidal.

Barring the ability to fix any of that, yeah, itā€™ll need to be nerfed. At least until they figure out where the regressions are.

There has to be some telemetry to see where the issues are. Right?

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Dark Souls ā€” the Flight Simulator

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That is true and I fear Iā€™ll be one of them. Thatā€™s frustrating because I want to do the firefighting and other missions. Again, career mode is kinda neat after all but still too restrictive

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I am very much in favor of consequence, otherwise actions donā€™t matter. However, I donā€™t think they should be so brutal that essentially someone has to quit. Which it does not appear to be the case here unless it happens very early on. Even then it seems they can recover by going up the cert tree and unlocking the later specialization missions.

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If you can hit ā€˜restartā€™ in time when you are going down, wouldnā€™t that dodge the bullet?

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I think a good temporary solution is that crashes donā€™t save the flight. You just go back and have to do it again. Thatā€™s enough of a penalty for most.

The things that cause crashes in the sim are often bugs, anyway - terrain spikes, bumps in the runway, etc. Iā€™d rather see it knock you for wear and tear by way of maintenance costs and inefficiency by fuel/time costs.

If they get the sim dialed in to a point where crashes are entirely on the user, then maybe revisit down the line.

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I lost the plane! :smiley:

Took off, set autopilot, and went to walk the dogs. Returned to a death screen. No idea why it crashed. Not really enraged at all, because before buying it I waited to be able to afford to lose it. Also I could have insured it.

If people are dead-set on doing things that are stupid (crashing without insurance or planning for ability to do so without insurance) it is completely fair to suffer the consequences.

I knew the risk of walking the dogs. Could have paused it instead. It is part of the fun.

Now I have the full price replacement, should probably insure that one before I know I can afford to lose it.

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I may be the only one, but anyone here remember Star Wars Galaxies and itā€™s original death mechanics? When your character died, you lost everything and had to recover your belongings from your corpse. Items like weapons would get damaged too.

Some players werenā€™t happy with this, so they eventually removed all penalties. But for me, that change killed the excitement of venturing into the wilderness. Not having damage (to weapons, clothing, etc) also made the in-game inflation skyrocket. Games need to have money sinks.

The point Iā€™m trying to make is this: without the risk of losing something, the thrill and feeling of accomplishment fades.

I respect others opinion on it especially more casual players perspective, but since this is not an MMORPG, then having this as an option would be the best way, in a similar fashion as one would choose to disable failures on study-level planes.

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Oh, it is just part of the method for Asobo to sell their not-yet-here simcoins for the career mode. So they can basically sell you the same game contents twice or more, first as aircraft module, and then with countless possibilities as means to avoid the hellish grind.

Making the career mode with hellish grind and no economy difficulty options, serverside credit account. And this crash punishment combines with the always extreme winds and turbulence in career missions. It was all mechanics focused on selling simcoins.

Think about it, many players likely have enough patience to do a hellish grind for an aircraft once, but if they easily lost it by crashing and facing another hellish grind, purchasing simcoins would be a much more attempting option.

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Why should we expect there to be esoteric things like playability balancing when obviously everything is still in the ā€œletā€™s just implement it and fix it laterā€ stage?

(Yes, Iā€™m annoyed and cynical.)

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Hardcore MSFS

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I just skipped to take off in my cub and it auto crashed my plane before loaded in. Just straight to a you crashed screen.

Good thing hardcore brutal punishments like this exist because they have absolutely zero bugs. Unbelievable. Buckle up bois and girls. The rage when this happens to casuals is gonna be spicy AF.

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But people wanted realism and now you are telling me realism is too hard ?

Welcome to the real world sonny

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So if I crash the plane I lose it? Good. Thatā€™s what I wanted out of a realistic career mode. Be careful out there! (Like irl)

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[Moderator edit: please do not ping the Community Managers] I think there should be a warning before you sell that Cessna at 23K, I saw the 171,000 Cr for selling it and I thought it was a money glitch. I was awaken with a steep surprised when I went back to used market and found out the C172 is now 250K. I donā€™t mind the grinding but I think you should be warned of the consequence. Itā€™s all good I got money to unlock more certification but I am uncertain if everyone is going to feel the same.

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