I returned for the first time, to take a look at MSFS’s progress since I bought it on release, and I’m so disappointed to see the airports still deserted of anything landing or taking off.
Can anyone please confirm whether there is any intention to improve the AI, or is MSFS really just for enjoying solo or multiplayer flying?
My concern is heightened by the fact that there appears to be no category or section on this forum specifically for AI traffic (only one for online issues).
Since day 1 this game is nothing but Issues. the Ai Control is still broken and it never gets fixed. they rather you buy stuff then Fix things. who knows they might fix it some time down the road in yr 2065. 
cast your vote as well please, here is a long thread
Lors d’un départ de JFK de New-York, j’étais le 6e en attente pour le décollage. Ce fut la seule fois où c’était réaliste.
Wow, if only I could see that!
Done, thanks. I hope devs eventually do something about it. I must admit, I will be spending no more on this sim until or unless the AI & ATC is worked on. I will check back again in a few months. 
yes . there will be, but it will be 3rd party probably or maybe the aig india group.
I totally agree that the current state is not good enough.
That said, in Southern Oregon yesterday, the AI traffic was pretty realistic around KMFR in terms of who was arriving and the amount of it, etc
To add to my concern, in the options menu, there is a slider for ‘ground aircraft density’.
Why would this even be needed if the AI airliners and GA traffic were actually working properly?
I should not need to add aircraft to sit around like ornaments to make me feel like there is some ‘life’. OK, maybe a few, but for the most part, the aircraft that are present should be those that are ‘live’ and scheduled to move, or dormantly waiting to become ‘live’.
It’s just so disappointing.
I swore to myself I would not buy addons to make this latest sim workable, (as I spent far too much money doing that for FSX), but I would begrudgingly buy one if it added this sorely lacking AI presence & behaviour.
It’s probably for generic parked aircraft
There’s no way to have data on that…Some airports can have planes parked for months that don’t move, but are “there”.
Your expectations of what good data exists are too high here.
I would say it is better as first release… Much more often now in waiting queue, more often ‘go around’ , etc…
Live traffic is partly drawn from open sources like FlightAware, but that data is only as good as what’s provided. Between latencies in the feed and the lack of an end-to-end (i.e., at gates,T/O, enroute, arrival, at gates) status, there are phases that are derived or assumed rather than explicitly shown in-game. That’s not MS’ burden.
Tying live traffic to airport activity at the gates and ramps would bring your sim performance to it’s knees. As it is now, even just turning up airport activity sliders eats away at your FPS rate. Imagine what happens if the server needs to track that in real-time vs. a pre-calculated and non-randomized setting, and that’s happening even when you’re just flying near or over an airport/field. No thanks.
Agreed
Plus I have no clue what people expect Asobo (or anyone else) to do for data and accurate traffic/ramp representations at the zillions of non commercial fields (which are the vast vast majority in the world).
Maybe at some point they could pull rough guestimates on amount and locations from sat imagery and just do randomization based upon that?
Yep. Like that idea better. Honestly, there’s just not enough compute power locally, and server performance across a multitude of varying quality Net connections, to make a high fidelity ground traffic model. In agile principles, I’d rather see the cycles and effort spent to making Aircraft performance, avionics and weather more realistic. If there’s traffic I want to improve, it’s the airborne ones.
Already answered, they are working on it, click here “https://youtu.be/u9lMr9JXU04?t=2784” it’s aircraft issue without destination data and altitude data, missing data, are filter out from MSFS, aircraft get ignored in the sim, all data taken from Flightware.
I shouldn’t have used the word ‘live’ . By ‘live’ I simply meant NOT just static eye candy, so perhaps should have said ‘active’ or ‘NPC’, hopefully you understand my meaning.
I don’t need the AI to be live as in real world, (maybe third party addons will produce those in the future anyway) ; but I do expect them to be SIMULATING believable movement of air traffic at the gate, on the taxiways, and in the air. So they should be present and in a cycle of dormant / loading / pushback / taxi / landing etc etc.
That is not unreasonable, and is certainly sorely missing here.