It’s not a question of it being about basic computer skills. I’m an IT administrator in networks and security for the past 15 years, I’ve plenty of “computer skills”. I’m also not Einstein but I’m not stupid either, where this “Marketplace” concept is too difficult for me to understand. I’m just sort of fed up of poorly thought out software that breaks all the conventions that we learn - it makes the process an utterly confusing one for newcomers and makes experienced people scratch their heads and wonder what the developers were thinking. It shouldn’t be a case of “if you know, then you know” - that’s no good for something that we invest so heavily in, this is a Microsoft product after all for which we pay a significant amount of money.
As I mentioned in other posts I spent hours troubleshooting the lack of UK and Ireland photogrammetry after having done what seemed to me like all the updates possible within the sim (not including the marketplace), including a content manager update called “UK and Ireland”, utterly making me believe that nothing else was left to do. I spent HOURS clearing caches, rebooting MSFS, removing the Community folder all for it to be something really stupid, and because I wasn’t in the “if you know, then you know” crowd. Not knowing an unknowable thing, cost me many hours of frustration and a lot of utterly avoidable work if it was clear within the Sim what was necessary to do.
Yeah, I don’t disagree with you, MSFS is a complex simulator, BUT that doesn’t mean that it should be by default an obtuse, complicated to use piece of software. The complexity of the Sim has nothing to do with its UI and UX - there is nothing stopping them from being very clear and simple. As it stands it’s surprisingly simple in most regards to use the UI (to get a flight running is easy, changing weather is easy, flight plans and routing aren’t even all that bad and the UI is much more functional compared to FSX days). However what we’re talking about here is the incredibly simple process of updating the sim with region improvements - not a complicated concept to understand or even code for. The complexity of the sim shouldn’t become a reason to turn typically simple procedures such as updates, into convoluted, complicated and nonsensical procedures. I wish we were talking about something actually complex, but we’re not, so the “FS is complex anyway” argument doesn’t work for me - it’s just updates we’re talking about. It would be simple to argue that the planet and its regions are some of the most important aspects of MSFS, along with the aircraft and weather system. If you’d agree with me, and I’d expect that you would then ask yourself the question as to why the improvements for these regions are so hidden. Why isn’t there a Region section in the sim that allows you to download the ones that interest you and keep the others basic to save space. That to me would be infinitely more logical for an aspect of the sim that is so fundamentally important, instead of hiding the updates in an utterly illogical part of the Sim.
Who told you this? I never heard about it, I started on FS2020 in 2022 so was I too late for this message? Again what we’re talking about is “lucky if you know, then you know” syndrome which is not really acceptable, where if you tend to watch the livestreams or go through the pain that is reading release notes online, you MIGHT notice this written somewhere. For the UK and Ireland update for which I was the most excited, the Release Notes in sim (that you can see by pressing the V key) just had the message “Error”, so no hope of those instructions there. The previous 4 or 5 World and other updates had NO release notes whatsoever, just a message similar to “Thanks for playing Flight Simulator, can’t wait to see you in the skies”. That button simply doesn’t do anything anymore, it’s pointless and it’s kind of embarrassing that it’s still included when it has just been neglected. It’s quite sad at what point they’ve kind of stopped caring about their own software and the features that they implement.
