I would like to throw in my own two cents on this topic as I am a probably what you could call a "professional user" of MSFS as I have taken its abilities in the home cockpit building world just about as far as you can go (within the limits of reasonable affordability). Secondly, I am a real world multi-engine instrument rated pilot.The way I see this is dual fold. I understand Microsoft's desire to try and offer something to a larger "gaming public" which is more simplified and more interactive while at the same time reap the profits of DLC. From a business or "idea" perspective I can somewhat see the point but there are many flaws and loose ends to this concept. From a "gamer" perspective I can only say good luck. From a real pilot perspective I feel they have missed the boat entirely and for those here who continue to applaud Microsoft with a "let's wait and see" attitude I have to say please stop being so devoutly optimisitic and look at the reality of the situation. I will make my points in checklist fashion.#1 - Microsoft has for years, once having seen the profits bieng made in the 3rd party dev. market, wanted a slice of that pie. Again, that is fair and reasonable. It is their software after all. However, when MS Flight was first announced they made key statements about honoring and respecting the large community which had grown and flourished around their software. Since that time they obviously went back on their word to a very large degree and only after the full release will we know the true scope of their intentions.To begin, let me put all this into a simple perspective analogy. Let's say Microsoft is our drug dealer and we have all regularly bought the crack we shall call our "sim". I hope you will all find the humor here.For years our drug dealer made our "sim" better and better each year for a price we could all afford and for that we really respected our beloved dealer. They were even so nice that we could go out and buy various paraphenalia to complement our sim and make the experience more enjoyable. Then one day our dealer decides they aren't making enough money so they decide that they will cut the sim in half, no wait..., down to less than 1/1000th of the orginal pure product that it was and will now just give it to us for free but will instead FORCE and MANDATE that we only buy all their paraphenalia at whatever price they feel necessary. Furthermore they WILL NOT let us get any paraphenalia from any other dealers. In short, it is their way or the highway without any chance for free choice in what should be a free market society. Dare I say this is borderline on a communist mentality (or that of Pablo Escobar). This is the point where I tell you I have decided to go to rehab. :)#2 - A person or two earlier made very, very valid arguments about the "freedom of flight" issue. Let's say I have three hours to kill with my sim. I fly around Hawaii for an hour and then get bored because the overly simple "day VFR" Icon is like driving a car with no stereo (by stereo I mean VOR navigation). Now let's say I want to fly from my home airport in Class Delta to 250 miles or more up the coast to a major city in the Bravo. --Now what?--Now I have to go to the drug lord and pay them $20 or more to get that experience providing I can get the plane I really want to fly and providing the money I have available will cover that 250 miles. So lets say I need a fix really bad and so I shell out the money and make the flight. After that I land and now have another hour to kill. For the third hour I'd like to fly a larger jet in IMC conditions from the last airport to say Denver. No scratch that ...I'd like to start in London now and fly to Madrid Spain. So, again, how much will THAT cost now? By the end of the night I could easily be out of pocket $100 or more and only have a few areas of coverage. What happens next week when I want to fly from Anchorage to Seattle in a twin otter or fly a business jet from Perth to Melbourne?My point here folks is that it is totally and utterly irresponsible as well downright scandulously greedy to have your entire world hijacked and held for ransom. that's right...RANSOM. Under no uncertain terms that is what MS Flight is doing with their business model and it is designed to prey upon the weak and feeble minded sim addicts. With FS 2004 and FSX you at least have the OPTION to buy better aircraft and better scenery... IT IS NOT MANDATORY. I repeat...NOT MANDATORY. As a consumer advocate, as we all should be, your sim should give you a global experience right out of the box for $50 to $100 and no more. Only after that should you then have the free choice of how to lather on extra scenery or aircraft of your choosing. MS could have easily been doing this all along right alongside other developers. For whatever reason they didn't and now they are trying to make up for lost wages by hovering over their food bowl like an angry dog. This makes for a sad, sad day for flight simulation. In my opinion a game, a sim, whatever, (first person shooters included) should be fully functional right out of the box...period. A child, adult, or any senior should be able to wholly enjoy the product AS IS without even having to buy any addtional scenery or aircraft even if those add-ons are available en'mass to futher "pimp" the product. I enjoyed FS 98, FS 2000, and FS 2002 for my first few years without any add-ons whatsoever. At the very, very least that should still be an available option for everyone young or old. In my opinion Microsoft should simply not hold hostage all the things which you were already so accustomed to for so long. I think what they are trying to do now is just rediculous and is a really bad way to conduct business. Again... RANSOM.#3 - VATSIM and multiplayer functionality. As a real world pilot VATSIM is an incredibly valuable tool for hundreds of thousands of pilots the world over and the reason why it has been such a huge global success is because...drum roll please... ITS FREE. I will be absolutely shocked if MS Flight decides to incorporate this feature. If they do..it will probably cost you a monthly fee of $10 - $20 and I can't imagine it would actually be VATSIM. So..within some mutiplayer ATC controlled environment your "descend and maintain" will probably be delivered by a 12 year old who is completely new to FS. Great. Check please.#4 - FSX... I hate it and I know many developers who agree. It's still buggy, it still crashes, and the vast amount of forum threads on the subject of how to tweak it to get it to run properly will likely go down in history as the largest user of server space on countless forums. It's old and it's no longer supported. Great... check please again. For the average user FSX is fine on a single monitor unless you want to network several PC's just to get it to do what FS 2004 can brilliantly do on one PC with many displays. If Microsoft had any sense they would have just released FS11 with performance on par with FS 2004 or FSX, and then for DLC they could offer their own unique brand of high-fidelity, high resolution mesh and scenery add-ons for all those folks with high end computers which could handle such upgrades. (yes..it's genius) How could they have overlooked this idea!!! What if they offered the entire planet to start but just not in ultra high detail. The same goes for aircraft. Maybe give 10 - 15 reasonable aircraft to start with and then sell much better high fidelity aircraft for less than other 3rd party developers. I call this undercutting the competetion..NOT ELIMINATING IT. This would instantly help people with lower end computers while still offering a full experience that would encourage the consumer to upgrade their sim rather than FORCE them to. In my humble opinion people DO NOT LIKE BEING FORCED INTO ANYTHING. Microsoft should have hired a psychologist instead of some greedy bean counters. Rather than shut out the third party developer market Microsoft should've just become a big interactive part of it themselves and used slogans like "guaranteed to work better than any other add-ons". With add-ons coming from their personal laboratory people would have immediately jumped on board . Duhhh! Did I say Duhhh. I'll say it again.. DUHHH.#5 - Cornering the market and shutting out other developers who have invested their whole lives into this industry does not allow for truthful comparisions, nor growth, nor does it make friends especially after saying how much you respect them! A free market allows for competition which in the end would make all add-ons better and better. By maintaining a monopoly Microsoft now gets to do whatever they want without a care and they get to feed it to you however they wish like a stingy child who doesn't play well with others. Again... communism. The "M" in Microsoft Flight should be made to look like a hammer and sickle.#6 - Where to now ? Personally I'm going to give all my buisness to Lockheed Martin and Prepar3D. I have no other choice of dealers. X-Plane may be great but I know it will not be able to do what P3D will be doing in a year. I will most likely cough up the full cost simply because I don't really have a choice not to and I'm sure I will still be using it at least 5 - 7 years from now. More importantly though they fully welcome the 3rd party developer market and even encourage it. They see the true value in it. Secondly, most developers like FTX and REX are already making their products avaiable for it. I've read many interviews, listened to many podcasts, and have even got some key insider information on it's progress and it is amazing. They are (and have been) re-writing the core code to utilize modern CPU's and GPU's. For those who do not already know, P3D is made from the same Microsoft ESP engine that FSX is made from. So, in essence P3D is FS11 on steroids. Developers like VRS are about to release the "TacPac" for FSX which will then be integrated into P3D over the next year. This means that P3D will eventually become an "everything" sim with full land, sea, and of course air capabilities complete with fully active weapons systems for those who desire to install such add-ons. From what I've learned since it's quiet release last year... the grass has never been greener.In closing, I have personally trained several young kids over the past few years using FS 2004 and FSX. They really enjoyed the full realism and were all eager to learn the vast complexties of a real aircraft. I'm sure MS Flight will undoubtedly allow that to happen too on some level as I cannot imagine that they would only provide simple aircraft..who knows. However, and more importantly, I just do not see kids having what will undoubtedly be a need for daily if not weekly funds available for DLC purchases let alone the attention span to enjoy MS Flight as a pure "game" and not a real flight simulator. The thousands of kids, like myself 15 years ago, get into flight simulation because we wanted to be pilots...not just goose chasers on a treasure hunt. Sure, that can be fun but it's totally TOTALLY devoid of the much bigger picture. I think today's younger generation will quckly see through the fog if MS Flight remains to be what we expect it to be. I certainly know the younger generation expects a lot more, and they also deserve a lot more, as do all of us.See you on the other side!

Edited February 7, 201214 yr by SimSamurai

Wasn't MS damned if the did and damned if they didn't? People have not stopped complaining that FSX runs badly because it was built on a legacy platform, GPU bound, etc, etc, etc. Another re-worked FS2004 is still going to be just that. I have no doubt that a number of the anti-Flight crowd would have complained about that, but believe FSX (or 2004, for those so inclined) is the be all and end all. At some point, the only way to change that is to start from scratch. So that's where we're at. Maybe it'll be a screw up. Hopefully not. We still have our old toys if it is.CheersMike D

Perhaps it's time to look at Nostradamuses quatrains. :)

Edited February 7, 201214 yr by Barnstormer1

I don't think MS Flight would have been dammed in any way if they had just been honest about their real intentions from the outset. A sim " arcade game" is great as long as that is what the public had expected it to be. Because of how they orginally promoted it I think we can all agree that most simmers expected it to be FS 11. While our old toys still fucntion..the fact remains that they are old. However, FS 2004 runs better on my high end i7 machine than FSX does and so I use it the most just because it's much more reliable and I can run locked at 35 FPS while running 6 displays on one PC. Lastly, while having the greatest high detail scenery is an awesome goal, at the end of the day for someone like me it also isn't the most important aspect of simming. When flying IFR you don't need to see anything save for takeoff and when you hit the DH, MDA, or VDP. I also don't think that Lockheed would have picked up the ball and dropped so much work into ESP if they didn't see the full potential of it. Lets face it folks, FSX was rushed to market alongside Windows Vista and it has two huge service packs to prove it. Over the past two years Microsoft could have easily re-worked it and re-released it as FS11 along with their own suite of new DLC while remaining openminded to the community which has kept it alive to begin with.

Edited February 7, 201214 yr by SimSamurai

Wasn't MS damned if the did and damned if they didn't? People have not stopped complaining that FSX runs badly because it was built on a legacy platform, GPU bound, etc, etc, etc. Another re-worked FS2004 is still going to be just that. I have no doubt that a number of the anti-Flight crowd would have complained about that, but believe FSX (or 2004, for those so inclined) is the be all and end all. At some point, the only way to change that is to start from scratch. So that's where we're at. Maybe it'll be a screw up. Hopefully not. We still have our old toys if it is.CheersMike D

You are misinformed. Flight is not a product that was written from "scratch". It is a gutted FSX, with some parts rewritten to better handle multi-cpu systems and to move more functions to the gpu(s).

My bad... but only by degree. It's still more like gutting the house and starting from there, than trying to tack yet another room somewhere on to fix the problems.

That house by the way is ESP. They have gutted it and turned it back into a play room. Lockheed gutted it and is turning it into the Playboy mansion. ;)

I would like to throw in my own two cents on this topic as I am a probably what you could call a "professional user" of MSFS as I have taken its abilities in the home cockpit building world just about as far as you can go (within the limits of reasonable affordability). Secondly, I am a real world multi-engine instrument rated pilot.The way I see this is dual fold. I understand Microsoft's desire to try and offer something to a larger "gaming public" which is more simplified and more interactive while at the same time reap the profits of DLC. From a business or "idea" perspective I can somewhat see the point but there are many flaws and loose ends to this concept. From a "gamer" perspective I can only say good luck. From a real pilot perspective I feel they have missed the boat entirely and for those here who continue to applaud Microsoft with a "let's wait and see" attitude I have to say please stop being so devoutly optimisitic and look at the reality of the situation. I will make my points in checklist fashion.#1 - Microsoft has for years, once having seen the profits bieng made in the 3rd party dev. market, wanted a slice of that pie. Again, that is fair and reasonable. It is their software after all. However, when MS Flight was first announced they made key statements about honoring and respecting the large community which had grown and flourished around their software. Since that time they obviously went back on their word to a very large degree and only after the full release will we know the true scope of their intentions.To begin, let me put all this into a simple perspective analogy. Let's say Microsoft is our drug dealer and we have all regularly bought the crack we shall call our "sim". I hope you will all find the humor here.For years our drug dealer made our "sim" better and better each year for a price we could all afford and for that we really respected our beloved dealer. They were even so nice that we could go out and buy various paraphenalia to complement our sim and make the experience more enjoyable. Then one day our dealer decides they aren't making enough money so they decide that they will cut the sim in half, no wait..., down to less than 1/1000th of the orginal pure product that it was and will now just give it to us for free but will instead FORCE and MANDATE that we only buy all their paraphenalia at whatever price they feel necessary. Furthermore they WILL NOT let us get any paraphenalia from any other dealers. In short, it is their way or the highway without any chance for free choice in what should be a free market society. Dare I say this is borderline on a communist mentality (or that of Pablo Escobar). This is the point where I tell you I have decided to go to rehab. :)#2 - A person or two earlier made very, very valid arguments about the "freedom of flight" issue. Let's say I have three hours to kill with my sim. I fly around Hawaii for an hour and then get bored because the overly simple "day VFR" Icon is like driving a car with no stereo (by stereo I mean VOR navigation). Now let's say I want to fly from my home airport in Class Delta to 250 miles or more up the coast to a major city in the Bravo. --Now what?--Now I have to go to the drug lord and pay them $20 or more to get that experience providing I can get the plane I really want to fly and providing the money I have available will cover that 250 miles. So lets say I need a fix really bad and so I shell out the money and make the flight. After that I land and now have another hour to kill. For the third hour I'd like to fly a larger jet in IMC conditions from the last airport to say Denver. No scratch that ...I'd like to start in London now and fly to Madrid Spain. So, again, how much will THAT cost now? By the end of the night I could easily be out of pocket $100 or more and only have a few areas of coverage. What happens next week when I want to fly from Anchorage to Seattle in a twin otter or fly a business jet from Perth to Melbourne?My point here folks is that it is totally and utterly irresponsible as well downright scandulously greedy to have your entire world hijacked and held for ransom. that's right...RANSOM. Under no uncertain terms that is what MS Flight is doing with their business model and it is designed to prey upon the weak and feeble minded sim addicts. With FS 2004 and FSX you at least have the OPTION to buy better aircraft and better scenery... IT IS NOT MANDATORY. I repeat...NOT MANDATORY. As a consumer advocate, as we all should be, your sim should give you a global experience right out of the box for $50 to $100 and no more. Only after that should you then have the free choice of how to lather on extra scenery or aircraft of your choosing. MS could have easily been doing this all along right alongside other developers. For whatever reason they didn't and now they are trying to make up for lost wages by hovering over their food bowl like an angry dog. This makes for a sad, sad day for flight simulation. In my opinion a game, a sim, whatever, (first person shooters included) should be fully functional right out of the box...period. A child, adult, or any senior should be able to wholly enjoy the product AS IS without even having to buy any addtional scenery or aircraft even if those add-ons are available en'mass to futher "pimp" the product. I enjoyed FS 98, FS 2000, and FS 2002 for my first few years without any add-ons whatsoever. At the very, very least that should still be an available option for everyone young or old. In my opinion Microsoft should simply not hold hostage all the things which you were already so accustomed to for so long. I think what they are trying to do now is just rediculous and is a really bad way to conduct business. Again... RANSOM.#3 - VATSIM and multiplayer functionality. As a real world pilot VATSIM is an incredibly valuable tool for hundreds of thousands of pilots the world over and the reason why it has been such a huge global success is because...drum roll please... ITS FREE. I will be absolutely shocked if MS Flight decides to incorporate this feature. If they do..it will probably cost you a monthly fee of $10 - $20 and I can't imagine it would actually be VATSIM. So..within some mutiplayer ATC controlled environment your "descend and maintain" will probably be delivered by a 12 year old who is completely new to FS. Great. Check please.#4 - FSX... I hate it and I know many developers who agree. It's still buggy, it still crashes, and the vast amount of forum threads on the subject of how to tweak it to get it to run properly will likely go down in history as the largest user of server space on countless forums. It's old and it's no longer supported. Great... check please again. For the average user FSX is fine on a single monitor unless you want to network several PC's just to get it to do what FS 2004 can brilliantly do on one PC with many displays. If Microsoft had any sense they would have just released FS11 with performance on par with FS 2004 or FSX, and then for DLC they could offer their own unique brand of high-fidelity, high resolution mesh and scenery add-ons for all those folks with high end computers which could handle such upgrades. (yes..it's genius) How could they have overlooked this idea!!! What if they offered the entire planet to start but just not in ultra high detail. The same goes for aircraft. Maybe give 10 - 15 reasonable aircraft to start with and then sell much better high fidelity aircraft for less than other 3rd party developers. I call this undercutting the competetion..NOT ELIMINATING IT. This would instantly help people with lower end computers while still offering a full experience that would encourage the consumer to upgrade their sim rather than FORCE them to. In my humble opinion people DO NOT LIKE BEING FORCED INTO ANYTHING. Microsoft should have hired a psychologist instead of some greedy bean counters. Rather than shut out the third party developer market Microsoft should've just become a big interactive part of it themselves and used slogans like "guaranteed to work better than any other add-ons". With add-ons coming from their personal laboratory people would have immediately jumped on board . Duhhh! Did I say Duhhh. I'll say it again.. DUHHH.#5 - Cornering the market and shutting out other developers who have invested their whole lives into this industry does not allow for truthful comparisions, nor growth, nor does it make friends especially after saying how much you respect them! A free market allows for competition which in the end would make all add-ons better and better. By maintaining a monopoly Microsoft now gets to do whatever they want without a care and they get to feed it to you however they wish like a stingy child who doesn't play well with others. Again... communism. The "M" in Microsoft Flight should be made to look like a hammer and sickle.#6 - Where to now ? Personally I'm going to give all my buisness to Lockheed Martin and Prepar3D. I have no other choice of dealers. X-Plane may be great but I know it will not be able to do what P3D will be doing in a year. I will most likely cough up the full cost simply because I don't really have a choice not to and I'm sure I will still be using it at least 5 - 7 years from now. More importantly though they fully welcome the 3rd party developer market and even encourage it. They see the true value in it. Secondly, most developers like FTX and REX are already making their products avaiable for it. I've read many interviews, listened to many podcasts, and have even got some key insider information on it's progress and it is amazing. They are (and have been) re-writing the core code to utilize modern CPU's and GPU's. For those who do not already know, P3D is made from the same Microsoft ESP engine that FSX is made from. So, in essence P3D is FS11 on steroids. Developers like VRS are about to release the "TacPac" for FSX which will then be integrated into P3D over the next year. This means that P3D will eventually become an "everything" sim with full land, sea, and of course air capabilities complete with fully active weapons systems for those who desire to install such add-ons. From what I've learned since it's quiet release last year... the grass has never been greener.In closing, I have personally trained several young kids over the past few years using FS 2004 and FSX. They really enjoyed the full realism and were all eager to learn the vast complexties of a real aircraft. I'm sure MS Flight will undoubtedly allow that to happen too on some level as I cannot imagine that they would only provide simple aircraft..who knows. However, and more importantly, I just do not see kids having what will undoubtedly be a need for daily if not weekly funds available for DLC purchases let alone the attention span to enjoy MS Flight as a pure "game" and not a real flight simulator. The thousands of kids, like myself 15 years ago, get into flight simulation because we wanted to be pilots...not just goose chasers on a treasure hunt. Sure, that can be fun but it's totally TOTALLY devoid of the much bigger picture. I think today's younger generation will quckly see through the fog if MS Flight remains to be what we expect it to be. I certainly know the younger generation expects a lot more, and they also deserve a lot more, as do all of us.See you on the other side!

Very well stated sir and some very good points. Your point about holding us for ransom is actually something I had not thought about. I have kind of always thought about the price of Flight Sim as just the price you pay for Bigboy Toys. I have never complained even once about the cost of any addon and have always hated the post with people whinning about it. You are correct in that this is very much a different situation. I hope you will visit many forums and make that point. I have never been a MS hater but I will give this new view some thought although, to be honest I have figured for many months now that PrePar3d was going to be the way to go for the next few years and at the young age of 64, it may be my last great hope. As you said...See you on the other side!!

grrr... CPU bound. :Waiting:We don't know what the house will look like. It seems the playroom was certainly finished first. :Party:Mike

That house by the way is ESP. They have gutted it and turned it back into a play room. Lockheed gutted it and is turning it into the Playboy mansion. ;)

Aren't you in the wrong forum. What does a not to be used for entertainment sim have to do with FLIGHT DLC discusion?

Edited February 8, 201214 yr by Barnstormer1

Aren't you in the wrong forum. What does a not to be used for entertainment sim have to do with FLIGHT DLC discusion?

Umm, don't get your panties in a bunch Shirley, If you read my orginal post (ok essay #106) I was thoroughly on topic. I know it's a lot to take in for folks who don't read much and just like to spout off single sentence quips. I'm sorry if I offended you. Do you need a nap now? I'll sum it up for you.. DLC = RANSOM and I don't negotiate with terrorists. 'Nuff said.

Edited February 8, 201214 yr by SimSamurai

Umm, don't get your panties in a bunch Shirley, If you read my orginal post (ok essay #106) I was thoroughly on topic. Do you need a nap now? I'll sum it up for you.. DLC = RANSOM.I don't negotiate with terrorists.

Shirley dont call me shirley

Edited February 8, 201214 yr by Barnstormer1

Glad you got the "airplane" reference... :(

That house by the way is ESP. They have gutted it and turned it back into a play room. Lockheed gutted it and is turning it into the Playboy mansion. ;)

If only that were true... I've been testing P3D for a month and I see no significant improvements. P3D has some annoying bugs and lacks native support for many peripherals. To make things worse only a very few developers have (or plan to) released SBSLs.But I agree with you. FLIGHT is looking like a disaster for all of us who dreamed of FS11.

The dlc I'd like to see are packages that provide the missing features, such as advanced weather, ATC, the rest of the world scenery.Most importantly, I want to see an SDK, with the possibility to locally install my own developments and also the possibility to submit them for consideration for publication via the DLC framework.