A warning to all X-Plane users!

[DrUzi 5]

Hello everyone! I just recently converted over to X-plane from FSX, and it wasn't easy leaving all those add-ons behind! But it was time to begin anew with X-plane 11. The sim feels great, and looks great, however the add-on developers for XP are few. So few that there is almost no competition for quality payware aircraft, if you want a certain plane there is usually only one developer that has what you want. And here begins my horror story of awful support, rude website owners, and just general amazement at how poorly I have been treated by certain a certain Xplane developer and the Xplane.or site owner.

I purchased the Flight Factor 767 from the X-plane.org store, and boy do I wish I had not! The aircraft seemed to work OK, until final approach. Then, once the A/T was "disconnected", the throttles went nuts fluctuating wildly from full to zero thrust all the way down to landing. Then once the inevitably hard landing was made and thrust reverse was applied(had issues with this as well but I managed a serviceable work-around) once it was disconnected the throttles moved to MAX forward thrust and stayed that way, no matter what I did with the throttles. Ok, I send the FF support staff a ticket describing my issue. They then respond by telling me to map commands for the wheel brakes... A command that has nothing to do with thrust. Then they tell me to map the reverse to a button, which not being a complete moron I had already done. I was baffled by the lack of help, and general poor knowledge of its own aircraft displayed by FF support. I am not the only one to experience broken throttle behavior in this aircraft, I can assure you that. I decided at that point to request a refund, the developer was clearly incapable of solving my problem, let alone even understanding it. Now it gets really good.

Then the developer actually accused me of trying to commit fraud! I already paid them $65 for their product and they now accuse me of trying to steal it! Why do I want your broken product, that after hours in the sim completely takes a dump on approach and landing, completely ruining the experience? So instead of offering any useful help and admitting there is a problem with the aircrafts throttles in the current release version of XPlane, they accuse me of theft. To add icing on top of that word not allowed sundae the owner of the X-plane.org site sent me a message saying they would refund my money for the 767 and to never use the store there again! What?! Apparently if you have problems with Xplane add-ons you should just shut-up and take it. Of course it works fine they said, well, no it doesn't. If you think I want to waste time trying to make a faulty aircraft work, and emailing back and forth to a developer that clearly thinks its customers are the problem and not its product then you are sorely mistaken. I will most certainly be looking elsewhere for future purchases.

Anyhow, I just thought the community here should be made aware of my terrible experience with the Flight Factor 767, the awful manner in which support for the add-on was handled, and the awful attitude of the x-plane.org owner who is clearly deeply in bed with this developer. Stay FAR FAR away from the Flight Factor products, maybe they work fine for you, but if they don't you are gonna be treated awful and find no solutions from FF support or X-plane.org. Be very, very, careful what add-ons you purchase, do your research very diligently before you buy, and DO NOT under any circumstances buy from the Xplane.org store! Stick to sim-market, FS Pilot shop, Flight one, Flight sim store, Aerosoft. I have NEVER in many years of simming been treated as poorly by these vendors as I have been over the course of two weeks by X-plane.org.

Had to get that out there. I hope I can help someone avoid going through this in the future, be very wary of what developers you support in XPlane everyone!

[sd_flyer 6,031]

This is your sad personal experience, so please don't  use hasty generalization to project you personal issue with all X-plane add on and developers.

1. I do own FF767 and I don't have issues like that

2. There absolutely no difference between FSX, P3D, or XP developers. Most X-plane/FSX/P3D developers are very quickly to respond and eager help with a problem.  

3. Since I converted to X-plane I have received great deal of help setting and figuring things up.

 

My advice to cool down your emotional spill and ask XP community for help resolving your issues. Sometime they get back to you faster than developers.

 

[mikea76 184]

I have had a bad experience with both the owner of the .org and with the first flight factor 777.... never again, the owner of the .org is awful and FF in my opinion is the captain sim of x plane.. they make kind of sort of planes that check off a lot of boxes with incorrect simulation 

[kakusso 12]

Having a problem with a plane does not necessarily mean that the plane has a problem. Check the forums, depending on the number of complaints on that specific issue you will than be able to tell if it is a problem with the plane or if it is a problem with your installation / configuration etc. Addressing the developer with accusations is not a good way to start a relation.

[Paraffin 2,197]

I'm sorry you had a bad experience with that plane and the .org store, but I have to point out a couple of things you may not be aware of.

First, if you read the Terms and Conditions at the .org store, you would have known that "No full refunds will be provided on any software purchases, updates, or scenery CD's and all sales are final." 

I'm not familiar with that particular model, but many planes sold at the .org store do not include any DRM. They're just open files that you download. The vendor has no way to prevent people from buying a plane, getting a refund, and then keeping the plane (or distributing copies). I'm not saying you're doing that, but from the vendor perspective, the policy means they get at least one sale per download.

The .org store isn't alone with that policy either. If you buy from X-Aviation, which even includes a DRM system, their policy is that all sales are final. I think Carenado is the only one that offers refunds within a limited time when buying from their online store. No-refunds isn't exactly a rare policy when it comes to software sales. 

I do wish we had more options for purchasing addon aircraft, but boycotting the .org store means no access to some of the best models available. Especially in certain categories like payware helicopters. 

For what it's worth, I've been buying aircraft from the .org store for years without any problems, but then I've never tried to return anything either. It's basically "buyer beware" when it comes to the quality of plane models sold at the .org. There are excellent models and clunkers sitting side by side on the store pages, with no real quality control from the store itself. So, research what people say in each developers support forum before buying. 

[finkelstein 25]

I can't echo this sentiment at all and as @sd_flyer has said, I would be careful to generalize. I have only had good experiences with Flight Factor's support. The 767 works well for me and many others.

29 minutes ago, Paraffin said:

For what it's worth, I've been buying aircraft from the .org store for years without any problems, but then I've never tried to return anything either. It's basically "buyer beware" when it comes to the quality of plane models sold at the .org. There are excellent models and clunkers sitting side by side on the store pages, with no real quality control from the store itself. So, research what people say in each developers support forum before buying. 

Buyer beware indeed, although that certainly does not apply to this aircraft. I'm inclined to believe this is a classic case of PEBKAC.

[YukonPete 581]

Ive been an X-Plane org customer for about 10 years and I've always received good customer service. They are probably the fasted store to respond to inquiries about order support. usually within the hour! I own the FF767 and have never experienced the problem you mentioned. Perhaps its pilot error. Did you try the FF forum? You label the X-Plane store as bad. There is also such a thing as bad customers. 

[1st fltsimguy 466]

In my only very recent experience.

I bought a plane from RWDesigns, the Beechcraft B60.

I have sound issues and click spot issues, like the plane is not fully compatible with XP11 although it says it is.

I posted the issues on the general and specific forum page.

Not even an acknowlegement that they say my post and will get back to me.

So I'm not impressed at all at this point, other users have also made comments here at AVSIM about this plane as I posted here as well. Support seems very weak.

I get that sometimes these folks are one or two person company's, whatever, at least they should monitor a forum and acknowledge your problem and advise when they might get back to a purchaser.

I subscribe to forums in flight sim all over the place, I get my email notify's first thing in the morning. I get some 50-70 each morning. I scan through and see what's important vs just information vs not important to me it takes me one morning coffee.

Bryan

[Chock 17,769]

It's clear you've had a bad experience, so it's only natural to be narked off about that, however, there are many reasons why a flight simulator add-on may have issues and a lot of the time it can be something at the user's end even if it doesn't seem like it would be so, be it hardware or software. For example, sometimes the operating system  can cause contoller issues, i.e. an older OS can sometimes mean controllers are not read properly. Now, I'm not suggesting this is the case for you, merely that such things can be a possibility, as can one add-on clashing with another. I will give you an example of one such occasion I had where that was indeed the case:

I bought the Virtualcol Shorts 360 for FSX/P3D, and it installed just fine, apart from one thing - there was no VC in it - and I looked on the Virtualcol website at the screenshots thinking: 'Isn't this thing supposed to have a VC?', sure enough it was supposed to, so I contact Virtualcol's support and explained the issue. They were very helpful and pointed me to a service patch and I tried that, but still no VC, so I tried a complete reinstall and all kinds of things, still no joy and they continued to be helpful but were at a loss as to what the problem might be. So, I looked in the config files for FSX and for the aeroplane etc, and eventually I found out that it was in fact EZDOK camera causing the issue and buggering up the Virtualcol's VC, so I uninstalled EZDOK and deleted a bunch of stuff out of the FSX camera config file, reinstalled the Shorts 360 and bingo, it had a VC. So, I emailed Virtualcol, thanked them for their efforts in trying to help me and informed them that EZDOK clashes with their product so that they would be aware of the issue should anyone else contact them with that problem.

Had I not done that bit of investigating and determined the problem with that add-on, I could have found myself saying that I emailed Virtualcol's support and they never solved the problem with my purchase, which of course they didn't, because they were in no position to know what and what was not on my PC, so it would have been a bit out of order for me to slag them off for not being able to help when they had in fact tried their best to help me.

I only have one Flight Factors aeroplane for XPlane 11, and that is their A350. Now admittedly I was a bit annoyed about the fact that the .org store listed it as XP11 compatible at the time I bought it, when in fact I had to tweak a couple of things in Plane Maker to get it to be compatible with XP11, but in the end it didn't actually prove that difficult to sort out with a brief search on Google about what to do, and I've been pretty happy with their A350 since.

Now none of this means you were not having an issue, but if you were/are, then a better way to address it would be to ask here on Avsim if anyone might suggest things to try, because there are a ton of really knowledgable XPlane users and I reckon they'd sort you out, in fact they probably still will having seen what the problem you were having is since you mentioned it on your post. As far as developers and store people being rude to you and asking you not to use their store again is concerned, without being party to the exchanges you had, there is no way I can say whether that was the case, but hopefully you can sort that out too. There are usually three sides to every story: yours, theirs, and somewhere in the middle is invariably where the truth resides.

Anyway, why not try posting a request for suggestions on how to get your add-on working on here? I'm sure that will be a much more satisfactory way of addressing the problem.

[1st fltsimguy 466]

24 minutes ago, Chock said:

Anyway, why not try posting a request for suggestions on how to get your add-on working on here? I'm sure that will be a much more satisfactory way of addressing the problem.

While not the OP, I am having plane issues that are not being addressed.

I have posted over there, and here, in three locations. Nadda!

If something is freeware, not an issue, but as soon as cash exchanges hands...then there is an expectation of support if the thing is not working correctly and one has tried to themselves to "fix".  Buy and new car and the electric seat heater isn't working, how quickly would one go to the dealer and ask to get if fixed?

[Chock 17,769]

True, but I just thought I'd point out that if one is not receiving help from those quarters (you never know, people might be on holiday, or have some other life issue getting in the way), then Avsim is worth a shot, and a better shot is to post a request for assistance than to go about it some other more belligerent way.

[ComSimPilot 623]

2 hours ago, mikea76 said:

I have had a bad experience with both the owner of the .org and with the first flight factor 777.... never again, the owner of the .org is awful and FF in my opinion is the captain sim of x plane.. they make kind of sort of planes that check off a lot of boxes with incorrect simulation 

That's rather a generalization. I own both FF 757 v2 and 767 and there are extremely good simulations. I think you need to be more careful when tagging a brand "incorrect simulation". At least own the specific plane, FF 767 in this case and share specific bugs to make an argument, before you blame FF.

[blocks_off 5]

So you have had your vent of anger.... but your title is completely unacceptable. Warning to X-Plane users ? For something that you have not given chance ?

I have been gradually using X-Plane/ for 5 years off and on to the point now where for most of this year and last I have done most flying in it.

Are you really trying to think that using X-Plane after 'recently converting' is going to do you any good ? It's like trying to go from regular to decaf. Fly 'em both and enjoy. Try, practice. Try again - ask for support. When I read your threat, I would urge you to thoroughly check everything. A few assignments and see how it goes.

That is how the community will support you.

[wiler 394]

Mods change the title of the thread please, this is a totally misleading title. 

[garrett_frank 150]

What a lot of these rants leave out is generally how someone like the OP corresponded and treated both the developer(s) and the "store owner." Reminiscent of that Seinfeld episode: I had a bunch of problems, yada yada yada and then the developer accused me of stealing and the store owner told me to never come back. Hmmm...