27 minutes ago, strider1 said:

Are you into photography? The Sony Alpha Forums make Avsim look like kindergarten!

As a matter of fact I am. I better take a look, could be entertaining 🤣  Cheers !!!

1 hour ago, Mark_A said:

Just fly the sim - it’s great.

Im sure nobody will be going back to P3D or X-Plane which says it all.

This is my default sim now especially with VATSIM getting sorted out. However, until I get my payware airliners into F2020 my P3D4 stays. 

For the most part it was NOT the alpha testers responsible for the ridiculous hype in recent months. 
 

For ages I’ve been trying to subtly get across that people shouldn’t be so hyped up.
 

One example is the default planes that some non-testers on this forum were claiming would be amazing. 
 

I knew how broken the autopilots were and how especially in the airliners no autoflight System actually worked reliably. They’re just plain awful. 
 

But whenever I brought this up in subtle ways, I was basically attacked by the hyped non-testers who claimed they know everything because they’ve seen VNAV working in an Asobo promotion video. 
 

It was frustrating as hell. The PR machine for this game was perfect and testers weren’t allowed to even talk about the real state the game was in. 
 

And trust me, thousands of bugs were reported. It’s funny how in public Asobo looked super-engaged with the community but as a tester... wait, am I even allowed to talk about my experience now? See the issue? 
 

The thing I kept repeating in public during alpha was: “Being an an alpha tester, I am pretty sure I’m not uninstalling P3D anytime soon.”
 

The whole process was frustrating.  
 

I think the sim has enormous potential but also enormous issues and many of those issues have been around since 2019. 

Edited August 19, 20205 yr by flycln

Well Shez, I keep saying, don't delete your old sim.  You never know if and when you might find a use for it.

Hook

6 minutes ago, LHookins said:

Well Shez, I keep saying, don't delete your old sim.  You never know if and when you might find a use for it.

Hook

Too right. But give me a few months after PMDG, Majestic, Flyismware, Aerosoft, A2A, QSim, etal are out and I am out of P3D...

A lot (flightsim) developers nowadays release products followed by multiple hotfixes and/or updates..

And as people (like me too) are willing to pay for it, this will never change.

Asobo had a deadline and that was it. 
MS wants to make money now and not in 2-3 months time....

So alpha/beta testers are not to blaime....

 

If only you knew the state of the Beta just a few weeks ago. Frankly I'm suprised how much they managed to still fix in the short time they had.

Apart from that, me and many other testers said it for weeks:

• Realistic expectations
• Don't preorder

If people still don't get it and insist on preordering a sim/game they know very little about, when there wasn't even any incentive AT ALL to preorder, it's on them.

Edited August 19, 20205 yr by Ray Proudfoot
Removed quote of post that has been hidden.

1 hour ago, LHookins said:

I never used the in-sim flight planner;  everything was done in skyvector.com with some assistance from Little Navmap and an occasional glance at VFR Map.

Oh, by the way, do you know what the current best way is to plug a Skyvector plan into MSFS without too many steps in between?

6 minutes ago, Der Zeitgeist said:

If only you knew the state of the Beta just a few weeks ago. Frankly I'm suprised how much they managed to still fix in the short time they had.

Apart from that, me and many other testers said it for weeks:

• Realistic expectations
• Don't preorder

If people still don't get it and insist on preordering a sim/game they know very little about, when there wasn't even any incentive AT ALL to preorder, it's on them.

Use simbrief and download the plan via their downloader software into the FS2020 default directory. Just load the plan and off you go. SIDs/STARs included.

30 minutes ago, Der Zeitgeist said:

Oh, by the way, do you know what the current best way is to plug a Skyvector plan into MSFS without too many steps in between?

Ok, I'll bite.  What is the current best way to plug a Skyvector plan into MSFS without too many steps in between?

That WAS a joke, right? 😄 It sure sounded like the start of a joke.

I don't plug *anything* into my flight sims.  I do everything on external charts.  Remember, I don't use GPS.  Or fly airliners or other aircraft with an FMC.

Hook

4 hours ago, rickjake said:

I think most testers, like myself, agree that it was released a bit earlier then expected.

While I was not a tester, I was an avid observer of the process here on the forums. And even from the outside that was clearly visibible. I expected the Beta to not begin before September and last at least 3 months from what I saw.

It's not that testers were openly talking about what they saw, but the little pieces they did talk about together with the pogress reports from Asobo made it clear to me that release was premature.

Sadly that is just how things are in the age of cloud computing and fast internet. Companies release half finished products because they know they can easily fix them later.

And from that point of view, after testing it for a day I have found nothing game breaking so far, but many small glitches, omissions, sub-par vector data (just look at the rivers in southern Papua-NewGuinea), unfinished features, that make it clear that this needs at least 6-12 months until it is really a finished product which will then be added upon instead of just fixing issues and completing parts of it.

 

At least it performs well and doesn't CTD constantly like P3DV5 which I threw off my system after trying it for a month, with no aleviation of the bad implementation of memory management in sight.

Edited August 19, 20205 yr by Farlis

2 minutes ago, Farlis said:

I have found nothing game breaking so far, but many small glitches, omissions, sub-par vector data, unfinished features,

Yeah.  What HE said.  Good synopsis.

Hook

As a tester, the UI is downright frustrating, and not one single Airbus flight completed. I see this only as a platform to run addons such as PMDG/Aerosoft/FSlabs. 

 

1 hour ago, LHookins said:

Yeah... there was a thread in Hanger Chat "New filters with std 40mm threads?" and I thought he was talking about cameras!  You remember those... the ones with actual film? 😄 

Hook

40mm threads, thats sounds like tiny lens. My smallest lens filter is 72mm. I used disposal camera during the film age. It was point and shoot and wish for the best! I would have film develop and good chunk of the negatives had nothing on it.  I just got into photography a few years ago! Reviewing my Gopro footage of flying and scuba-diving peak my interest in photography. 

When you do a 13K user testing you can’t be testing content but servers.  What I feel from what testers say publicly or privately is that reports of anomalies, bugs or suggestions of improvements were, for the most part, falling into deaf ears. Ready to stand corrected here, this what I understand.

What I do not understand is why they didn’t structure the testers population into small dedicated groups: by type of aircraft, by regions of  scenery, UI etc. That they miss to add Stuttgart or FS iconic airports like Valdez AK or Stewart BC is not the sign that the work was well organized.

Edited August 19, 20205 yr by Dominique_K