You know I heard that one of the major complains of flight simmers when they go for their CPL is that they have their neck buried in the instrument when they should be looking out and pay attention to their surrounding. Maybe there is a lesson here.

I think part of the problem is that due to the marketing and hype, there are a lot of people buying a sim for the first time. These people are coming from a gaming back ground where you can routinely get 90 or 100 fps, and almost real life graphics.

Now we long time simmers know that this isn't how flight sims work. For myself, if I can get a smooth 30fps, and scenery that looks like MSFS does right now, I'm happy as hell! I

It tends to fall apart a bit when you get right up close to the auto generated stuff when walking around an area, but its meant to be viewed from the air, and looks great from a few hundred feet up.

And on that note, how incredible is it that you  can use the drone camera, and actually walk around the landscape? Now going on a hamburger run will actually let you walk to the restaurant! 😁

I suspect we'll see another spate of negative reviews when this hits Xbox, and the console crowd who have never had a flight sim get their hands on it.

Edited August 19, 20205 yr by JerryT87

16 minutes ago, fogboundturtle said:

You know I heard that one of the major complains of flight simmers when they go for their CPL is that they have their neck buried in the instrument when they should be looking out and pay attention to their surrounding. Maybe there is a lesson here.

I would agree with that. One of my big criticisms of some of the earlier platforms was that the graphics rendering was so inconsistent, you never even got close to the "sensation" of flight (at least in so far as you can do it sitting in a chair in your basement), even if the flight model was decent.  The real world doesn't "stutter." 😉 Simulators like these have often been limited to being "aircraft systems" simulators, not necessarily "flight" simulators.

Edited August 19, 20205 yr by PurdueKev

I think they have done a awesome job, yes some things need tweaked in time, but overall this is a great Sim.

If I may offer some perspective...

 

For me personally the negativity comes from a lack of transparency and communication from the dev team during the alpha and beta phases of the game, and contrasting it to what was promised. Many of the bugs and incomplete features of the game have been there since alpha (garbage flight model, temperamental live weather system, missing basic autopilot functions, game performance issues, downloader and backend issues). Whenever these topics were brought up, they were either completely ignored or given non answers to. And this was throughout the entire alpha and beta cycle. They gave us feature lists of things that were coming but never answers to things that needed addressed.

 

Credit where it is due the game is beautiful and that can’t be argued. For some of us though, beauty is not near enough without functionality and it’s clear that MSFS lacks the latter.

1 hour ago, mtr75 said:

To the OP: perfectly reasonable points with an absolutely idiotic thread title that detracts from them. You're part of the problem you're complaining about.

Agreed - I actually called it "Pearls and swine" initially 😉 But I should have called it something less offensive like "The sky is actually not falling down?"

2 hours ago, Nemo said:

 We shoud be aware that those whiners and complainers are a minority and we should not listen too much to them.

 

Last I checked on Steam, around 1500 negative reviews, a little less than half of the reviews posted were "would not recommend". Botched launch, lots of people angry at Asobo (see MS forums!). So, it's not a small number of so-called "whiners", the sim - as of 19th August - has so far been met with a decidedly luke-warm response from the wider world.

8 minutes ago, OzWhitey said:

Last I checked on Steam, around 1500 negative reviews, a little less than half of the reviews posted were "would not recommend". Botched launch, lots of people angry at Asobo (see MS forums!). So, it's not a small number of so-called "whiners", the sim - as of 19th August - has so far been met with a decidedly luke-warm response from the wider world.

So how many bought the game on Steam? 3000 people where half of them are disappointed? I would think not - but the 1500 whiners let off their Steam and do exactly what I meant in my original post. From a potential customer perspective it looks like this really is a bad product because of a strange installer, a weird distribution where us that bought the Premium Deluxe version got the Standard version on install and had to find out that we had the Premium Deluxe version "owned" in the Marketplace and had to download it from there. Yes, that really is a bad release - but most of the negative posts are about the installer or the missing PD version. Does that make MSDS a bad product looking at the amazing core product? Not according to me, even though I sure grunted over the fact that I had to find out myself where my Premium Deluxe version actually was... 

2 minutes ago, mazex said:

So how many bought the game on Steam? 3000 people where half of them are disappointed? I would think not - but the 1500 whiners let off their Steam and do exactly what I meant in my original post.

No, that's not how Steam user reviews work. The balance between positive and negative reviews is a pretty good gauge of public sentiment for games. "Mixed" - which is what MSFS is right now - is a really bad result for a major title like this. Under normal circumstances, I would stay a hundred miles away from any game with the "mixed" tag next to its reviews, because it means a large proportion of the player base dislikes it. 

With due respect, it's pretty childish to call people who have a negative opinion of something you like "whiners". Whether someone likes a game or not, they should feel free to post their honest opinion without others trying to censor them.

20 minutes ago, OzWhitey said:

Last I checked on Steam, around 1500 negative reviews, a little less than half of the reviews posted were "would not recommend". Botched launch, lots of people angry at Asobo (see MS forums!). So, it's not a small number of so-called "whiners", the sim - as of 19th August - has so far been met with a decidedly luke-warm response from the wider world.

You are absolutely right, it's not a small number of whiners. It's a mix of a few old fart whiners (probably those ranting on Avsim) with a very large number of why-is-it-not-GTA 16-year-old crowd.

But I digress. Here is what I really don't get: anyone who is active on these forums KNEW from testers and even early reviewers that on August 18th, what would be released was still very much a beta. If they did not know that, it was voluntary ignorance.

Many/most of us felt that based on what we had seen and heard, we were happy to have the sim now and work with it. We preferred that to the alternative: wait months or years for MSFS2020 to be polished all around that way less ambitious games/sims are at launch (even the scope of some very popular and universally lauded open-world games like Skyrim, The Witcher or RDR2 looks in comparison, at many levels, very limited).

Others did not like the idea of paying to be beta testers, which is an absolutely fair sentiment. But then there was a very simple option: don't buy it at launch. Instead, I realize that many of these very well informed people with gazillions posts under their belts actually pre-ordered MSFS2020 and they now basically say that they should not have bought it.

9 minutes ago, OzWhitey said:

With due respect, it's pretty childish to call people who have a negative opinion of something you like "whiners". Whether someone likes a game or not, they should feel free to post their honest opinion without others trying to censor them.

Nobody is censoring you. Complain as much as you wish. The reason the OP's post is getting so many upvotes is because it is basically voicing what the majority of us think. A silent majority, which is not surprising: people are less likely to start a thread saying "oh wow I would never have thought that one day, a flight sim would model the beach by my house" than "I cannot believe that step #45 on the 787 checklist is missing".

14 minutes ago, Turpentine said:

Nobody is censoring you. Complain as much as you wish. The reason the OP's post is getting so many upvotes is because it is basically voicing what the majority of us think. A silent majority, which is not surprising: people are less likely to start a thread saying "oh wow I would never have thought that one day, a flight sim would model the beach by my house" than "I cannot believe that step #45 on the 787 checklist is missing".

- I'm not complaining, I actually like MSFS. But I am objecting to the idea that only groupthink should be praised, and the critics are "whiners". We've had two threads at least now using that word.

- Getting a moderate number of upvotes on post does not mean that this is what the "majority" thinks. You'll note that there's a very large number of negative posts too, both here and elsewhere, and Avsim doesn't currently have a "downvote" button! Maybe there's a "silent majority" who like MSFS, maybe there's a "silent majority" who dislike it. You're just guessing as to which one it is. 

- I think the Steam review balance is generally a much better gauge of public sentiment than "likes" on a post in an enthusiasts forum. That is looking pretty ugly right now. If MS/Asobo fix the install issues, we might see sentiment trending upwards. Watch this space!

Right now over 42k pilots on steam playing MSFS , don't let the very few neg people take anything away from the fact that this is a new day for flight simmers. 

33 minutes ago, Turpentine said:

You are absolutely right, it's not a small number of whiners. It's a mix of a few old fart whiners (probably those ranting on Avsim) with a very large number of why-is-it-not-GTA 16-year-old crowd.

But I digress.

You are not digressing at all,  you are purposely fanning the fire by insulting those who dont share your views.  Despicable. Off to the bin.
 

3 hours ago, EmaRacing said:

You can undock instrument screens, if you press ALT GR while hovering over them the cursor becomes a magnifying lens, click and it becomes a dockable window.

 

Thank you very much, after 2 months of flying, I had not found that feature