5 hours ago, Greazer said:

Because a better sim came along with a million users in a couple of weeks and whose developers listen to the community, do work, and put out patches and improvements?  

Not a better sim , just better scenery, i have watched plenty of hilarious videos.

8 hours ago, mSparks said:

TBH I dont think there is anything wrong with making some noise/trying to get yourself heard as to why its not a perfect flight sim as well.

Theres already a 3rd party plugin for that

https://www.fseconomy.net/

I meant real money... or it wouldnt be realistic

Edited October 4, 20205 yr by mjrhealth

1 hour ago, mjrhealth said:

I meant real money

Thats already Laminars bread and butter.

If you want to charge real money for people to use your install of xp you need

https://www.x-plane.com/pro/

Makes me realize how wonderful my life must be when you can come onto a forum and just listen to people complain, maybe I should smile more often. Im enjoying xplane as it is,but some will never be happy.

+1 to stay on topic. Discussions can be made in a different topic.

10 hours ago, FlyBaby said:

3. Irrelevant, the steam user base and its numbers can be used to show that XP's user base (if only on steam) is shrinking. IF LR did any real market research....they would know the importance of current users when looking to invest more in the sim.

Yes, paying for external companies that anyway don`t have any idea about flight simulation. Worst advice someone can give. Btw. funny enough to see there is no user base shrinking in X-Plane but you claim to know things that are wrong in reality. What should these companies advice anyhow? Arcade mode for the masses? (FS). Focus on visuals and stepping the simulation aspects aside? (FS). Releasing XP in a faulty state and focus on profit (FS)?

10 hours ago, FlyBaby said:

Not so, it is the crowd (and 3P Devs) that have moved towards the development platform that actually listened....gave them the pretty clouds...the performance...the community engagement...and now a monthly "meet with the dev" twitch sessions.

A suggestion board (wall of shame) 10 years in pales in comparison.

Yes, the video sessions where they tell their gamers we will do this, we will do that, we will improve that and in reality, with every new patch release they destroy more and more.

 

You have expressed your suggestions for X-Plane 12, now it`s good enough. Nobody wants to read in here about  which simulation is better. Did you read the title? It says suggestion board. Don`t you even realize that you are littering up the suggestion board?

39 minutes ago, BigDee said:

What should these companies advice anyhow?

We already know the answer to that, and its a doozy.

"forget about VR - there's no market for it".

I really think that demonstrates why there is simply no substitute for in house deep personal knowledge of a market, while drawing on your user base for inspiration. 

Its also very telling to see how many of the "most wanted" on the list are already available from 3rd parties or the sim itself. One even says "There a multiple mods on x-plane.org to improve it".

like seriously, what is the point of asking laminar to devote their scarce developer resources on things that are already available and highly customisable to personal preference.

 

Edited October 5, 20205 yr by mSparks

1 hour ago, mSparks said:

Its also very telling to see how many of the "most wanted" on the list are already available from 3rd parties or the sim itself. One even says "There a multiple mods on x-plane.org to improve it".

The most wanted being atmospheric lighting and clouds which nobody has managed to do yet to a decent standard. I think something like this needs to be done in engine and not something a third-party can do or should even have to do at this point. To ignore this and expect a third-party to do it would be suicide, however it's already somewhat confirmed LR are working on it, so this is good news, and third-parties can also improve on it once out.

It's interesting to see what people consider important in a sim. e.g. I never cared much for seasons, but this seems to be high on the list. At Orbx, I see many people requesting seasons for the TrueEarth regions in P3D, but nobody seems to care in X-Plane. In addition, nobody seems to care that MFS also doesn't depict seasons either (Only snow). I found the seasons in P3D/FSX to be awful and really unrealistic, basically in winter covering all of northern Europe in snow. Real seasons for me would be seeing the types of crops change in fields, the atmospheric lighting etc... and not just changing the colour of leaves on the trees.

6 minutes ago, tonywob said:

I think something like this needs to be done in engine and not something a third-party can do or should even have to do at this point.

Completely agree.

I hope/expect them to go through that list and select as either do in-engine or make easier to customise by 3rd parties.

G1000 and EFIS  etc. probably a great examples of this, pretty sure you saw the lengths AFM Sim is having to go for their G1000 integrations, no developer should have to endure that.

 

Back on topic, I made a quick count of the votes per tag in the table below, the first three items, all closely linked, are covering for about 70% of the votes

Weather	2102
Scenery	1811
Rendering Engine	1758
ATC	515
User Interface	298
Aircraft Systems	212
Flight Model	187
WED	158
Aircraft	149
Multiplayer	125
Map	116
Plugin SDK	95
Startup	94
Sound	88
Joystick	70
Plane Maker	64
VR	55
AI Aircraft	49
Replay	42
Tutorials & Missions	38
Ground Traffic	17
Installation	14
Boats	6

I think one fundamental flaw of the way Laminar has set up that poll is that you can click "as many as you want". So if I look at the list above - I want it ALL to improve!

Yet we still see a pretty clear hierarchy in wanted items. Maybe people did not know that they can click "all" items, or some really don´t care at all for Multiplayer, for example?

Cheers, Jan

36 minutes ago, Janov said:

I think that X-Plane is showing a very steady usage over the last month. Yes, you are right - it lost about one third of its players to MSFS if you look at the long run (pre-MSFS-release). I personally think that is an absolutely astonishing testament to X-Plane´s long time appeal, given how MSFS would "stomp X-Plane into the ground when it is released" 🙄.

Also consider that most of the decrease in usage comes from Steam users. Mac and Linux users together make a significant part of the total userbase, and it's unlikely they switched to a Mac or Linux version of MFS. 😬

And statistically speaking, those who bought directly from X-Plane.com website are probably (on average) more hard-core users than Steam ones, so XP probably lost less users there.

All of this to say that IMO the total loss of users is probably less than 30%. Considering that XP11 is nearing the end of its life cycle, I'm also positively surprised that the loss hasn't been so dramatic after all.

This bodes well for XP12, provided that LR does what it has to do.

Edited October 5, 20205 yr by Murmur

17 hours ago, mSparks said:

This is a misunderstanding of what Austin said.

LR do a lot of market research, they just don't have to and dont pay money to external market research companies.

 

Either he doesn't do market research or he ignores the findings. The cloud issues have been there for YEARS...

8 minutes ago, FlyBaby said:

cloud issues

issues? What issues?

Edited October 6, 20205 yr by mSparks

5 minutes ago, yidahoo said:

As a side note, it's interesting that all the videos on your Youtube channel are of X-Plane. The last one being uploaded a mere six days ago. Seems you still have a soft spot for the old, antiquated, dying sim. No MSFS videos yet though, I wonder why that is? 

I use XP a lot. I have many awesome planes.  What I need is LR to fix all the bugs and broken features.

Many will not stay there, far to many love to shoot, blow up and score points and unless MS makes it even more a game, kids will loose interest fast