Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 is going to go down as one of the worst launches in gaming history, and I am hard pressed to think of one worse in the past 5 years. How did the largest software company in the world get this one so wrong? Microsoft has one of the largest cloud infrastructures in the world. How could they not have been prepared for a cloud product? And even if we look past the server issues, so many other aspects of this sim are broken. I have only tried a few planes, and some have no power, others have gear that doesn’t work, and the list just goes on and on. And these are but the initial glance issues. As we progress through testing over the next few days the list of broken issues is sure to mushroom. 

Clearly Microsoft/Asobo have no quality assurance team working on this project. Or, if they do, nobody is listening to them. There’s also the fact that many issues resolved in 2020 are back in 2024. That means the months and years we waited for certain issues to be resolved in 2020 was wasted on 2024, but nobody merged those changes into the new repositories. That is a colossal screw up. 

Clearly MSFS 2024 was rushed to market way early. Why? Did some suits up the food chain throw out a date and decide that’s the date we launch, regardless? And who decided against an open beta? That lesson was learned in 2020 but forgotten when it mattered. 

I would have expected better from Microsoft, but maybe they left much of the testing to Asobo, and it bit them. I suspect that Microsoft is going to take a much more hands on approach with this project moving forward, but who knows. 

Edited November 21, 20241 yr by RobJC

The red glow from the flames illuminated the sky and we were still 100 miles from the city...

Another post beating the same old topic to death!

It's time to move forward and get the best use from the game as possible or use an alternative.

People do have another choice.

5 minutes ago, RobJC said:

I am hard pressed to think of one worse in the past 5 years.

Helldivers 2 and Concord say hello and those were just this year. Were you really hard pressed to find something worse? 

6 minutes ago, RobJC said:

And even if we look past the server issues, so many other aspects of this sim are broken.

Nonsense.  You need to WAIT until server severe overload subsides before passing judgement on what if ANY aspects of a cloud-based product are broken.  Yes, they had WAY MORE DEMAND than expected, or at least didn't appreciate the impact of WAY MORE DEMAND than expected.   It will all be resolved in due time in fact all of the hysteria will drive enough people to where they should be, that is away from trying to run the sim, until things cool down.  Ultimately it's a good thing that demand was higher than expected if that was the case.

Well, I can certainty think of equally or more disastrous releases, do you remember Cyberpunk? Its release was so challenged with so much expectation it actually made headline news.

In this case, MSFS is quite complex in that it draws on so many external services in order to operate, it strikes me as quite an impressive feat and what allows us to have all of these features, from streaming scenery, to weather to traffic. But if one of these services fails it can, as we have seen, affect the whole sim and that is all that happened here. It is a tradeoff and those who have pointed out the weaknesses of drawing on so much cloud infrastructure are correct. We will have to see how this goes. Unfortunately, everyone's first engagement with the product was terrible, including all the mainstream reviewers, and I am pretty sure everyone at Asobo -- which in this case is the entity with the check-service that was overwhelmed by connections and failed -- feels terribly disappointed, as does Microsoft. At this point I think the horse is dead and it is best to move on and see how they recover and how things go from here.

I was able to get in 4 or 5 times yesterday -- the thing fully loading in under 2 minutes which is a remarkable development. With 2020 -- and also with P3D -- there were times I just did not make a flight because I knew there would be 10 minutes of just getting the sim going!  I had 3 great flights, the flight model and the ground model were quite good, the scenery and especially the lighting were superb, all significant advances over what we had. The walk around and wear and tear functionality -- which other developers can now build easily into their aircraft -- was great. I have not experienced most of the issues you noted above. There are some regressions and there are some things that can be made better but we all know what will happen in forthcoming SUs.

For me, despite the rocky launch, I am quite happy with 2024.

Edited November 21, 20241 yr by Cognita

26 minutes ago, Krakin said:

Helldivers 2 and Concord say hello and those were just this year. Were you really hard pressed to find something worse? 

Were either of those debacles picked up by Forbes? This was one of the most anticipated launches in 2024. 

2 minutes ago, Cognita said:

Well, I can certainty think of equally or worse disastrous releases, do you remember Cyberpunk? Its release was so challenged with so much expectation it actually made headline news.

In this case, MSFS is quite complex in that it draws on so many external services in order to operate, it strikes me as quite an impressive feat and what allows us to have all of these features, from streaming scenery, to weather to traffic. But if one of these services fails it can, as we have seen, affect the whole sim and that is all that happened here. It is a tradeoff and those who have pointed out the weaknesses of drawing on so much cloud infrastructure are correct. We will have to see how this goes. Unfortunately, everyone's first engagement with the product was terrible, including all the mainstream reviewers, and I am pretty sure everyone at Asobo -- which in this case is the entity with the check-service that was overwhelmed by connections and failed -- feels terribly disappointed, as does Microsoft. At this point I think the horse is dead and it is best to move on and see how they recover and how things go from here.

I was able to get in 4 or 5 times yesterday -- the thing fully loading in under 2 minutes which is a remarkable development. With 2020 -- and also with P3D -- there were times I just did not make a flight because I knew there would be 10 minutes of just getting the sim going!  I had 3 great flights, the flight model and the ground model were quite good, the scenery and especially the lighting were superb, all significant advances over what we had. The walk around and wear and tear functionality -- which other developers can now build easily into their aircraft -- was great. I have not experienced most of the issues you noted above. There are some regressions and there are some things that can be made better but we all know what will happen in forthcoming SUs.

For me, despite the rocky launch, I am quite happy with 2024.

Agree there’s a lot to like. I am super optimistic about the future. But this is a thread about what went wrong, and why it went wrong. It is a post-mortem of the launch, which clearly the same posters clearly missed lol. The launch was terrible. Why? It seems to be a combination of things, including the tech alpha being of almost no value. 

31 minutes ago, Noel said:

Nonsense.  You need to WAIT until server severe overload subsides before passing judgement on what if ANY aspects of a cloud-based product are broken.  Yes, they had WAY MORE DEMAND than expected, or at least didn't appreciate the impact of WAY MORE DEMAND than expected.   It will all be resolved in due time in fact all of the hysteria will drive enough people to where they should be, that is away from trying to run the sim, until things cool down.  Ultimately it's a good thing that demand was higher than expected if that was the case.

How do we wait for the launch, which already happened? Reading comprehension isn’t your strong suit. 

2 minutes ago, RobJC said:

The launch was terrible. Why? It seems to be a combination of things, including the tech alpha being of almost no value. 

Yea, I actually think it is good people understand what happened because I will not be shocked if a similar weak link causes similar problems in the future. I am not sure if the Alpha was helpful -- maybe the launch would have been even worse with a longer recovery time had they not done it -- but it seems clear their testing parameters were not robust enough. That is an issue for the team that established the verification protocols. To be honest, given the numbers Jorg has shared over the last year and the hype they tried to build for the launch, I am surprised that the protocol called for a test of only 200,000 simultaneous connections.

However, it is not that the testing team is not capable or completely negligent. The number of users and the number of simultaneous connections are very different things and maybe there have never been 200,000 people playing MSFS at the same time; or what would be even more rare, 200,000 people who make an almost simultaneous request to play, and this particularly relevant as this seems to be an authorization-validation request process that was overwhelmed and failed.  Whoever wrote the testing protocol probably looked at the number of connections during the 2020 launch, the highest and average number over the past 4 years, likely did a contrast test with other similar titles, and decided a test of 200,000 should be adequate. What happened it seems is that a much, much higher number actually tried to launch the game at about the same time and that authorization process was overwhelmed denying people access either to the sim or to certain assets in the sim (likely this is the process that determines if you have standard, deluxe or premium deluxe and hence what assets you get access to).  It is not necessarily a hardware error, not connected to MS server capacity, but that particular program or its cache just was not robust enough to handle demand.

Now the bad news is that resulted in a terrible launch experience and terrible press for Asobo and MS and I am all but absolutely certain that some people have been called into dreadful pressure-laden meetings to explain and those human beings feel horrible. It is not pleasant fall out and their excitement for the launch is of overshadowed by what happened, just as it is for us; but for them this is their career and livelihoods. So I have measure of compassion. 

The good news is that it seems flight simulation may be growing, with increasing numbers, confirming what we have heard over the past 4 years, that many more people are using MSFS now than in 2020. And that bodes well for our hobby.

42 minutes ago, RobJC said:

Were either of those debacles picked up by Forbes? This was one of the most anticipated launches in 2024. 

https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2024/02/21/helldivers-2s-biggest-battle-continues-to-be-servers-disconnects-login-errors/

 

https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2024/09/21/new-report-says-sonys-concord-cost-400-million-to-make/

 

This is fun!

Is someone trying to suggest MS dev team were not aware of 2020 release issues and 4 years of user usage data?  Of course they knew “the demand” and did nothing because they don’t have the budget to support it and know it’ll resolve after a month as less people use the product post purchase … there is no positive spin here, just reality.

People paid money for MSFS 2024 … and to be frank, money NOT well spent and it’s not just related to launch, so many other issues that were NOT addressed in MSFS 2024.  I’m not “angry” more indifferent because the work I’ve done for it, I’ve already been paid for that work … but it could impact future contracts.  Now back to my regular full time job and wait and see.

1 minute ago, CO2Neutral said:

and to be frank, money NOT well spent

Is for me.

 

Isnt it a bit early for a post-mort? Would wait at least a couple weeks 

Watching threads like these is almost as good as watching the election meltdown videos. 

Come on, get over it guys!

There are still problems, nobody deny that but most of the users have downloaded the game right now and are able to access it.

Wow, people were not able to play in the first hours and this is the end of the world. Put it into perspective, this is a just a f**** game!

If not being able to play on day one is your only problem, then I envy your life.

Edited November 21, 20241 yr by sdirand