Now that the sim is relatively stable in that I can launch it whenever I want without sitting in a queue and the initial immense career mode framerate drop is, while not completely gone, much better, I've been messing with it quite a bit more. It has serious potential if the devs would just correct some mystifying design decisions:

- Fuel. I haven't found a way to order an appropriate amount of fuel without "cheating." I get that they're trying to make you manage the mixture/etc properly and so they give you just barely enough fuel to reach the destination in many cases, but that's unrealistic. Where is my alternate +45 fuel? They should let us play a role in planning the mission, which I think does come later in career mode, but it should be there from the first mission.

- Scenarios. There's a "special" scientific research scenario available right now. First, it keeps crashing or forgets to load the window that tells me what I'm supposed to do, so it doesn't work. But second, the overall mission is to fly a Diamond twin up to a tornado and take photos of it. You spawn on the ramp with the tornado already on the ground.  This is a mission that would never, under any circumstances, happen in real life. If there's a tornado a mile away from the airport, you're not calmly wandering around pulling covers and preflighting your airplane.

- Home airport.  What's the point? All missions, at least in the earlier stages, start and end at random airports. You teleport to the start and then fly it to the end. I don't see why it made me pick an airport if that's not going to be important in some way. Even the training and license missions happen somewhere that isn't the airport you picked.

- Preflight. OK, after about the 10th time I was ready to be done with preflighting planes. Great idea, but the movement setup is too clunky and the preflight isn't realistic. It wants you to wiggle the elevator on a T tail that's 15 feet above your head, but it doesn't want you to sump the fuel. It's just turned into "glitch around for a little bit and click 2 or 3 spots before you can actually start the flight." And since it does not appear to track wear and damage from flight to flight, the preflight is pointless anyway because the plane will always be in 100% condition.

- Flaps. The number of times I've been dinged and taken a reputation hit for overspeeding the flaps while sitting on the ramp with the parking brake on is absurd. Either make it work right, or stop checking flap speed until it does.

 

 

 

What is also missing is an option to sort the missions you get by different criteria.

I'd like to see one where you can sort by payment, so that you don't have to look through the entire list to find the highest paying ones.

 

And I really hope that later on you can chose to fly in real time with live weather and the system picks appropriate mission for time of year and weather. (No point in giving you sightseeing in an area where it's all IFR)

Edited November 23, 20241 yr by Farlis

Agreed, that would be nice.

Oh, and one I forgot is the skydiving mission. They always give me 0% for completion speed. Like, you're the one making me fly to 10,200 feet in a 172. This takes time. You want me to do this faster, let me do it in Draco. 😉

 

Lots of Career complaints floating around. Not being able to pick the plane you want to use is a biggie for me.

Just now, VeryBumpy said:

Lots of Career complaints floating around. Not being able to pick the plane you want to use is a biggie for me.

Well that is kind of the point as long as your career is at a point where you still work for someone. You don't get to chose what aircraft you fly, your boss decides it for you.

Maybe later in the career when you open up your own company you can pick the aircraft.

Many bugs also here.

Otherwise that is really a feature I look forward too.

Currently the credit system doesn't make sense and I can't afford any new licences

Career is good idea with poor interpretation. Some things are definitely  awkward.

Main shortcomings:

- Too much micromanagement . Don't tell me to fly via brackets just give me one marker speed direction radius. Let me be a pilot in command

- Concentration on "nonsense"  objectives in some  missions. For example my favorite parachute jumper mission MSFS asks to fly pattern. Given nature of ops I'd like to do steep descent short approach no stinky pattern!

Would it should have been:

- Mission with relative freedom but at the same time encourage aeronautical decision making . Make it learning tool, not bracket flying rote learning 

- Subtract point based on mission profile . For example, overstressing aircraft (over G), stalling, overbanking and etc depending on particular objective. Obviously aerobatic and pax mission will have different scoring criteria .

- Let me decide which runway to use and where to hold short. This is good example of micromanagement. IRL you can request to take off from opposite side of runway if it safe (winds calm) and fit your objective.

 

Basically there are some 3rd party developer that already done it like Neofly, Simbits and etc Why not to look what they don't and what customer prefer vs reinventing the wheel?

 

In conclusion: I like idea of career. I think it's interesting element, but as probably most of us feel it has to be overhauled completely  

3 minutes ago, sd_flyer said:

For example my favorite parachute jumper mission MSFS asks to fly pattern. Given nature of ops I'd like to do steep descent short approach no stinky pattern!

I did discover it doesn't dock me if I fly a downward spiral to land again. But I still can't get down fast enough for it to think I completed the mission in time. I'm at a loss for what to do to make it think I did things fast enough.

I also discovered you can get rid of those sky-tunnel boxes with a key assignment, which is great. It does keep the blue glowy boxes to tell you where you're supposed to end up, which is handy for parking since the voice just says GA parking but not necessarily *where* in GA parking, but you lose the taxi ribbon, the markers and the sky boxes.

I also discovered you don't have to follow the boxes all the time. In one mission I was approaching from the downwind leg side of the airport. The boxes wanted me to overfly the airport, then turn around and overfly it again before teardropping into the downwind leg. Well that's dumb. I just entered the downwind leg like a normal person, and it didn't dock me any points. So now, unless I'm experimenting with something, I fly with the boxes off.

I also think it's dumb that they make you stop at the hold short line after exiting the runway. Real life, you're often already getting initial taxi instructions before you hit the taxiways so you don't have to stop and block traffic waiting for ground to tell you what to do. Especially at the untowered air fields, no one's stopping to announce their taxi, they just announce it while exiting and keep rolling.

 

 

 

Helisimmer is not impressed having to do missions in fixed wing aircraft in order to fly Choppers, seems his direct requests to the Dev team went unheard.

1 hour ago, eslader said:

I also think it's dumb that they make you stop at the hold short line after exiting the runway.

That's not dumb it's actually completely wrong how they implement this and teach new pilots a mistake instead of doing it right.

The checkbox that you have to hit for it to count as having stopped is alway placed before the hold short line relative to your aircraft. But when you exit a runway you are supposed to pass the hold short line first and THEN stop. Only after you have passed the line the runway counts as cleared.

That too. But in practice airplanes only stop there if they need to. If you've got your taxi instructions or you're at an uncontrolled airport and no one's in the way, y you don't have to don't have to come to a complete stop. And if you don't, then as long as you didn't create an unsafe situation, no one will care and it will not impact the kind of jobs or pay you get for the next flight.

 

It goes to the micromanaging thing sd_flyer was talking about. They're trying to add gaming elements to something that doesn't need them, and it's going to annoy everyone whether it's the simmer who knows how it should work or the gamer-type who recognizes lazy "challenge elements" for what they are.

2 hours ago, Farlis said:

What is also missing is an option to sort the missions you get by different criteria.

I'd like to see one where you can sort by payment, so that you don't have to look through the entire list to find the highest paying ones.

 

And I really hope that later on you can chose to fly in real time with live weather and the system picks appropriate mission for time of year and weather. (No point in giving you sightseeing in an area where it's all IFR)

Agreed on your first point. As to your second, once you have your night and interment certifications you can then fly with real time and real weather. 

Non-transparent evaluation criteria and basically no feedback system. According to my scores I really suck at banner towing, but I have no idea what I'm doing wrong and no one is telling me.

45 minutes ago, outermarker said:

Non-transparent evaluation criteria and basically no feedback system. According to my scores I really suck at banner towing, but I have no idea what I'm doing wrong and no one is telling me.

I think there is button where you can see post flight report

I haven't unlocked all missions. But so far my most favorite is parachute jumpers drop. The challenge is to get up and down as fast as possible. You can actually see some jumpers on way down - which is kind of add to immersion.

This mission gives me the most perks at the moment. In my book is the most reasonable one. I can skip all the brakes and go straight to drop point. Getting turbine rating also helps because switching from 172 to Caravan - which makes life so much easier! LOL