4 hours ago, Fiorentoni said:

In general guys, if you have any issue, please get on the Discord: https://discord.gg/beyondatc

There's around 50.000 members and issues are solved, users are helped, fun is restored by the minute.

How long will it take for honest people to get these same features in the regular version?

BATC has worked decently most of the time, but i do see issues often enough for me to dust off P2ATC. Today was particularly rough. Here are a few examples:

I request pushback and get clearance, but after pushback my next option is ready for departure. I had to do a radio check to get it to provide the option to taxi again.

I was holding short, first in line. BATC tells me on am 3rd in line, but we are all stuck. I had to line up, then BATC gave the plane behind me clearance to takeoff, and started screaming at me. 

BATC regularly repeats the same instructions to AI pilots over and over. 

In the 777 I am instructed to taxi in ways that cause me to go under bridges that would hit the top of the plane. I also come across planes taxiing right at me with no place for either of us to go. 

Of course, vectoring me in the opposite direction where i need to go, or just forgetting about me. 

I am sure i am forgetting things but enough things go wrong to make me think FSLTL and P2ATC might be better. I will test it and see.

 

Edited March 1Mar 1 by RobJC

4 hours ago, RobJC said:

I was holding short, first in line. BATC tells me on am 3rd in line, but we are all stuck. I had to line up, then BATC gave the plane behind me clearance to takeoff, and started screaming at me.

Occasionally BATC gets the sequencing messed up. I remove conflicting aircraft in Traffic Map. Screaming? 😉

4 hours ago, RobJC said:

BATC regularly repeats the same instructions to AI pilots over and over. 

I only noticed this happening after a recent update, and AI pilots get 'stuck' as well. For me, it happens rarely enough to be annoying.

4 hours ago, RobJC said:

In the 777 I am instructed to taxi in ways that cause me to go under bridges that would hit the top of the plane.

I believe this is something the scenery developer needs to sort out.

4 hours ago, RobJC said:

Of course, vectoring me in the opposite direction where i need to go, or just forgetting about me. 

Hopefully the new version will improve vectoring!

4 hours ago, RobJC said:

FSLTL and P2ATC might be better

I'd be interested in your conclusions.

16 hours ago, Vitold69 said:

How long will it take for honest people to get these same features in the regular version?

Are the people who pay for supporters edition… dishonest? 
 

the move from experimental to EA is entirely dependent on the current features in experimental and usually moves over when majority of bugs are squashed. 

@RobJC , in your post above a lot of those BATC issues should have been resolved by beta testers. Does anyone know if it was beta tested? Usually a gratis copy is given in exchange for detailed testing including the situations you describe.

I was one of the Radar Contact beta testers 21 years ago (crikey!) and we gave it a thorough workout. That’s why it’s still very useable today in P3D of course.

11 minutes ago, Ray Proudfoot said:

should have been resolved by beta testers

BATC is 'Early Access', you click a disclaimer before purchase to confirm that you won't get upset by bugs.

 

25 minutes ago, flyingscampi said:

BATC is 'Early Access',

in other words: a fool's licence for each and every bug, however crazy they may be. no guarantees for nothing, except your payment. with such fundamental problems I can just as well use similarly bugged default or freeware.

ego te absolvo.a peccatis tuis.

1 hour ago, flyingscampi said:

BATC is 'Early Access', you click a disclaimer before purchase to confirm that you won't get upset by bugs.

 

Crikey! That's effectively paying to beta test. Do you get a reduced price?

It's worse than I thought! You're actually charged more for the beta version!

"Show your support to the BeyondATC team and get an early taste of our features under active development!"

https://www.beyondatc.net/pricing

Paying to test is something that's been said about various products for MSFS. What happened to the notion that having created a reasonably robust product you offer it to beta testers in a closed group to iron out bugs BEFORE it's released to the paying public.

It is always astonishing as some people fail to read properly or otherwise try to intentional descredit a certain product.

BATC is Early access!!!
So, if you buy it, you buy to test it or, if you prefer other words: you buy it as it currently is!
YOUR DECISION!

if you want support development, you can pay something additional, for this you get even earlier access for certain features in development. Note that there are even more bugs then!
YOUR DECISION!

 

Obvisiously, developing an ATC addon seems to be a complicated, long lasting task where money is needed over the time.
Say Intensions does it. FSHud does it. All take money for "unfinished" products. Even default ATC is unfindished and they have already taken money for it.

But yes, P3D and PF3 are fully matured meanwhile, yes ....

 

22 minutes ago, guenseli said:

It is always astonishing as some people fail to read properly or otherwise try to intentional descredit a certain product.

I can read properly. Asking customers to pay extra to gain access to new features which may or may not work seems to be becoming more widespread than 20 years ago. It was unheard of then. However you want to name it it's beta testing.

22 minutes ago, guenseli said:

BATC is Early access!!!
So, if you buy it, you buy to test it or, if you prefer other words: you buy it as it currently is!
YOUR DECISION!

So you don't agree that a product should be tested in a closed environment before being released in a pretty robust state? That's a very different situation to how Radar Contact was developed. We spent a long time testing.

The Radar Contact team comprised a lead programmer (John Decker), two real-world AT controllers (US and England), Pete Dowson, a maths genius and around 12 beta testers who also recorded over 2,000 pilot wav files and 3,000+ controller wav files.

No-one was paid for their efforts. They were given a free copy of RC4 (cost around 50USD) which was considerable 20 years ago. I fail to understand why it needs funding. Perhaps trig and ATC experts need paying.

Plus the RC support forum on AvSim still exists and is supported. A very different situation to how things are done now.

 

seems to be a lot of complaining about buying a beta product of batc, who openly say it is still in early access. if you don't want to beta test a product, there is any easy fix... dont buy it. nobody is asking you too.  a lot of you installed msfs 2024 over a year ago. you were beta testing for microsofts shockingly bad early days of msfs24. i don't recall microsofts marketing ever saying 'MSFS 2024 buy the early release now for full price and spend a year testing it for us'

They openly say it, yes. But further providing a beta branch inside an EA product with the ridiculous claim to «support the devs» is just... as if buying the EA version alone is not already supporting the devs. It is just a cheap excuse for selling an EA product and then further selling another branch. Kinda weird. Anyway, I still hope it will end up as a good ATC product, for the moment, sadly none of the available ones is a complete product providing everything...

7 minutes ago, Ray Proudfoot said:

be becoming more widespread than 20 years ago

oh, so many things changed since. 🤣

 

8 minutes ago, Ray Proudfoot said:

So you don't agree that a product should be tested in a closed environment before being released in a pretty robust state?

No. As I said above, developing an ATC tool (better said a modern ATC tool, because I don't want to argue with you about Radar Contact and PF3) seems to be a very difficult task. Otherwise we would have seen one since a long time as it would be a money maker.

And for such a long development you need money, and other developers which also need to be paid as you can't do it alone nowadays.

 

Everyone is free to support companies he have faith in that they will bring a good program in the end. Or not.
Of course, if you jump as early adopter onto every early access release, you will have bad experiences earlier or later. But normally, people wait for reviews, other opinions and take a certain amount of risc. And then, the developers have to deliver. Some do, some not.

But even with ready built products you have a risc: remember the PRO ATX/X "scam" ... the developer made a good start, failed to deliver needed updated, ported it over and over without fixing but taking money for it and then vanished. And this was not earyl access!

19 minutes ago, Ray Proudfoot said:

So you don't agree that a product should be tested in a closed environment before being released in a pretty robust state? That's a very different situation to how Radar Contact was developed. We spent a long time testing.

Not a fan of BATC (see my comments earlier) but...  restating what @guenseli notes, early access is a choice.  If it's not for you (and in this case, it certainly isn't for me!) you don't get it.  If you do, you have to expect a certain level of roughness.

There's nothing magical about the word "beta".  There are multiple paths to a full product release, and "early release" products have proven to be popular with many.  The market votes with their $$.  In this case, I still vote no.   You obviously do to - or I guess you would if you were an MSFS user?  But none of that makes BATC wrong in how they're managing their product.

Choices, y'know.

Scott