54 minutes ago, Lucky38i said:

.......Oh come on, don't be disingenuous now, because you know despite what the license states on usage, everyone used it for home simming. Everyone who wasn't using Xplane was using P3D. You're side-stepping to avoid acknowledging all of @UrgentSiesta 's points.

.....and Lockheed Martin knew exactly what they were doing when they offered the Academic Licence.

10 hours ago, Sky_Pilot071 said:

Just turn up your fauna setting to high. Yes landing gear are considered small animals.

dd

Does that actually work?

1 hour ago, simsuper80 said:

Does that actually work?

Do not think so.. Someone would have figured that out in a couple of years.

3 hours ago, Matchstick said:

MSFS '24 pushes it's curated experience to the front, a cynic might suggest because career mode is designed to push plane sales on the MP rather than third party stores.

Oh no, a business is going to, try and garner sales on their storefront as opposed to others? How dare they? As far as I'm concerned developers fully free to sell aircraft however they see fit, whether that be on MP or not or even both. This isn't DCS which requires that you do so.

3 hours ago, Matchstick said:

You've never wondered by the free flight button is the smallest on the screen ?

No not really, I can still freely press it and use it to my whims. I see no issue with a company attempting to put their gamification at the forefront because it's what will garner the most sales, so long as I can still use free flight which Asobo hasn't given me any reason to believe that that would be removed.

3 hours ago, Matchstick said:

Similarly why not offer an unranked open career mode that allowed any plane from any store but had no scoring ?

So first there was a problem that asobo was promoting gamification, now you've moved the goalposts to which aircraft they allow on career aspect. While I won't discount your point and I agree that all aircraft should be allowed in the career, I'm worried how often you plan to move the goal posts until you're vindicated in your pursuit.

3 hours ago, Matchstick said:

As for P3D, the issue isn't that people didn't use it's rather than LM didn't care one little bit about them because there were a tiny rounding error compared to the money made from their actual target market and so made absolutely no attempt to respond to MSFS's arrival because without a commercial license it had no material effect on them.

The point still stands because P3D still made a significant portion of the home market. Whether LM valued that or not is of no value to the point that MSFS has unilaterally knocked P3D out of the market.

3 hours ago, Matchstick said:

Finally crashing - I know of NO other sim in history that has had and equivalent of "Back on Track" that can't be turned off ?
Do you know of one ?

You have a problem with a button you're not required to press?

3 hours ago, Matchstick said:

In essence 2024 is Asobo's attempt to create Forza Horizons for planes and the general sim aspects have suffered from the effort put into that focus.

Can you demonstrate to us what simulation aspects have directly been affected by the gamification of MSFS?

Just now, Lucky38i said:

Can you demonstrate to us what simulation aspects have directly been affected by the gamification of MSFS?

Live Weather

7 minutes ago, MarcG said:

Live Weather

You haven't answered the question. You said what has been affected but it hasn't been demonstrated how gamification directly affected live weather.

5 minutes ago, Lucky38i said:

You haven't answered the question. You said what has been affected but it hasn't been demonstrated how gamification directly affected live weather.

Downgraded the visuals, introduced bugs still not fixed, no improvement in 5 years, was better before SU7 etc etc

Just now, MarcG said:

Downgraded the visuals, introduced bugs still not fixed, no improvement in 5 years, was better before SU7 etc etc

I still don't see how this is linked to gamification. Visually the game looks great but that's just my opinion. I don't see how you can directly link career mode to added bugs. No Improvement in 5 years is a WILD statement.

I agree live weather woefully needs to be more comprehensive, but I don't look at career mode and think that this was traded in favour of live weather. That's quite a stretch that's not really based on anything, just an old headed mentality that hobbyists like to spew because their hobby is becoming mainstream and thus certain things are being done to cater that. Asobo has released a number of SUs fixing a plethora of things and adding a number of things.

While not everything is fixed and not everything we wanted is here now, I can pretty clearly see that the work is being put in.

Edited September 13Sep 13 by Lucky38i

1 hour ago, Lucky38i said:

Oh no, a business is going to, try and garner sales on their storefront as opposed to others? How dare they? As far as I'm concerned developers fully free to sell aircraft however they see fit, whether that be on MP or not or even both. This isn't DCS which requires that you do so.

No not really, I can still freely press it and use it to my whims. I see no issue with a company attempting to put their gamification at the forefront because it's what will garner the most sales, so long as I can still use free flight which Asobo hasn't given me any reason to believe that that would be removed.

So first there was a problem that asobo was promoting gamification, now you've moved the goalposts to which aircraft they allow on career aspect. While I won't discount your point and I agree that all aircraft should be allowed in the career, I'm worried how often you plan to move the goal posts until you're vindicated in your pursuit.

The point still stands because P3D still made a significant portion of the home market. Whether LM valued that or not is of no value to the point that MSFS has unilaterally knocked P3D out of the market.

You have a problem with a button you're not required to press?

Can you demonstrate to us what simulation aspects have directly been affected by the gamification of MSFS?

I have a problem with risking losing the core of what it means to be a flight sim in the process of smoothing the experience for people looking for a light experience. I'm NOT trying to gate keep here, there is absolutely nothing wrong with ideas like Back on Track for people who want or feel they need it. It's about saying the only styl;e of play is with them forced on.

Similarly, as I explicitly said in my earlier post, the problem isn't having a career mode, I use one myself in the form of FSE, but it's about the incredibly rigid nature of the career mode they have provided.
Again this comes back to the idea of Asobo seemingly not to understanding that different people use sims in very different ways and raises the question about whether investing these resources is spending considerable resources on a career mode designed around the specific style of play is a good use of those resources.
And looked at this thread to the one posted by MarkG earlier there are clearly areas of the core simulation that could use those resources, that people want Asobo to look at but that just doesn't seem to be important to them or MS.

6 hours ago, Matchstick said:

Asobo in '24 have delivered a gamified experience pushing a specific way to play rather than the fully open world that has defined GA flight sims.

This is patently untrue. Every single one of my flights is Open World with no other hoops through which to jump. I use MSFS in exactly the same Open World manner as I use P3D and X-Plane.

6 hours ago, Matchstick said:

Can you name another sim that doesn't allow you to crash ? Not one with an option to turn off crashes but one that simply doesn't allow crashing to have any consquences ?

A. Isn’t the fundamental goal of Serious Simmers to NEVER crash? It certainly is mine.

B. What is your definition of “crash”, anyway…? I have over-G’d the CJ4 through the Mach Loop, hit one of those random Amazon rainforest trees on a dragged-in final, and smacked my wingtip on a terminal building in an ultralight.

All were immediate flight ending events.

Are you somehow upset that there’s no explosions or wreckage…?

C’mon, man - it’s been a G-Rated game since the very beginning!!!

You don’t like that kinda movie then you gotta go to another theatre.

6 hours ago, Matchstick said:

Whether that's messed up OrbX's business model or not is of absolutely zero relavence.

Surely you don’t claim that’s a coincidence, do you...? 🤷‍♂️

Orbx nearly folded because the cash cow regional sceneries market dried up the day after 2020 released, and the market for custom airports was blighted by the relatively decent Defaults and hundreds of rather good Hand Crafted ones. ALL notably better than than what was included in P3D.

They have yet to release another True Earth scenery on ANY platform since then, and won’t even update the X-Plane sceneries from v11 to v12. Why? Because anyone who cares enough about Hi Fi scenery isn’t willing to spend $45 on a few thousand square miles when they can get the entire world right there in the game

No, that giant sucking sound was caused entirely by 3 PETABYTES of satellite ortho and AI generated overlays streamed on demand - for FREE

6 hours ago, Matchstick said:

As for knocking P3D out of the Home Sim game, I'm not sure that was quite such an impressive feat as you, largely due to the fact the the sim's License EXPLICITY banned that kind of use. That's a product not exactly going out of it's way to compete in the market.

Another ridiculously bad conclusion.

A. Let’s do a poll over in the P3D forum and see what percentage of users were in compliance with the Academic license, or paid the $250 for the standard version. I wasn’t (and remain so).

B. Do you really believe PMDG was able to pay for their own private jet on the backs of just a few P3D users or scofflaws using bootleg Academic licenses? 😂

No, bro - not even close. P3D was THE Serious Simmers choice, and every simmer who wanted Study Level aircraft were using it.

Blackbird Sims (nee MilViz) literally confirmed it in writing: Their P3D addon license sales dropped so low after v2020 that they were losing money just keeping the e-comm system online. Literally single digit unit sales…

No, MS and Asobo definitely understand flight sim and flight simmers. And more importantly, they’ve cracked the code to massive market share growth, and are making their partner ecosystem more profitable than ever before.

Meanwhile, P3D is a dead man walking, and X-Plane has become like buying a Porsche: great car, but expensive and relatively rare.

Edited September 13Sep 13 by UrgentSiesta

13 hours ago, abrams_tank said:

Yes, I am starting to think that all the major new features we are requesting, including improvements to the weather, may end up appearing in MSFS 2028 (or whatever the next version is).

Working Title has done an AAU for MSFS 2024, and of course the 707 was redone and made much better, but aside from that, I don't think there have been major feature inclusions since MSFS 2024 was launched (maybe I missed a few plane enhancements or plane additions though). I thought they would start to include major new features again after SU4, or SU5, when MSFS 2024 had become much more stable, but we're moving into SU7 and it's mainly been bug fixes, with small feature enhancements being added (but no major feature enhancements, aside from AAU).

I mean, come ON guys…!!!

Isn’t what everyone’s been tar and feathering Asobo for is fixing all the performance issues and bugs in 2024…?

So now that’s happened/-ing, we think the spigots are thrown open for new features and they just start flowing…? 🤦‍♂️

And surprise, surprise - all that is taking way longer than they estimated. Let me find my shocked face to throw on for a second

Jorg said just a week ago that the primary focus remains bug fixes and Career. And Career has been said to be a hugely popular feature set for users.

So we’ve got tangible examples of Asobo responding to wide user demands (and you better believe they’ve got the auto-metrics to back it up the prioritization).

But yeah, let’s start those conspiracy theories about v2028 already… SMH

@Bdub22

Edited September 13Sep 13 by UrgentSiesta

8 hours ago, Matchstick said:

In essence 2024 is Asobo's attempt to create Forza Horizons for planes and the general sim aspects have suffered from the effort put into that focus.

Nope. Just…nope.

MSFS is peer level to any available flight sim, and quite a bit better in many respects.

There are plenty of bugs and shortcomings and “missing” and/or “unrealistic” features in X-Plane and DCS and whatever other flight games folks are flying.

Just take a stroll through the AvSim x-plane forum. Or if you want some real entertainment, go over to the DCS fora and watch all the caterwauling over minutiae like splash damage, multi sensor integration, missile physics and dynamic campaign (🤣)

The grass isn’t any greener over in those games by a long shot.

If Career mode is extremely popular, then it stands to reason that they will want to fix the bugs, and expand upon it. Absolutely no use to me, but I can understand it.

5 hours ago, MarcG said:

Live Weather

P3D never had live weather. Nor DCS (and they just came out and confirmed there it’s not even on the road map)

I could regale you with a long (loooong) list of X-Plane’s Live Weather issues, but that list might be long enough to be considered Off Topic.

Point is that none of those sims have gamification and still have plenty of weather problems.

21 hours ago, Funky D said:

Microsoft already sold their IP in the form of P3D... doing it again for the current MSFS would probably take a pretty big carrot, but I've been surprised plenty of times in this hobby!

They wouldn’t sell it. They’ve learned how profitable commercial simulation is. They have plans (and probably active programs) for comm/gov/mil use.

All they need to do is similar to what they already did with the mil/gov instances of Office365 (or whatever they’re calling it this month 😂).

Once they have a separate instance(s), they can control feature deployment according to simulation standards.

And the comm/gov/mil market is certainly big enough to get the FAA and others to adjust the sim certification process enough to accommodate there.

21 hours ago, Funky D said:

My main issue with XP was the lack of turbulence when flying small aircraft, and the "on rails" feeling was still a common complaint the last time I checked. In MSFS, I've gotten the same thermal updraft when flying over a parking lot during short final at my old home airport that I used to get IRL. I'm sure the location of that thermal was just a coincidence (realllly doubt MSFS is taking ground color into account for generating thermals), but it's that "lively" feeling when flying GA that I love most about MSFS, even though it is at times overdone.

Funny you mention that updraft effect! 🤙 one of my favorite little airports has a huge one of its own just short of final. Quite enjoyable (perhaps a bit overdone, but it’s great that it’s there).

In re the rest, comparing several similar study level addons between the sims is a bit of a hobby for me.

For pattern practice, I still prefer X-Plane with live weather to make me work harder to get off and on the airfield in good order.

BUT, the gap isn’t all that big any longer, and it’s steadily closing.

Shockingly, I think the gap has become smallest with helicopters (again, comparing the really good ones). Since v2024 it’s gotten to the point where I prefer to fly rotary in MSFS than in XP(!). Some of that is due to 2024’s much better scenery, but helos like Taog’s and even the little Cabri have just become so good that I only fly helos in XP for specific aircraft.

Now THAT’S progress!! 😁👍