Outsider here. I'm a middle aged man who grew up on Flight Simulator from the monochrome DOS days all the way through FS X before having to abandon it due to unrelated reasons. I was around civil aviation as a kid due to my parents' job, worked for a commercial airline as a young adult before moving on to a career track in the tech industry, and after spending an embarrassing amount of time binge watching those "real airline pilot flies xplane/flight simulator" videos during the pandemic, realized how much joy this stuff has brought me. I knew I should just buy the hardware to get back into this.
Trouble was, I now live in a small <500 condo in Manhattan and frankly I get enough seat time in my "work" chair, I've got enough computer hardware that I don't want a third PC just for gaming, and Xbox made perfect sense. I can set something up in my "not at work" part of my condo, buy a yoke and pedals, etc.
I waited diligently for something to show up, and last night the timing was right and I nailed an Xbox X order thanks to a restock. This morning I woke up thinking about how much time I was going to waste going down this black hole of learning to cold start antique jumbo jets and filing flight plans in my spare time instead of rekindling a normal social life of the sort I had pre-COVID. And it didn't bother me one bit.
Then I started looking into how to get into VATSIM and installing other mods, since, to me, this is about real world everything. And then I found out that not only is it not supported, but the attitude of the average VATSIMmer is this kind of toxic gatekeeping word not allowed. Not just here, but on other forums too, and r---it (am I allowed to name other websites? anyway you get the idea). Didn't used to be like this.
My other hobbies are road cycling and fine wines so I'm no stranger to toxic levels of elitism, and you guys honestly make the average road warrior wine snob look like Barney the Dinosaur.
So if you ever wonder why the average member will be one of your own, maybe it's not because people aren't willing to put in the time and effort. Maybe the problem is you.
Brand new account and this will probably not even get mod approved, but I needed to rant so there you go. Enjoy your secret club, my Xbox is going on ebay and I'll spend this energy on a hobby that's less aggressively obnoxious, like middle aged men taking testosterone supplements pretending to be world champion pro cyclists.
