Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024's launch has been marred by a handful of issues and clunky backend infrastructure designed for just 200,000 players. To somewhat alleviate this situation, Microsoft's latest patch for its flight simulator addresses a few common stability problems and advises users to relocate the Community Folder for better performance.
MSFS 2024 (Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024) incorporates a unique design to reduce initial download sizes - streaming assets from the cloud on the go as you play. This has several implications, the first being bandwidth on Microsoft's end and the second being game preservation, but that's a topic for another day. Microsoft's design did not factor in the large swarm of players at launch, and even now, it struggles to keep up with demand. Talk about suffering from success.
In its release notes, Microsoft suggested users transfer the Community Folder to another folder before restarting the game. According to Microsoft, outdated packages in this folder can impact your framerate, so this small step might boost your performance—to a certain extent. A handful of other bugs have also been addressed, as you can see in the list below.
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Stability & Performance
- Fixed a crash when you selected "As Arrival" in the EFB.
- Fixed a crash that could occur when closing and invoking the Camera menu after changing the Drone focus mode option to a value other than undefined.
- Fixed various crashes across the title.
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General Bug Fixes
- Fixed missing cursor on Xbox Live sign-in popup
- Fixed an issue where you could lose focus when creating a new input profile.
- Aircraft selection is accessible via the control menu, but can only be changed from the home page.
- Fixed an issue where you could get stuck when accessing the menu bar from any help page.
Users have expressed their frustrations, an example of which is Steam - seeing MSFS 2024's rating drop to "Mostly Negative." Admittedly, while server capacity issues still plague the flight-sim, initial testing should have taken these considerations into mind. Global player counts are still on the rise - offsetting Microsoft's best efforts to mitigate ongoing bandwidth problems.
As we speak, Microsoft has not rolled out a roadmap of any sort to address the community's concerns. This sort of ties into the increasing player count problem we mentioned above. A game heavily reliant on cloud streaming is bound to run into these issues. The idea is new and innovative but also restricts data and bandwidth-limited users from accessing the game and then you have the obvious subject of game preservation. Nonetheless, MSFS 2024 has been a hit - in all sorts of ways but we expect Microsoft to find solutions to these issues shortly.
