Saw an interesting discusion from an MSFS forum yesterday about where we should buy our addons from — the MSFS MarketPlace or the Developer’s website or their partnered webstores ?

Most people support the latter because in comparison the price is generally cheaper and the product release and update times are faster.

I agreed with them in general.  But the truth I found is: not all developers have good customer services and not all developers/webstores will prompt you for updates and bugs immedately.  And the most frustrated is this “missing link” sometimes leads to CTDs after MSFS updates.

There were many times I had to Google and trial and error to find out what addon(s) was (or were) the cause(s).  Spending hours to catch the bugs wasn’t uncommon in my experience.

A recent example was the RealSimGear plugin that crashed MSFS after the latest SU9 update.  I didn’t aware of it at all since the plugin had been working stably since its installation more than a year ago.  And it had gone thru many MSFS updates without any issue.

And in particular, I am not using the RealSimGear hardware all the time.  The plugin just runs in the background.

It took me nearly two days to notice that the bug was reported in the company’s Discord channel, which I seldom visit.  I didn’t hear a word from the company by direct email or whatsoever about the serious bug at all.

Indeed, the RealSimGear plugin might not be a very good example since it is by nature a standalone addon to MSFS.  Then, probably the serious stutters caused by the Switzerland Mesh from FSDreamTeams after SU8 update I reported in Post 768 is a better one.  I bought it from SimMarket.

I have uninstalled it since then, and I haven’t heard from the developer or the webstore if there are (will be) fixes to the issue or not.

Anyway, since last December, I took an approach to buy from the MarketPlace for addons that I would want them to be with MSFS all the time; and from developers or webstores for addons I probably play for a while and very likely might exclude them from my regular addon list via AddonLinker.

I am not saying that buying from the MarketPlace will be “addon error-free”.  But this practice seems to be working pretty well to me since addons from the MarketPlace, in my opinion at least, are less likely causing CTDs.

And most importantly, I don’t have to spend time on checking whether these “primary” addons to me are up-to-date or not.   They always are, even though the updates may come a day or two later.

—
—