by tdammers » Mon Aug 03, 2020 7:34 pm
Swift is a bit of a UX clusterfuck, especially the "model matching" part, which I suspect is about 1000x more complicated than it needs to be. But the technology works well, near flawless, and by now most of the kinks of the setup have been worked out; once set up and working, it's an absolute joy.
The network itself is definitely worth it; compared to FGMP, the professionalism and seriousness of the majority of controllers and pilots is overwhelming. If you want the "full ATC experience", this is your best bet. The only issue might be that it comes with a "bureaucracy simulator" - that's a necessary evil in order to maintain this level of realism and professionalism, and you'll rarely, if ever, witness any trolls, at least not longer than maybe 5 minutes until they kicked off the network. But occasionally, it leads to weirdness, and the politics going on in the VATSIM "government" (I think they actually call it that) are just like the real thing. Fortunately, as a pilot you don't usually have anything to do with that, you just fly and enjoy the service.