Do you want wait hours/days before you can actually play?

I'm suggesting that they build in an interface where you can select certain cities/regions or particular flight paths, you know, small chunks of stuff, and it would display how much it needs to download/cache up front. Give you a little progress bar and let you queue up multiple locations, if you have the bandwidth/room in your data cap. Let the user have control. Worst case, if you want to download a large area, start it at night, it downloads while you sleep, then it's ready in the morning, ezpz. Give the user control, instead of invisibly doing everything in the background without giving the user any way to monitor/control bandwidth/data usage.

You do that by, hear me out, playing! And the game figures out where exactly you want to play and what you need.

I want to have more control over that process than just booting up the game, taking flight, and hoping I don't hose my roommates watching Netflix because my flight path is slightly off course and the game starts streaming gigabytes of textures I didn't think I'd need.

it probably will be an option to preload anyway but I don't know enough about MSFS

If that's the case, great, problem solved, as long as I can also turn off the auto-streaming feature.

And in the case of preloading, you would hit the exact same data cap.

If the game let me control what textures to download more granularly, instead of automatically downloading a bunch of shit in the background, I have control over when/if it that cap is reached. If I'm getting close, I can make the decision to wait until next month to download the New Zealand textures or whatever.

And if you a data cap, I'm sorry for you. That's a real bummer.

You're being awfully dismissive about this, but it's a huge problem. Most of the USA and Canada still has data caps. That's nearly half a billion people, and probably a good chunk of the overall audience for MSFS are from the US, using data capped Internet plans. Making a game intended for that audience that downloads huge amounts of data without a way to control it other than "just never fly in new areas 4head" is asinine. I don't think that wanting more control over what the game downloads is that ridiculous of a request.

But, I don't know why i have to keep repeating this point, the amount of data is at worst the same!

Granted, but I want control over when that data is downloaded, and I only want it to be downloaded when I tell the game to download it. I don't want the game making that decision for me invisibly in the background.

But this is the exact same as with preloading..

No, it isn't. There's a monumental difference between the game deciding to download 100Gb of textures invisibly in the background while I'm playing the game and other people in my household are also trying to use that shared Internet connection, and me telling the game to download those textures overnight when no one else is using that bandwidth, and after I've confirmed that it isn't going to incur fees by pushing me over my data cap.