I've played IL-2 on PC for quite a while (Graduated JO, flew co-op SQN, etc.) so I know how I like the plane to 'feel'.
I bought a Saitek AV8R-02 for the 360 so I could fly properly over here, but the game has a nasty deadzone and no visible option to turn it off. I checked the stick out on Windows with some alternate drivers and managed to prove it has no deadzone built in, so I'm assuming there is one built into either the game or the 360 controller setup.
If it is the game, can you please remove it or give us a slider to set the deadzone where WE want it?
(And the logarithmic sensitivity setting would be nice too so we can adjust the percentages in 10s to things like 1,3,7,12,24,36,48,65,82,100 - not holding out much hope for that though )
It is very frustrating trying to target someone's engine with what feels like a 5%+ deadzone in the middle of the stick. Fine adjustment of altitude once you're on their 6 is just unnecessarily tricky, in my honest opinion.
The stick rudder seems to work fine (twist grip unfortunately, when I have a perfectly good set of Saitek pedals under the desk - but that's MS's fault for not letting us use PC peripherals!
) so lateral aiming is easy.
If it turns out to be a Microsoft probem - just tell us who to write to, so we can have controllers with no deadzones!