Battle Of Britain: Storm Of War - Pilot's Lounge

[zapatista]

Originally Posted by csThor

With all due respect, but ...

1.) Oleg already tried the road of communicating with the community. He has done it for years, but it didn't do him any good. He was flamed, belittled, accused of cultivating various bias, swamped with demands of small-minded "I want! Now! Gimme! Whine!" folks and ultimately people accused him of having no idea how to run his business. Why should he bother with this narrow-minded, greedy, moronic and impolite community? Why should he post updates when all he gets is a load of flak? *

that is only partially true, and only giving that angle misrepresents the change in attitude that took place towards oleg in some of the bigger il2 forums over the years

first, yes oleg was active initially in il2 forums and that was an exception compared to other game creators. but a couple of years after the initial il2 release several il2/PF problems were not being addressed, and as more ww2 enthusiasts with reliable historical data became part of the il2 forum community, it gradually became more obvious that a one sided bias had crept in with some aircraft performances (the i-16 comparison with the me109 is a good example of this) and that various aircraft/munitions had some errors which were not being fixed or even acknowledged despite good evidence being available.

with olegs very high aim of making il2/BoB the most realistic ww2 aircraft sim it can be, he also needs to be more open about the data programmed into the game for aircraft and munition performances. most of us are way past the old excuse of "everything is programmed perfectly correct, its the pilot making the error not the plane/munition performance being wrong". if we have clear tables and graphs of the data being used for climb rate etc, then even if they are "wrong" compared to what we think they should be, we can decide how to fly a particular plane in certain situations and make the most of it. oleg thinks giving us that data would lead to more arguments, but it would resolve more important issues instead for his hard core fan base, and that will then reduce the wine factor from the lost teens that blow in with the wind on a regular basis because there would be more self regulation in the forums to control the whine factor..

it also turns out that on some of the issue where we repeatedly were told "trust me, trust me, it is perfect" this was not correct, a good example is the 50 cal belting where simply the wrong munitions were being used, this would have taken only a few minutes to identify and correct (it is now in one of the mod's). there are other glaring examples where we were given wrong information, and in the end with the files being hacked open it turns out many of our concerns were justified. as frustration mounted with some of those issues, and it turned out we had been given (deliberate ?) wrong information on repeated occasions, the tone in the forums gradually changed.

with some of the russian bias this can be partially explained by the mainly russian reference texts oleg has used for his sim, and yes after all it is a russian flightsim, but some of that data has been shown to be incorrect and lots of independent expert sources are now available to have a better overview of what is right and what was dated wartime propaganda. if oleg doesnt become more global in his perspective and data sources used, we will continue to have the exact same problem the next time around (get ready for the mig-sabre problem folks )