Reviewing Luthier's roadmap

[Blackdog_kt]

Originally Posted by bongodriver

Phil,

I understand the concept of criticism and how fanboi'ism will not help, but the criticism is becoming a stuck record, and I don't think a constant barrage of DCS is better or ROF is better will help the sim suceed, rather it will make people go and buy DCS and ROF and forget COD......no? but how about this for a concept, every aspect of the games bugginess has now been discussed to death, and there have been sadly only a couple of threads that really go into highlighting the bugs, the rest is just mud slinging, this is why I see no logic to the current form of criticism....it just wont help the sim suceed at all.

Exactly. Sorry for the off topic tangent, but this needs to be stressed somewhat and maybe hammered into some of the thicker skulls.

The difference between a whine and a legitimate, constructive complaint is the tone the message is delivered in.

If people think there's things broken in the sim, they want to tell us about it and expect some reasonable feedback to their posts, they should at least put some effort in how they tell us about it all.

I have a bucket load of things i would like to see fixed, but my description of the issue is generally a bit more eloquent and detailed than "plz fix the crap ai/sounds/green fields/flavor of the month whine".

Is it because i'm smarter than most? Not really. So what gives? Well, i'll just go on out on a limb here and make a guess, i think it's e-laziness.

You know, the kind of laziness where i want things to work without any intervention from my part as an end user but at the same time i hypocritically rely on a bunch of other people getting knee dip in it, not all of them developers on a payroll but members of the community as well, to do all the testing, bug hunting/reporting/fixing, FMB tutorial publishing, making new missions/campaigns/tools/etc and what not, so that little precious me can enjoy CoD with all the shiny graphical and audio features of DCS:A-10, ROF and CoD itself combined while at the same having the content, multiplayer user base and seamless functionality of the 10 year old IL2:1946...all that without ever lifting one finger to that effect myself but on top of that, constantly berating those who are trying to move things in that direction.

You see it's a win-win situation: if the other people make it work i get a functional game, if they don't i can gloat and go all "i told you so" on everyone and all the while, i don't really have to do any of the hard work myself and i've talked so much hot air and contradiction over time that i can easily have a bunch of different, conflicting quotes bookmarked to quote depending on how each argument is going, so that i always end up on top...the true essence of a forum warrior.

They just seem too lazy to describe the problem properly, too lazy to try and come up with a workaround, too lazy to search the forum on their own for existing fixes, even too lazy to read whatever little stuff is included in the manual (which usually ends up in hilarious "bug reports" that are actually a case of the user not understanding why things don't work the way he expects, but work perfectly fine if he follows the manual's advice) and the list goes on and on ad nauseum.

If i had a penny for every time i've heard "i'm out of here, game XYZ is so much better", only to have them repeating their message and still be here constantly debating what needs to be fixed in a game they supposedly have no interest in, i'd probably be able to afford a real aircraft by now or at least hire a few extra developers for Luthier. In reality they are not leaving us, they are just trying to coerce everyone else into fixing the gameplay experience for them by a constant stream of complaints



As for the main topic of this thread, i think it's a very balanced assessment of how things are going. Like i said before i've got a load of things i'd like to see getting fixed or improved upon, but it's perfectly clear that if we care to apply a bit of deductive reasoning and revisit older threads to make a comparison between today and how things were immediately post-release, we can all see that:

1) Targets were set and the most pressing ones were met pretty fast.

2) The developers are out of the woods financially (they are planning expansions and hiring a new sound engineer to remake all the sounds from scratch), so work continues on the issues still remaining.

3) Feedback or no feedback, the developers are in fact reading the forums. This can be clearly seen from the fact that they react on the issues mentioned, either by the infrequent development updates or the actual changelog on the patch readme files.

It's just that some people want their hand held more than others, or a bird's eye view of their offices to feel content, but in reality nobody can say they are oblivious to our bug reports, especially since various little details, some of them pretty obscure stuff, that was spotted by certain knowledgeable, dedicated community members has been fixed at various points in time (small details on aircraft and how some aircraft systems operate).