One can see that people are moving on...

[Flanker35M]

S!

People are absent for whatever reason. For me it is the summer! Why sit inside pressing F5 or play something when you can go out and check out babes on beaches(when weather warms a bit), have a BBQ + beverages with friends and all that..For me summer is low profile regarding gaming anyway Autumn is another matter then..and I guess we have got far more progress in CoD then as well.

As of patching or fixing the game devs can look in mirror. What you did or did not do in the past is in front of you sooner or later

[Blackdog_kt]

Originally Posted by Anders_And

Well, this board is getting more and more quiet as can be seen by same posts staying far up on the list even without getting any replies... Last friday update has only 8 pages or so...

Lack of small fixes and a feeling that nothing is progressing...
This my friends are how you lose your customers. Poor Blacksix has been given the task of keeping us updated, but more often than not he has nothing to provide to us... Why isnt Luthier here to keep us motivated? Or some of the programmers?

Why does everything have to be released in mega patches? How about one small patch for sound updates (fix the flyby sounds of the 109 and 110? One for the spitfire throttle? Or one for lack of ground friction for the spits?
Or one for grass? One for Trees? One for Clouds? One to give back the damage visuals for small caliber fire? One for hit flashes? List goes on...

Ah well, who am i kidding... That would be logic and customer support...

Dont get me wrong, the game has potential, but lack of support makes people move on and once they have, its difficult to get them back.

I don't know about others, but personally speaking that doesn't apply to me. I was one of the most frequent posters here and spent quite some time collecting tips and tricks, how to guides, etc and compiling them into single-thread FAQ documents after the initial release, so that people could find workarounds for what didn't work in the sim and get to flying.

The reason i'm not active is not the sim. It's in a far better state than when i was highly active, which makes it all the more exciting for me to get to grips with it.

My problem is other real life commitments that limit my free time, as well as the fact that some people, when given pointers on how to make things work will not follow it but just go "i shouldn't have to do that in the first place", which makes me feel like i'm wasting my limited time trying to make their game playable, instead of just flying it myself.

So you could say it's a mix of real-life and certain behaviour trends in the community that are to blame for my inactivity. If i had more free time i would just stick to discussing things with the people who are actually interested in making things work, instead of those speculating on the reason for their current state and all would be fine for me

Also, it's summer and i prefer to go out for a cup of coffee or a couple of beers with friends instead of sitting in my room with the PC radiating generous amounts of heat due to the high processing load of gaming software, plus i bought a used motorbike from a friend and i might spend some time riding soon.

As for the state of the forums, i really like it now. The amount of repetitive posts is down and the ones who most frequently engaged in them are probably bored and have moved on.
For me this means i can check the forums once a week when i have free time and i'll still see the interesting stuff, whereas previously it was buried under an avalanche of separate threads dealing with the same repetitive discussions and i had to waste extra time separating the wheat from the chaff.

After all, i was never of the opinion that discussion for the sake of it is doing any good, especially in an "insulated" media like this that doesn't facilitate proper face to face contact between participants. Ok, in a pub you might talk just to talk because it's a social thing, but here? A forum to me is a place where people post if they have something to say that interests people who gravitate to the same topic. If there is nothing new to say, there is no reason to create new posts/threads.

This helps keep the whole thing clean and people can use it as a directory of relevant topics that are easy to find, not buried under a pile of repetitive discussions that are essentially one topic that could be served under one single thread.

As you can see i don't mind difference of opinions, i just have an opinion myself and i don't believe that talking for the sake of talking is any use. I come here to see a selection of topics, then i click on whatever interests me and if i have something to add i'll do so. I don't come here to see 15 separate threads with the same topic, where the same people post, dominating the entire forum and preventing anyone else from speaking their mind through sheer volume of repetition: it's like running ECM against the rest of the users, limits their freedom and it's a display of pure arrogance and inconsideration.

I'm a fan of having one thread for each discussion topic, so that anyone can participate or ignore it based on their own volition. What we had before was equivalent to someone reaching out across the internet, strapping me to a chair and shouting to me "here is my version of the story, you WILL hear it". It's too clockwork orange for my taste. It was also the main reason i accepted a moderator position, so that i could prevent it from happening: select posts on the same topic, move to single thread, done.

Finally, in regards to the patches i agree that smaller patches fixing individual issues would be nice to have. I also understand however that due to remaking the graphics and sound engines, it's not only that the manpower is all taken up by those projects but maybe it doesn't make sense to correct small issues until the groundwork is finalized, because they might have to go back and do it all over again after the engine changes.

I thought things like that were totally separated in code, but the more we learn in the university i'm currently attending, the more i can appreciate the mess that is tracking the consequences of one small change in the code across an entire application. So i reserve judgement and hope they have a good reason for patching things in bigger batches.

To sum up, i'm way too busy with other stuff currently, so i like the fact that i can come here once a week and just get the gist of it all without having to trawl through a mountain of repetitive "forum dogfight" posts anymore. It's great.