customer satisfaction poll

[Sternjaeger II]

Blackdog, I always get kinda scared by the length of your posts, but I generally agree with with you, you always come out as a well balanced member. Let me explain what I meant with this poll, cos I believe there's a lot of second guessing and misunderstanding of my purpose:

Originally Posted by Blackdog_kt

You just saved me a lot of typing, +1.

If there's nothing new to report, a simple "hey guys, we're still working on feature X and it's coming along at such and such pace" is the only thing that can be reasonably reported to us in an update.

That's what, 2-3 lines? Well that's exactly what we got yesterday in the last update and it's what can reasonably be expected until the next milestone in the roadmap is reached (banjo video notwithstanding), yet people flail about nonetheless.

If a road map changes every week it's not much of a roadmap, so i guess we're also out of things to report on that front as well.

I don't think there's a need to change the roadmap, all I'm saying is that an update of the work status towards the next patch would be very appreciated, cos it puts us in a perspective of knowing what's happening.

Again, as a customer and a fan of one of the (potentially) best sims on the market, I feel that, because of the relentless support, help and investment (I personally bought two copies of every single game released by the guys, publicised their work and ran the first Italian community website back in the times when the first IL-2 came out) that we made in Maddox Games, the least that we could receive is the same treatment we received over the past years, with constant feedback, updates and interaction. Yes, there have been dark times and bright ones, but the result (IL-2 1946) was a gem of rare beauty.

The air is different now, the screwing up that came with the poor distributor managing (and here I curse you, Ubisoft!), brought us to a release of a half finished game. I'm sure that the guys made a miracle in terms of logistic and programming work, but the sad reality is that they were forced to sell an alpha for a complete game. We were ready to put up with it too, but 5 months along the line, and after years of "family work", the last thing I accept is to see a new development manager behaving in a bit of an unprofessional manner, using sarcasm when really uncalled for and giving less and less updates, until the embarrassing silence of the last weeks, broken only by a very poor stunt that is only buying him time. And again, it's not the action per se, it's the fact that he thinks he can pull such a number to the "old school" members that really leaves me disappointed.

As such, i didn't vote because i consider the poll options unsuitable to reflect the true conditions of the current situation: there's not much to report until something is finished, a beta sample is ready for testing, or the majority of the forum are professional programmers with prior knowledge of the CoD source code so that they will be able to understand a block of C++ posted in a future update where Luthier tells us how they go about implementing dynamic weather or something similar

What do you think the reaction would be?:

1) "wow, i don't know what this means but thanks for being so open about it?"

or

2) "what in god's name is this technical jargon mambo jumbo/you call this an update/it's clear they are mocking us/ we want a preview video and a patch release date"

this is just speculation, and I'd be the first to corner the real trolls that come here and look for some trouble whenever Luthier posts a genuine update that is respectful to the community.

Here's another poll for us all

In other words, updates just for the sake of getting them is only a recipe for repetitive or empty posts, unless there is something tangible to report.

It's not a matter of whether we want updates or not, everyone does. It's a matter of whether there's anything to update us on that the majority of the forum can make sense of without seeing a final, complete result.

I seriously doubt there currently is such a thing, especially seeing how hung up the loudest crowd is on easy to spot superficial details and completely misses all the gameplay-relevant details and fixes needed under the hood (where they haven't bothered to look much because the fields are too green and the tracers too thick) so the way updates are currently handled is fine for me: it seems the majority of people who create the "want updates" wave is mostly focused on things they can see or hear, but there's no new pretty pictures to show and the sounds are not ready yet.

You know what fixes i would be ecstatic about? Fixing the gyrocompass in the Ju88 so that it can use its level bombing autopilot and actually fly the mission it's intended to, tweak the CEM to correct the current inaccuracies in FM, adjust the turret behaviour on bombers with powered turrets so they can be used as intented and redo the anthropomoprhic controls to filter out controller spikes and take into account control proximity instead of having an arbitrary "two hand limit".

However, these are not fixes that can be displayed until they are done and a demo video is uploaded for us to see. I wouldn't understand a thing about how they do it in the code, so a simple "we're fixing the issues with the bombers" is all i need to hear.



To start wrapping this up, if the poll had a "none of the above, i have another opinion (please elaborate in post)" option, i would have gone with that. I think the options are a bit too "railroaded" for me and while it's true we can't have polls with 19765 options to reflect every opinion, i think the current choices are a bit too limited: they will result in an overwhelming "yes, we want updates" verdict without making any mention of the issues presented above in the rest of my post and the quotes provided, which is actually the biggest part of why there are no regular updates at this time.

As such, i consider it a non-representative poll (there's no immediately visible way to know how many people read the poll but abstained, which would be a good indication of how the community gauges the validity of the poll, unless we start comparing the amount of views and votes), abstain from voting and i will openly challenge the interpretation of its very predictable results if it ends up being used as a "leverage point" further down the road. Nothing personal of course, i'm just taking the clinical approach here and telling it how i see it:

The poll is skewed (i'm not saying it's done on purpose, it's just skewed), the results will be the same and as such, it doesn't qualify for much of an argument/evidence. For example, people may vote "i don't want updates" if they think it's skewed on purpose, just to spite off the ones who demand the updates, if it happened to be a majority would the result be valid?

Some people may like to make fun of him, but the guy in the below quote got it all right in much fewer words than i used:

I think the magic of the poll is that once you vote you can explain why you did it. Like I said to Robert, any opinion is valid, as long as there's polite, civil and intelligent conversation coming with it. I have no mercy or sympathy for trolls or agitators, my flaw is that I get to their level, but I can't help it.

I hope you will consider my words and maybe understand that mine is a genuine call to see how many people would like to be updated on this long, unusual and somehow worrying silence.