+1, that's pretty much my take on things.

Communication and feedback to the community is needed, but it shouldn't be the job of the guys doing the coding because it takes up A LOT of time.

Half the people here continuously post about issues that are mentioned in threads just 2 spots above their own and they manage to miss it because they're too impatient to read.

I've been actively trying to help by sharing my observations on how certain things work in the sim, guess what, i had repeated the same things at least 4-5 times within a week because people just can't be bothered to read. They expect to pop in here, ask something and get a response within an hour or so.

I actually started to copy-paste all of my posts to a text document and compiling some sort of FAQ because, i kid you not, it actually saves me time when someone asks the same question for the umpteenth time: i just paste a wall of text from my .txt file and tell them to use the forum search function, which saves me enough time to test more features and possibly answer something that hasn't been answered a million times already.

I'm not complaining mind you, it's not a job for me and if i was unhappy about it i would stop doing it. What i'm saying is that it's too time consuming.

So, is this what we want them to spend their time on, or fixing the sim?

Then how do we ensure that the needed communication exists?

1) A full-time community manager to babysit these discussions. This is what they said they'll do.

2) A weekly dev update, but don't expect much in that because of the reasons above.

I agree it's not much to spend 5-10 minutes per week on such an update, i really do.

I just don't trust half the forum population to be content with the amount of information a busy coder can provide in the span of 10 minutes. Specific changelogs and bug lists will be demanded and then, if a feature slips past the deadlines and doesn't make it to the patch everyone will be all "torches and pitchforks" once again.

Having a full-time community manager is the more effective solution.

Just to set the record straight: my comments about recurring communication was not about getting an apology. I recon this was not directed to me, but just in case. I don't want the creators of the one and only real ww2 flight sim to apologise for anything.. what we have is already well worth 50$ for ppl with enough hw to enjoy for it!

But getting for example once a week updates on how are they progressing and what's the 'top 5' at the moment would be great! It doesn't have to be a commitment or a feature list, more of an longish tweet that would probably do it for a lot of people.

And this is not shoddy software company or a piece of junk we're dealing with there. These guys have vision and passion to create something that no one else in the industry does due to it's lack of ROI and I salute them for that!

http://www.totalgamingnetwork.com/im...ies/salute.gif

I've always wondered about this anomaly happening throughout the web forums: the moment people see a text not to their liking then #1 comment is about the author being a child.

For us geezer like me it feels pretty good actually. :)

Your patience and contribution in to this forum never ceases to amaze me. My hat goes off to the detailed support posts you've written so far. Great to hear there is a FAQ in the oven! You should apply for the community manager position.. ;-)

And I can't blame people for assuming they conveniently get an answer to their questions for a product they've bought without reading through walls of random text. If the information is not part of the manual or similar easily accessible source of support material available there should be answers available in a community of some sort.

I'd be interested to hear of the longer term roadmap for features like dynamic weather, campaign, DX11, 64-bit exe, etc.

Even a rough outline of what sequence we can expect to see those features appear.

Though I expect there is still too much to be done fixing the current state and getting up to standard with AI, comms, map, etc.

Well put.

Like u-boats:

Run silent, run deep....

Attack from nowhere with a devastating blow.

The next update is gonna sink us for sure :p nvm that... actually: Be sure!

The only thing I miss is an organized way to keep track of the bugs, an their status. Some users of this forums had tried , but I believe this is a job for the dev team, or a middle man, because they have the tools and the knowledge to keep the list useful, updated and in some cases with an explanation

Sometimes I wonder if our efforts to comunicate issues to the devs are in vain or not. Not easy to be a good beta tester without feedback from the other end.

Yep, I can point out a number of things that need attention or would help but I get the feeling they're still in scramble - or perhaps near panic - mode for US release and can't even think about that kind of stuff. I'd also bet they're still in the midst of trying to hire staff.

What do you have against Blackdog_kt, wishing this upon him is almost evil :-P