Online Squadrons playing CLOD

[Bewolf]

I dare say that the descision to coninue to play a long standing, exisiting Sim opposed to switching to a new one has more factors involved but the state of the new release. I remember back in the days when CoD was still due to be released many players stating they will wait until the new series sports a similiar amount of aircraft and theatres as IL2 1946 did (notwithstanding it took IL2 1946 more then 10 years to get where it is now).

As others already said, the more choice you have, the more likely it is that people will take different preferences, pretty natural.

Personally, I am a WW2 geek, played 1946 like crazy back in it's day but for the love of it can't go back there now. CoD simply put the bar too high for 46 to compete in regards to FM, DM and graphics. But I am sure others will have different priorities. As aus3620 already said, pointing fingers here in the line of "CoD destroyed my squad" is a bit simple.

[FS~Phat]

I think the loss of squad pilots has a lot more to do with the fact that a lot of people were hanging out playing 46 in anticipation of CLOD, and when it finally came out, a lot of squads already had lower participation from various factors.

Let me list a few;

• Life sometimes just gets too busy
• Splitting community from the different mod versions of 46
• Complexity of getting 46 mods working (not everyone flying is an IT geek)
• LOTS of other worthwhile games coming out
• Going a bit stale from 10 years of almost the same thing over and over
• CLOD not working as well on some systems as people were hoping
• Some people like me just decided to have a break until some of the teething problems were sorted with CLOD

I wouldn't worry too much, a lot of those people will be back, especially if it's in your blood...

So i dont think you cant point the blame squarely at CLOD for people leaving squads, its a broader set of issues.

[klem]

Our Squad was already split by IL-2 vanilla/mods as far as preference was concerned but we bit the bullet and continued in vanilla '46 so that we could continue to fly together. Just making the point that we are committed to the Squad and eachother to a large extent.

When CoD came out it fragmented us badly, largely due to the basic playability/bugs of the game which put a lot of our guys off and also due to the PC spec requirements which even now, generally speaking, need to be at the high end. As a result we had only about 25% of our regulars flying in CoD. A few stayed in '46, one or two simply stopped flying and curiously the majority of the rest went to RoF, temporarily as it turned out. I guess we were all just ready for a new sim after so many years in IL-2.

However following release of the last CoD patch and some more of our guys upgrading their PCs we now have 14 guys able to fly in CoD. Of these 11 fly regularly but include 4 new guys (only 7 'old hands' regulars). Another 2 old hands have only just become CoD capable so should be regulars soon. 2 more old hands can fly CoD but aren't regulars due to life's commitments.

So we have about 70% of the old hands converted to CoD plus 4 new guys.

Having said that we still aren't happy with some fundamental flaws like the memory leak, disappearing dots and, to a lesser extent, the FMs which desperately need sorting out.

But its positive and improving.

Im certainly not pointing all the blame at CLOD, but had it worked correctly out of the box I am certain there would be at least 10 times the amount of people playing online right now than there currently is, Its seems so sad that what was advertised as the next generation of flight sims actually killed so many peoples interest in flying, and 10 months on nothing as really changed or been fixed since release.