Oleg and Team.

[LEXX]

mslama::

You can't really compare SH3 and IL-2. The first one is primarily an offline game,...

IL-2/FB is primarily an Offline game in number of customer sales and financing of Oleg's business. Granted, Oleg's personal focus and hobby was primarily Online Dogfight fps shooter gaming which alone does not pay the bills without Pay-To-Play.

If you use mods online you get branded as a cheater, and if you use them offline you still have to suffer the godawful AI and other assorted limits of an ancient game engine....

The benefit of Online play is human vs human gameplay. When played Online, the sim becomes real life social interaction. We only get branded as a cheater if we play with anti-social and hostile behaving players, for example some members of ubi.com who frequent the anonymous public servers. The true Online play community is modding up their FB/PF in private servers as we poast.

[csThor]

Get off your high horse now and don't give me that cr@p about the "true online community", Lexx!

This elitist BS is one of the main reasons why I bother with posting my anti-modding opinion. I have a very low tolerance for arrogance and the snide attitude I see at AAA is IMO the primary reason why you guys are taking so much flak. You guys were a lot easier to get along with (read: easier to ignore) if you weren't behaving like some self-proclaimed cult leaders who claimed to have the holy grail in their hands.

[Feuerfalke]

The glorious days of hacker-groups, that managed to post their label in protected games and spreading them on schoolyards is long gone.

What you call "true Online play community" on anonymous servers, is neither the "true" community, whatever that should be, and it is most surely not anonymous; they're numerous, if at all.

But that's what we're talking about:
This is not about a group of fans flying purely offline campaigns in a Tigermoth, with visible explosions and smoketrails for well above 10km or billboards to make Icons visible over larger distances. I doubt anybody would even care. It's about those who use these mods to fly on "non-elitist" servers and you cannot say who is using what modifications.

[msalama]

It's about those who use these mods to fly on "non-elitist" servers and you cannot say who is using what modifications.

Exactly.

[Lo0n]

oh come on, i've only been flying online for a few months now, and only in public non-mod servers, but i have still to see any cheating going on. you do start to recognise the players who aren't just stopping by for a one off visit, and you start geting chatting to them. you do see people getting insta-kicked as soon as they join, evidently because they have the modded files, and then you see them rejoin when (presumably) they have used the version switcher tool to revert to stock. no funny flying, no super p.11's, no 108 armed spitfires. and the trust aspect? well how many times have you had someone warp out of your gunsight, pre- and post-mod days? did that not do anything for your trust of certain players?

the online game is far from dead, there seems to be a bit of ebb and flow of numbers on the servers i play on but it goes up as well as down. but then if you aren't playing cos you don't trust anyone... how would you know about the state of online play?

[msalama]

did that not do anything for your trust of certain players?

Not overmuch... their Internet connections, however, were sometimes a bit untrustworthy

And yes, there were 'tards printscreening and cable-pulling before the crack too, of course. But that still doesn't lessen the fact of the basic situation being different now - and if you can't accept or understand that, fine, your business.

how would you know about the state of online play?

How would I know about some good friends still flying online telling me about the general swing of things in the circles I used to frequent while I was still active myself? By e-mail, among other means... HTH

[msalama]

But hey, this discussion is just so much c**p and little else if IL-2 indeed goes Steam w/ v4.09, now isn't it?

[Feuerfalke]

Originally Posted by Lo0n

oh come on, i've only been flying online for a few months now, and only in public non-mod servers, but i have still to see any cheating going on. you do start to recognise the players who aren't just stopping by for a one off visit, and you start geting chatting to them. you do see people getting insta-kicked as soon as they join, evidently because they have the modded files, and then you see them rejoin when (presumably) they have used the version switcher tool to revert to stock. no funny flying, no super p.11's, no 108 armed spitfires. and the trust aspect? well how many times have you had someone warp out of your gunsight, pre- and post-mod days? did that not do anything for your trust of certain players?

the online game is far from dead, there seems to be a bit of ebb and flow of numbers on the servers i play on but it goes up as well as down. but then if you aren't playing cos you don't trust anyone... how would you know about the state of online play?

No, online playing is not dead - nobody said, but it changed.

Surely we've had warping and stuff before, but that's not the point. I can see somebody that jumps from my gunsight to my six, while his ping rises and I know he's a printscreener and usually he's getting kicked before he can use that advantage. You knew that, everybody knew certain bugs and exploits and you could easily identify people, at least by watching the tracks.
But I cannot detect, if somebody uses a transparent cockpit or wonder-woman view on a Cockpit-locked server or if he detected me over 30km or over 3km. Can you?

[msalama]

The true Online play community is modding up their FB/PF in private servers as we poast.

Well according to your opinion at least. Us mere mortals may disagree however, because tastes differ.

I did play w/ a closed crowd of participants in private servers for a while myself, and let me tell you, that grows rather boring after a while because you soon know the combatants and their capabilities pretty well. And the rest then tends to be the same old same old repeated ad infitum, whereas w/ the public matches what you used to get when the same rules still applied to all was a good mix of skilled and not-so-skilled combatants. So what you had was an element of surprise combined w/ lots of variety PLUS a known playing field, which is something we plain and simple cannot trust to have anymore w/ the crack out there. No?

Hell, pre-hack you at least _knew_ what to expect for the most part regardless of your personal opinions of some FMs or whatever, but now? Now these anti-social types you keep on mentioning have an excellent means of cheating at least if they're skilled enough, whereas previously you could just ignore them if you wanted. Ergo, the public online part - which used to be something the majority of us onliners preferred, at least to my understanding - is dead and buried now, and not because of the anti-social types out there, BUT BECAUSE of this game having been hacked. Easy and simple, no?

So yeah Lexx, twist this any way you want, but this I think is the jist of it still. And mind you, it doesn't really change anything even if the 'tards _don't_ actually cheat because the trust is just not there anymore...

Not a biggie, though, because this game is getting pretty long in the tooth anyway. But trying to obfuscate what's basically pretty straightforward doesn't really cut it either Lexx

And oh yeah, closed communities and offliners can of course do what they want, provided that they don't come and p*ss on my preferred online cornflakes. It's just that nowadays I've no way of knowing for sure if they actually do, unless it's very blatant - and that, my friend, is the point here.

S!