Thoughts about Friday's update

[klem]

Good post zapista ( http://forum.1cpublishing.eu/showpos...&postcount=125 )

Many people here don't or won't grasp the reality of the current situation. Their frustration, like mine, is understandable but the continuous unrelenting complaining about the same things won't change anything and as you say will deter newcomers from the series. Everyone knows CoD was full of problems on release and everyone knows not everything will be fixed but it is still here and so are 1C MG.

I have just two concerns now:

1. The FMs for the CoD aircraft must be improved and that is all it will take to make CoD unique aspects acceptable because all core improvements will be overlaid by the sequel (they could also release some of those as a patch later on for 'CoD only' users). I'm not an off-line player and I understand the campaigns are lousy (?) but that is something the community can fix and would have to anyway once people got bored with the out-of-the-box campaigns.

2. You talked about a bug tracker, well as you also said we have one already but the devs don't read it. It was a fairly clean tracker with objective reporting mostly substantiated by in-game and historical evidence. It was mostly free of the usual ping-pong attacks and ego mongering (probably because certain people couldn't be bothered with real testing or providing such factual detail). It was prioritised by the community (how else would you prioritise it?) and for a while they took notice but BlackSix has confirmed that they don't look at it now, possibly because, as you say, their minds are really on BoM. And that is where my second concern comes in, they aren't listening to us except in patch bug threads which quickly deteriorate into the usual scumbag arguments and get abandoned by 1C and of course they are reluctant to say anything on a regular basis because they just get attacked and insulted all the time. In short, its the community's own damn fault and it isn't doing us any good.

Finally, I can't help noticing that some of the biggest critics don't even own the game or have abandoned it and no longer play it but still come here and use the forum as their own personal playground for creating mischief in something they are not really interested in. Except for their own entertainment or egotism.

[laBonj]

Originally Posted by klem

Finally, I can't help noticing that some of the biggest critics don't even own the game or have abandoned it and no longer play it but still come here and use the forum as their own personal playground for creating mischief in something they are not really interested in. Except for their own entertainment or egotism.

Agreed completely! Despite the current situation, I think the vast negativity on this forum doesn't always help things. I think even with it's many problems, I can still spend an evening with the game and have a good time!

[Von Crapenhauser]

Agreed
Since i started play it has improved no end.

[SG1_Lud]

Guys, if I have to quote all the things said in the above posts I would fill all the space with quotes, start arguing and make this unreadable, so I'll sumarize saying that I can agree on 90% of what have being said, and said that give my description of what some of us feel / believe.

The following is my take and those of my surroundings, so it could be only an isolated case, I dont want to speak for everybody and I dont wanna to argue here or convince anyone, so please take it only as sample of a poll.

I don't think that this is a problem of whinner vs fanbois anymore, is not if Tree was right or Zapatista, that's history now. I don't think either if we have more or less degree than elsewhere of the average trolls that take the opportunity of this discussions to feed their needs and look for forum dogfights.

The problem IMO is that a new season has turned out and again many squadrons need something to fly. Simple as that. They need to maintain the interest, train people, make SOP's, fly unite and act as a team.

This is a lot of effort and the natural question is : what sim are we gonna use?

And then we have very few options if we talk only WWII, but the truth is that if for a moment, even if magically we all became the same sort of optimistic people, we know that at short term we are not going to have a stable base in COD. Even if we forget about offline play, meteo, everything, and we asked about PvP only, we lack a stable network code to think about that seriously.

We have no way to make competitions in COD, and the squadrons need competitions. Farber is asking (S to 5./JG27 for hosting the first SOW campaign) who's is gonna take the next online campaign and he's trying to stir up the hive a little, and? who is willing to take all this efforts without a stable base?

So, I don't know of your plans guys, but in my squad we are deciding what to do for this season, and the future with COD is not very bright to say the least. We have never come and will not come here to harass good B6 with "please give me info", but if they don't show up soon with solid proofs we are gonna -quietly - take another way to survive as a squad.

If this is not only happening with us -I guess not - the problem with COD is not about fanboys or whinners, will be that the people don't sim this sim, and that will be the end except for the casual players and the offline fellows.

I wish I could blame someone in the community, for example the much beloved Tree, for all of this, but seriously and sady I cannot; and I don't think he is / has doing any harm apart of being a bugger for some, and I will say now that I changed slowly my opinion him, because fact is that much of what he said was true, like it or not. This conclussion came from direct observation since COD's release, not that he waved a magic wand on me, that is ridiculous to think of.

Of course, much less influence has had in me the usual trollers.

So please don't focus this thing again in dialectical fights among ourselves and who was right and who wasn't.

They have clearly give us hints that they dont want community's active help. Despite that Community showed support. We overcame the lack of proper manuals, readme's and heck, even the most basic things. No problem, someone was there to help and fill the gaps with videos, tutorial, bugs documentations, scripts...much of the time only guessing things that were undocumented.

But this is not April 2011 anymore you now. Some of us have spent hundred, even thousands of hours flying COD, and one and a half year of active waiting now is moment to say, OK we gave you money, bought more copies for our friends, convinced them to learn it, gave you time, gave you beta test and showed love.

Now show what you have for me please, because there is only one responsable of this situation and only someone that can fix it. And that someone is you. But please, no more screenshoots or announcements please. Show me a plan that I can believe, give me a timeframe so squads can organize their inmediate future and stop bleeding pilots, and show me solid proofs of the WIP that we can trust to continue supporting this. They know it and I hope the show up soon. I hope-.

S!

[Stublerone]

S! amd +1, Lud. One of the best posts in this forum and I totally agree. If the next patch step or announcements are again proving no big improvement, I will give up taking time to look up here or in bugtracker, which is also awfully bleeding out, because no issue is handled or said to be handled.

I am personally very sad about that, but I still hope for 1C to come back on course and proof, that they are a developer with good ideas and the ability to technically master their projects.

Originally Posted by SG1_Lud

Guys, if I have to quote all the things said in the above posts I would fill all the space with quotes, start arguing and make this unreadable, so I'll sumarize saying that I can agree on 90% of what have being said, and said that give my description of what some of us feel / believe.

The following is my take and those of my surroundings, so it could be only an isolated case, I dont want to speak for everybody and I dont wanna to argue here or convince anyone, so please take it only as sample of a poll.

I don't think that this is a problem of whinner vs fanbois anymore, is not if Tree was right or Zapatista, that's history now. I don't think either if we have more or less degree than elsewhere of the average trolls that take the opportunity of this discussions to feed their needs and look for forum dogfights.

The problem IMO is that a new season has turned out and again many squadrons need something to fly. Simple as that. They need to maintain the interest, train people, make SOP's, fly unite and act as a team.

This is a lot of effort and the natural question is : what sim are we gonna use?

And then we have very few options if we talk only WWII, but the truth is that if for a moment, even if magically we all became the same sort of optimistic people, we know that at short term we are not going to have a stable base in COD. Even if we forget about offline play, meteo, everything, and we asked about PvP only, we lack a stable network code to think about that seriously.

We have no way to make competitions in COD, and the squadrons need competitions. Farber is asking (S to 5./JG27 for hosting the first SOW campaign) who's is gonna take the next online campaign and he's trying to stir up the hive a little, and? who is willing to take all this efforts without a stable base?

So, I don't know of your plans guys, but in my squad we are deciding what to do for this season, and the future with COD is not very bright to say the least. We have never come and will not come here to harass good B6 with "please give me info", but if they don't show up soon with solid proofs we are gonna -quietly - take another way to survive as a squad.

If this is not only happening with us -I guess not - the problem with COD is not about fanboys or whinners, will be that the people don't sim this sim, and that will be the end except for the casual players and the offline fellows.

I wish I could blame someone in the community, for example the much beloved Tree, for all of this, but seriously and sady I cannot; and I don't think he is / has doing any harm apart of being a bugger for some, and I will say now that I changed slowly my opinion him, because fact is that much of what he said was true, like it or not. This conclussion came from direct observation since COD's release, not that he waved a magic wand on me, that is ridiculous to think of.

Of course, much less influence has had in me the usual trollers.

So please don't focus this thing again in dialectical fights among ourselves and who was right and who wasn't.

They have clearly give us hints that they dont want community's active help. Despite that Community showed support. We overcame the lack of proper manuals, readme's and heck, even the most basic things. No problem, someone was there to help and fill the gaps with videos, tutorial, bugs documentations, scripts...much of the time only guessing things that were undocumented.

But this is not April 2011 anymore you now. Some of us have spent hundred, even thousands of hours flying COD, and one and a half year of active waiting now is moment to say, OK we gave you money, bought more copies for our friends, convinced them to learn it, gave you time, gave you beta test and showed love.

Now show what you have for me please, because there is only one responsable of this situation and only someone that can fix it. And that someone is you. But please, no more screenshoots or announcements please. Show me a plan that I can believe, give me a timeframe so squads can organize their inmediate future and stop bleeding pilots, and show me solid proofs of the WIP that we can trust to continue supporting this. They know it and I hope the show up soon. I hope-.

S!

Very good post, and i'm not talking about the bit about myself . IMHO if Luthier had adressed the coop/netcode problem from day one then we would have a much healthier community, my squad has all but folded because we could not practice or use the coop function, many have pleaded with Luthier to fix this but unfortunatley the requests fell on deaf ears. Squads need coop's and online wars with stats etc to become immersed, it worked so well with IL2FB that it was a massive oversight to not consider fixing this for CLOD. Its madness to see more people flying online in the old IL2FB than in what was supposed to be the next gen flight sim. I think Luthier has lost sight in what his customers want out of a flight simulation, and unless he starts listening pretty quick it will be then end for either him or his company IMHO.

[Icebear]

lol....where is my post ? Already deleted ? Hell, that was fast !

[Stublerone]

Just in addition, as it was getting unreadable in the first days after luthiers well known post:

1.) Did he answer anything after the initial post?
2.) Are there any news on sukhoi.ru or any news here?

I haven't seen any news or feefback since then. And the Friday update became again an unregular event. So many are currently waiting for a big news and this will be necessary as priority topic for luthier and Co. to answer.

[zapatista]

Originally Posted by klem

I have just two concerns now:
1. The FMs for the CoD aircraft must be improved and that is all it will take to make CoD unique aspects acceptable because all core improvements will be overlaid by the sequel (they could also release some of those as a patch later on for 'CoD only' users). I'm not an off-line player and I understand the campaigns are lousy (?) but that is something the community can fix and would have to anyway once people got bored with the out-of-the-box campaigns..

exactly right !
- fixing the major FM errors and tuning relative performances for the competing aircraft (FM and DM) should be their nr-1 priority, regretfully i am not sure luthier sees or understand its importance, or that he know how bad things are in that department (but this has only become relevant since the sim became playable). as you correctly identified, that is the single most important core element to address right now and it will satisfy the more experienced sim fans who are focused on realism (which is what had been the il2 series's great strength, and it is that "niche market" which will then attract new users who initially start on lower "full real" settings)
- i also agree on the offline missions and campaigns, however frustrating that they are not present, the fan base can gradually add those (as they already started) while more important technical sim aspects are addressed

Originally Posted by klem

You talked about a bug tracker, well as you also said we have one already but the devs don't read it. It was a fairly clean tracker with objective reporting mostly substantiated by in-game and historical evidence....It was prioritised by the community (how else would you prioritise it?) ......

that bug tracker serves a very important unique purpose, all CoD users can go and report on bugs they found, or participate in discussing bugs found by others. the volume of comments and the number of people voting for a particular bug's importance is also usefull, BUT that system of reporting does not provide a comprehensive overview of bugs, gameplay issues, missing features, and the importance of fixing them in context of creating a more rounded finished product which "does most things well, but has a few residual problems to be fixed".

hence my suggestion of having some specific constructive discussion amongst ourselves (without constant disruption by whiners and trolls), where we organize a list of elements to be addressed (most of which we already know) and place them in their order of importance so it addresses the overall gameplay and use of the sim. this can then be repeatedly flagged to luthier as the most important issues the community wants addressed, and their inclusion and degree of fixing will be the measuring tool by which the "final CoD patch" can be rated (for ex the lack of tree collision models i do NOT put on a high priority, however much we would like it for thrill factors. i resolving this is a major drain on cpu/gpu performance at the moment, resolving it can be delayed till later in BoM)

- a good example of some real major problems:
- reversed controls in some aircraft and some gauges not correctly working (mostly easy fixes but very annoying)
- the problem of not being able to set a specific FoV for your monitor size (which was possible in il2 series, in increments of 5 degree's between 35 and 90), and when correctly set you were able to see in-game objects in their 1:1 correct sizes for the distances they were at (a MAJOR issue, and again has a relatively easy fix for them).
- another crucial one is the problem of distant LoD model visibility (we are currently flying around like myopic pilots, instead of having distant aircraft being able to be spotted/seen at the right RL distances). i suspect the LoD problem issue is relatively easy to fix now the new gfx engine is working, eg in the short term it might be sufficient to have the smaller LoD models provided with "visual enhancements" ("dog balls" paint schemes, or maybe bump mapping etc). this needs tome tuning and work by luthiers team, but is a critical issue
- the problem of allied fighter performance (as is well documented in kwaitek's thread etc), damage models on 109's etc
- lack of AI control and commands of friendly squad
- AI behavior in general is poor "out of the box", yet mission builders can set level of AI skill and then have much better results and more realistic behaviour, similar control of AI skill level should be made available in quick mission builder and for campaign missions or online server AI elements
- etc..

Originally Posted by klem

And that is where my second concern comes in, they aren't listening to us except in patch bug threads which quickly deteriorate into the usual scumbag arguments and get abandoned by 1C and of course they are reluctant to say anything on a regular basis because they just get attacked and insulted all the time. In short, its the community's own damn fault and it isn't doing us any good.

exactly, and hence my own concerns vocalized several times in the last few months. imho we need need to get better organized "as the consumers" and provide some of the groundwork to sift through bugs/omissions/errors that affect normal gameplay and use of the sim, and then present this (in this forum) as some sort of "consumer request list" of bug fixes in order of importance. failing that i think a few squeaky wheels will get oiled in the last patch, and some important (but relatively easy to fix) more important issues will be left out.

Originally Posted by klem

Finally, I can't help noticing that some of the biggest critics don't even own the game or have abandoned it and no longer play it but still come here and use the forum as their own personal playground for creating mischief in something they are not really interested in. Except for their own entertainment or egotism.

agreed. tolerating the level of abuse and constant disruption by a little cluster of perpetual whiners who are deliberately disruptive is very counter productive and undermines new players to get help and objective feedback. several of those trolls, and all their alt login aliases should be perm banned instead of the revolving door of temp bans that doesnt change their behavior.

[csThor]

Originally Posted by klem

{SNIP}I'm not an off-line player and I understand the campaigns are lousy (?) but that is something the community can fix and would have to anyway once people got bored with the out-of-the-box campaigns.{SNAP}

Sorry, but that's too easy. Fact is we don't even have the most primitive of campaign systems, no ranks (even in the very primitive form as used in 1946) and therefor no medals or anything like that, either. For an average dolt like me, who could turn out some missions in 1946 for own consumption, this is far beyond my capabilities to actually design a campaign module like the Desastersoft guys did. And because I don't like their style of campaigns (achievement over storytelling) I'm bitten in the hinder again.
Secondly the abysmal AI and the utter lack of a working player-AI interaction is making offline gaming as a whole pretty pointless.