Plane unlocks in single player - now more relevant than ever

[Axe99]

G'day Anton and crew,

I _love_ BoP, it's easily the game I've enjoyed most this year (and that's up against some very good games, including inFamous, Motorstormacific Rift, Killzone 2, and plenty others, which I all enjoyed a lot). I've been playing a lot of the online as well, mainly for fun but also because I'm both a big fan of planes and don't mind a dash of trophy-hunting as well. However, after spending almost three days solid (I kid you not, over 20 hours in the last four days, a lot of that time in European and US evening times) trying to get into games, I'm giving up on chasing all the planes (let alone the loadouts), as ?t's just not possible to get a fraction of the games needed without a lot of luck or an unreasonable dedication to the game. I've got some mates over here which I'll set up games with every now and again, but while we like trophies, we're not 'boosters', so we have no interest in playing a lot of three-minute games just to get a specific plane (and it'd feel cheap anyways).

In this context, is there a way of patching BoP so that the planes (in particular) and loadouts (if possible ) will be unlocked after finishing certain missions on certain difficulty settings? You can always make the harder unlocks only available to hard missions completed on Sim (although please make them possible ). I would _love_ to have a crack at flying and landing the B-17 on sim (this is the standout unlockable that I'm missing, although I wouldn't mind giving the Spit MkXVI a run either), or just doing a few random bombing runs on the training mission, or using it in some games with my mates, but as it stands, it's almost impossible (not hard - impossible, because the games aren't there) to get access to it. Indeed, at the moment it's considerably easier and more possible to unlock the highest-tier cars on Gran Turismo 3 and 4 (racing games that require a lot of dedication and skill to unlock all the cars) than get to some of the lower-end planes and loadouts on BoP.

In terms of the games, what happens is:
- you sit around in a room for 10-20 minutes waiting for people to show up.
- about half the time, one person joins, then leaves 30 seconds later.
- sometimes they hang around, and you play a 1v1 - if you start winning, they quit out. If you lose, it's a fun game, but you're no closer to the B-17 or whatever else you're chasing.
- on a very few occasions, you get a good crowd 6-10). When this happens about 15% of the time, or the game crashes out, 60% of the time one side or the other is completely dominant and half (or more) of the losing side quit out. Yes, the other 25% of the time you get a good entertaining game, but it's just impractical and illogical to spend that much time and effort waiting for a game that has such a small chance of working out.
- and, if you make some friends on BoP, and want to play with them, everyone sees you teaming up for the one side and bugs out quicker than you can say boo.

Now I'm not dissing the game - it's got enough in single-player to make it an absolute classic, but it'd be really good to be able to get to the planes, and also not have the trophy hunting skewed by a multiplayer setup that just isn't working at a scale that makes it practical to chase the planes and loadouts without getting a mate and 'boosting' - which kinda defeats the point. Am also noting that in another post you've pointed out that you can't change the multiplayer setup because the server is outside of your control, hence why I'm asking for single-player unlocks - would much prefer fixed MP (it's really good fun when it works ), but understand that may not be possible, whereas patching the unlocks is likely a lot easier. Also, now that we're a couple of weeks past launch, it's likely that a lot of the people who have been turned off multiplayer won't be coming back, which means that other than specific organised games organised, finding general games in IL-2 is going to become harder and harder, even if it was fixed overnight and was perfect from here on in.

And it's not the end of the world if this doesn't happen, I'll still have and love the game, but it doesn't hurt to ask eh? I loved landing the Blenheim on sim, and want to have a crack at that B-17 .

Note - I've posted this on the 'new' forum, but it looks like most folks are still here.