I don’t doubt that for a second, I’ve worked with them long enough to confidently state that as a fact.
But then I start to wonder something else:
ED is either telling me that they are working on something that they are not working on or putting very little resources into with the intent of keeping me buying their DLC (they are intentionally selling me their vision of what DCS should be but isn’t right now) or they are very, very optimistic in their resource planning, to the point that they miss the mark by years.
Did i miss some other less depressing option? Because those are both options that i find very worrying.
You know, I trust in wags and mr Grey to be competent, and I know for a fact that they have the same love and passion for the hobby as you and I do. Therefore, I feel no need whatsoever to question their way of steering the ship. My role is not to second-guess them. My role is to evaluate whether I want their product when it’s time to pay up again. Nothing more, nothing less.
Personally I buy DLC because I want to fly that particular aircraft in the sim we have today. New stuff such as a dynamic campaign, ATC, weather enhancements etc are icing on the cake to me, but I certainly don’t spend my time playing/flying DCS focused how good it could be. I enjoy it for what it is, right now. Despite any perceived shortcomings, I think it is an amazing sim right now, as it is. It will only get better going forward.
It’s not that i can’t enjoy DCS for what it is right now, i can and i do regularly, it’s just that i can work much better with “we don’t have the resources” than with “yeah, we’re doing it, definitely at some point, for sure, we promise, just not right now, but soon”. I hope that makes it a little clearer.
Yeah it’s not that we don’t criticize stuff. We criticize things all the time. We are just mannered about it. Most of the time. I’ll be the first to admit that now and then I make a rant and need someone to pull me back a bit.
And just to be on the safe side: I am not saying that everyone on SimHQ or the ED forums is a hater or anything. There are good people on all forums.
There is not one thing ED has said they are working on that I think is a waste of time. All are good steps.
I don’t know what priority the various items have, and which are more likely to come out sooner rather than later, and I have my own feelings about that.
I must admit I can’t really think of anything they’ve NOT mentioned that I think is worth them diverting resources to. They have the list they’ve shared over the years and I agree with it. I just personally wish certain items were prioritized over others. For example, ATC–I don’t care how long they take on it. It’s something that should work better, yes, but I place it near the bottom.
About that- the subscription to my fanclub expired last night- please everyone send me 20$ for Komemiute’s Citizenship Card and a whole year of exciting content*!
From my perspective, the ED forums have always been rather heavy handed and unwelcoming from an outsider’s perspective. There are/were many examples of mistakes made by moderators and community managers; I get that it’s a difficult job – I’ve done it before – but reviewing many threads and history of the forum makes the whole place seem very bipolar. It’s as if one user getting wound up results in retaliation that has an area effect damaging a bunch of other users who had nothing to do with the whole thing from the start. Naturally, for our niche community, bad news travels faster than good, and as with many passionate people, tempers can quickly flare. Trying to tame this fire is very difficult and must be done with a careful eye if you’re dependent upon these people for your product’s success.
I’m hoping that ED looked long and hard at their PR game and community relations, coming to the realization that while there are many folks out there who will always have a chip on their shoulder and will never forgive them for perceived infractions toward their character. I understand that these people can be very grating and annoying, but to succeed you have to let them do their thing, because even they often have a few nuggets of truth in their rants. Don’t let it get personal and don’t fight fire with fire. “If you’re not getting shot at, it’s a good day,” an old infantryman once told me. Yes, it’s odd seeing a grown person throwing a tantrum on the internet like a 2 year old hopped up on meth and sugar, but it gets even more alienating when you see someone who’s supposed to know better get down and roll in the mud with them.
This is a starting move by ED and while I must admit that I am skeptical as well as pessimistic regarding how successful it will be, I also believe that perfection won’t come at the first step. If ED can grit their teeth and bear the first few painful steps, then it will be subsequently easier to move forward as time goes on.
I would also add more rants on other forums and members here, but I’ll refrain and grit my teeth on that.
I can’t say that I really agree that you should let everyone do their thing. In a ideal world, the ones with the largest, most obvious chips on their shoulder (and want to make sure everyone knows about said chip in every possible thread/forum/community) would have limited impact and would not really guide the tempo/tone of a overall discussion. Sadly, we don’t live in that world. Over the past decade or so, it has become more and more the norm for online communities to skew hard towards hyperbolic, angry, sometimes wildly inaccurate points of view since they are the most emotionally cathartic and come off as the most “authentic” in that “They took down my post because I am just telling it like it is!” kinda way (even if that often isn’t really the whole story at all).
If you kinda want to see a good example of this in action, think back to when IL-2 Battle of Stalingrad was first announced and their forum first went up. There were specific IL-2 forum communities that intentionally went to to the Battle of Stalingrad forums to toss around insults, make wild, hyperbolic assumptions, and generally attack the entire project out of spite. When they got banned or punished, they would go back to their favorite forum and talk about how they were “censored” for “telling it like it is” when in reality, it was their behavior that got them punished and rightly so.
Unfortunately, the places where new DCS players are most likely to end up (in terms of online communities) when they first start out are also the ones that tend to relish negativity and encourage weekly outrage blowouts over even the smallest things. These places are setting the tone for a lot of players and it has been happening long enough to start seeing the long-term impact.
ED runs their forum the way they do because it is so easy for just a few loud, angry voices to turn into a wild mob of people that get swept up in everything, pick sides, and attack each other, ED, third parties, and other communities. If you give a inch with that kind of thing, a mile will inevitably be taken.
