This is what it’s all about.
If you’re not having fun, you’re not doing it right.
But what I consider fun may very well be ridiculous to someone else, and vise versa. That’s ok too. Some people want a warthunder experience, others want to play pretend they are flying the real thing. It takes all kinds…
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I’m hip. I’m a golfer (of sorts - a horribly difficult game for a no-talent, senior citizen for sure) and I play with people who’s idea of ‘fun’ means they can reach the greens in ‘regulation’ and their score will be in the 70’s (a commonly held belief that that makes you “better than average” - my words).
So, they play from the closer tees - makes the hole 20 - 100 yards shorter. That’s fun, to them. It bores me: I never use more than ~ 4 clubs doing that.
My fun is mastering each shot - the feel of it - regardless of what club it is, how far it is, or what my score might be. It’s all relative. There are limits of course.
Dude asked me one day, as I was walking off the course what my score was. When I told him I didn’t know what my score was he replied, “then how do you measure yourself [as a golfer]?”. I replied, “with a ruler”. Likely I came across as a smart-azz but that’s my way. And we all have fun.
And I’ll never pretend to be a ‘professional’ - that’s a whole other ‘real’ world. Frankly, I suck at it but it’s the ‘journey’ as they say.
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I think one the ingredients here at MS is that we have a whole lot of people who fly for a living or a hobby here. I think that dramatically cuts down on the “how it’s really done” arguments here at MS. Also we almost universally seem to have a healthy life outside of sim’ing. There’s nothing wrong with spending all your time sim’ing if you take care of the rest of your life. I often wonder about some folks on other boards…
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This. I’m with ya.
Never understood the machination’s over how X-missile or Y-Electronic gizmo doesn’t do it like “Z-thing I read on the internet or in a book”.
As long as it’s reasonable (seems to demonstrate the laws of physics) then I see my “task” as: how do I utilize/operate this ‘thing’ within that context. EW is a biggie: if we wait til it all becomes unclassified we’ll never any system(s); my tactics will be based on what it is, not what someone thinks it is really supposed to be like. Adjust.
And That, X2.
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Well, at gut level, all one needs to qualify as a fan is to enjoy a type or specific property of entertainment. So, I’m not actually comfortable with saying they aren’t fans as it just kind of smacks of the No True Scotsman fallacy. I don’t necessarily mean just literal YT commenters. After all, lowest common denominator there.
No one should have any patience for those types, they should just be seen as an annoyance to block and be done with. I mean the communities that have sprung up around certain personalities and groups that are content to bring the worst of Xbox Live’s behavior into the media they make, they circles they create, and then act as if everyone else is wrong when they find out that kind of behavior is frowned upon in the larger culture.
That’s who I meant.
Though, I definitely agree that we’re a very demanding bunch when it comes to quality and accuracy. A lot of the time, our reaction to even minor inaccuracies can seem quite extreme. There’s also a reaction to that in turn as people are so quick to remind us how ‘cheap’ DCS is compared to other sims as if $70-$80 for entertainment software isn’t a bit steep to begin with.
We, as a consumer base and as an enthusiast community need to come to terms with some realities:
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Development is Belle. Belle is the name of my dog. She is a female. Software development sucks at the best of times and now we’re dealing with some fairly complex computations that need to be done by a fairly specialist programmer. We need to be ready to accept slow updates at times and mistakes. ED and third parties can’t just go out and hire help at random, they need qualified programmers. For a lot of the third party devs, this is a sidehustle and not a full time gig. That means, you’re paying for someone to work in their free time. We need to temper our timetable expectations accordingly.
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Certain limitations exist. I’ve stopped explaining to people that Mag 3’s MiG-21 will never have totally accurate stall characteristics. This is because the Soviet approach to the stall envelope was to basically terrify newbies into avoiding speeds nearing stall. Stalling the Fishbeds can be very dangerous, this isn’t like your granddad’s 172 that’ll basically recover from a spin-stall if you even think about opposite rudder. It’s a video game at the end of the day and I’d never ask Dolphin887 to gather that kind of info, given that he gathered the telemetry for the -21 when he still flew them. As you go back farther in time, aircraft display more and more quirks like this and it could prove utterly infeasible to model things like this. That’s just how it is.
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Defense organizations do not care if something doesn’t make sense. If I had a dime for everytime I’ve had to explain to another person that defense contractors, manufacturers, and operators have the ultimate say in whether or not we get something, I’d have my own air force by now. Especially in regards to Russian aircraft. Since '08, the RuMoD has been incredibly protective of its technologies. We see this a lot with the MiG-29, there comes the refrain of “Well uses it, they could just go to that country for the information.” That’s all fine and good until you remember a bulk of ED’s employees are in Russia. It’s just a good rule of thumb not to irk the group that holds a monopoly on force in a region. Yes, there are other operators of the MiG-29. Yes, even American. It doesn’t matter, it doesn’t make sense, and the Russian MoD doesn’t care. They’re only beholden to the taxpayers their charged with serving, at least ostensibly.
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ED is going to make mistakes. Sometimes, they’re infuriatingly slow to fix it, too. The F-86’s gun muzzle velocity has been known to be too slow for 5 years now. They even seemed to want to sweep that under the rug. Who knows if it’ll get fixed, but I’m holding off on any ED WWII/Korean aircraft until it does. Also, the rising system requirements at a time when parts are at all time highs in cost? No amount of “turn down your settings or upgrade” will be an appropriate response to this, frankly, dimwitted trend. ED needs to be told what to do, it needs to be informed of what its customers want, but it needs to be informed politely or else it’ll give them an excuse to ignore cries to optimize as just the rantings of a loud minority. ED is made up of human beings, so do react to them as such. Screaming at a McDonald’s worker because they messed up your order makes you look like a tool, the same applies here. We’ve yet to develop SHODAN just yet, so we can’t have perfect programming right now. The bonus there is that we don’t have homocidal hybrids swinging pipes at us, too.
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It’s content comment trolls, not sims and their fans. Look at us. Mudspike is now one of the larger flight sim social media platforms in the English-speaking world. That sounds over the top–and I did after all totally pull that statistic out of my a$$–but what else out there has a bigger following. We are almost always cool to one another and to the sims we (mostly) love. In the online world there is a special hell for trolls who skewer content creators for entertainment. They don’t represent us the passionate users. They represent people trying to get a rise. As for as Mover in particular I am not much of a fan. I rarely view visual content that isn’t either intended to be funny, or marketing new content (ie, @wagmatt’s stuff). And because web cams bring out the worst in people I prefer audio. Again that’s me. Haters do exist. But they exist in higher percentages in nearly every other gaming genre than here in our flight sim world where love and good-will generally prevails.
Mover also suffers from coming from a pedestal. He actually did the job. Some people hate that. They want to throw rocks a take some satisfaction when one of them lands. He does frankly have a demeaner that makes him a little more open to de-throning by those with serious self-esteem issues.
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Just watched the video (or section of the video DCS related). Yeah…we are a fickle bunch. I think I’ve gotten less so as I’ve aged. I can remember writing passionate (but with a supportive tone) to the developers way back in the Jane’s days…asking them for features. Most of those features weren’t really technical features so much as "game"play features…to make things more interesting. I don’t much do that anymore…and certainly never really got twisted up about it.
It is actually one of the reasons I enjoy VTOL VR so much. It is a fantasy game, with a LOT of the technical gee-whiz button pushing of DCS, but since it is based in fantasy, there seems to be far less angst about the details. I love it.
Spot on.
And that is very much appreciated by me and the guys that help out around here. It makes keeping the site positive much easier. We don’t usher someone to the door for a single bad day…hell, I would have been thrown out long ago if that were the case. Everyone here seems to bend over backward to be respectful and thoughtful…and that is what makes the place great.
Exactly. And I agree…we (including Mover) have to be careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. If you let yourself focus on the negativity, of course you’ll skew your perspective. If I see one of those super contentious threads at Reddit or something…(flight sim drama posts)…I don’t read them anymore. I don’t care what Razbam did today or how some YouTuber lied about something. I save my outrage for a few choice things per year now…instead of getting involved in every one. For some…the drama has become the game instead of playing the game…(uh oh…I called it a game!)…
Agreed. I hate when we lose anyone…and anyone is welcome to come back (well, almost). It is interesting in that our community here is very diverse and ranges across all of the time zones…and each of you bring an ingredient into this mix and it takes restraint and awareness that we AREN’T all alike in every way…and that is OK. We still manage to break bread at the table and enjoy our shared interests. There are other houses and other tables to go visit when you are feeling a certain way and want to align more closely…but for general fun…it is a pretty good place to hang out.
I haven’t watched much of his content really…I’ll bet I’ve only really watched two or three of his videos. Not for any other reason that I’m probably watching the mindless Miami Boat Ramps or Haulover Inlet because I don’t want to think too hard. 
One of his videos did pop up in my feed the other day though…the one about his mental health and how he described some of what was going on in 2021. I felt it was one of his more important videos and I did identify with a lot of what he was saying…about sometimes not even wanting to be in the plane. 2021 was a year of extremes for me…where I was forced OUT of the plane, without any real confidence I’d EVER get back in it, and then once I was back in the plane…learning a new platform, I had to relearn that feeling of “oh crap…I don’t have any idea what I’m doing in here…am I still cut out for this?” that accompanies learning a very different airplane (mostly avionics stuff). It was quite the swing. Throw in a lot of personal issues and…yeah…life can press down on you and ours isn’t the profession where leaking a lot of that into your day job works out well. So I do commend him on that video…I watched it in its entirety.
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You have had a year of extremes. The negative were handed to you and the positive you seized. I’ve also asked the question above a few times in the last two months. The answer is now “Yes. But only just barely.”
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The fact that this thread and this community can have this discussion with such civility and grip on reality is testament to how great Mudspike honestly is.
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Life is too short for unnecessary drama.
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LOL Reddit! - some kind of hellish random noise to me. 
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The only thing that ever really irks me as far as modeled performance is relative performance.
I don’t know how far an AMRAAM can go, or what will or won’t break the lock of an AA-10. I DO know that making AMRAAMs miss more often than they hit, when fired inside the correct envelope, while watching AA-12s have 2x-3x the pk, isn’t borne out by real world experiences.
So in a head-on shot between the two all else being equal, I expect the AMRAAM to get a kill as often or more often than the AA-12, not the other way around.
Extrapolate that to radars and other “techie” aspects and I’m sorry but I’m not going to buy a late 90’s era Flanker or Fulcrum outperforming an early 2000’s F-16 or F/A-18 unless it’s a WVR dogfight. Or that same era Viper or Hornet being unable to spoof a Nam-era single digit SAM with jamming, chaff, AND turning. Otherwise, why were the SA-10 and later developed if the SA-5 is still that good?
Bosnia saw a couple of allied planes lost over the course of thousands of sorties because their ADA stuff was obsolete. They could get lucky, the western pilots could get careless, but on average they were not a major impediment.
That’s what I care about–that the planes behavior relative to each other and the ground defenses matches real-world expectations. Exact numbers are irrelevant.
But if you make one plane “as accurate as unclassified sources allow” and the other is lots of guess work, and the guess work plane out performs the accurate one in ahistorical ways…well I want it changed. It needs to feel right even if the stopwatches and graphs say they’re off.
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I do get what you mean but isn’t that a bit of a constant issue for games that want to be simulations? In that, life doesn’t gameplay balance and the sim is trying to be real-life ish? If we play an older game that doesn’t claim accuracy or something lighter like VTOL VR then you can balance the teams, weapons, but in a sim not so much. Now does DCS try to compensate for X, Y, Z because the game would be no fun unless they did, sure? Would developers put in inherent bias, absolutely. A constant strain on ‘real world sim’ is that sometimes it isn’t fun.
My daughter told a story of how when she got to the 2nd year of University people were completely losing it because they got grades on courses that just plain failed them. A few of them got together and confronted the professor on how can they get ‘0%’ as a mark (the course was just pass/fail). The professor replied “Up until now, your education has been using a form of Mario Kart rubber-banding catch-up, so if you get behind then just on the last lap you get given a ‘C’. Unfortunately, life does not rubber-band, and it’s best you get used to it now. Sorry”.
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I am with Jedi on this one. Instances where I was convinced that someone had their finger on the scale have been the most rage-inducing. An example was that crazy stick the JF-17 used to launch versus the AMRAAM. I say “was” because I no longer participate in PvP DCS servers and don’t know what’s happened with missile physics in the last couple of years. And it is only in competitive play where I cared about such things anyway. In single player and PvE, DCS and IL2 are no different than VTOL-VR or My Little Pony as far as an expectation for accuracy that’s consistent across platforms is concerned. I just want to “put the thing on the thing”, survive and maybe have a laugh on comms.
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I have never played vs human players in DCS except a rare occasion of silliness and never cared about what happened.
I mean purely vs AI. If the AI’s missiles are always better than mine, something is up. If I’m in an Su-33 against an AI Hornet, and they lay me out as my missiles go stupid and I can’t spoof theirs, and then I’m in a Hornet against an AI Flanker and my missiles go stupid and I can’t spoof theirs…NO. That is a gameplay concession to make it “challenging” or whatever, I can’t abide that. A MiG-21 should lose against a modern western fighter in BVR almost always. It doesn’t matter if it’s not “fun”, the 21 shouldn’t be in that fight because it WILL lose.
By the same token, if the Su-33 seems to always win regardless of whether I or the AI is flying it, also NO. Again, would Russia be dumping the 33’s in favor of new 29K’s or whatever they’re designating them now if the 33 and early Adder (because they are getting the R-77M now not the one in DCS) were THAT great? Of course not.
To be clear, to have “fun” in an inferior plane is about making missions that play to their strengths, avoid their weaknesses, and do so with a realistic scenario. If I’m in a superior plane, the missions should exploit the weaknesses and create a challenge without resorting to unrealistic behaviors to make those planes be more than target practice.
If it’s an simple 1v1 match up on equal footing, i expect the better plane to win a majority of the time depending on that setup. So BVR, Hornet wins. WVR with 9Ms against R73s, the Flanker should win. WVR with 9Xs, 50/50. Guns only, Flanker.
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All this Mover/flight sim, gaming drama is summed up well in the beginning of this video as Karmakut lays down his “video game” disclaimer. 0:05 - 0:57 notably the last statement 
There will always be backseat drivers, keyboard warriors and those that know more. As a very casual “youtuber”, I’ve dealt with my share and simply ignore/block them out. I just don’t have the time and energy to deal with the BS.
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That got a chuckle out of me.
I’m taking this to heart. When I’m agitated (and who isn’t on the second dark and wet winter day at home where they don’t manage to find the time or wisdom to get out of the house just once), I tend to become a morally righteous blob of anger and annoyance. And that doesn’t benefit anyone, least of all the cause I’m getting worked up about.
On the days where I’m not, I try to compensate by being polite, but I could definitely be more aware.
As for the topic at large:
I like your comments, there’s a lot of perspectives on this and I find it hard to form an opinion of my own or add something that has not been said already.
So “What is wrong with flight sim fans?”
I don’t know really…
The one in the Hind works fine, it even stops momentarily when you push your finger into it. Always liked the ones on the Mi-8 too, and they’ve been working for years now.
I wonder how hard it would be to hook up a physical fan to the state of the in-game fan… Should be easy with a USB fan…
That should show in some detail what is wrong with me at least 
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I still think we should all be tazed when we eject. Mildly. I think @jross should be the guinea pig since he is already good at hooking up external components to his sim. Fly carefully man. Fly carefully.
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Thanks for pointing out this video, I just watched it and it prompted me to decide to use the counselling available through work again this year about some specific head stuff. I don’t go Mach 2 with my hair on fire for a living like you pilots do but I’ve been getting a bit of anxiety at work and in business where I used to get none - so time to stop avoiding it and put labels on the feelings and get them sorted.
I digress - as to the main topic, I don’t have much to add to the excellent points made, agree with you all.
Ultimately it is a game and a hobby and when it stops being fun, it’s time to go outside and do something else. Life is too short and too busy to spend precious free time in pointless arguments over a game.
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