Hmmm, that sounds like hyperbole to me.... - Do your friends only want to be gunners? - They don't actually fly the planes?

Out of the 17 copies I have bought the only people who have stayed are the people who also fly fighters. I cant get the rest to play or buy more planes because they don't feel that the tail gunners are useful. The AI is bunk and gunning for someone is a lesson in patience because of the listed reasons. The bombers are just not fun to fly by yourself and if none of your friends want to gun for you then you are left with random strangers who tend to reenact scenes from Indiana Jones movies more than they help.

Flying a bomber is a community experience. That is why you had large warbirds, aces high and il2 bomber squads. They enjoyed flying and gunning for each other. A 2 hour flight is nothing when you have friends on TS to joke with but if you remove the gunners through a poor experience then you remove the bombers. That is just the nature of the beast. Many of these people dont like fighters and dont want to fly a plane with the AI gunners.



That is 6 people who wont play rise of flight and who wont buy the bombers or 2 seaters because of issues with the gunners. I have other keys (second amazon account, fspilotshop, and paypal so people can buy straight from rof.com) I bought as well and most of them feel the same way. I cant even get them to play a game I bought for them because the bomber experience is so poor and the only real complaint I hear is the abysmal gunner support. They dont want to fly alone and no one wants to gun so they dont even log into the game.

On the plus side the people who like fighters love the game and I can normally get them to fly 2 seaters and bombers or at least escort me.

If I knew 777 studios was willing to revisit the gunner model and I had a reasonable price I would be more than willing to donate money to get the gunner model changed. If I cant donate I could at least buy x amount of plane gifts or ice keys and give them out.

*maybe I am just being irrational about this and it isn't worth wasting time on. Personally I feel the gunner is a core feature that is broken and needs fixing. I also know of a lot of other people who feel the same way.

Guns aim just fine if you don't put your cheek on the sight.

So it works just fine as long as you dont look down the site.

That is pretty much an acknowledgment that it is broken.

I don't know if it's broken or not, but I'm pretty certain that observers were not able to hold their head directly behind the sight as they fired at all angles. The "nestle up" view is pretty arcade.

How exactly do you want the gunner controls changed?

I agree that the system is broken to a degree but if anything MP people seem to want gunning from the back seat to be made harder rather than easier. If you take away the current limitations on movement speed then gunning from the flexi mounts will be very very easy. I suppose you could increase the dipersion to extreme levels then people will just complain they can't hit anything.

What I would like to see is

1) The traverse problem fixed, where you get stuck facing front and have to press F5 to re-set.
2) A "brace" key added. Meaning that if you don't sit down when your plane goes close to inverted then you risk falling out.

I want to control the gun directly. Imagine playing a fps where the gun lags 1/2-1 seconds behind your mouse movements. No one likes that and I cant for the life of me figure out why its acceptable in rof. Using a real ring mount is no where near as hard as using the in game system.

I am not saying to speed up the ring movement either just make it so that the player controls when it moves and how much. There are a few problems with the current system because the ring movement is 1) limited to 270 degrees of movement and 2) automatic depending on where the gun is facing.

The first limitation can obviously be fixed somehow because the gun can already make an unlimited turn. If you reach the limit all you have to do is turn the other direction fast enough and the gun will turn opposite how you turned.

the second limitation has to do with the automatic movement system. There are times when a place is sitting behind your tail and you can reach them if you rotate the ring left or right and then face the gun there but with the current system it is not very intuitive since you can not directly move the ring.

As for accuracy and dispersion... that really should be a setting that can be altered by a server along with AI values. You are never going to find a balance where accuracy is agreed upon by everyone. To be fair though I dont think accuracy is that much of a problem. The problem I have lies in the fact that the gunner is almost unplayable and certainly not fun to use with it's current flaws.

I agree with Master. Something really needs to be done. My buddy and I love to multicrew and the machine guns are a game ruiner at preset. He gets real fed up real quick. If you nestle to the sight, it's even worse!

They know its jacked up and buggy, and they will never fix it. They either don't know how, or its too big of a coding problem to do it. Screw em, let em go the way of the dodo bird. If they aren't selling you a plane, or adding useless eye candy, they aren't interested in fixing real game play problems.

OK, I take your point Master. I had no idea gunning was such a big part of the game to some.