After a long hiatus....

It is good to come home....

And find the whole house on fire ......when I left it was merely the living room (CLoD)

Sooo....here we are....small...and getting smaller every year (WWII genre flight simmers)

I've parsed through the comments on BoS....ummhhh...departure from expectations (how's that for diplomatic?)

And I share those sentiments.

However in the interest of perhaps proposing a way out for the Devs in their own probable market cul de sac --- the irony here is outstanding no?. Can BoS be salvaged (more or less) by taking the current platform and having it cater to three market segments as opposed to the one where it is seemingly headed with these latest developments? (let's call that segment that the Devs are apparently pursuing - WT complex)


1. Offline Crowd - Preserve what was best from IL2 (improve the single player campaign or at least open it up for 3rd party modding/development, if you bought it you got it --- NO LOCKED CONTENT -- all skins and options are available and configurable, user skins possible, Devs can continue to sell product into this segment and customers get what they pay for --- no WT like grinding, point, rank, achievement nonsense. As demonstrated by all the "Founders" who have paid for the development of this game...there is a market for continued sales of add-ons here. But if you buy it -- you get it right then and there...no bait and switch.

2. Freedom Servers -- take the skins and mods sold above and have online servers that cater to them. Again no WT ranking, grinding. But IL2-like servers where those who bought it come for entertainment, not the WT social status etc. The devs don't have to track boards and all the other Sim Market 2.0 stuff associated with the free to play genre.

3. WT Complex and the grind for achievements - Here all the locks and grinding is present for that market segment that does not want to pay for the mods and also wants the opportunity to grind through to get them, get "achievements", buy "premium", compete in leader boards....etc...Here...like WT and WoT, the price for entry is low or non-existent..and customers will grind and pay for premium and unlocks.

This give them two distinct and complimentary revenue streams and does not preclude those who want to from crossing over (with locks and status imposed) from one type of server to the other.

It seems to me that most of those who funded this simulation fall into market segments 1 and 2, whereas the Devs have decided to target market segment 3. No point in repeating all the sturm and drang posted here (justified) over this decision (a betrayal of trust to those who bought into the "IL2 Brand"). It just seems to me that this platform can cater to all three markets provided the Devs want to. If I buy it I can play it all (no locks), but if I want to fly it on a WT complex server, then my stuff that was open gets locked and now I grind, or I go onto a "have it your way" server -- the middle path, and once again if I bought it I can use right away. Depending on what way I fly (offline, freedom servers, WT Complex servers) my paid for content will be available (1 and 2) or restricted (3)

There is nothing preventing them from implementing this within the platform and it could save it.

Or is this naive?

From a business market standpoint it appears that the Devs are abandoning their core market who funded this sim (1 and 2) while going off in pursuit of the crowd from an established market (3) in the hope that they can woo them away while assuming that this 3rd market will pay a lot more than they have become accustomed to for a lot less....not to mention have them leave behind all their "social gains" within an existing system and start over --- I see no validity to this assumption.

This was literally impossible to screw up. Yet they went out of their way, despite the community telling them not to, and did it anyway.

All we I expected was RoF with WWII planes. How hard could that be? They did the right stuff all the way, until the campaign was shown. Now it's clearly sailing to the finish for them, with deleting posts from dissatisfied customers, making weird threads where you can only applaud and posting the most ridiculous reviews on Metacritic.

BoS isn't beyond saving, but IMHO it's just best to let it rot in peace. Something good might actually come out of this - decades will pass and no one in their sane mind will want to poke Eastern Front and the IL-2 brand with a stick.

Thats not a good thing...

It is if you think about it - I would really like a sim that is not made in Russia, does not portrait the Russian Fron and is not based on Russian documents.

Cliffs of Dover, made in Russia, remade by enthusiasts all over the world

This.^ The bias is so hugely obvious it's almost embarrassing. Special never-seen-before Russian documents that only 1C have had access to, which apparently reveal a hitherto unknown superiority of 1941/42 VVS fighters.

Yeah.

Never again will I buy anything sim-related made by Russians.

Form what I experienced the Russian planes in BoS are still crap compared to the German ones. I never seemed to mind the Lavochkins in 1946. Yes, I am biased, but not becasue of balancing, FMs or propaganda. It's becasue, before IL-2, simulator user to have something cool about them - good campaigns, a nice story, nice soundtracks and well designed UIs.

After Microprose went bust and all the market shifted East, it's just a barren wasteland. Campaigns are just a bunch of similar missions described by uninspiring briefings (I guess Black Shark 2 is the exception here) - no atmosphere, no emotions in radio chatter ("help, I am going down, over and out"). Simulation level might be good, but the experience is lacking. Sp campaigns are tacked on, focus is on MP and even here it's just always team deathmatch with planes.

In my most recent experience the VVS fighters are at least on-par with the LW ones (historically they shouldn't be), except the LW ones also have FMs that are twitchy, massively over-sensitive to control inputs and plagued with rubber-banding noses. Half the fight in combat is with ones own plane.

Done deliberately in my opinion. Bye bye BoS, enjoy your Russia-only market.

Well,

last one out shut off the lights. Looking back over 15 years, and 12 years on these boards, the genre has been dying (just look at the number of titles in this space and years between releases) and the Russians are the only ones left in the room.

These guys have made a rookies mistake in attempted market segmentation (take this right out of business school) where in attempting to bridge (create a new market segment) the divide between two distinct market segments (paid content simmers and freemium arcade players) they have alienated the former while for many reasons explained already on this board they are not going to attract the later with this hybrid model they sprung on everyone.

As has been said...the IL2 brand looks to have taken it's second and knockout punch with this one. Whereas before we were inclined to give the benefit of the doubt based upon the original Il2's reputation....well now we've been fooled twice.

A pity....If I want "hypothalamus" pleasing arcade thrills...I already have that with WT and WoT....how these guys think they are going to steal those customers having them pay for a new title with less content while losing all your built up game capital (read that AS LOTS OF TIME SPENT GRINDING!!!) shows some real business naivete or arrogance.

Somebody said they wanted to sell 200,000 licenses??? wtf how'd they get those projections? ....ha ha..

Damn it people! Please use some discretion when naming the discussion thread! I "ran" here as soon as I saw "Vodka" only to find . . . well, NOT vodka. Luckily I have some remedy for what's ailing me so I will forgive this transgression.

They probably took seriously the bogus "one million players!" claim of WT and stopped thinking right there. Totally ignored the fact that, whatever the real figure, most of its players are non-payers (grinding instead of paying) and somehow imagined 200,000 of them would stump up the significant asking-price for BoS for a lesser product.

Cloud cuckoo-land fantasy and any chance they had of scoring even a fraction of their target went south as soon as they started bending the FMs, never mind introducing a pathetic SP campaign with unlocks to boot. That cripple MP too!

Couldn't make it up. Oh wait, they did.

I think any any analysis of flight models should be done in QMB with AI only. I put 8 vs 8

4 x Yaks
4 x La-5's

vs

4 x 109G2's
4 x F190's

With both on veteran -- the Russians swept the skies of LW a/c and took only two losses
When I put all the LW on ACE while leaving the Russian on Veteran

The LW ended up winning but only had two survivors at the end

now I suppose you could run this test again and again and then avg the results (for statistical significance)...but these results immediately made me question flight model or AI bias...as I would have expected LW wins with this mix if the pilot experiences were equal. And the opposite happened.

WT suffers also from "play balance" bias which shows up in giving the Russian stuff better qualities then they had IRL.

That's an interesting experiment, one that never occurred to me to try. All my testing has been done in MP (my own combats and watching others). Which one might say is highly subjective, if it wasn't for nearly a year of flying CloD Emils against CloD Spitfires. I come out on top of those 80% of the time because I've been able to master the Emil, something that's been possible because I'm not having to fight a bent FM and sabotaged flight characteristics. The BoS 109 continues to make me spit in disgust at how blatantly bent it is. The bottom line is BoS' Yaks and Laggs are a bigger challenge to the F4 than CloD's Spitfires are to the Emil and that's so laughable one could choke if one wasn't already spitting in contempt.

Sounds to me like you have a personal issue with Russians.

Just go away already, Siggi.

Not anything more than the one all the other conned purchasers of the EA have. Sold a sim, got a cheap shonky arcade blaster.

Based on what? The fact I don't like the Eastern Front? I also don't like Polish vodka, Polish attitude towards drinking and Polish music - does that mean I have personal issues with Poles?

Exactly, I'm pissed I gave them $90 (that I will never see again) when I think we all assumed it would be "RoF with WWII planes" way to destroy your loudest supporters 777, you just made them your loudest naysayers.

And now, after all of this, they have the gal to charge $20 a plane. yea right.

+2!

Well...I had not intended this thread to be a critique of modeling bias...or omission of the "immersion" factor though no doubt there is plenty of room for that.

But from a business standpoint these guys are either geniuses (and that will take 1 year to find out)

or complete buffoons

They have alienated their "base" and core market segment while going out after the 800lb gorilla in the freemium space with an inferior product (less content) for that segment.

I just got done playing WT and it is very good for what it is meant to do..provide quick arcade gaming without me taxing my brain....why would I want to drop what I have "acheived" there...so that I can start over in a smaller more expensive "world" with BoS?....I mean...WTH?

All I can think is that that Devs need someone on their staff that understands software game markets because this product as it is right now...I just can't see them selling into the WT crowd and the simmers by and large are outraged at the whole unlock/xp grind for content they thought they had paid for.