I just wanted to voice my frustration on this subject because it's obvious from the live stream today that this is apparently no longer in the works. There was some discussion last year from Matt Wagner about ED releasing a server exe for people that want to run dedicated servers. In today's live stream Matt stated that they have no plans to release any server maps and that if you want to run a dedicated server you will have to purchase two sets of everything to be able to participate on the server and run it too. This doesn't include aircraft modules as you can still join a server that has ones you don't own but it will include the asset packs as well as the maps.

I just wanted to say that this is total BS in my opinion. To force everyone to have to purchase two of maps and asset pack simply to run a dedicated server is wrong. ED guys, please read this and know that you are going to piss a lot of people off with this policy. It would actually increase your business footprint if you offered a server exe and server side only assets and maps. Making everyone pay double just to run a dedicated server is actually reducing the number of people willing to put the effort into doing it. I can state for myself that I "WILL NOT" purchase the Normandy map to run on our dedicated server and my game system unless there is a huge future discount. So that pretty much eliminates me from any WWII stuff for the time being.

Disappointed, but not surprised. They are clearly getting desperate now... or at the very least, spread too thin that they can't go any thinner. If it doesn't make them any money, it doesn't get any dev time.

Yeah, just so everyone knows, they announced the live stream almost a month ago and it was only attended by about 750 viewers and that included a bunch of Russian participants. That speaks volumes in my opinion. If they were doing this 3 years ago there would have been several thousand from just the US easily. You might want to start discussing how you should change your company's direction for the better or you will go extinct. And this is coming from someone that actually likes your products, a lot.

Ouch!!

Wasn't it delayed twice? I forgot it was on...

That's a good representation of England. Wish they could have hedgerows versus trees, but at least they made it look right.

Also wish they could get rid of the "fishbowl"effect when you turn your head. All sims have that, just need more maths to get rid of it.

Yes, Once by Matt stating that he had a conflict and then by ED.
It was originally announced about a month ago.
That's an unbelievable horrible turnout considering it is a global community.
It's actually very shocking in my opinion and definitely shows that their treatment of people on the forum has had a negative effect.

It's an amazing looking map in my opinion and everything is destructible according to Matt.
If they get it out without any problems it will certainly be a winner.

The busiest their forum has ever been is.....

Most users ever online was 1,654, 12-08-2016 at 02:47 PM

So not really that shocking.

Nate

I would love to see the numbers for amount of posts deleted and people banned over that time period

The arithmetic that yields that number has changed quite a few times with forum software updates, it seems. I wouldn't put too much faith into that number, either way...

The map and lighting do look good. I'm one of the ones that's getting the bundle for "free" so for that reason I'm starting to look forward to my reward. The viewing numbers may be down to the 'I'm going to wait and see from now on' mindset that a lot of DCS customers are adopting after years of disappointment. Also at its core DCS was a modern sim and it's core fan base are just not interested in a historic sim. It will be interesting to see what route ED take after the Normandy sales figures are in. Will they continue with historic content or focus on the modern. I believe they will leave the historic content for the 3rd parties, those that are interested in a small reward for a long development. There is another WW2 game in development and even with clickable cockpits I can't see DCS competing , successfully, with a large percentage of their fan base that are just not interested in WW2.
We will see.

That just says there's X amount of people who were online and browsing at the same time. The forum also says there's 59,000+ members registered... and this is the English forum; wasn't there a Russian forum as well? Even if we just say there's 59K members, a 750-person turnout is 1.3% of the population. Not a very good sign.

That membership number includes thousands upon thousands of banned accounts (mostly bots).

Source? And how many are to be considered invalid accounts? 58,200? BTW, banned accounts still count if they've been made by legit customers who got banned for any reason. I think only bot accounts should be invalid.
For a site that trolls other sites so that they can ban their own members, it'll be a hard sell to convince others that they don't do "clean up" with their own member list.

Just so you know, those numbers are from after the last reset of the forums last year when they did the update.
I absolutely remember seeing several thousand people being actively on the forums back between 2010 and 2014.
ED has had a massive drop in community support and they know it.

In my >3 years of moderation i did not witness one cleanup of the user database. We banned bots to keep them from posting, but no measures were taken to remove them in any way. If i could query the database, i could give some rough numbers but as is, i have no idea as to what the percentage of valid users vs bots is.

Personally you can count me as someone who use to spend countless hours every month flying DCS but now don't fly DCS at all anymore.

For many reasons but one of the big ones is how ED treats its customers, specifically those that have complaints. Add in what appears to be a lack of focus or planning and it basically took the enjoyment out of the sim. Between the post a few years back about NTTR and SOH by the end of winter 2014 (IIRC) to the 18 will be ready for prepurchase and beta testing in 2016 and the latest play on words from beta access to early access with bugs pulling up and never seeing the light of a fix. I seriously believe that if ED had any other competition they would be hard pressed to stay in business.

And don't get me started on the asset pack purchasing now. Soon ED customers will be paying a monthly charge to play multiplayer. Just a guess but based on what We've seen recently I can see it happening.

It's been fun but the key works are "it's been" because it isn't for me anymore.

PS anyone wanna purchase a Warthog HOTAS send me a pm.

I cannot comprehend that mindset.

I can understand not buying anything new anymore. I can understand lack of interest in new product announcements.

I cannot understand how it affects your enjoyment of something you already have and have been using for years happily. Same product, same gameplay, but now it's not fun due to a lack of focus for future development?

It must really suck to have your recreation sabotaged like that.
I'm happy that my opinion of a company, its employees, its PR, and its future projects have absolutely no bearing whatsoever on whether I enjoy a product of theirs that I've been enjoying for years.



The Jedi Master

Those are contributing factors not the factor. But how can anyone truly enjoy something that continues to be buggy. I also didn't go into items I saw behind the scene when I was still a tester due to NDAs. I can't even flip a battery switch in the A-10C without potentially crashing right now. Bugs like that shouldn't make it out of the testers branch.

So some mods troll other forums in search for the next ban-hammer victim but nobody bothers to clean up their own site?? Wow.... I guess I'm surprised, but at the same time I'm not surprised. If you could give a rough idea of the number of valid users, that would be great! However, even if we were to say that only 30,000 users are "legit" and the other 29,000 are bots, that still does not look very good for the 750-person turnout.... that would be 2.5% which although better than the initial 1.3%, is still hilarously low.



Zero flight hours, Snoopy? Again, wow...



Sometimes, the honeymoon period just ends and you start seeing the flaws. The little bugs that you could once gloss over are now glaring annoyances that stares at you right in the face. When you notice something wrong and you're confident that "they'll fix it" but years and years later that "something wrong" is still broken, it takes away your confidence in the devs and takes away your enjoyment of the product.



It does. What sucks even more is when you watch those who "sabotage" your recreation move on to different projects leaving you behind to enjoy your "broken" product.



Good for you! I guess some of us are just wired differently.

What would be the point, really?



I can't with any certainty. My guess is as good as yours. I only know that they introduced a reverse turing test sometime 2012 i think, that dealt with all the bots and left only human spammers.

Cleanup.



I wonder if there's any statistic as to how many have been active over the last 6-12 months? Surely there are some statistics that are tracked on the website. Just would be an interesting thing to know, but like I said, even if we were to say half of the registered number was "legit," it still doesn't look good in terms of what the thread is about.

What for? You gain nothing but a few mb of database size. That's nowhere near worth the time of an administrator.



I think you're trying to put the cart before the horse. If ED want hard user statistics, they can get them much more easily and reliably from the master server and through their sales. People being active on the forum doesn't really tell you anything of importance. Just that they are active on the forum.

I could say the same about trolling other forums to ban the user on the ED forum.... but they've found **THAT** worth their time?



Was just speculating. The forum said there are 59K+ members, then someone says "not all of them are members, some are bots", so I'm simply asking for a much more reliable number. Since you said you guys banned the bots and I'm sure there have been steps taken to control the human spammers as well, then maybe the number of people that have posted actively over a certain time period are "legit users" and not bots or spammers.

Still can't believe that ED having seemly thought this through

There will now to several versions of DCS spreading the already smaller online community thinner :-(

For the love of god

1. Asset packs that you cannot actually PLAY in should be part of the core product
By all means later on release Combined arms WW2 for those that want to PLAY IN these vechs later on

2. Making people who want to host dedicated server have to pay for these the taking the p!ss
We are already using our money to pay for servers to allow people to play online , thus helping to promote YOUR product

No other company (to the best of my knowledge) has done such a stupid , shoot yourself in foot retarded PR move
..... hang on .......

Would you pay for DCS: Ground Crew? You'll see ground crew during startup, they'll marshall you in/out of your parking spot, and they'll do EOR checks... sad to say it, but I know a lot of people would pay for something like this!

Yeah!!, I bet ED is right now working a lot harder to find a profitable way to divide in smallest possible pieces their buggy soft than solving actual issues...but dont worry, I have a good news for you all guys, president Trump's official announcement of DCS: F/A-18 Hornet:

Welcome to the forums! interesting and mature name you've chosen.

Haha!! Nice avatar too!

I loled so hard

Ah!! cmon!!!...what happened to my nick?¿?¿?

Thanks for your comments guys!!

Now the nick is representative of the behaviour? Is this ED's forum?. Can I at least choose an alternative new nick?

LOL... yeah Spawn... better toe the line here and deliver your thoughts properly or else you'll get hit by Force10's ban hammer!
On a more serious note, bad words are not allowed here. It may offend some sensibilities.... everything else is game!

I compared with ED forums due to the "behaviour" reference, not because of my nick...but you are right in one thing, I should never compare any forum with ED's dictatorial fake forums



I will, dont worry

Is there a list of words not allowed to be used in usernames ?

Better late than never:



Obviously those 1,654 must have been reporting a serious bug.......
Never would that amount of people be online on ED's forums if the life was good.

Surely the release of Nevada and the screw up it was to download the map must have come close to that figure in terms of end user complaints?
Even took a member of the public to set up a torrent so the end user's could download the map and avoid ED's own torrent system, Or has everyone forgotten what a screw up that map release was.
No doubt it will take another member of the public to fix Ed's balls up when Normandy is released

You can count on it...

I think there's been a terrible mistake: it says Junior Member under SiCkSpAwN's name. Shouldn't it be "Community Manager"?

Nope. He has to earn his way around here

The fact that you guys resort to personal shi- is why this site is in the toilet..

Sith hasnt even been here in a while, and ya still being immature about it.

Enjoy the ads, enjoy the pop ups, enjoy the click bait to pay for server costs.

We're making fun of his name... and he's game about it. Where's the harm in that?

Instead of nitpicking how we nitpick some other guy's tongue-in-cheek username, why not head back on over to the other thread and respond to some more constructive discussions?

C'mon now, those that defend ED and their poor PR and project management are equally at fault for the "personal shi-" Ending your post with "Enjoy the ads, enjoy the pop ups, enjoy the click bait to pay for server costs." Just reiterates the point. This website is not funded by a developer. To enjoy the freedom, to express ones views on a product one has paid for, comes at the cost of ads etc. ED pays for their own website so are free to censor all they want there. Not great PR but that's what they pay for. ED do not pay for this website so customers views can be expressed honestly. With all the advertising customers and future customers can receive honest opinions of ED products. I'd rather an honest website full of adverts than a propaganda filled sterile environment like ED forums. So yes I will "Enjoy the ads, enjoy the pop ups, enjoy the click bait to pay for server costs." thank you very much. It's the price of freedom my friend.

I think people here had enough of the personal shi- you guys threw on us over, and over, and over, and over again on your forum, and now you even cry because you can't take a little banter?
Jeez, welcome to the real world, where you are accountable for your shi--y conduct and personal attacks on people. Better get used to it once you pull your head out of the collective ED butt.


EDIT: Explain to me Skate, how I got banned for infringing a "rule" that doesn't even exist, and how is that NOT considered "personal shi-" in your book.

I didn't realize this site was such a burden to you Skate...especially with your 60 posts so far this month alone in various sections.

Enjoy your time off.

+1 to this so much. I'd more rather trust a review or recommendation from a fellow forum member than a review site, even the "reputable" ones. Plus I'd get to ask questions, pick their brains, and eventually get a better understanding if a particular game or sim or peripheral is something I'd like to try.

Having to wade through a bit of banter for a couple of useful, helpful replies is nothing new, but I don't see the point in him harping about the other forum. When I was posting there years ago, I'd have to go through 20+ posts just to maybe get one that's useful.