I wonder how many people are gonna ask for SPAD XII...

Hi

Only a guess here. Maybe they are checking to see how many customers are coming from mainly simulation games or not.

It would be helpful to determine if the answers you gave were based on past sim experience, or from someone that mainly plays games like Grand Theft Auto. Might be used to help weed out some replies.

The OP never said he was unhappy with RoF, he actually suggested they fix some flaws and did not ask for new planes in his response from what I read. I did not see criticism in his response. Lets see how neocube responds.

I love the way folks here read stuff into other people's posts.

Perhaps I should have said appears to be unhappy with it because he hasn't been playing it because that's what triggered the survey. Those of us who play regularly didn't appear to be surveyed.

Here's what WP actually said in the first post: "I haven't touched RoF in a long time."

Would you conclude from his statement that he is a happy customer? I would say your comment, fox3, is pointing to a difference without a distinction.

I think RoF asking why he isn't playing it is both appropriate and deserving of some praise to the developer.

HT

Wow! Maybe I should stop playing the game for a month so that someone will ask me for my feedback!!

I'm waiting for an email that says "Wtf, dude, you bought all the planes and all you ever fly is the darned Nieuport 17!" or, possibly, "Congratulations, Dart! According to our data you are the worst player of our simulation, which has earned you a special medal to put in the GUI."

[quote=HotTom
Would you conclude from his statement that he is a happy customer?
[/quote]

No HT, No I wouldn't. He never said in his post he was unhappy or disgusted or whatever else you read into his post. He said he had not loaded the sim in a while, real life gets in the way sometimes FYI.

Now you did post that it was good to seek feed back "especially from those who are unhappy with it." which seems to me you are implying the OP is unhappy with this sim. Lets just leave it at that, your own words, and agree it is a good thing that neocube is seeking feedback for whatever reasons to make this amazing sim even better.

Least you are flying one you bought.

Mine would say. "You bought all the planes but only fly the N28 that we gave you for free?"

I wouldn't mind getting this survey, doubt I will though. I play too much.
I think it's a good idea.

I received the survey and sent it in.

I've received no survey, but I see it like this:

1. First, I think all the questions they ask have merit. Answer them honestly or you will do the privilege of getting the survey a disservice.

2. It's direct communication with the development team. That's a good thing.

3. Monitoring how much you play is moot. There are plenty of tracking cookies and other services (including gaming and non-gaming ones) that track individual activity. That's nothing new, nor, IMO, something to cause you to put on your foil hat.

I'd ask that if anyone gets this survey (or anything similar) that they take the time necessary to answer it directly with detailed information. After all, the desire is obviously to make the end product better...isn't that what we all want?

my .02c

Hey guys,

They're just doing some market research so they can improve the product. The pubs have given them plenty of feedback and of course they monitor the forums, but they wanted to reach out directly to users to see what they would like to see improved. Of course the english could be improved. It's a positive development.

Some of the features that you all want are indeed being worked on and some are in testing now, but this survey is just another way to solicit some feedback from known users.

Jason

LOL I got the e-mail but the link to the survey was broken so I couldn't reply, I did send them an e-mail requesting DF servers which would bring me back, until then I continue to fly AHII

I think this kind of thing is a great idea and not at al creepy. The DEVELOPER is asking for OUR opinions directly! That's cool. Hope it makes a difference.

Yeah I agree FlatSpinMan.

I didn't get it, but would welcome it and certainly not think of it as span or anything like that.
Maybe if more devs done this (with a option to opt out, of course), we might not have quite so many crap games on the market. Or, maybe some of those crap games would get better via updates.

Too many devs distance themselves from their customers. They are not in touch with what we want. Not all of course, but many are like that and it shows in their games.

Hats off to NeoQB for reaching out to those they feel (due to lack of playtime) that may not be satisfied with their game. It's a refreshing change of pace, for sure.

known users who evidently don't play the game. Filling mine out now.

I also received the email and I was going to fill out the survey but the link was broke. What has kept me from playing is a lack of time - nothing more, nothing less.

I think the survey is a good idea. They could just ignore those who bought the game but don't play it anymore - they have my $, why should they care if I play it or not? But they seem interested in the reasons why I have not been playing it with a view to improving the game and getting me to play it once again. That is a good thing in my opinion since I don't like spending $ on a game that I don't play for more than a few hours.

On yer bike! That medal's mine!

The Dunker's Dugout badge

dunkelgrun was awarded this badge on 30/9/2009 for almost getting a Dolphin out of a spin from 8000ft. During his journey to the small crater forever to be known as 'Dunker's Dugout' he completed the Times crossword and a lengthy suicide note asking for the matchbox to be sent home to Mum

Brenda Lord Kitchener of Barnsley

Of course I am unhappy with the sim - hence why I have not played it. I've spent $62.85 + shipping on a sim and 3 planes... and I haven't touched it in so long that the developer is sending me e-mails asking "What's wrong?"

Put it this way: I bought DCS: Black Shark around April. RoF came out in mid-Summer. I did it enjoy it for a bit, and openly stated here that this sim is the closest to real flying I've ever experienced. That is still true. When they were available, I bought the SE5, Pfalz DIII, and N17. I flew those for a while.

But now, in the beginning of Autumn, which sim do I crave to play? For which one have I joined an online squadron? For which am I writing new documentation for the community? Not Rise of Flight, even though I've only had it a couple of months - not five.

I'm a silver-lining kinda guy. I can watch a horrible movie and see good in it... somewhere. I watched "Mutant Chronicles" last weekend, the worst piece of crap I've seen since Uwe Boll's "Bloodrayne", and I still thought the effects and look of the movie were good. However, that little glimmer of silver lining doesn't change the fact that the package as a whole was terrible. That's where I'm at with Rise of Flight. It suckered me in with the pretty graphics and flight model, but in the end the overall experience is just not good.

I'd also like to note that I'm the kind of person they'd probably want to cater to. I like niche flight sims. I buy add-ons. I appreciate accuracy - even if it makes the sim difficult. I like independent developers/musicians/artists and gladly support them however I can when they produce even just a decent product.

Heck, I even bought the game when they decided to add the two additional planes to the original roster. I thought it was a reasonable gesture on the part of a developer who actually paid attention to their (potential) user base. I appreciated that, so I decided to offer my financial support by buying their game. But what I got was a pretty flight sim wrapped up in a godawful user experience.

Before I got into my current job, I designed graphical user interfaces for web sites and Flash applications. Every time I load up RoF I wonder what their designers were thinking - and if their beta testers actually thought the interface was good. Tiny text buttons without actual buttons behind them, so you need to click on the pixels of the letters to open a menu. "I thought I opened that?" A sim that doesn't remember your machine gun convergence settings. Being forced to click through a realism menu every.single.time you play. The clunky pre-flight setup screen where the menu covers up the aircraft, so you can't really see the skins as you scroll through them. At least they managed to fix the in-flight map screen somewhat.

The interface, of course, is just one tiny part of the whole issue. First is the lack of a instant mission generator. The Russian Roulette stuff just gets boring. The first opponent is always a SPAD or N28, the second always 2-seater, and so on. Not exactly random. I want to be able to choose an altitude, time of day, weather conditions, location, ground obstacles (AAA, armor, barrage balloons), number and type of opponent flights, and number and type of friendly fights.

It's in an instant mission generator that many folks - myself included - learn proper gunnery, aircraft identification, situational awareness in a furball, and the strengths and weaknesses of our - and the enemy's - aircraft. Laser's QMB was nice, but it's still nowhere near as powerful as the 10-year old one in IL-2.

The second thing that severely rankled me was the online component. I play a lot of games online - not MMORPGs but more "pick up and play" games. DCS:BS. IL-2. Red Orchestra. Call of Duty: World at War. People have been playing online for years and it should come as no surprise what people want in their online experience.

I have never seen a game force people to wait every time before playing. Sure, IL-2 and CoD:WaW have coop modes where players do have to "ready up" - but that's only one part of their online setup. If I just want to pick up a La-7 or an MP40 and blow some other players away I can just switch over to another server type.

RoF has NO other server type. You wait - or you don't fly. And every time I've tried - half a dozen times? - I've sat there and waited. And waited. Readied up. Waited. And Waited some more. I don't mean five minutes. I'm talking fifteen or more. And it's not like there were that many other servers out there I could try. Eventually, I just closed out, opened up DCS:Black Shark, and within a couple minutes I was online and flying - no "ready up", no wait.

Also, while coop modes are great and mission-based teamwork is one of the best aspects of flight sims, they can also be extremely frustrating for new players. To get good enough to fly online, you need practice against live people. The best way to get that is on an instant respawn dogfight server. People here say that dogfight servers are crap. Apparently that opinion wasn't shared by the tons of people I always saw on the IL-2 servers in Hyperlobby.