It's not an excuse, sad or otherwise, just some context, so let's not get carried away here. I chose my words with care. I'm not trying to 'justify' anything - that's a matter for the devs.

And BTW, I definitely saw a dev post encouraging those who liked BoS to make their views known, specifically to counter the less favourable stuff, but is it established fact that people were paid to do so? Is there any evidence, beyond surmise and gossip?

There is evidence basically…yes. The text message's between AM and one of the paid forum poster's that was unhappy with the direction of the game but had to keep up the positive crap on the forums because he "needed the money".

We don't really need to open up this can again…most of the dev faithful won't accept anything as evidence unless a 1C/777 rep goes on the stand and says "yes…we paid people to post positive stuff on several forums".

Payments are one thing, then you have the talk of other incentives in those PM's and email where loans of expensive equipment were made and the trips to the launch event etc. also the way they restricted access the the Dserver created an incentive for positive posts, look at what happened with the U.S. server, members of that group tackled negative posts across several forums until they dared to criticise one aspect that affected their server plans and the server was taken away from them. It's no surprise that another group then became more vocal and positive when they were in the running and then secured access to the Dserver.

See what you mean, found it now, hadn't ploughed thru all those links. Well, like I said in the review, I take BoS as I find it, regardless of the PR side, on its merits. Was quite surprised to find the lack of some stuff I still consider important, and the presence of some stuff I don't much like, didn't actually spoil it for me, or even make that much difference. Each to their own.

just when it was thought to have bottomed out... it plummets further to sit now on 5.8 and still no real reviews

Time for the Coroner's Report

Aye, there's the rub. Too many hidden agendas. It's a bloody soap opera...

beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep

Just noticed something on the metacritic site

http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/il-2-sturmovik-battle-of-stalingrad/details

Rating: T

T , is that short for Turd maybe ?