Straycat, your mission is completed. You put forth some bs about what to do with your money, then you buy something without doing ANY research whatsoever and now you get in a frenzy about how bad the product is.

Well Done. You got what you wanted.

DCS is not for you. This is a STUDY sim. If you had read my review in this forum, and watched the videos I linked most of your questions would have been answered. If you had bothered to read Chucks (most excellent) Guide on the M2KC you would not be so lost.

But what you wanted is to start a rant.

Congratulations.

I understand the module maybe be in beta, but I'm still really interested in it. First modern aircraft for DCS in years. And one that I like. If you're so disappointed with it I'll take it off your hands. Or even trade for it.



Agreed. Make it a MICA capable 2000C, or even better, a -5 or -5mk2/-9 and I'll be even more interested.

More likely the publisher would decide that there is no interest in the module, cancel it and release yet another silly smartphone- or tablet-based game with in-app purchases.

+1. One day I would love to find the time to learn the A-10c & Mig-21. But in our busy lives, FC3 provides the right level of quick-fix simulation for me.

I like the M2K. I bought in beta, expecting beta quality & have not been disappointed at all. Has the advantage that it comes with AFM & not all Betas do. The only DCS product I have been disappointed with is the Hawk.

^This is what needs to happen

Money is what motivates the business world, nothing else

If they think they can get away with constantly releasing half finished stuff and people
will still part with their money, then that is what they will do

Once they have your money they don't care about you, what motivation do the have to complete it ? sweet FA

I don't see what the problem is.

If nobody bought the planes until release date, no planes would ever get developed because the people developing them are REAL PEOPLE and they need money to LIVE. They survive by getting funding from pre-purchases and early purchases, so that they can code full time (or nearly full time) in order to bring aircraft to the masses.

Let's not forget most of the planes being developed by 3rd parties are also works of love - they're not making those planes to get rich, they're doing it because they want to see their favorite aircraft finally simulated on the PC.

Imagine if you were one of those guys and some dudes came and got in your face about how disappointed they are in your first release, how much it sucks, how bad everything is, etc. You'd probably be pretty annoyed. That's because it's ANNOYING and nobody likes all that whining.

Do something productive, give constructive feedback and report bugs. The developers will tackle everything they can as fast as they are able to. They also have to work with ED to get patches out, they can't just update every day on a whim. They need to build up enough stable updates to be able to release to the public.

Lastly, please, for the love of god, don't cry "BUG!" about features that are part of the real aircraft (Not having flaps, oh come on, did you read the manual for the aircraft even a little bit?) As for a number of the gripes in your original posts, if you check the ED forums (have you been banned there..?) you'll see the developer has a thread for coming fixes / known issues / bug reporting and is actively participating in it.

I am not here for hugs and friendship. I bought something for 60$. I bought the Mig15, Mig21, BF109, on release day, and all of these developers managed to deliver a complete product with some bugs. But they were complete. And I do not care how they lived before getting money for the module. If someone tries to make a business out of getting money early so they can deliver later, they should label their stuff EARLY ACCESS and not BETA. Because BETA = feature complete.

Now for me it will depend on how January goes and how fast RAZBAM can fix the remaining glaring issues. If they fail to fix that in a very short timeframe, I will not get a RAZBAM product this early on release. The M2000 in its current state was rushed panickally to make a release date, probably because ED told them to get it done or else until December.

I will treat DCS developer like anyone else selling something for 60$. And they cant play the "we are poor developers who only do it for the love of flightsim" whil going for a hefty 60$ for release. They are a business like any other and want to max out their profit, that is ok. But then they better deliver on that.

They probably are not even pretending to be a poor developer trying to make it in a cruel world (tm). But the fanbois just love to protect developers with it.

You got a source for that? Because LN and VEAO also blasted through their December release plans without so much as a second thought, so I'm rather skeptical that ED was cracking the whip on this one.

The difference is, the Mirage was on pre-order since september, for a december release. So people paid for it, ED got money, RAZBAM got money. If they missed a release date it would cause problems for both ED and RAZBAM. However LN did not offer anything for pre-order yet. And VEAO is a joke and a complete failure that I wont take serious. They get nothing done on time and when they do get something done they take substandard to the next level.

The Mirage has some glaring bugs evidend within a literal minute of playing: Camera default angle messed up, some switches can be flipped, clipping through the safety cap, quite a lot of switches do not work yet, manual is being vague on some important things. These are not bugs that only appear after thousands of hours of testing, you bump into that like instantly.

And ED did a backhanded blaming of RAZBAM in the release week. They would only release that week if RAZBAM delivered some required items. Try to understand this. ED says we wont make it in the last week of december if RAZBAM does not deliver the last missing items. This was not a controlled, planned on time release like other companies do. It was a panic rush to almost the last few days, not knowing at the beginning of the week when it will be.

Fallout 4 release date was known 5 months in advance, and they delivered.

Considering Mr Wagners forum signature reads "all things subject to change", I'm not convinced ED would be in any position to reprimand Razbam for a late release.

I think Razbam simply took an "we'll release our latest stable build at the end of the month, whatever that entails" approach. I agree ED and it's partners are playing it fast and loose with the term "beta" but at this point I've calibrated my expectations to what that means in the context of DCS.

Just curious by the way, is there any other modern combat flight sim that has delivered a similar product at a lower price in a shorter time frame with fewer issues? What precedent is there for all the things your claming these developers should be doing?

And yet you even said you knew it was unfinished even before you bought it, why did you buy it?

Nate

I agree and would have no issue with the M2K being such a plane and being marketed as such...with the appropriate price point. Look at what the FC3 planes go for individually--$20 I believe?

If the M2K is currently a plane you'd be thrilled to have for $20, it isn't necessarily one you'll be thrilled to pay 3x that amount for. Supposedly it will be finished into a plane that will rival the MiG-21, A-10, and Ka-50, and be worth that price, and that's great. But it's not there yet. So to pay a DCS price for an FC3 plane that you hope will become a DCS plane is for me still a bridge too far.




The Jedi Master

Depends how you define "modern" since the only other thing released in the past decade has been FSX planes. I have no experience with them, so I can't say what issues they have or haven't had, what the exact pricing has been, or development schedules.
Before that, I think F4: AF was the last, which was ~$50 F-16C sim with multiple theaters, AI planes, MP, and such. Not sure if it was really comparable being a redo of F4 itself. So then we're back to LOMAC, DCS' progenitor, and then...Jane's F/A-18? That Matt Wagner himself worked on.

The problem is DCS is almost a monopoly due to the small size of the market. When your choices are DCS or something 10+ yrs old, people will go to DCS even if they have serious disagreements over many aspects. In the 90s, Flanker 2 was one of many jet sims and people could pick and choose based on merits. Those days are gone.

Yet we have almost no leverage. If people stop buying cars from GM because they hate them, GM doesn't say "Oh, well, in that case we'll just build tractors and boats instead" and abandon the market, they're forced to innovate to stay profitable. Most flight sim developers have the option to just quit the field and make some other game or other type of software altogether if they think flight sims aren't cutting it. You're made to feel grateful you're getting anything at all and not just fly F4 again for the 18th year.




The Jedi Master

JM, you bring up some good points.

I time the decline of flight sims with the advent of the graphics engine as a commodity. It's much easier and more profitable to license an engine (Quake, Doom, Unreal), design some levels, and release a shooter than it is to spend time developing a high fidelity flight simulator. That the shooter will take only 15-15 hours to burn through is actually icing on the cake since that will send the purchaser coming back for the next offering (unlike a good flight sim, which will spend years on a hard drive). Combine this with the instant gratification/ADD/graphics and shiny things demographic we have buying most games now, and you won't have a AAA publisher go near a flight sim unless it can be controlled with a keyboard and mouse and has as much action as the original Afterburner by Sega.

Since no AAA publisher will go near a real flight sim, ED (and the 3rd party devs) are really the only ones currently developing high fidelity combat sims. Since they don't have AAA money behind them, infusions of cash help fund the ongoing development cycle. We see this in the form of the 20% pre-order discount on the understanding that we are assuming some risk by purchasing a product before the reviews are in. That risk is a better bet in some cases than others; I won't hesitate to pre-order the next RAZBAM or Leatherneck module, but I might have to think long and hard when VEAO's Typhoon is marketed (despite loving the EF2000).

While I agree that if I pay $60 (or even $48 for the pre-order price) I expect a high quality product and I won't be satisfied until it is complete to the standards advertised, my patience has a much longer fuse for an independent developer than it does for a AAA studio which could otherwise bring all of its resources to bear.

Can you stop the "people who play anything else than flight sims are stupid" thing? Any AAA company like EA or UBI or even VALVE, would knock the stuffing out of ED because they got far more resources to throw at a game. The only reason ED exists and is selling modules at a price I would call "overvalued" is because AA companies have not a large enough customerbase to get the expenses back in. Stop being such a flightsim [edited]. If there was a large market for flight sims, ED would have been replaced already by 2-3 competing companies and the module prices would be lower because free market.

Flightsims have been pathetic pieces of trash with #%&*$# production values UNTIL DCS came out and lifted the graphics to acceptable levels. Yes, I need good graphics and effects for the game to convince me I am flying a plane. And on top of it these AAA games you [edited] hate so much, when you buy them, you get a lot more for your money. DCS just barely delivers and is priced very expensive. This might be hard for you bear emotionally, but one single single player campaign mission in a current COD or BF4 game has more production value than all of which DCS has to offer.

Also stop the "study-sim" nonsense. I had the a10c figured out in a week and mapped on a 12 button stick only. Flight sims are not any more difficult to play than a more slow paced FPS game.interesting gameplay.

Also about the pricing. Razbam is not up to standard (mig21, mig15) on release, they rushed it, and still went for a unreasonable high price, exactly knowing that this is a niche market and people get excited over it. So they took advantage of the excitement of customers and overpriced it. Now if we extend that comparison to other things that cost 60$, BF4 and COD are very reasonably priced in comparison for what you get.



That's enough of the name calling Straycat...debate the topic and don't make it personal.

Edgy.

Forgot to /drop da-mic

So it's come to a personal attack if you disagree with my position? Hippie? Really. It was an interest in flight sims at a very early age that got me interested in an aviation career in the US Navy. So take that hippie BS and shove it into that orifice in which it desperately belongs.

Where did I say that people who play AAA shooters are stupid? I can see how the target marketing demographic may have implied something, but that was merely a large portion of today's demographic, and not a blanket statement of all AAA titles. FWIW, I've had consoles as well as PCs, and I've played Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Quake, and the sequels as well as the Half Life series and CoD up to MW3 (where I felt it jumped the shark). I'm not about to insult myself, nor refer to myself as attention-span challenged.

What I was trying to say is that back before the shooter engines were a licensing commodity, flight sims were all the rage. And they weren't bad quality either; Falcon 3.0/4.0, Tornado, the Janes series, EF2000, F-22 ADF/TAW, Flanker 1 & 2, Mig Alley, and EECH were all innovators and/or standard bearers. All were backed by big names as well, though there were more of them back then. Then the publishers realized that they could release a shooter at a fraction of the development cost and time for much larger profits, and the sim industry all but dried up.

And where exactly did I say that only study sims count? What I said was that no AAA would go near a flight sim that couldn't be controlled with a keyboard and mouse. I enjoy FC3 as much as the next guy, and when I was operational I didn't spend time with the study sims because I was too busy learning my own aircraft. I enjoy the study sims now, but I also enjoy Shadows of Mordor and the latest Gauntlet reboot.

We can disagree all day long about prices; my point was that I'm more apt to be patient and understanding with an independent developer with limited resources than a publisher who cares only about the bottom line.

1. Hippie is not even an insult, if he declares anyone who likes AAA games addicted to "instant gratification", then he gets declared hippie.

2. Stop lying in ambush in my topic, you just wait looking for anything I say to use your red font on.

You totally brought it upon yourself. Treating people with a modicum of respect is something you're clearly having difficulties with on these boards. It's not the first time a moderator warns you either.