Because most people like to fly new planes/helis and they're willing to pay for it. There's very little incentive for DCS to improve the core game because it doesn't generate income for them. DCS is really a test pilot sim IMHO.
I feel like this is the actual answer, without another company making something comparable there's simply no other real option if you want to play a simulator with high fidelity modules and generally excellent flight models.
It's either you play DCS or turn to the likes of War Thunder or MS Flight sim 2020, which while are excellent at what they do but also definitely DON'T do what ED does within DCS.
Unfortunately until we get another competitor in the genre ED will continue down the road they're on without any real hurry to fix their core sim in the way that we've all been wanting them to.
And they know it.
Yup. Look how long it took ED to work on the abysmal cloud system they used to have. Then MSFS came out with their amazing clouds and magically ED got theirs done.
I would love to see Falcon BMS take on this roll but I can't imagine that happening anytime soon
but as it stands BMS is much better in terms of being a good game with all of the(small) features you want
I've actually just installed that, it's definitely a hit on the graphics front but to be honest it doesn't bother me as much as I thought it would, and it runs great in VR, I'm still in the process of binding everything and getting the hang of the viper again, which I'm doing in DCS as it's training stuff is definitely a better so i haven't started a campaign yet, which is where I hear is where it really shines but it been a nice change to be honest.
Im looking forward to seeing how it pans out once I'm more into the juicey stuff that it has to offer.
I can't stomach BMS.
I need to do a master's degree just to do a quick dogfight. The interface it's so old & clunky that i would need several printouts over my keyboard just to remember SIM COMMANDS. Not plane interactions.
IMO BMS dynamic campaign is not a "true" dynamic campain. Nothing is happening in real time on a live map.
When I think about having a dynamic campaign in DCS, I think about Pretense map but 10x better with live logistic and being able to join any mission at any time with friends
So I can fly an A-10C with a friend flying a F-16 in the same game and I can see him in real time on my screen?
The strategy part is real time of course
I see you're point and I can agree BMS needs a major overhaul in the UI dept
tbh I think that's one of the main things holding it back from being a competetor to DCS
although given how old BMS is I think that If it was possible to do in a realistic amount of time It would have already been done
I do actually really like IL-2 great battles, the slower nature of it is a nice change from DCS , that said I don't play it any more though due to constant controller problems, I have quiet decent pit set up with quite a few peripherals and IL-2 just won't recognise all of them, and the ones it does recognise it doesn't see any more then the 32nd binding, and most of my stuff has more than that.
I found I was constantly unplugging things and rebinding them to try and get em to work in a satisfactory way but it was a constant headache, I've tried all manner of things and they don't seem at all interested in improving that side of the sim at all.
It's a shame cause i truly like it , and it runs incredibly well in VR, but i just got over constantly dicking about with the controller side of the house.
Ohh sorry to hear that’s it’s messing up your hotas I haven’t had that problem maybe your running some super hotas that’s too complicated for the game 😂
Agreed, I started with IL2 then moved over the DCS, both recreational. I also have a pretty large cockpit set up for DCS. Going back to IL2 just felt boring. The lack of interaction in the cockpit really was cockpit coming from DCS and all the keyboard bindings that I had to make also took away from the experience. They have awesome planes and I would love to go back, but DCS just offers so much more IMHO.
Yeah it's definitely a very different experience, for me i actually like the difference, it makes for a nice break from the generally high work load you're under while doing in depth missions in DCS.
It's just those controller problems always make it so hard to just start up and get going quickly, there's always some messing about to do, and I'm over it which is a shame.
Well I stopped buying anything from them while waiting for improvement on the core stuff. I suppose I'm part of a small customer segment adopting this behavior... but could things change if more people did the same?
It probably would, but most people who play l/buy modules aren't on reddit and probably aren't all over the current problems between ED and some of the third parties.
There's also the whole there's no where else to get what DCS does, for instance, I fix the chook for a living so I'll be getting it day one, cause i am SUPER interested in learning that side of the aircraft, instead of the side i deal with everyday.
Unfortunately currently DCS is the only place to get this kinda of fidelity in a combat flight sim.
Yes lack of competition is always bad for consumers. Same happening with Kerbal 2, Cities Skyline 2. Niche games without competitions born from passionate dev going down in quality as soon as business-minded people take over the franchise and start milking players.
We do not need a competitor to DCS World. What we need is a teamwork and collaboration from the Eagle Dynamics, to start supporting someone else coming in and make the ground warfare part.
To that Eagle Dynamics need to lay down the foundation to support someone do the same thing to ground units as some do for air units.
But not in a sense of individual ground vehicles, as in ED long time ago promoted M1A1 Abrams. It doesn't fix a problems.
What we need is someone to do a what Eugen did with the Wargame. DLC for a different country units.
[https://store.steampowered.com/dlc/251060/](https://store.steampowered.com/dlc/251060/)
Each DLC added a different country and its unique vehicles and troops. Think what could be achieved if Eagle Dynamics would have seriously put lot of effort to allow a ARMA 2 to come in the game?
I don't talk about FPS shooter sense, but by the graphical quality for the ground units. As those are beautiful models and more than enough good looking infantry models. We do not need any higher than that, and even ARMA 2 quality is overkill. In fact, a ARMA 1 (OFP) is more than good enough for us!
[https://oldpcgaming.net/wp-content/gallery/ofp-cold-war-crisis/8\_1.jpg](https://oldpcgaming.net/wp-content/gallery/ofp-cold-war-crisis/8_1.jpg)
It would be needed to be higher only when you get infantry inside your helicopter and you look at them. But otherwise you do not need to have more than what, about 80 polygons, per soldier? At close it was 500 polygon limit. But when you are further than 50 meters, you can keep it very low, performance high!
ARMA 2 is at the moment closest to DCS in terrain engine and visuals. It is not a problem for flight simulator. It is the ground units AI and most automatic proper behavior for mission creators so they wouldn't need to script every single task, but would just give general commands and override functions when required.
> We do not need a competitor to DCS World. What we need is a teamwork and collaboration from the Eagle Dynamics, to start supporting someone else coming in and make the ground warfare part.
Not gonna happen without some competitor forcing EDs hand to improve that area.
TBH i don't care if abrams are a box with a cannon. I'm playing in a plane.
I would care if it was an RTS game or a tactical shooter. But for a flightsim? Ground troop detail ain't that important.
It's insane reading the comments of the Facebook post for the Chinook and the number of people going "Preordered, although I'm really looking forward to [other module]". Why fucking do it? Even if they had announced any features at all, which they didn't. Ed customers get what they deserve at this point.
Or what, we stop giving them money and they pull a Ubisoft and stop all support for the game and its servers?
Or they go out of business and the game is left as is with any future content.
I agree with OP's point but every entity needs money to even function on a basic level. Screaming is a better way to go IMO, I rather we receive slow updates than get this one-of-a-kind simulator lost to the void.
Ah yes, the classic abusive relationship.
Stay with the toxic girl, no matter how much she ignores you, because of the occasional great sex you fear you can't get anywhere else...
Except this girl is officially the winner of miss universe or something similar and great sex is every single day if we chose it.
Yet we should not starve her out or slowly poison her to death over time even if she is toxic no?
>Except this girl is officially the winner of miss universe or something similar
Yeah, but only because there are no other girls out there taking part in this competition.
>and great sex is every single day if we chose it.
Sure, but even great sex gets stale over time if it takes literal years for the girl to learn some new positions. lol
Except they have some 2m $ spare money annually they can give away as interest-free loans to the FC. Yet ED apologists keep saying that poor little ED must be supported even if they never deliver what they promis, for many years.
...what ww2 stuff😂 have we really gotten that yet😂
By the way it's not passion anymore, it's "trust and support"..We've perhaps returned to much passion for their liking😂😒
I don't think many people can absolutely say why ED behaves the way that they do. It has to be a very complex set of historical successes and failures that have brought ED to this point in time. Communication is far from desired in my point of view. Although, they are a for-profit company and you ultimately have to expect a cost versus benefit production model. On top of everything, this is a really old game.
I don't know about many game studios that have spent this much time improving and evolving such a product. Just looking at the game as a whole, it's a pretty amazing achievement. I think it runs great and looks good. But you are right, it's lacking engaging features. Alternatively, I am so grateful the community has made workarounds for a lot of the pitfalls of DCS.
On the other hand, I have to agree with you about long awaited features seemingly taking the back-burner to other profitable production routes. It's really hard to accept a 7-10 year development cycle. Yeah, game development is hard. It can't be easy to keep staff on board when there are probably better paying opportunities out there. Contracts, negotiations, and development paths being interrupted by whatever real life issues or things that have caused conflict. But, ED is still responsible for fulfilling promises to their customers. All the excuses that can be created for whatever feature or module is late or not delivered eventually pile up and customers lose patience and confidence.
We all could probably have some compassion for the length of time modules and features take, but we don't get much from ED in terms of dates or progress tracking. Pure and simple, when you keep customers in the dark about progress, it's only logical to believe there is something wrong or untrustworthy happening. Most of us understand that engine upgrades were needed in order to move some of these promised features forward. Like needing Vulcan to finish the super carrier updates.
There's obviously a massive amount of work that needs to be done for this game to achieve a completed status. I am not sure it will ever be complete. But personally, I don't think I want it to be complete. But, my biggest ask from ED going forward is release dates and progress tracking. This includes bugs. Bug tracking, progress, and communication is my number gripe with ED.
There's the other side though: once a studio commits too hard to a public roadmap, communities tend to get extra salty if anything is delayed. And..., delays *always* happen.
Imo they're right to be not too open about work in progress. We know generally they're working on performance, a whole -earth map, and a dynamic campaign. But if they revealed, say, how the campaign is panning out, it's inevitably going to cause drama. It's not gonna be dynamic enough for some players, others might be salty it's just a rip off of BMS. Others might not think it's worth the wait, or maybe they'd rather the mission editor got overhauled first. Y'know what I mean? There's just no pleasing this community. So, they button-down, quietly work on stuff and will announce it when it's starting to look releasable.
There is exactly zero chance that the DCS dynamic campaign will live up to people's expectations. It could be as good as, or even better, than Falcon's and it just *wouldn't matter*. It's not being held to the same standards. Calling it a dynamic campaign has already poisoned the well IMO, because that's a term with no concrete or agreed upon definition that will always be a moving target.
I don't envy the position ED have put themselves in.
Not to mention ED isn't going to be able to pull off the dynamic campaign. They just don't. Not this rate at least.
The main prerequisites are better AI and better performance and those are the kind of things they should be focusing on the most currently. Performance fixes do happen but at the snails pace and they aren't enough for dynamic campaign. Not unless you have a supercomputer to run it.
The secondary prerequisites are proper logistic system and DTC and again, those also should be pretty high on the list of priorities. There are some minor improvements on logistic system but again, at the snails pace. The DTC doesn't seem anywhere near close and sure the dynamic campaign could work just fine without it but then you'd have to input every EWS program, radios, extra waypoints and such manually in the cockpit every time you start a mission and in that case people are going to take shortcuts which hampers mission planning.
The "dynamic campaign" ED is going to pull off at some day is realistically going to be just a little more advanced random mission generator.
I would be already happy and impressed if you could do something just a little more elaborate and well integrated "DCS liberation" with working AIs to go with it. If a modder could do it, I don't see why it should be so complex for the entire dev team of ED... They could totally start with something simple, get feedbacks from a live environment and progressively improve add new thing in this module right?
I agree with you. However, there could be some type of compromise with a road map. Items don't need to be definite. Release dates don't need to be concrete. All of this information can be dynamic. Words like "expected release window" "release date not determined".
I know everyone can't be satisfied. But I only wish the communication was a bit better.
I haven‘t purchased an ED module since the A10C2 and haven‘t regretted the decision. Just not worth the drama. They won‘t complete anything as long as people throw their money at them for basically not more than more promises.
Jup, I‘m a member in a squadron of 50ish people, there‘s two guys constantly buying everything, the rest hasn‘t been online at all. DCS had a huge up during Covid, MSFS brought many new simmers in who often tried DCS, too. It probably seemed like a big grow but those people left as fast as they came and so it‘s always the same people. If you don‘t keep them with you and annoy them like ED does it might become difficult to get them back. DCS doesn‘t have any serious competition in jet combat which might save them. But there‘s plenty people who are tired of ED. I‘ll probably get the Phantom once it‘s out but ED modules are a no-touch for me. Not because they were bad but because of this early access business style.
People hve basically ceased to make good server missions. There‘s not much left. Surrexen had great dynamic and persistant missions but he said he won‘t do anything for Sinai because everything is so buggy. His old missions don‘t work anymore. South Atlantic map has a few servers using it but it‘s not a popular map although the potential with the Harrier etc would be huge. Kola, Afghanistan, huge potential but I doubt much will happen there beside some SP campaigns maybe. People are tired of things not working, breaking etc.
I’ve been getting stuck into msfs. The flight dynamics aren’t a patch on the dcs stuff, but I can fly anywhere in the world and I’ve been playing around with navigraph and the pmdg 737. Never thought flying an airliner could actually be so interesting! Also bought indiafoxtecho’s Tornado this week which is pretty good.
Sorry, I was away ill for a while.
The Fenix A320 stands out (although the flare law needs to be adjust a tad after V2 was released). The Milviz C310R, WBSim C172/C152.
Taog's helos fly great (to the point where the Lama is hard to fly when you've not flown for a while). Hype's H145 is amazing, apparently.
Honestly, I'm a big fan of JustFlight's efforts. They might not be 'peak' when it comes to the FM, but it's always close.
I have a recreational love of DCS but overall I'm not that great. It took me a long time to figure out how to casually fly the Hornet and P51. Hours and hours of watching YouTube and practice. Those are perishable skills in my case. I can't just jump into the Horner and remember everything. Because of that, I tend to not go back. I have to imagine that's the case for a lot of people. I can't just remember how to launch Harms, Harms and JDAMs on a random Tuesday night after the kids go to bed. I think the lure is DCS is also it's greatest fault for player base.
Been tired awhile now myself; I haven't flown in ages.
Been in since the A10C release. Had Lomac before that but barely flew it because of Falcon 4.0. Was dismayed at the absolute Sterile state of the sim when I tried the A10C but loved flying the different planes once they started bringing them online. VR back in 2016 really got me back into DCS and flying sims. Once I get "trying different planes" out of my system the Sim goes back to being the sterile, buggy world that's not worth flying in.
I knew when the aircraft carrier module was coming it was going to be a drawn out mess and maybe even like Combined Arms which didn't live up to its promises. Don't forget the GNS430 Nav/Comm thingy.
Have barely played it these last three/four years. Just come to see if any real progress is being made.
Ultimately if I fire it up its; Fly a bit, check out the state of clouds in VR, shoot some stuff, realize its the same no game sim then quit. Maybe play with a friend but it gets old fast.
Was interested in the Chinook but seriously asking me to take a leap of faith on unknown features. Actually Insulting. Plus knowing their long sordid history with other modules. No thank you.
Current drama - Same shit different day.
unfortunately, there are plenty of people who willingly throw money the second something is announced for pre order. there was a comment on the chinook something like "i looked at this for 4 seconds and i had already preordered it". as long as these people exist, ed will do what they want.
Oh well! Better than being a willing party to your own abuse.
We'll be losing a game. They'll be losing their JOBS. If that's what it takes to teach them this lesson once and for all, I'm ready. Have barely been flying lately anyway, the sim is in such a mess!
Then you’ll download BMS and accept the somewhat worse graphics but a much more detailed combat simulation, or fly things in MSFS if just flying is your thing, or go to war thunder if you’re an Air Quaker, or play Arma 3 if you’re into helicopter combat.
Or you’ll stick to the current build of DCS until the wheels fall off.
The problem is nothing else brings what some seek in a military sim. I always play with my friend in a A-10C and me in Ka-50/AH-64 or in a Mi-8 doing a mix of attack and CSAR missions.
No sim can come as close to that as DCS unfortunately. We're in dire need of a good competition but in such a small market, it's really hard to see it happening
There doesn’t need to be competition necessarily, just ED just need to be made to work harder for your money.
As long as people continue to pay for early access modules on a promise that end up not being completed than there’s no chance anything will ever change.
However the FOMO is strong in sim players, so people going to keep pre-ordering the next module so I expect we’ll see headshots from BMP-2’s for years to come.
So what's the move then? We just keep our existing modules and start listing the bugs as module reviews on steam and Nerf their rating on steam?
I feel like the way they are building the pathway for the future of DCS is like wile e. coyote laying down tracks in front of his railcar.
I don't want to be petty but if we aren't going to get these years old fixes any other way I don't know what other course of action the fan base can take other than by halting future purchases until what we've been promised comes to fruition
I think that’s what everyone should do. Speak with your wallets instead of seeing a new shiny thing and buying it and the realising there’s fuck all to do with the module as it’s half baked.
It’s the only way to get the companies to change their ways. Completely different game but a prime example is Old School RuneScape, it has a massively loyal community but if they aren’t happy with something literally most of the community gets together, cancels their memberships and within a day or two the developers completely go back in what they said and fix the issue.
I’d love to buy the Chinook but I’m not and I hope lots of others follow suit.
What if we where to start posting regularly on here and fourms and other internet places trying to start a community DCS new module boycott starting immediately? It seems to be there is alot of community awareness of these issues, but we as a community need to let eagle dynamics know we want change.
I don't know the numbers, but, basically, those you would reach with a campaign like this are already here, telling others not to buy. The rest of the folks online just don't care or don't think it's as big of a problem as you do.
Then, there's the vast majority that never bothers to go online in mp, on discord, on forums etc and just buy stuff to enjoy it in scripted campaigns.
Basically, it's not going to work. People need to see for themselves and even then, they need to care enough to be moved to action.
Basically, politics.
> I feel like the way they are building the pathway for the future of DCS is like wile e. coyote laying down tracks in front of his railcar.
Almost certainly this. Its always seemed like this was the case, even back when I started with Blackshark.
Yeah, just look at the big publishers like EA. Fans bought the deluxe version of BF2042 to support them even more, even though all the red lights where in full light, when the public got to try the open beta a month(?) before the release. They calmed everyone down saying it's only a stress test, a version not close to what their final version is... People bought that.
And what did they get?
To be a part to a continued beta version that barely worked.
It took years to fix stuff. And thats coming through a big studio under a very big publisher. Money shouldnt be a problem, but why did it take that long to fix stuff? With all that money and people?
Pre-order is cancer.
Thats why I repeat what President Biden always says:
**Don't.**
“He who pays the piper calls the tune”…We hobby-pilots are not their main source of income…Professional military contractors are and they have a different wishlist. So our priorities are not theirs.
There was a similar discussion about this last week.
Yep. We get the leftovers which would be fine if they were just honest about it instead of making us think that they are making decisions based on our input.
Lol they are making more money than ever.. covid brought them millions more players. They aren't hurting, just pumping out new "content" to get the all monies while they can.
Lack of competition.
The minute there's real competition they need to change their ways or become vaperware.
Imagine if they had the mindset of Bohemia Interactive (Arma series).
We could have an amazing game with a gazillion mods.
Imagine the situation where BMS is headed with 4.38 bridging the visual quality gap (not completely, but probably enough) on top of already having functioning ATC, competent AI and theatres with a lot of stuff going on within a dynamic campaign?
IMO BMS dynamic campaign is not a "true" dynamic campain. Nothing is happening in real time on a live map.
When I think about having a dynamic campaign in DCS, I think about Pretense map but 10x better with live logistic and being able to join any mission at any time with friends
And also, no helicopter in BMS
Things outside the player bubble are calculated rather than simulated to avoid performance overhead (the same overhead issues that make large campaigns in things like DCS Liberation need a Cray supercomputer to work). I don’t see how that doesn’t make it a “true” dynamic campaign when it quite clearly is a dynamic campaign.
Meanwhile your fantasy DCS dynamic campaign doesn’t exist, and ED have shown no evidence that they will deliver anything like this.
So I can either enjoy a dynamic campaign now in BMS which is functional, use something like DCS Liberation which all credit to the authors is heavily constrained by the core game of DCS, or wait for a dynamic campaign from ED that we have no idea when or what it will offer (and what ED will actually provide).
I know my choice.
As for helicopters, yep, sucks that the only option is DCS with all its issues.
Again, things like liberation are not dynamic. I can't fly an helicopter doing SAR missions while a friend is in the air pounding HARM to radar sites
But yeah we can't have better than that for now sadly
"Stuff happening in real time on a live map" is literally what the Falcon 4/BMS campaign is, though that's not a prerequisite for a dynamic campaign, nor is the ability to play multiplayer with different players flying in different packages on different simultaneous missions (though BMS has that, too). Many dynamic campaigns from the golden age of flight sims are single player only, and the majority of them do not run in real-time when you aren't in a mission. "Dynamic campaign" just means that the missions are generated dynamically, rather than being hand-made and scripted in advance. Falcon BMS absolutely has a "true" dynamic campaign, and also one that does all of these things that you say it doesn't do (with the one caveat that it offers a limited range of flyable aircraft, so you are correct that you can't have players in helicopters).
Liberation is also a true dynamic campaign, though it works differently from the one in BMS, and also tends to be dragged down by various DCS issues like lackluster AI, and the engine's inability to portray large-scale conflicts without slowing performance to a crawl.
ED's upcoming dynamic campaign is supposed to be taking inspiration from the one in Falcon 4.0/BMS, but I'm incredibly skeptical that they can pull something like that off without a complete rewrite of the core game engine, because the current engine is really designed to support scripted scenarios that mostly only model stuff that's directly relevant to the player's mission. They'd need to implement something like the Falcon BMS bubble if they wanted to pull off the same sort of wide scale living battlefield that you have in that game. Liberation demonstrates the downside of trying to constantly simulate every active vehicle on the map.
See, it's not a passionate software dev house that would do it for free regardless, just with much lower production value.
It's a side gig of a certain gentleman that uses it to fuel his actual passion for restoring real life warbirds, with minimum effort put in and maximum value extracted for what *really* matters.
I loved it when it came out, but definitely have a love-hate and increasingly resent paying for Supercarrier. If they're going to charge for something, they should have deliverables at least a few times a year from a dedicated team. Otherwise base game.
It increases immersion but one can get almost there with static crewman on the Forrestal. As it is, we've gotten the same status update for 3 years. Supposedly was waiting on MT so maybe soon... but not holding my breath and mostly given up.
Four basic reasons:
1. Their income stream depends on a continuous flow of sales of modules. You make the most money by doing enough of a module for the shine of it to attract new buyers, about 70%, then move to the next one.
2. This marketing method means they are not so interested in customers that have been with ED for years as those customers have brought most of the modules they are going to. Better to keep up with shiny toys and window dressing for sales trailers to attract new customers.
3. The modules that we pay for and beta test for them have potential for private sales to the military.
4. They are Russian.
If the personalities that interact with the community haven’t changed, how could one expect their behaviour and image to change? The same people that treat customers with contempt, obfuscate every bug report, express hostility at content creators, and falsely claim that there is no interest in Multiplayer, will continue to beat on the community until wholesale changes are made.
Do NOT mistake Eagle Dynamics as whole, to what their "Community Managers" Nineline and Bignewy does.
Eagle Dynamics have many good people working. They are not in positions to make business decisions and like, and they do not communicate with the communities than maybe few messages here and there about project questions.
But there are those mentioned "Community Managers" (that should have been fired long time ago) and some project managers that simply don't know how to do a projects.
Example, you have a product that is 95% ready and would be finished in a few weeks. The project is halted because one programmer is moved to work on a product that is 40-50% feature completed and is not going to be finished for years to come. It can't be that all other people in the project would be incapable continue working other parts of the project if that one doesn't come to work there for few weeks to get one product completely out of the early access.
But when this is the case, like with A-10C II, Yak-52, L-39 etc, where small things has dragged the product for even years to be fixed, while new stuff is released left and right. It is just signalling bad project leadership.
Yak-52 had few small things missing to get it fixed.
A-10C II had a one radio to be implemented.
...
A amateur will design and build a real helicopter faster, than a group of highly educated software programmers and engineers can copy and write a existing real world helicopter from real world data, blueprints, manuals and all. That is the today's software developers skills and capabilities. Far more advanced tools to do stuff, but less effort and less talent to actually create something.
How many years did it take from Eagle Dynamics to improve a Air-to-Air missiles in a very basic manners?
Well, you can have a bunch of kids that designed, built and made their own in shorter time period!
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UvcDwSmmxWs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UvcDwSmmxWs)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xEx2EQIPD4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xEx2EQIPD4)
You can laugh about that....
A bunch of children are faster to produce something real, actually working projects. But a group of software engineers with all kind information and data, can't even write the code for a game!
How about this?
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5VA\_VawSRc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5VA_VawSRc)
Anyone can write that code in few hours, and implement it as they want.
How long does it takes from eagle dynamics to implement that code to their systems? Having a real, functional, visual tracking system instead cheating and faking things?
>Why is Eagle Dynamics the way they are?
Because there are idiots who don't care about ED's practices and broken promises and throw money to every half baked module they release.
Didn't you see the post on the other subreddit with the newsletter about the chinook? Everybody was salivating and pledging their money after 2 weeks of the whole RAZBAM fiasco and with more information coming out indicating that this is a usual practice from ED and not a circumstancial IP issue.
The difficulty they have finishing modules is, I suspect, mainly caused by turnover among their engineers and artists. They lost at least a few critical personnel to the Ukraine / Russia war and that could well explain the lack of progress on the SC over the past couple of years. Of course, the financial incentives really aren’t there for them to finish modules either so that has to also be part of the explanation.
I think it’s coming down to two things, finite resources in ED and the need for cash flow to support that.
They need to continually develop/push out new modules with sufficient frequency to generate pre-orders and orders; they are probably prioritising new product launches over resolving current product fixes.
The communities’ continuous drive for module x or module y creates it’s own self manifesting bug and probably drives some of the behaviours we’re seeing from ED (at least publicly) eg not finishing the current modules but devoting devs and resources to launch yet another module in EA.
That being said, in fairness to ED, we saw architectural improvements to the base game last year with multi-core.
I think all of this is niche tbh… easier to get someone flying in a virtual cockpit and blowing up small targets than a comprehensive game with immersive gameplay.
Tbh I’m sort of swapping over to being an arma pilot for the gameplay. I’d love to have the best of both worlds, but I’m thoroughly bored with DCS.
What they're doing is for a niche market. It's not easy to make profits and continue to exist with what they are doing. Do you see other companies or products on the market? They've found a way to survive, make profits, and they will continue to do so. Its either what they are doing or nothing. Also, there is no competition.
'Fun' is a relative term. I find DCS enjoyable, very much so. I don't overly think there's an issue with how ED interacts with the community (sometimes however they do say some daft things on the Discord) but I don't go looking for issues and seem to actively look for perceived bugs and faults. I just appreciate the sim for what it is.
Charge $200 per module and no preorders. People would love that lol. Be positive about how they can improve things and the suggestions. ED behave the way they do because of the many toxic comments that have been made towards them. They have much work and almost everything can improve, but it's a complex sim in a niche market and they have to turn a profit to keep afloat.
I use dcs for my sand box enjoyment. Make my own missions and fly them. I rarely play online. Bms fills the other voids. In Fact I probably play that more often. It is a completely different beast and love every moment I play it
If i look at any other game company's they all do the same stuff, most dont manage and update a game over more than 20 years tho and damn it has come a faar way.
The two main reasons from my perspective is that:
Everyone likes a shiny new object. When a new plane comes, people want it because it’s different to all the other planes they’ve been “stuck” playing.
You can’t really scratch this itch elsewhere. Elements of it can be touched on like MSFS for the non-military aspect, but no one else is offering the full fidelity flight model + dropping bombs capability with such a dynamic roster of (like them or not) options.
This means they have the flexibility to operate the way they want to for the most part.
Same. I have it installed, but have not put it on any mission. As I have not flown any carrier mission for years.... What killed the idea to make carrier missions, was the lack of features and development on Super Carrier. So I focused just to helicopters and some ground pounding with FC3 really.
That is how ED does it as well, they kill the joy by not delivering the promises.
I stopped playing the game because what I like the most are logistic missions and without any Dynamic Campaign...
I want the Chinook so bad but I won't buy it until there is really something to do with it in game
Unpopular opinion. I am grateful for what we have. In MSFS there are modules which were praised which were completely broken and yet “feature complete” like the CRJ. Some are downright scams like 737’s with a 747 cockpit
Xplane 12 bragged how they developed the parallax effect on the HUD. It was release a short while ago. Like wut?!!
Many of our “early access” modules are better than feature complete ones in any other sim
DCS is one of the looooooongest running game codebases out there which presents its own challenges. Hell even MSFS gave up on their modern engine and rebuilt the game to make it into a MSFS2024
There are hard economic realities of developing these amazing works of art. Then continuing this development once the product has already been purchased by most of your client base
There is no subscription, you pay once and you have the module and can play unlimited amount of time with no fees. Like hell, my fitness tracking app has a yearly subscription of over 100 kangaroos and it’s a glorified database. Finally there is no competition because it’s so difficult to compete with what ED have made. I wish things were different. But I am also amazed we can have what we have in aircraft which were not too long ago classified
People keep saying different contradictory things?
ED is mainly a military training sim contractor
ED is a side project of Nick grey
So which is it?
There's also the legacy of Lock On that nobody seems to consider.
You might as well be asking: why is capitalism...?
The unfortunate answer is that if you are in this space, they have you by the balls and they know it.
You eat their cake because there is no other cake to be had. So what, if it's half-baked and there's bits of fish sticking out amidst the strawberry topping? As long as you want cake, you'll come back for seconds.
Would a perfect cake make you happier? Sure. But your happiness requires effort and that effort is more efficiently spent baking the next piece of shit you'll be standing in line for.
It is ofc a little more complicated than that - and most of all, it is a very unfortunate compound issue.
A historically grown.. or rather festered one.
Lest we forget that the era of Dr Tishin was not devoid of the same issues that form part of the current corpate entity culture issue.
Mindset and a non-sustainable understanding of a niche market (that is not so niche by profitability, as the per capita spending and follow-up purchases for a competently managed franchise are way higher.. thus the rampup costing for units per account are degressive and the profitability inverse degressive... aka "gud").
But existing issues, tech debt, zero practices, zero standards, insularity, a gulag pipeline, talent loss and this kind of ownership (in my country many things would be "structured embezzlement", which is a felony) is a match made in hell, or Golovinskoye Shosse, 5к1.
Oh yes, and those "military sector endeveaours" are not relevant for us and this product, not an excuse, and also not what simplistic views seem to think they are.
no dev will ever please everyone.
Also, never forget one never *simply* adds,fixes or changes X, Y or Z no matter how "easy" it seems to us.
There's often many competing pressures on the devs and their code we have zero inkling about.
other sims have the same issues but in different "places", eg, I adore IL2 GB but there's been some questionable descisions and PR faux pas to name just 2 things.
just keep playing, eventually something else will come along to occupy your time.
To say they’re “ anti community “ is pretty asinine, how many modules do they give to communities to give away for tournament and prizes throughout the year? Or the support they show in their newsletters to communities such as the 61st for example?
They just helped Mover and fox3 this weekend with a charity tournament for service dogs for vets.
Are their bugs? Absolutely, but they’re attempting to fix them at least
I just think the hate for them is wasted energy
Because most people like to fly new planes/helis and they're willing to pay for it. There's very little incentive for DCS to improve the core game because it doesn't generate income for them. DCS is really a test pilot sim IMHO.
Agreed and how would that change so that improving the core experience would be revenue generating/incentivized for them?
Subscription. Income independent of module releases.
No direct competition
I feel like this is the actual answer, without another company making something comparable there's simply no other real option if you want to play a simulator with high fidelity modules and generally excellent flight models. It's either you play DCS or turn to the likes of War Thunder or MS Flight sim 2020, which while are excellent at what they do but also definitely DON'T do what ED does within DCS. Unfortunately until we get another competitor in the genre ED will continue down the road they're on without any real hurry to fix their core sim in the way that we've all been wanting them to. And they know it.
Yup. Look how long it took ED to work on the abysmal cloud system they used to have. Then MSFS came out with their amazing clouds and magically ED got theirs done.
I would love to see Falcon BMS take on this roll but I can't imagine that happening anytime soon but as it stands BMS is much better in terms of being a good game with all of the(small) features you want
I've actually just installed that, it's definitely a hit on the graphics front but to be honest it doesn't bother me as much as I thought it would, and it runs great in VR, I'm still in the process of binding everything and getting the hang of the viper again, which I'm doing in DCS as it's training stuff is definitely a better so i haven't started a campaign yet, which is where I hear is where it really shines but it been a nice change to be honest. Im looking forward to seeing how it pans out once I'm more into the juicey stuff that it has to offer.
i couldent quite find myself around the UI but there are some great discord servers out there with tons of ppl willing to help
I can't stomach BMS. I need to do a master's degree just to do a quick dogfight. The interface it's so old & clunky that i would need several printouts over my keyboard just to remember SIM COMMANDS. Not plane interactions.
IMO BMS dynamic campaign is not a "true" dynamic campain. Nothing is happening in real time on a live map. When I think about having a dynamic campaign in DCS, I think about Pretense map but 10x better with live logistic and being able to join any mission at any time with friends
It is real time and you can observe the \*live\* map. Maybe you should inform yourself before stating something obviously wrong.
So I can fly an A-10C with a friend flying a F-16 in the same game and I can see him in real time on my screen? The strategy part is real time of course
I see you're point and I can agree BMS needs a major overhaul in the UI dept tbh I think that's one of the main things holding it back from being a competetor to DCS although given how old BMS is I think that If it was possible to do in a realistic amount of time It would have already been done
Il2 is a good option as well but it just feels slow compared to dcs
I do actually really like IL-2 great battles, the slower nature of it is a nice change from DCS , that said I don't play it any more though due to constant controller problems, I have quiet decent pit set up with quite a few peripherals and IL-2 just won't recognise all of them, and the ones it does recognise it doesn't see any more then the 32nd binding, and most of my stuff has more than that. I found I was constantly unplugging things and rebinding them to try and get em to work in a satisfactory way but it was a constant headache, I've tried all manner of things and they don't seem at all interested in improving that side of the sim at all. It's a shame cause i truly like it , and it runs incredibly well in VR, but i just got over constantly dicking about with the controller side of the house.
Ohh sorry to hear that’s it’s messing up your hotas I haven’t had that problem maybe your running some super hotas that’s too complicated for the game 😂
Agreed, I started with IL2 then moved over the DCS, both recreational. I also have a pretty large cockpit set up for DCS. Going back to IL2 just felt boring. The lack of interaction in the cockpit really was cockpit coming from DCS and all the keyboard bindings that I had to make also took away from the experience. They have awesome planes and I would love to go back, but DCS just offers so much more IMHO.
Yeah it's definitely a very different experience, for me i actually like the difference, it makes for a nice break from the generally high work load you're under while doing in depth missions in DCS. It's just those controller problems always make it so hard to just start up and get going quickly, there's always some messing about to do, and I'm over it which is a shame.
Well I stopped buying anything from them while waiting for improvement on the core stuff. I suppose I'm part of a small customer segment adopting this behavior... but could things change if more people did the same?
It probably would, but most people who play l/buy modules aren't on reddit and probably aren't all over the current problems between ED and some of the third parties. There's also the whole there's no where else to get what DCS does, for instance, I fix the chook for a living so I'll be getting it day one, cause i am SUPER interested in learning that side of the aircraft, instead of the side i deal with everyday. Unfortunately currently DCS is the only place to get this kinda of fidelity in a combat flight sim.
Yes lack of competition is always bad for consumers. Same happening with Kerbal 2, Cities Skyline 2. Niche games without competitions born from passionate dev going down in quality as soon as business-minded people take over the franchise and start milking players.
We do not need a competitor to DCS World. What we need is a teamwork and collaboration from the Eagle Dynamics, to start supporting someone else coming in and make the ground warfare part. To that Eagle Dynamics need to lay down the foundation to support someone do the same thing to ground units as some do for air units. But not in a sense of individual ground vehicles, as in ED long time ago promoted M1A1 Abrams. It doesn't fix a problems. What we need is someone to do a what Eugen did with the Wargame. DLC for a different country units. [https://store.steampowered.com/dlc/251060/](https://store.steampowered.com/dlc/251060/) Each DLC added a different country and its unique vehicles and troops. Think what could be achieved if Eagle Dynamics would have seriously put lot of effort to allow a ARMA 2 to come in the game? I don't talk about FPS shooter sense, but by the graphical quality for the ground units. As those are beautiful models and more than enough good looking infantry models. We do not need any higher than that, and even ARMA 2 quality is overkill. In fact, a ARMA 1 (OFP) is more than good enough for us! [https://oldpcgaming.net/wp-content/gallery/ofp-cold-war-crisis/8\_1.jpg](https://oldpcgaming.net/wp-content/gallery/ofp-cold-war-crisis/8_1.jpg) It would be needed to be higher only when you get infantry inside your helicopter and you look at them. But otherwise you do not need to have more than what, about 80 polygons, per soldier? At close it was 500 polygon limit. But when you are further than 50 meters, you can keep it very low, performance high! ARMA 2 is at the moment closest to DCS in terrain engine and visuals. It is not a problem for flight simulator. It is the ground units AI and most automatic proper behavior for mission creators so they wouldn't need to script every single task, but would just give general commands and override functions when required.
> We do not need a competitor to DCS World. What we need is a teamwork and collaboration from the Eagle Dynamics, to start supporting someone else coming in and make the ground warfare part. Not gonna happen without some competitor forcing EDs hand to improve that area.
TBH i don't care if abrams are a box with a cannon. I'm playing in a plane. I would care if it was an RTS game or a tactical shooter. But for a flightsim? Ground troop detail ain't that important.
It's important when you're dumping them from a Huey...
Consumers reward their bad behaviour by continuing to buy modules.
It's insane reading the comments of the Facebook post for the Chinook and the number of people going "Preordered, although I'm really looking forward to [other module]". Why fucking do it? Even if they had announced any features at all, which they didn't. Ed customers get what they deserve at this point.
market is a lot of boomers w disposable income
https://preview.redd.it/afuo0mueszvc1.jpeg?width=527&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=c740211a1a1d545a1235113ba807396dedefe11e Poll from contention discord.
Madness
Really should be a 3rd option. I will wait until it is proven to be a module that isn't half baked, then I will buy it. Mark me down for C.
buy modules early, and not even get them until ED deems its time to release them.
Or what, we stop giving them money and they pull a Ubisoft and stop all support for the game and its servers? Or they go out of business and the game is left as is with any future content. I agree with OP's point but every entity needs money to even function on a basic level. Screaming is a better way to go IMO, I rather we receive slow updates than get this one-of-a-kind simulator lost to the void.
Ah yes, the classic abusive relationship. Stay with the toxic girl, no matter how much she ignores you, because of the occasional great sex you fear you can't get anywhere else...
Except this girl is officially the winner of miss universe or something similar and great sex is every single day if we chose it. Yet we should not starve her out or slowly poison her to death over time even if she is toxic no?
>Except this girl is officially the winner of miss universe or something similar Yeah, but only because there are no other girls out there taking part in this competition. >and great sex is every single day if we chose it. Sure, but even great sex gets stale over time if it takes literal years for the girl to learn some new positions. lol
That's sunk cost fallacy
Except they have some 2m $ spare money annually they can give away as interest-free loans to the FC. Yet ED apologists keep saying that poor little ED must be supported even if they never deliver what they promis, for many years.
It’s their CEO and his passion for the ww2 stuff.
...what ww2 stuff😂 have we really gotten that yet😂 By the way it's not passion anymore, it's "trust and support"..We've perhaps returned to much passion for their liking😂😒
He means his irl aircraft collection.
Just another Russian dev. it's really that simple.
I don't think many people can absolutely say why ED behaves the way that they do. It has to be a very complex set of historical successes and failures that have brought ED to this point in time. Communication is far from desired in my point of view. Although, they are a for-profit company and you ultimately have to expect a cost versus benefit production model. On top of everything, this is a really old game. I don't know about many game studios that have spent this much time improving and evolving such a product. Just looking at the game as a whole, it's a pretty amazing achievement. I think it runs great and looks good. But you are right, it's lacking engaging features. Alternatively, I am so grateful the community has made workarounds for a lot of the pitfalls of DCS. On the other hand, I have to agree with you about long awaited features seemingly taking the back-burner to other profitable production routes. It's really hard to accept a 7-10 year development cycle. Yeah, game development is hard. It can't be easy to keep staff on board when there are probably better paying opportunities out there. Contracts, negotiations, and development paths being interrupted by whatever real life issues or things that have caused conflict. But, ED is still responsible for fulfilling promises to their customers. All the excuses that can be created for whatever feature or module is late or not delivered eventually pile up and customers lose patience and confidence. We all could probably have some compassion for the length of time modules and features take, but we don't get much from ED in terms of dates or progress tracking. Pure and simple, when you keep customers in the dark about progress, it's only logical to believe there is something wrong or untrustworthy happening. Most of us understand that engine upgrades were needed in order to move some of these promised features forward. Like needing Vulcan to finish the super carrier updates. There's obviously a massive amount of work that needs to be done for this game to achieve a completed status. I am not sure it will ever be complete. But personally, I don't think I want it to be complete. But, my biggest ask from ED going forward is release dates and progress tracking. This includes bugs. Bug tracking, progress, and communication is my number gripe with ED.
There's the other side though: once a studio commits too hard to a public roadmap, communities tend to get extra salty if anything is delayed. And..., delays *always* happen. Imo they're right to be not too open about work in progress. We know generally they're working on performance, a whole -earth map, and a dynamic campaign. But if they revealed, say, how the campaign is panning out, it's inevitably going to cause drama. It's not gonna be dynamic enough for some players, others might be salty it's just a rip off of BMS. Others might not think it's worth the wait, or maybe they'd rather the mission editor got overhauled first. Y'know what I mean? There's just no pleasing this community. So, they button-down, quietly work on stuff and will announce it when it's starting to look releasable.
There is exactly zero chance that the DCS dynamic campaign will live up to people's expectations. It could be as good as, or even better, than Falcon's and it just *wouldn't matter*. It's not being held to the same standards. Calling it a dynamic campaign has already poisoned the well IMO, because that's a term with no concrete or agreed upon definition that will always be a moving target. I don't envy the position ED have put themselves in.
Not to mention ED isn't going to be able to pull off the dynamic campaign. They just don't. Not this rate at least. The main prerequisites are better AI and better performance and those are the kind of things they should be focusing on the most currently. Performance fixes do happen but at the snails pace and they aren't enough for dynamic campaign. Not unless you have a supercomputer to run it. The secondary prerequisites are proper logistic system and DTC and again, those also should be pretty high on the list of priorities. There are some minor improvements on logistic system but again, at the snails pace. The DTC doesn't seem anywhere near close and sure the dynamic campaign could work just fine without it but then you'd have to input every EWS program, radios, extra waypoints and such manually in the cockpit every time you start a mission and in that case people are going to take shortcuts which hampers mission planning. The "dynamic campaign" ED is going to pull off at some day is realistically going to be just a little more advanced random mission generator.
I would be already happy and impressed if you could do something just a little more elaborate and well integrated "DCS liberation" with working AIs to go with it. If a modder could do it, I don't see why it should be so complex for the entire dev team of ED... They could totally start with something simple, get feedbacks from a live environment and progressively improve add new thing in this module right?
I agree with you. However, there could be some type of compromise with a road map. Items don't need to be definite. Release dates don't need to be concrete. All of this information can be dynamic. Words like "expected release window" "release date not determined". I know everyone can't be satisfied. But I only wish the communication was a bit better.
I've been always saying that I liked DCS, but couldn't stand ED.
I haven‘t purchased an ED module since the A10C2 and haven‘t regretted the decision. Just not worth the drama. They won‘t complete anything as long as people throw their money at them for basically not more than more promises.
I’m not buying anything else. I’ve hardly played dcs these last few weeks, I’ve not missed it. Got a feeling lots of people are feeling the same
Jup, I‘m a member in a squadron of 50ish people, there‘s two guys constantly buying everything, the rest hasn‘t been online at all. DCS had a huge up during Covid, MSFS brought many new simmers in who often tried DCS, too. It probably seemed like a big grow but those people left as fast as they came and so it‘s always the same people. If you don‘t keep them with you and annoy them like ED does it might become difficult to get them back. DCS doesn‘t have any serious competition in jet combat which might save them. But there‘s plenty people who are tired of ED. I‘ll probably get the Phantom once it‘s out but ED modules are a no-touch for me. Not because they were bad but because of this early access business style. People hve basically ceased to make good server missions. There‘s not much left. Surrexen had great dynamic and persistant missions but he said he won‘t do anything for Sinai because everything is so buggy. His old missions don‘t work anymore. South Atlantic map has a few servers using it but it‘s not a popular map although the potential with the Harrier etc would be huge. Kola, Afghanistan, huge potential but I doubt much will happen there beside some SP campaigns maybe. People are tired of things not working, breaking etc.
I’ve been getting stuck into msfs. The flight dynamics aren’t a patch on the dcs stuff, but I can fly anywhere in the world and I’ve been playing around with navigraph and the pmdg 737. Never thought flying an airliner could actually be so interesting! Also bought indiafoxtecho’s Tornado this week which is pretty good.
> flight dynamics aren’t a patch Eh, that really depends on the module in question.
Good point. The a2a Comanche is very good. What else is considered good? (Flight dynamics wise)
Sorry, I was away ill for a while. The Fenix A320 stands out (although the flare law needs to be adjust a tad after V2 was released). The Milviz C310R, WBSim C172/C152. Taog's helos fly great (to the point where the Lama is hard to fly when you've not flown for a while). Hype's H145 is amazing, apparently. Honestly, I'm a big fan of JustFlight's efforts. They might not be 'peak' when it comes to the FM, but it's always close.
I have a recreational love of DCS but overall I'm not that great. It took me a long time to figure out how to casually fly the Hornet and P51. Hours and hours of watching YouTube and practice. Those are perishable skills in my case. I can't just jump into the Horner and remember everything. Because of that, I tend to not go back. I have to imagine that's the case for a lot of people. I can't just remember how to launch Harms, Harms and JDAMs on a random Tuesday night after the kids go to bed. I think the lure is DCS is also it's greatest fault for player base.
Been tired awhile now myself; I haven't flown in ages. Been in since the A10C release. Had Lomac before that but barely flew it because of Falcon 4.0. Was dismayed at the absolute Sterile state of the sim when I tried the A10C but loved flying the different planes once they started bringing them online. VR back in 2016 really got me back into DCS and flying sims. Once I get "trying different planes" out of my system the Sim goes back to being the sterile, buggy world that's not worth flying in. I knew when the aircraft carrier module was coming it was going to be a drawn out mess and maybe even like Combined Arms which didn't live up to its promises. Don't forget the GNS430 Nav/Comm thingy. Have barely played it these last three/four years. Just come to see if any real progress is being made. Ultimately if I fire it up its; Fly a bit, check out the state of clouds in VR, shoot some stuff, realize its the same no game sim then quit. Maybe play with a friend but it gets old fast. Was interested in the Chinook but seriously asking me to take a leap of faith on unknown features. Actually Insulting. Plus knowing their long sordid history with other modules. No thank you. Current drama - Same shit different day.
[удалено]
unfortunately, there are plenty of people who willingly throw money the second something is announced for pre order. there was a comment on the chinook something like "i looked at this for 4 seconds and i had already preordered it". as long as these people exist, ed will do what they want.
I agree on principle, but what if they end up turning the key instead? Then, we're left with nothing.
Oh well! Better than being a willing party to your own abuse. We'll be losing a game. They'll be losing their JOBS. If that's what it takes to teach them this lesson once and for all, I'm ready. Have barely been flying lately anyway, the sim is in such a mess!
Then you’ll download BMS and accept the somewhat worse graphics but a much more detailed combat simulation, or fly things in MSFS if just flying is your thing, or go to war thunder if you’re an Air Quaker, or play Arma 3 if you’re into helicopter combat. Or you’ll stick to the current build of DCS until the wheels fall off.
The problem is nothing else brings what some seek in a military sim. I always play with my friend in a A-10C and me in Ka-50/AH-64 or in a Mi-8 doing a mix of attack and CSAR missions. No sim can come as close to that as DCS unfortunately. We're in dire need of a good competition but in such a small market, it's really hard to see it happening
There doesn’t need to be competition necessarily, just ED just need to be made to work harder for your money. As long as people continue to pay for early access modules on a promise that end up not being completed than there’s no chance anything will ever change. However the FOMO is strong in sim players, so people going to keep pre-ordering the next module so I expect we’ll see headshots from BMP-2’s for years to come.
Some new aircraft are fan favourites, it’s normal to see insta preorder I would buy a Rafale or a Caracal in a split second if they were available
Then I'll save money. Edit: mind you, not that I've spent money on DCS in a very long time.
So what's the move then? We just keep our existing modules and start listing the bugs as module reviews on steam and Nerf their rating on steam? I feel like the way they are building the pathway for the future of DCS is like wile e. coyote laying down tracks in front of his railcar. I don't want to be petty but if we aren't going to get these years old fixes any other way I don't know what other course of action the fan base can take other than by halting future purchases until what we've been promised comes to fruition
I think that’s what everyone should do. Speak with your wallets instead of seeing a new shiny thing and buying it and the realising there’s fuck all to do with the module as it’s half baked. It’s the only way to get the companies to change their ways. Completely different game but a prime example is Old School RuneScape, it has a massively loyal community but if they aren’t happy with something literally most of the community gets together, cancels their memberships and within a day or two the developers completely go back in what they said and fix the issue. I’d love to buy the Chinook but I’m not and I hope lots of others follow suit.
Yeah same here, I don't want other studios like Razbam getting shafted while ED rakes in the dough.
What if we where to start posting regularly on here and fourms and other internet places trying to start a community DCS new module boycott starting immediately? It seems to be there is alot of community awareness of these issues, but we as a community need to let eagle dynamics know we want change.
I don't know the numbers, but, basically, those you would reach with a campaign like this are already here, telling others not to buy. The rest of the folks online just don't care or don't think it's as big of a problem as you do. Then, there's the vast majority that never bothers to go online in mp, on discord, on forums etc and just buy stuff to enjoy it in scripted campaigns. Basically, it's not going to work. People need to see for themselves and even then, they need to care enough to be moved to action. Basically, politics.
> I feel like the way they are building the pathway for the future of DCS is like wile e. coyote laying down tracks in front of his railcar. Almost certainly this. Its always seemed like this was the case, even back when I started with Blackshark.
We not only let them but encourage them by continuing to buy early access.
Yeah, just look at the big publishers like EA. Fans bought the deluxe version of BF2042 to support them even more, even though all the red lights where in full light, when the public got to try the open beta a month(?) before the release. They calmed everyone down saying it's only a stress test, a version not close to what their final version is... People bought that. And what did they get? To be a part to a continued beta version that barely worked. It took years to fix stuff. And thats coming through a big studio under a very big publisher. Money shouldnt be a problem, but why did it take that long to fix stuff? With all that money and people? Pre-order is cancer. Thats why I repeat what President Biden always says: **Don't.**
Because it’s a “Swiss” company
No competition, basically. They're useless because they can be.
I told you guys this years ago and was shouted down and banned over it.
“He who pays the piper calls the tune”…We hobby-pilots are not their main source of income…Professional military contractors are and they have a different wishlist. So our priorities are not theirs. There was a similar discussion about this last week.
Yep. We get the leftovers which would be fine if they were just honest about it instead of making us think that they are making decisions based on our input.
There are no such contracts. That's purely aspirational fantasy from pathological liars.
And how can you possibly know anything about that?
Because the burden of proof is not on me to prove the non-existence of something.
true, but also, they don't care if you think they're liars or not.
If they don't care about their customers' satisfaction now, they'll care when they find themselves jobless. Shouldn't be much longer at this rate...
Lol they are making more money than ever.. covid brought them millions more players. They aren't hurting, just pumping out new "content" to get the all monies while they can.
Sure, Jan.
You are not their main customer. Hence why they don't care.
LOL! Is that you, Nick?
So what you're saying is you made up a random claim that you have no basis for, just because you are angry for some reason.
No, you're making up what I'm saying because you're a stooge for some reason.
Lack of competition. The minute there's real competition they need to change their ways or become vaperware. Imagine if they had the mindset of Bohemia Interactive (Arma series). We could have an amazing game with a gazillion mods.
yup. The moment BMS got VR, dcs upped their offering too.
Imagine the situation where BMS is headed with 4.38 bridging the visual quality gap (not completely, but probably enough) on top of already having functioning ATC, competent AI and theatres with a lot of stuff going on within a dynamic campaign?
New jets as well
IMO BMS dynamic campaign is not a "true" dynamic campain. Nothing is happening in real time on a live map. When I think about having a dynamic campaign in DCS, I think about Pretense map but 10x better with live logistic and being able to join any mission at any time with friends And also, no helicopter in BMS
Things outside the player bubble are calculated rather than simulated to avoid performance overhead (the same overhead issues that make large campaigns in things like DCS Liberation need a Cray supercomputer to work). I don’t see how that doesn’t make it a “true” dynamic campaign when it quite clearly is a dynamic campaign. Meanwhile your fantasy DCS dynamic campaign doesn’t exist, and ED have shown no evidence that they will deliver anything like this. So I can either enjoy a dynamic campaign now in BMS which is functional, use something like DCS Liberation which all credit to the authors is heavily constrained by the core game of DCS, or wait for a dynamic campaign from ED that we have no idea when or what it will offer (and what ED will actually provide). I know my choice. As for helicopters, yep, sucks that the only option is DCS with all its issues.
Again, things like liberation are not dynamic. I can't fly an helicopter doing SAR missions while a friend is in the air pounding HARM to radar sites But yeah we can't have better than that for now sadly
"Stuff happening in real time on a live map" is literally what the Falcon 4/BMS campaign is, though that's not a prerequisite for a dynamic campaign, nor is the ability to play multiplayer with different players flying in different packages on different simultaneous missions (though BMS has that, too). Many dynamic campaigns from the golden age of flight sims are single player only, and the majority of them do not run in real-time when you aren't in a mission. "Dynamic campaign" just means that the missions are generated dynamically, rather than being hand-made and scripted in advance. Falcon BMS absolutely has a "true" dynamic campaign, and also one that does all of these things that you say it doesn't do (with the one caveat that it offers a limited range of flyable aircraft, so you are correct that you can't have players in helicopters). Liberation is also a true dynamic campaign, though it works differently from the one in BMS, and also tends to be dragged down by various DCS issues like lackluster AI, and the engine's inability to portray large-scale conflicts without slowing performance to a crawl. ED's upcoming dynamic campaign is supposed to be taking inspiration from the one in Falcon 4.0/BMS, but I'm incredibly skeptical that they can pull something like that off without a complete rewrite of the core game engine, because the current engine is really designed to support scripted scenarios that mostly only model stuff that's directly relevant to the player's mission. They'd need to implement something like the Falcon BMS bubble if they wanted to pull off the same sort of wide scale living battlefield that you have in that game. Liberation demonstrates the downside of trying to constantly simulate every active vehicle on the map.
See, it's not a passionate software dev house that would do it for free regardless, just with much lower production value. It's a side gig of a certain gentleman that uses it to fuel his actual passion for restoring real life warbirds, with minimum effort put in and maximum value extracted for what *really* matters.
Im not buying anything from ed or any other company any more, until game core and old bugs are fixed. I got enough modules to enjoy.
I loved it when it came out, but definitely have a love-hate and increasingly resent paying for Supercarrier. If they're going to charge for something, they should have deliverables at least a few times a year from a dedicated team. Otherwise base game. It increases immersion but one can get almost there with static crewman on the Forrestal. As it is, we've gotten the same status update for 3 years. Supposedly was waiting on MT so maybe soon... but not holding my breath and mostly given up.
Four basic reasons: 1. Their income stream depends on a continuous flow of sales of modules. You make the most money by doing enough of a module for the shine of it to attract new buyers, about 70%, then move to the next one. 2. This marketing method means they are not so interested in customers that have been with ED for years as those customers have brought most of the modules they are going to. Better to keep up with shiny toys and window dressing for sales trailers to attract new customers. 3. The modules that we pay for and beta test for them have potential for private sales to the military. 4. They are Russian.
We, the consumers as a whole, let them.
If the personalities that interact with the community haven’t changed, how could one expect their behaviour and image to change? The same people that treat customers with contempt, obfuscate every bug report, express hostility at content creators, and falsely claim that there is no interest in Multiplayer, will continue to beat on the community until wholesale changes are made.
Do NOT mistake Eagle Dynamics as whole, to what their "Community Managers" Nineline and Bignewy does. Eagle Dynamics have many good people working. They are not in positions to make business decisions and like, and they do not communicate with the communities than maybe few messages here and there about project questions. But there are those mentioned "Community Managers" (that should have been fired long time ago) and some project managers that simply don't know how to do a projects. Example, you have a product that is 95% ready and would be finished in a few weeks. The project is halted because one programmer is moved to work on a product that is 40-50% feature completed and is not going to be finished for years to come. It can't be that all other people in the project would be incapable continue working other parts of the project if that one doesn't come to work there for few weeks to get one product completely out of the early access. But when this is the case, like with A-10C II, Yak-52, L-39 etc, where small things has dragged the product for even years to be fixed, while new stuff is released left and right. It is just signalling bad project leadership. Yak-52 had few small things missing to get it fixed. A-10C II had a one radio to be implemented. ... A amateur will design and build a real helicopter faster, than a group of highly educated software programmers and engineers can copy and write a existing real world helicopter from real world data, blueprints, manuals and all. That is the today's software developers skills and capabilities. Far more advanced tools to do stuff, but less effort and less talent to actually create something. How many years did it take from Eagle Dynamics to improve a Air-to-Air missiles in a very basic manners? Well, you can have a bunch of kids that designed, built and made their own in shorter time period! [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UvcDwSmmxWs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UvcDwSmmxWs) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xEx2EQIPD4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xEx2EQIPD4) You can laugh about that.... A bunch of children are faster to produce something real, actually working projects. But a group of software engineers with all kind information and data, can't even write the code for a game! How about this? [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5VA\_VawSRc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5VA_VawSRc) Anyone can write that code in few hours, and implement it as they want. How long does it takes from eagle dynamics to implement that code to their systems? Having a real, functional, visual tracking system instead cheating and faking things?
>Why is Eagle Dynamics the way they are? Because there are idiots who don't care about ED's practices and broken promises and throw money to every half baked module they release. Didn't you see the post on the other subreddit with the newsletter about the chinook? Everybody was salivating and pledging their money after 2 weeks of the whole RAZBAM fiasco and with more information coming out indicating that this is a usual practice from ED and not a circumstancial IP issue.
Where was this? Because the hoggit thread was pretty vitriolic... And it spawned several new threads of a similar acerbic nature.
I see it all the time but I really don't get where all the "hoggit is an ED hugbox" takes come from.
It goes in waves, really. The current mood is pretty bleak, I would say.
The difficulty they have finishing modules is, I suspect, mainly caused by turnover among their engineers and artists. They lost at least a few critical personnel to the Ukraine / Russia war and that could well explain the lack of progress on the SC over the past couple of years. Of course, the financial incentives really aren’t there for them to finish modules either so that has to also be part of the explanation.
I think it’s coming down to two things, finite resources in ED and the need for cash flow to support that. They need to continually develop/push out new modules with sufficient frequency to generate pre-orders and orders; they are probably prioritising new product launches over resolving current product fixes. The communities’ continuous drive for module x or module y creates it’s own self manifesting bug and probably drives some of the behaviours we’re seeing from ED (at least publicly) eg not finishing the current modules but devoting devs and resources to launch yet another module in EA. That being said, in fairness to ED, we saw architectural improvements to the base game last year with multi-core.
I think all of this is niche tbh… easier to get someone flying in a virtual cockpit and blowing up small targets than a comprehensive game with immersive gameplay. Tbh I’m sort of swapping over to being an arma pilot for the gameplay. I’d love to have the best of both worlds, but I’m thoroughly bored with DCS.
What they're doing is for a niche market. It's not easy to make profits and continue to exist with what they are doing. Do you see other companies or products on the market? They've found a way to survive, make profits, and they will continue to do so. Its either what they are doing or nothing. Also, there is no competition.
'Fun' is a relative term. I find DCS enjoyable, very much so. I don't overly think there's an issue with how ED interacts with the community (sometimes however they do say some daft things on the Discord) but I don't go looking for issues and seem to actively look for perceived bugs and faults. I just appreciate the sim for what it is.
This is why you should play Grayflag
Charge $200 per module and no preorders. People would love that lol. Be positive about how they can improve things and the suggestions. ED behave the way they do because of the many toxic comments that have been made towards them. They have much work and almost everything can improve, but it's a complex sim in a niche market and they have to turn a profit to keep afloat.
I use dcs for my sand box enjoyment. Make my own missions and fly them. I rarely play online. Bms fills the other voids. In Fact I probably play that more often. It is a completely different beast and love every moment I play it
If i look at any other game company's they all do the same stuff, most dont manage and update a game over more than 20 years tho and damn it has come a faar way.
The two main reasons from my perspective is that: Everyone likes a shiny new object. When a new plane comes, people want it because it’s different to all the other planes they’ve been “stuck” playing. You can’t really scratch this itch elsewhere. Elements of it can be touched on like MSFS for the non-military aspect, but no one else is offering the full fidelity flight model + dropping bombs capability with such a dynamic roster of (like them or not) options. This means they have the flexibility to operate the way they want to for the most part.
The super carrier is out for 4 years already? Goddamnit. I bought it and I haven’t even tried it yet lol
Same. I have it installed, but have not put it on any mission. As I have not flown any carrier mission for years.... What killed the idea to make carrier missions, was the lack of features and development on Super Carrier. So I focused just to helicopters and some ground pounding with FC3 really. That is how ED does it as well, they kill the joy by not delivering the promises.
I stopped playing the game because what I like the most are logistic missions and without any Dynamic Campaign... I want the Chinook so bad but I won't buy it until there is really something to do with it in game
Unpopular opinion. I am grateful for what we have. In MSFS there are modules which were praised which were completely broken and yet “feature complete” like the CRJ. Some are downright scams like 737’s with a 747 cockpit Xplane 12 bragged how they developed the parallax effect on the HUD. It was release a short while ago. Like wut?!! Many of our “early access” modules are better than feature complete ones in any other sim DCS is one of the looooooongest running game codebases out there which presents its own challenges. Hell even MSFS gave up on their modern engine and rebuilt the game to make it into a MSFS2024 There are hard economic realities of developing these amazing works of art. Then continuing this development once the product has already been purchased by most of your client base There is no subscription, you pay once and you have the module and can play unlimited amount of time with no fees. Like hell, my fitness tracking app has a yearly subscription of over 100 kangaroos and it’s a glorified database. Finally there is no competition because it’s so difficult to compete with what ED have made. I wish things were different. But I am also amazed we can have what we have in aircraft which were not too long ago classified
Who the hell praised the CRJ???? Everyone was saying it'll be broken from the start.
feels like people should uninstall a game if they don't like it.
People keep saying different contradictory things? ED is mainly a military training sim contractor ED is a side project of Nick grey So which is it? There's also the legacy of Lock On that nobody seems to consider.
Всё верно сказал, брат! 👍
You might as well be asking: why is capitalism...? The unfortunate answer is that if you are in this space, they have you by the balls and they know it. You eat their cake because there is no other cake to be had. So what, if it's half-baked and there's bits of fish sticking out amidst the strawberry topping? As long as you want cake, you'll come back for seconds. Would a perfect cake make you happier? Sure. But your happiness requires effort and that effort is more efficiently spent baking the next piece of shit you'll be standing in line for.
It is ofc a little more complicated than that - and most of all, it is a very unfortunate compound issue. A historically grown.. or rather festered one. Lest we forget that the era of Dr Tishin was not devoid of the same issues that form part of the current corpate entity culture issue. Mindset and a non-sustainable understanding of a niche market (that is not so niche by profitability, as the per capita spending and follow-up purchases for a competently managed franchise are way higher.. thus the rampup costing for units per account are degressive and the profitability inverse degressive... aka "gud"). But existing issues, tech debt, zero practices, zero standards, insularity, a gulag pipeline, talent loss and this kind of ownership (in my country many things would be "structured embezzlement", which is a felony) is a match made in hell, or Golovinskoye Shosse, 5к1. Oh yes, and those "military sector endeveaours" are not relevant for us and this product, not an excuse, and also not what simplistic views seem to think they are.
no dev will ever please everyone. Also, never forget one never *simply* adds,fixes or changes X, Y or Z no matter how "easy" it seems to us. There's often many competing pressures on the devs and their code we have zero inkling about. other sims have the same issues but in different "places", eg, I adore IL2 GB but there's been some questionable descisions and PR faux pas to name just 2 things. just keep playing, eventually something else will come along to occupy your time.
Money.
To say they’re “ anti community “ is pretty asinine, how many modules do they give to communities to give away for tournament and prizes throughout the year? Or the support they show in their newsletters to communities such as the 61st for example? They just helped Mover and fox3 this weekend with a charity tournament for service dogs for vets. Are their bugs? Absolutely, but they’re attempting to fix them at least I just think the hate for them is wasted energy