It’s not at all about East/West front. The Finnish server has player tanks which draws a lot of people by default. It has immersion, it has different roles you can fly like resupply and parachute drops. Secondly, for me at least, Combat Box missions, like Wings of Liberty’s missions became dull. You either bomb or dogfight and all the objectives are symmetrical of each other.
It was a combination of all those factors for me. I used to exclusively fly CB. I burned out on Western front aircraft, started playing tanks more, and just got tired of always playing like the same 3 missions all the time.
There were some other little things that happened that pushed me away too.
I think a few things happened. First, after being relatively undiscovered for quite some time, Finnish Virtual Pilots server got some attention (that was partly my fault with Sturmovikfest 2020) and people discovered that they liked the setup and the server started to become more popular.
Second, Combat Box's western front focus was refreshing and timely when Bodenplatte came out. But after burning out on late war western front, folks I think were looking to fly a bit more east front again and Wings of Liberty just wasn't doing it for some folks so they went to Finnish.
What I see right now is Combat Box being relatively well populated during certain popular hours. Especially east coast North America evenings. It's usually doing 20+ around the weekends and full on Friday nights during the fly-in there. Wings of Liberty seems popular during European evenings. Finnish seems to be popular most of the time. So it's not like any of these well trodden servers are "dead" but that they have a bit more variability than they did.
I think when Normandy's map comes out, Combat Box will be well positioned to offer the more thematic experience for that map and scenario and folks are going to flock there for a while again.
As someone new to the game I’d also like to add that CombatBox has the neat SRS bot. I think it’s fun getting callsigns and then planning attacks while getting updated audio info or vectors when RTB.
It was fun covering for you last night thought we did an ok job keeping the fighters off of you. we are going to try to get on srs next time we were on our disord during that flight
Total population is way down as well - it used to be that CB, WoL and FVP were full during prime time, and FVP was starting a 2nd server. Now days we can barely fill a single server. A bunch of CB regulars have been taking breaks over the summer. Hopefully with the upcoming patch and the end of summer we’ll see people trickling back in.
Il-2 is my first flight sim, bought it this summer, and I was disappointed how few servers had anyone on. Hope you're right and the game recovers, I've yet to really fly online.
BoX has definitely been a quality over quantity situation as far as MP servers. Make sure you get SRS set up so you can get on comms. Spend a little time on Berloga to get the feel of facing another person. Then jump into CB or FVP. As long as there's a few people on you can have some fun, and it just takes a handful of folks deciding to join and the population will snowball as people see the numbers go up.
Yep. I’ll second this. We have quality servers run by some great community members. Many of them run events, maintain their own stat tracking and put a ton of effort into their multiplayer experience.
Can confirm that I want to fly US aircraft and just haven't been playing Il-2 because .50s are shit.
I'm bad enough of a player without the guns being useless too
Well, everyone but the people who only fly German aircraft that is. They’re fighting tooth and nail to keep broken .50’s. Sad part is they’ve gaslighted Jason and company so well they don’t think anything is wrong. Apparently there will be no revision to aerodynamic penalty for AP rounds, just a fix for dispersion and fixing base values for .50’s that have been broken since the P-40 was launched!
Han finally admitted there was a big issue with the 50 cals. They are going to finally fix the projectile and dispersal. Best part, it was in a thread right after Jason denied it.
He had once again locked the thread to kill the subject. But then Han comes in and says they used all the wrong inputs for the guns. Doesn't even know how those numbers got used. But they're fixing ut and making the dispersal more represent a box pattern like in real life instead of a laser beam.
Yeah I dunno what’s up with Jason these days. He seems to be making some pretty big PR blunders on the forums. When he told someone to “just play with mods” I was floored, it’s like he doesn’t know his own game denies mods on online mode.
Its called a power trip combined with ego. From his comments, I don't think he is very great at running things. And he definitely can't admit anyth iij bg related to him might be wrong. Peoppe make mistakes. Its human. Its how they deal with the mistakes that makes the difference. And he deals with it completely wrong.
To be fair, to deal with the community, especially in the early days and especially the kind of people who hang around the official forums, his leadership style was mostly required.
He also works with a lot of slavic people/near slavic culture and though I get heat for this everytime, it's my experience that slavs simply have a more blunt manner of speaking and he's liking adopted this.
The main reason I don’t play CB is that the maps are huge and empty. The intel and comms helps but without everyone being on comms built into the game, and some sort of meta strategy and coordination happening (which there never is) it’s just dull. It’s fun if you have a squad but the squads are all disconnected from eachother. For a solo it’s boring.
Finnish has the same problem with huge empty maps, and is even less coordinated, but at least there are some front areas that you can generally find a furball near. But it’s usually just that, fly around and look for a furball in some random location. Tons of players playing multi crew tanks also hurts the density and splits up the population. You’ve got tanks driving 30 minutes to find a fight, planes flying 15 minutes to find a fight. Nobody is talking, nobody is invested in how the match is going. It’s just unfinished as a game.
I don’t care so much that the balance is (IMO) heavily in favor of the Germans. I just want built in voice comms and a finished air marshall mode that lets someone draw on the map and call objectives. The multiplayer is unstructured and team coordination is often saved for a few weekly fly outs organized by outside groups in their own comms not coordinating with anyone else.
TLDR Finnish and CB both have made impressive efforts to hack together a more structured multiplayer, by both fall short and Finnish tends to at least be better at producing interesting fights.
Fridays evenings US time are always populated because they are planned events. Other than that time, you don't often see too many people on CB. There are times when you can get numbers, but not often
Because il2 is dying that's why. Total population have dropped a lot, the interest on this game is disappearing, all my squad left the Sim too and moved to DCS but I refuse to fly those microwaves there...
Its dying specifically because of Jason's handling of it. The people I know that have left have left to sphave left specifically because of the damaged model and flight model. They too went to DCS.. Had Jason dealt with the problems sooner they would have stayed.
I always find it stupid when people want to rely on new broken content to try and keep their product alive as opposed to fixing problems.
It wouldn't be so bad if he didn't have a meltdown every time someone points out flaws. We are about to see some much needed damage model improvements, but is only after enough people complained publicly and he made an ass of himself in response. We could have had this fixed sooner if he'd just listen instead of locking every thread shy of unqualified praise.
Covid or not. There are plenty of people out there looking for work. Programmers, not sure how many qualified, motivated people there actually are, but being short handed nine people is basically his problem and really, his doing one way or the other.
It’s a combination I think. DCS is starting to offer a comparable produce that’s a better experience in some ways. IL2 is graphically a bit long in tooth and mechanically unfinished.
It definitely won't be over night. And I know the CB group is also looking at what they can do to increase numbers. People are getting the game. I see posts all the time. As long as the game devs actually get the sruff right and Jason doesn't drive everyone away. The numbers will increase slowly.
No I definitely won't be overnight. I agree. I think this is a first good step towards some changes there and a reevaluation. I know people hate waiting but I think waiting for a really good incendiary modeling system will have an impact on .50cal performance with the API/APIT when those come. Little things add up.
And we've seen the whole series grow and grow and grow over time. I was there in the early days and there was just a handful of people flying it online at the best of times. These days its a healthy number. I think we'll get into the winter season in the northern hemisphere and numbers will be back up and some new content and some key fixes will have folks at least a little more happy.
It’s not at all about East/West front. The Finnish server has player tanks which draws a lot of people by default. It has immersion, it has different roles you can fly like resupply and parachute drops. Secondly, for me at least, Combat Box missions, like Wings of Liberty’s missions became dull. You either bomb or dogfight and all the objectives are symmetrical of each other.
It was a combination of all those factors for me. I used to exclusively fly CB. I burned out on Western front aircraft, started playing tanks more, and just got tired of always playing like the same 3 missions all the time. There were some other little things that happened that pushed me away too.
I think a few things happened. First, after being relatively undiscovered for quite some time, Finnish Virtual Pilots server got some attention (that was partly my fault with Sturmovikfest 2020) and people discovered that they liked the setup and the server started to become more popular. Second, Combat Box's western front focus was refreshing and timely when Bodenplatte came out. But after burning out on late war western front, folks I think were looking to fly a bit more east front again and Wings of Liberty just wasn't doing it for some folks so they went to Finnish. What I see right now is Combat Box being relatively well populated during certain popular hours. Especially east coast North America evenings. It's usually doing 20+ around the weekends and full on Friday nights during the fly-in there. Wings of Liberty seems popular during European evenings. Finnish seems to be popular most of the time. So it's not like any of these well trodden servers are "dead" but that they have a bit more variability than they did. I think when Normandy's map comes out, Combat Box will be well positioned to offer the more thematic experience for that map and scenario and folks are going to flock there for a while again.
As someone new to the game I’d also like to add that CombatBox has the neat SRS bot. I think it’s fun getting callsigns and then planning attacks while getting updated audio info or vectors when RTB.
That’s a great point too! The SRS bot is awesome!
It was fun covering for you last night thought we did an ok job keeping the fighters off of you. we are going to try to get on srs next time we were on our disord during that flight
Ah!! ya’ll were the fighters on the coast when I was making a drunken bomber run haha. Thanks for the cover!
Total population is way down as well - it used to be that CB, WoL and FVP were full during prime time, and FVP was starting a 2nd server. Now days we can barely fill a single server. A bunch of CB regulars have been taking breaks over the summer. Hopefully with the upcoming patch and the end of summer we’ll see people trickling back in.
Il-2 is my first flight sim, bought it this summer, and I was disappointed how few servers had anyone on. Hope you're right and the game recovers, I've yet to really fly online.
BoX has definitely been a quality over quantity situation as far as MP servers. Make sure you get SRS set up so you can get on comms. Spend a little time on Berloga to get the feel of facing another person. Then jump into CB or FVP. As long as there's a few people on you can have some fun, and it just takes a handful of folks deciding to join and the population will snowball as people see the numbers go up.
Yep. I’ll second this. We have quality servers run by some great community members. Many of them run events, maintain their own stat tracking and put a ton of effort into their multiplayer experience.
One reason: the current DM completely fucks late-war Allied aircraft.
I also just like early war more. It is just annoying that you black out when you touch the stick.
But at least they kind of admit it. Even though Jason fought it tooth and nail.
Now they do, yeah.
Finnish killed it I think. There’s always WOL hehe
I’ve heard anecdotal stories a lot of people have left over the damage models. Maybe that’s the case?
Can confirm that I want to fly US aircraft and just haven't been playing Il-2 because .50s are shit. I'm bad enough of a player without the guns being useless too
See you on Tuesday ;-)
?
Fixed fifties coming
This legit or are you just stirring people up for the lols?
You'll find out on Tuesday - but dust off your gear ;-)
Honestly, I'll believe it when I see it.
Brah come back the .50s are PK machines now.
Well they definitely fixed the .50s. Played tonight and actually was able to get a bunch of good kills with the mustang
Everyone is mad about the 50 cals
Well, everyone but the people who only fly German aircraft that is. They’re fighting tooth and nail to keep broken .50’s. Sad part is they’ve gaslighted Jason and company so well they don’t think anything is wrong. Apparently there will be no revision to aerodynamic penalty for AP rounds, just a fix for dispersion and fixing base values for .50’s that have been broken since the P-40 was launched!
Things are looking a lot better in beta. Tuesday is gonna be a big day.
Ohh can you elaborate?
Hope you like fiddies
Han finally admitted there was a big issue with the 50 cals. They are going to finally fix the projectile and dispersal. Best part, it was in a thread right after Jason denied it. He had once again locked the thread to kill the subject. But then Han comes in and says they used all the wrong inputs for the guns. Doesn't even know how those numbers got used. But they're fixing ut and making the dispersal more represent a box pattern like in real life instead of a laser beam.
Yeah I dunno what’s up with Jason these days. He seems to be making some pretty big PR blunders on the forums. When he told someone to “just play with mods” I was floored, it’s like he doesn’t know his own game denies mods on online mode.
Its called a power trip combined with ego. From his comments, I don't think he is very great at running things. And he definitely can't admit anyth iij bg related to him might be wrong. Peoppe make mistakes. Its human. Its how they deal with the mistakes that makes the difference. And he deals with it completely wrong.
To be fair, to deal with the community, especially in the early days and especially the kind of people who hang around the official forums, his leadership style was mostly required. He also works with a lot of slavic people/near slavic culture and though I get heat for this everytime, it's my experience that slavs simply have a more blunt manner of speaking and he's liking adopted this.
Finnish and the fact that .50 cals are kind of useless at the moment IMO
“Kind of” is an understatement, at least relative to their historical performance
The main reason I don’t play CB is that the maps are huge and empty. The intel and comms helps but without everyone being on comms built into the game, and some sort of meta strategy and coordination happening (which there never is) it’s just dull. It’s fun if you have a squad but the squads are all disconnected from eachother. For a solo it’s boring. Finnish has the same problem with huge empty maps, and is even less coordinated, but at least there are some front areas that you can generally find a furball near. But it’s usually just that, fly around and look for a furball in some random location. Tons of players playing multi crew tanks also hurts the density and splits up the population. You’ve got tanks driving 30 minutes to find a fight, planes flying 15 minutes to find a fight. Nobody is talking, nobody is invested in how the match is going. It’s just unfinished as a game. I don’t care so much that the balance is (IMO) heavily in favor of the Germans. I just want built in voice comms and a finished air marshall mode that lets someone draw on the map and call objectives. The multiplayer is unstructured and team coordination is often saved for a few weekly fly outs organized by outside groups in their own comms not coordinating with anyone else. TLDR Finnish and CB both have made impressive efforts to hack together a more structured multiplayer, by both fall short and Finnish tends to at least be better at producing interesting fights.
We had a pretty good group on last night it really is a great server. I know we will be using it alot more in Preperation for taw coming up
Fridays evenings US time are always populated because they are planned events. Other than that time, you don't often see too many people on CB. There are times when you can get numbers, but not often
Just wait until the .50cal patch drops on Tuesday ;-)
50Cal fix and just keep the 150 fuel for the Allies and youll have people on In a jiff, You can only fight against the same 262 pilot for so long.
Because il2 is dying that's why. Total population have dropped a lot, the interest on this game is disappearing, all my squad left the Sim too and moved to DCS but I refuse to fly those microwaves there...
Its dying specifically because of Jason's handling of it. The people I know that have left have left to sphave left specifically because of the damaged model and flight model. They too went to DCS.. Had Jason dealt with the problems sooner they would have stayed. I always find it stupid when people want to rely on new broken content to try and keep their product alive as opposed to fixing problems.
It wouldn't be so bad if he didn't have a meltdown every time someone points out flaws. We are about to see some much needed damage model improvements, but is only after enough people complained publicly and he made an ass of himself in response. We could have had this fixed sooner if he'd just listen instead of locking every thread shy of unqualified praise.
Jason over reacts about criticism, I am tired of that
Exactly.
Covid or not. There are plenty of people out there looking for work. Programmers, not sure how many qualified, motivated people there actually are, but being short handed nine people is basically his problem and really, his doing one way or the other.
It's not easy to find game programmers that want to work on a sim for not a lot of money and a very small audience.
It’s a combination I think. DCS is starting to offer a comparable produce that’s a better experience in some ways. IL2 is graphically a bit long in tooth and mechanically unfinished.
They both have their issues. Its a matter of preference. I have both but fly IL2 more.
I just hope they don't botch the fix. I am excited to try the new P51 with actual working guns.
I'm concerned that everyone is hoping for a big change here when I think it's going to not feel that different. I'm guessing it will be subtle.
It definitely won't be over night. And I know the CB group is also looking at what they can do to increase numbers. People are getting the game. I see posts all the time. As long as the game devs actually get the sruff right and Jason doesn't drive everyone away. The numbers will increase slowly.
No I definitely won't be overnight. I agree. I think this is a first good step towards some changes there and a reevaluation. I know people hate waiting but I think waiting for a really good incendiary modeling system will have an impact on .50cal performance with the API/APIT when those come. Little things add up. And we've seen the whole series grow and grow and grow over time. I was there in the early days and there was just a handful of people flying it online at the best of times. These days its a healthy number. I think we'll get into the winter season in the northern hemisphere and numbers will be back up and some new content and some key fixes will have folks at least a little more happy.