Beegerite
This was an issue very close to my heart when I first started flying the Warbirds sim about 4 years ago. I had about 900 hours flying small civilian types, and it counted for squat. The surprising thing is that I have since met a real life F15E pilot who tried out a modern day sim which included F15s, and was getting killed all over the arena.
When I first started in Warbirds, the handling of the planes just didn't seem real to me. In Aces High, the planes are much more what I would expect of WW2 planes, given my civilian flight experience. You didn't say in which type of plane you gained your 3000 hours; I'd be interested to know.
I have just voted in your poll. Of course it's just a game. But you'd be surprised at the number of guys in WB 4 years ago who thought of it as real flying, and cited my "inability to deal with WW2 planes". The telltale signs were when these guys referred to themselves (and their other gaming heroes) as "pilots". I was accused of misunderstanding the dynamics of WW2 planes as my experience stretched only to small civilian types. To which I replied that at least my Socata TB10 had two wings and an engine, and asked how many wings and engines their PCs had, and how often they gained a height of more than 4 feet. They didn't like that. As far as they were concerned, Warbirds WAS realism, and any civilian flying experience I could offer was worthless. So many of these guys held visions of themselves of computerised reincarnations of WW2 aces like Adolf Galland and Erich Hartmann.
One of the things I didn't like about WB was that it allowed stick inputs to be applied far beyond those which could physically be applied by the pilot. If you pull the stick back too hard, you will black out, at which point your consciousness will begin to fade and your back pressure on the stick will naturally relax. Of course, with unpowered controls, the pilot may not have the physical strength to make full control movements above certain speeds. In WB at that time, your REAL consciousness was not affected even if your screen went black and you could continue to pull the stick harder. It seemed that the sim would arrive at the results of this by extrapolation, and in my case would send my 190 into an irrecoverable spin. Part of the problem was solved by reinstallation of the FULL version of the game, and then using the default stick settings. I had to be careful with the stick. When I expressed concern about this to one of the trainers, and said that in real life aerobatics one has to yank the stick quite forcefully in some manoeuvres, he said I'd been watching too many movies. I didn't bother to tell him that I had flown real aerobatics in a Pitts S2A, in which an aileron roll, for example, is executed by a rapid movement of the stick to the aileron control stop. That guy had probably never been in a real aircraft cockpit in his life. Still, he was only trying to help.
Eventually, WB2.73 came out and to some extent the forces required to move the stick began to be modelled. I thought this was a big step forward. Some guys were disgusted and decided to quit! They could not longer do their dweebish arcade snap rolls.
I continued with WB, but thought of it only as a game after that. One of my pet hates was the ridiculously overmodelling of blackouts and, more especially, redouts. Push the nose down 10° and you'd get a redout lasting 5 seconds. Running over a crater in the runway produced a G-force blackout, and yet even then someone leapt up to defend the sanctity of the WB modelling.
