Author Topic: free-WB-weekend (Read 1083 times)

Ozark · « **Reply #30 on:** May 10, 2002, 07:37:38 PM »

This must be part of a well thought out marketing plan.

My questions are:

1) Who is iEN currently marketing WB III to?
(My thoughts: It can’t be to the hard core flight sim community. EZ mode and 5K air start? No thank you!)

2) Are they after the share of the Fighter Ace relaxed mode market?
(My thoughts: I’m sure there is a large market for the relaxed mode flight sim market. However, will they stay and be as loyal as the WB hard core pilots?)

3) Do you have to give iEN your credit card number?
(My thoughts: I will never trust iEN with my credit card information again!)

Horn · « **Reply #31 on:** May 10, 2002, 07:56:45 PM »

Quote

Originally posted by Ozark
This must be part of a well thought out marketing plan.

Check out this thread--best "long range" planning info as regards WarBirds as I've ever seen from the corporate side...

http://bbs.warbirdsiii.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=1818

dh

easymo · « **Reply #32 on:** May 10, 2002, 09:38:55 PM »

Free WB weekend. Thats like socks for Xmas.

Dago · « **Reply #33 on:** May 10, 2002, 09:52:40 PM »

Quote

I haven´t said a word what I think of AH and I still won´t. I did play this game and actually paid

I guess that qualifies Julie as an expert who can speak of the differances! hahahah

I played WB for several years, 4 in fact. Guess what? WB sucks in comparison. I could give you alot of reasons why, but they have been described ad nauseum, and there is no point to do it again.

It gives someone a real idea what a product is worth when you have to give it away, and worse, when you offer it free and we still wont bother with it.

One question though, do you get a kind of spinning sensation when playing WB? Ya know, that kind of whirling feeling that one would get when circling the drain?

Dago

julle · « **Reply #34 on:** May 11, 2002, 01:13:29 AM »

The point was that there´s a possibility to try an another game for free. I haven´t entered to WB/AH flamewar and I still refuse to do that. If I got the opportunity to try AH for free I´d propably do so. We had a party last Saturday with some WB friends. An AH players was coming too. So I called him if we could try AH during that party. But he had cancelled his account. So we weren´t able to try AH. I can assure you that isn´t any airstarts on EZ mode on the WB MA. In WB there are several arenas to suite different kind of players. Like you have the MA and CT. In WB there are EZ-mode and RM arenas but they play in separate arenas. I for one can´t understand the EZ-mode but there are so many EZ-moders that they cannot be ignored. The theres my "home" the WAR ROOM. No icons, no killshooter...

If you someday get an arena that has a historical matchup of AC. NO icons, NO infight radar, gun dispersion (no hitting >100 yards), NO kilshooter, wind and turbulence, friendly collisioins. You can consider yourselves blessed...

julle

P.S. I DON´T have a clue what the il-2 boys have posted here but the game seems COOL. Bit of VVS bias but there isn´t a game that does not smoothen FM/GM homewards. If it was server based...

MrRiplEy[H] · « **Reply #35 on:** May 11, 2002, 03:27:13 AM »

That all sounds very nice Julle, but is it made just for sake of toughness or realism in mind?

Real life guns don't disperse so much that you can't hit anything past 100 yards.

Is the old WB2.xx style FM still in WB3? Where all planes including 190 and P38 hi-speed respond to stick control sluggishly like it was rubber-band controlled? Then when you manage to get it turning and try to reverse the movement it has inertia again like controls were not there and replaced by rubber bands?

This is the single most thing I don't like in WB.

I guess I'll have to go back and see myself.

Edit: I tried to download the latest WB from the link supplied in Julle's web page but all I got was 404 error..

Revvin · « **Reply #36 on:** May 11, 2002, 06:02:05 AM »

Quote

If I got the opportunity to try AH for free I´d propably do so

You can try AH for free whenever you want to, thats right not when it suits HTC to have a free weekend...when you want to. You can download Aces High (considerably smaller download too at 26MB) You do not have to supply your credit card details, just sign up with a username and you're in. On top of that you not only get two free weeks to really get to know Aces High (rather than try and cram something in in two days) but you also get to play Aces High in 8 player head to head servers over the internet or LAN free

Aces High has a HA/War Room setup in the form of the CT arena which incidentally is running a BoB setup (kind blows holes in the claims AH has a constant 1945 setup) The MA is often near its 500 player capacity during US hours and even during GMT hours you'll see 250+ players. Aces High has some great scenario's running by a dedicated team of CM's and terrain designers (yes AH allows players to create terrains with a freely available editor, paranoia about Russians does'nt seem to be an issue here) Many of the terrains are huge and not limited in size. Currently there are 18 different terrains to download. The terrains are used in many of the scenario's, large scale ones equiring registration and also things like the Wild Wednesday events and the excellent TOD series (equivalent to the WB S3 series)

We've had audio six calls for some time, not to mention ingame voice comms which requires no IP addresses to be swapped, simply tune radio channel 5 to a number just like you'd choose a private radio channel in WB and thats it, give everyone the number and they just type it in and join you. If you join a mission you get automatically tuned to the people in that mission....oh did I forget to mention the online mission editor? yes AH has an ingame mission editor where you can drop down waypoints, set the numbers of flights in the mission, their ord, fuel and starting runway and a time for it to start. Post it up, ask people to join and everyone gets automatically put on the right runway with the right plane fuel and ord as set in the editor.

On the whole you'll find people very happy with AH, you don't see people moaning about slow development here and we're kept up to date with news (Pyro posted some only yesterday) v1.10 is shaping up nicely from what he tells us and not a million miles away from release. Hope this did'nt sound too much like an commercial for Aces High. If it did then I apologize for posting it in the wrong place, it would obviously be more fitting in the iEN Warbirds forum

rosco · « **Reply #37 on:** May 11, 2002, 08:57:05 AM »

Quote

Originally posted by funkedup
Easy guys. It's not like WB is a realistic threat to HTC's market share. It's a very effective workfare program for sim developer wannabees.

Now thats funny.

Sandman · « **Reply #38 on:** May 11, 2002, 10:27:41 AM »

Quote

Originally posted by julle
-NO ICONS
-NO infight radar
-NO killshooter
-historical planeset
-wind
-limited tower based radar
-SCARY?

Sounds like a WWII "SIM"!

~~julle, FPO-CO~~

~~No icons... Hmmm... How do you identify the bad guys?~~

Dago · « **Reply #39 on:** May 11, 2002, 05:11:55 PM »

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I haven´t entered to WB/AH flamewar and I still refuse to do that.

Unfortunately, when you post to a company owned BBS like this, trying to get people to try out a competitor, you dont exhibit good will.

Some will discuss AH on AGW, and that really isnt a big deal because Argo allows it, and AGW is not owned by IEN.

IEN does maintain its own BBS, and posting there trying to entice WB players to AH would be consider bad form. You Julie are guilty of just this same offense, using an HTC owned BBS, on thier server, to push IEN/WB.

The differances you might notice are this:

1) You wont be attacked in anyway near the manner an AH player would be attacked if he did the same on IENS board
2) HTC has not bothered to delete your post, they just put it OT. IEN would delete it in a second.
3) HTC is doing very well and not threatened by IEN/WB. The reverse is not true for IEN.

You might do well to keep an eye on new features to AH in the future, just to see what will be added to IEN six months later.

Dago

julle · « **Reply #40 on:** May 12, 2002, 04:42:50 AM »

Sandman, you are supposed to look at the PLANE what you are shooting at. That is how you can tell wether it´s enemy. In WB I play only the NO ICON arenas, and it ROCKS. As for shooting ranges: 100 yards IS realistic. Further isn´t, mabye for BIG tgt´s like fiermots but not if you shoot a fighter who´s trying to shake you off. For some unexplained reason I was able to create a 2 week trial account. Now I have to try get the CT set up as a tolerable playgound to give AH a chance...

http://bbs.hitechcreations.com/smf/Smileys/defaultframe.html

julle

MrRiplEy[H] · « **Reply #41 on:** May 12, 2002, 12:32:51 PM »

Julle how can you reckognise planes from your monitor from real life distances?

In real life you'd be able to tell the type of a plane in four times the distance you need in a sim, or even further.

Where real life aircraft show reckognisable form, simulations like AH or WB3 show a bunch of pixels. Probably just a dot. It has nothing to do with realism settings, it's all about the limitations of current monitor technology.

That means that playing with no icons at all makes the game much much harder than real life in terms of f-o-f reckognition.

julle · « **Reply #42 on:** May 12, 2002, 12:51:07 PM »

We´ll in WB this works just FINE. I have several RL pilots in my squad and we have discussed about the shooting range and visibility issues. One of the virtual pilots is a present day fighter pilot instructor and a fighter squadron leader. It´s quite hard to think otherwise some one knows about from a daily job? 600 meters is the realistic range that you ID a fightersize AC. This is easy to do in WB. IMHO it would work in AH too...

julle

AKSWulfe · « **Reply #43 on:** May 12, 2002, 02:31:35 PM »

Quote

Originally posted by julle
AKSWulfe, the WAR ROOM IS totally playable with a 17" monitor at 1024x768. U can easily identify AC from realistic range. And people DON´T shoot friendly on purpose. They would do that in AH if it was possible?

Playable and realistic are two different things. Note: YOU said it was a realistic sim due to the lack of icons and other such stuff.

You are comparing what modern day pilots use to visually ID aircraft vs what WWII pilots did? That's just a big mistake.

We've got a couple of "real" armed services pilots here too, it's pretty common agreement among them that you can see a lot more in real life (and from my experiences in a plane I agree) than you can on a monitor.

There's hardly anything realistic about it... you'd be able to see the big ol' roundels, black crosses, meatballs or stars from a lot further away in the real world than you can on a monitor.

100meters might of been the optimum gunnery range in WWII, for GERMAN pilots in 109s due to their limited ammo and weapons... but American pilots commonly set their convergence up to 400-500 yards and had their gunsights calibrated for that range.

So basically what I'm saying is, you believe that's a realistic representation of how the war was....

I'm telling you it is a realistic representation of what YOU BELIEVE it was like, not what it was really like. Planes country affiliation can be IDd at well over 600 meters in the real world.
-SW

Durr · « **Reply #44 on:** May 12, 2002, 03:34:24 PM »

I beg to differ with the assertion that 600 yards is the distance at which you can finally visually id fighters in real life. I have frequently identified fighters that were over a mile away. I recently spotted an F-18 that our TCAS reported as being at least 2 miles away, and another time identified a pair of T-38s that were a mile away. Fighters are hard to identify at range but it can be done if you really know your stuff.

I understand the issue with the limited visuals that are offered by computer monitors but I have never been able to fully accept icons as the solution. Given a choice between making the aircraft slightly larger than they should be (kind of like the Janes Fighters Anthology used to, only not quite that much) and using icons, I would prefer the former. The icons introduce the realism of being able to id an aircraft from further away than you could using your monitor with all its limitations, but they just dont look real. It is glaringly unrealistic to have icons on your screen, its something you obviously would not see in real life. I know that its just a game and all that and I really dont want to get into the argument since it has been beaten to death repeatedly, but the icons do bother me.

My solution of late has been simple and effective. When I am in the CT, which is my favorite arena, I use ALT I to toggle icons completely off. This is really crippling and puts me at a handicap compared to everybody else to be sure, but I really like it that way. Best of all, nobody else has to do a thing, everybody else gets to keep their icons. We both get to have it our way. Of course I am forced to use icons in the MA but it doesnt bother me as much there since there are other obvious unrealisms inherent there. When I am trying to immerse myself into a WW2 sim however, in the CT, icons go off most of the time, at least until I get frustrated and have to go pull the kill ratio back up a little.

Printed out maps (so I dont have to use the clibboard with its AWACs and GPS) and icons off in the CT have really made the game more fun for me, without getting in the way of anybody elses good time. I recommend those that complain about these features to try it.

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