I agree with Sarge's general sentiments. Anyone wanting quick-fix furballing can go to the MA. Anyone interested in realism needs to accept that that means that fighters may actually have to patrol in order to find the enemy, and even - shock, horror, gasp! - they might be unlucky and not see any enemy at all if they are unlucky!
It seems to me that online WW2 flightsimming in general hit a bad patch a while back where what was happening was that the lowest common denominator was being catered for, and not a lot else. various reasons for why, and I don;t intend to go into them here. But the more that is true, the less involved and involvimng the games, the less interesting they are, and the quicker people will tire of them.
Another thing I've noticed. In the civil flight sim community are many people that look down their noses at combat flight sims, as they think them to be very arcadish. Some truth in that - they havent been aimed much higher than that level, and many folks flying em play them as if they were just 3D arcade shoot-em-ups in planes (although the games dont HAVE to be played like that). Amongst the civil flight simmers are virtual airlines. That's folk that will happily fly simulated RL air routes that take hours to fly, and they do all the proper navigational stuff, and flight-planning beforehand, etc.
Meanwhile, some in the WW2 flight sims seem to think that no-one wants to fly a bomber for three hours to get to a target and back, heck, some folk think that even an hour in the air is a long time! Am I the only one to see a missed opportunity here? As in add in just enough to make good flight-planning pay off (so fuel use rate needs to vary with throttle setting, and fuel load needs to be definable in smaller than 25% chunks, AND plane fuel loads need to be accurately modelled, as a minimum), to try toattract more folk who like both making long flights AND WW2 planes. It means making crewing buffs more interesting, and IMO Otto is imperative. Flak accuracy in AH needs to be reduced (it can stay as deadly when it hits; its the insanely over-accurate low-level flak that kills realistic NOE bomber attacks). Damn, I'm digressing into other stuff.
Anyway, overall, the experience in the S3s was and is that greater realism attracts more people in the long run. The real sense of achievement when a difficult mission is pulled off against the odds, or even knowing that your fighter units very presence dissuaded the foe from attacking a vital spot - it makes up for the bits where things are slow, or when things go wrong. As the games in S3 got better and better, they acquired a reputation, and curious newcomers came to see what they were like - and most stayed. Why? Because it was so different to the MA. Because it was nail-bitingly exciting (one frame, one life (in the air) ). You knew that the object of the excercise was to fly it as if it was for real, which meant that you had to go into hostile skies, do your job AND do your damndest to get back to base. If you didnt, you hurt your sides chances of winning. Sometimes we would even abort a raid or sortie, when we ran into unexpectedly heavy opposition, to give us a chance of flying again later in the frame somewhere where we could do some good, rather than just get killed for no gain.
That's the thing that haunts my memory, that is luring me back towards WB. And it;s that kind of thing I'd love to see here.
Anyway, I think I've wibbled on quite enough about what I'd like to see. My apologies for having unintentionally diverted teh thread a tad.
Esme
