A lot of players are going to want to play multi right out of the box and even if they are dumb enough not to read the requirements they will be pissed when they finally do learn of them after spending the money.
Whats the thinking here? Why would they do it?
This is the prevailing complaint, one I completely understand and agree with. All the backers who put 100$ into this game were mainly from the multiplayer IL2 community. When they found out it would take weeks for some of their squadmates to grind through silly unlocks to be able to experience the full multiplayer plane and weapons set, they were understandably upset. There are few people in my position on their boards who have a: ample free time to grind, and b: no interest in the IL2 multiplayer. I would guess I'm in the 5 percent or less percentile of customers over there. So, they angered a huge segment of the existing IL2 community, balanced against the risk of getting new players from the War Thunder and World of Warplanes games, who like pointy clicky ringy bells floating dollar sign unlock signals. That's really how I see it.
They went with the "long term customers aren't as important as potential new ones". Sound familiar? Cough. It's killing them on metacritic and many other sim forums, there is a huge number of folks on the warpath over the unlock thing. Again, for me, I can grind through it in a week or so if I want to, so I MAY give it a whirl, as there is potential in the game for some cool stuff from future mods, and by then, the unlock thing won't matter so much. But I totally understand the anger of the multiplayer community who backed the game, only to find out they needed to suffer through many hours of single player unlocks (and multi) in order to get access to the full potential of what they had already paid for.
One way to look at it is on a strategic level, the BoS team has made a couple major blunders, but on a tactical level, they've performed brilliantly, responding quickly and accurately to customer complaints about historical performance numbers, paint jobs, all kinds of details like this, and communicating quickly and rapidly with the customers who brought up such issues, and shared their responses with the entire community. As I said, they admitted their mistakes in many cases, and described their fixes for them - even some of the largest detractors of the whole unlock thing were praising them in this regard, and I agree, and think it's a great way to work with your players. It's a paradox really, a major dumb feature, balanced against excellent work with the community on everything else.
On their bbs, in just one thread regarding complaints about flight models, they listed 12 issues customers pointed out in the first few days after official launch. They agreed with about 1/3 of them, and posted their corrections. The developers didn't agree with, they posted very accurate and extensive explanations with proof as to why. Very well done, mainly due to the rapid and thorough free flowing communication with the entire community.
