Apollonaut

Somebody brought this up in the Facebook group, which I hadn't considered. For what it's worth, if a mod wants to delete the post, no hard feelings. "We don’t know the exact nature of the dispute or the associated problems that it brings up. Though well meaning, this may also further inflame tensions by bringing up yet another contentious topic in the community. This may warrant some reconsideration at the very least."

First of all, I love DCS and my only motivation with this post is to help it exist forever. The beginning of the post will be slightly controversial, but I have tried to avoid this framing. The end of the post contains a suggestion that I made on the DCS Facebook group to which several commenters expressed agreement. Hypothesis If we accept the recent gossip with respect to Razbam and ED as true, then it means ED is surviving off of Early Access buys and mod developers are not getting paid on time because of it. I have suspected this for a long time, so I'm biased toward accepting it. So to start off with, I am assuming everything both ED and Razbam said in their posts is generally true, and I am not accusing anyone of lying or acting in bad faith. I have seen this happen before, to other studios developing other games which I will not mention. I do not believe ED or Razbam are acting in bad faith, I believe we are all only human, and ED is just responding to incentives embedded in their business model, which is not an easy thing to work around or change. I am making these assumptions with the full understanding that I may be wrong to do so. I am pulling this thread recently because this pattern matches other patterns I've seen in the gaming industry. But I could be wrong. The point of this post is not to validate these assumptions or accuse anyone of wrongdoing but rather to explore what could be done in the case that they are true. I don't see an easy, incremental solution solution here. Why don't I see a solution? Because ED can't really sue. They can, and I'm assuming they'll probably win, but if Razbam lost two developers, it's likely they actually can't perform their duties under the contract (if two key employees left, perhaps a judge would consider that a legalistic 'act of God'). And even if a court were to disagree, the practical outcome would be Razbam formally declares bankruptcy and stops existing, still leaving the modules without developers and with nothing changed on ED's side except an even bigger hole in their pocket from legal fees. The Pitch This might be stupid and naive because I'm an engineering student (with 14 years in the working world, part time and full time, mind you), but maybe the solution here is to come clean, show us their books, share blame with Razbam (or better, agree to apologize to each other, not blame each other, and publicly bury the hatchet), blame the Early Access model's terrible incentive structure, admit to only being human, and ask the community for donations to reset their finances on the condition of abolishing the Early Access model while agreeing to not litigate with Razbam and other third party devs. The agreement to not litigate the issue I believe would be necessary in order for ED to set a crowdfunding goal without exposing themselves to legal liability. However of course I'm not a lawyer and I have no real idea about this, but it would be counter productive for ED to say "we need $2M to cover all debts" and then to have a third party developer say "but you said your finances were in good standing when I decided to work with you, I'm suing!" And there would have to be an agreement about how the raised funds are distributed between ED and the third parties. The Case for a Subscription Model From then on ED could change to a subscription model to take a lot of guesswork out of their business model: with more consistent income it would be easier to estimate the rate of module development they can sustainably afford, and therefore they'd also be able to give more precise answers to what third party developers can expect in compensation. If $50 a year for access to all modules results in double the development time, I'm all for it. To be honest, I would be willing to pay substantially more, but let's just say $50 for the sake of argument. This would also end the ridiculous partitioning of the community via "modules" that affect the core game and even server access (The Super Carrier and the WWII Asset Pack) as well as incentivize ED to work more on the core game (map updates, AI, performance etc. mostly AI and dynamic campaign). Under a subscription model, these core game improvements would become a force-multiplier that increases longevity of subscriptions and word-of-mouth subscriptions since each individual module would become more fun to fly as more features are added, more bugs are squashed, the prettier the graphics, the higher the framerates, and the AI gets more intelligent and the campaigns get more dynamic. Incentives Beat Willpower I got fat during COVID. You know how I lost weight? I didn't just will myself into not eating junk food, I deliberately kept it out of the house. I set my alarm on my dresser so I'd have to physically get out of bed earlier than I was used to, to encourage myself to go to the gym. When I lived on campus, I would leave my car keys in my locker in my building's gym so I couldn't get to school until I'd physically entered the gym. I created incentives for myself so I wouldn't have to rely exclusively on willpower. Does this mean I'm still lazy and undisciplined? Yeah probably, but so what, the point is the problem has been fixed (well I should still lose more weight...). Early Access creates bad incentives. Maybe the right team of people could muster the collective will to avoid the pitfalls of early access. But maybe it's much easier to just make the incentives the team is subjected to less error prone. It might be easier to endure a transient disruption for the benefit of a steady-state incentive structure that is easier for ED's team to understand and which presents much less temptation to spend money ED may not have. The subscription model, however much some people may hate it, would better align ED's incentives, the third party developer's incentives and we, the customers' wishes and dreams. The Devil's in the Details People should receive free temporary subscriptions depending on how much money they've already spent. And a lot hinges on the exact subscription fee too. $50 a year, in my opinion, is on the cheap side, while I would say the price of an inexpensive monthly cellphone bill is on the higher side. And maybe it should be stratified by module, or by 3rd party developer. Maybe each module costs $5 a month (use a transferable credit system for this, don't make people go through customer support if they want to simply substitute one module for another), or maybe you can get all ED modules for $10 a month. If the subscription is too low, development will slow to a crawl, and if it is too high, too many customers may be lost. And maybe the optimal quantity doesn't even exist. Maybe the fee required to sustainably develop the product(s) at a sufficient pace (according to we the customers) doesn't exist or is too high to retain customers and this whole post is pointless. Feasibility and Credibility I'm not an expert of business modelling or marketing. But I'm not an idiot either and I think some folks at ED should take this suggestion and run some numbers just to see if it's feasible. The first step after this would be that non-litigation agreement with Razbam and possibly the rest of the third party devs before ED would be able to admit without liability how much crowdfunding they'd need for a reset. Suppose for example every American user and every European user donated $10 to this campaign. How far would that go? Add in the Chinese and Russian users and do the purchasing power parity conversion. How far would that go? I think ED says they have close to 200k total customers. Maybe half stopped playing the game. 100k give $10, that's $1M. Maybe not enough for a reset, but maybe this would be enough to facilitate a transition to the subscription model? Anyways, I want to acknowledge that the premises of this post may be wrong. Maybe one of the parties is misrepresenting something, maybe I'm completely off the mark, maybe I have been drinking too much and not sleeping enough and my logic sucks, maybe I am arrogant to presume to know anything about ED's and Razbam's internal considerations, and maybe nobody has considered this and just needs to see it articulated in writing in order to consider the possibility that it might be just what they need. I just want ED to see this and consider it. I think a subscription model would be better for every party here. Thanks, your biggest fan, who does not want to see ED or any 3rd party developer fail PS I pretty much exclusively fly the F-18 (4 years), am proficient with the F-14, F5, and have dabbled with the F15E, AV8, and both Mirages. PPS Some context for the uninitiated: the product ED and third party developers are producing for us are complicated, relative to other software projects. The talent ED needs is expensive. People who are good C++ programmers *and also* able to read papers on electromagnetic wave theory (radar), or computational fluid dynamics (flight model), or artificial intelligence (dynamic campaign, dogfighting, BVR etc) do not come cheap, and they could be doing things more interesting than making games. I don't believe it's an understatement to say that a real time system which simultaneously models multiple complex processes like AI, CFD and EM waves, while synchronizing these processes with 3D graphics, is near the bleeding edge of software engineering. That's just a fact. "It's not just a game, it's a simulator" (of complex physical phenomena that no other game even bothers with)

I think your explanation is the likeliest. I am trying to figure out a way to test this theory.

I am getting the following error when trying to debug according to the guide. Mission script error: [string "G:\DCS World OpenBeta\bin\jsDb_m.lua"]:4599: loop or previous error loading module 'debugger.transport.luasocket' This wasn't happening before November at some point. I followed the guide. Edited jsDBm.lua line 771. All the files are in the correct place.

Really? Have Heatblur stated their intention to fix it?

It seems that the payload of a Tomcat produces more drag at high altitude than at low altitude. Surely that has to be a bug right? I understand there is a difference between IAS, CAS, EAS, TAS, GS and I don't have any formal training in aerodynamics but since IAS is less than TAS at high altitudes, wouldn't you expect the drag added by payload to be lower? Even in TAS terms? To be absolutely certain I performed the following test. I left the F14 on altitude hold at exactly MIL power, allowing the 14 to reach steady-state speed over 200 miles up the Persian Gulf at 1000 ASL and then again at 30 000 ASL. I repeated the test with different combinations of weapons and fuel tanks. I didn't test every possible combination, or the TPOD or any bombs/rockets, but the results were similar. Here are the results for two sidewinders, no fuel tanks. Fuel quantity shouldn't matter but it was an air start with a full tank. I also repeated the test by setting the initial speed above top speed and letting the speed decay to steady state speed and got the same numbers. I used the numbers from the F2 screen in all cases. CLEAN 2xAIM9Ms Δ KIAS @1000 ft 664 647 -17 KIAS @ 30 000 ft 408 386 -22 At low altitude, 2 AIM9s take away 17 KIAS, but at high altitude, they take away 22 KIAS (which means even more TAS). Why do the stores cause more drag at high altitude where the air is thinner? Am I missing something here?