That would be good to know. When i initially got starcraft 2 it used a new version of battlenet that didn't have any chat channels. You could start a private conversation with other people when viewing their multiplayer profile stats or if they were in your contact list, but there was no chat channels in the traditional sense of the word for people with similar interests to hang out in.

Apart from it being nice having a chat channel for you and your buddies, this was also a problem for most organized gaming communities. It forced people who organized tournaments to invite every single person manually each time, then kick the ones who were about to play the next match before it would start (so as not to be receiving text and "spoilers" on how the others in the channel viewed their game), then invite them back in and kick the ones who would play the next match, and so on. With a standing channel however, players could join and leave on their own as they were alternating from player to spectator.

Needless to say it was one of the most complained about issues, it got acknowledged by Blizzard with a commitment to fix it within 2-3 patches and that's exactly what happened. After getting to work on some bug fixes and gameplay balance changes they sat down and implemented chat channels for the next update. I think it still took them a couple of months (don't exactly remember now, but game was released in the end of July and chat channels were implemented around early autumn), but just the fact that it was acknowledged early on prevented most of the fuss.

Steam it is for me too!

I'd take Steam over hyperlobby any day.
It's a dated product, created out of neccessity, and the IL2 community could benefit so much more from a better, more userfriendly and more robust multiplayer integration.

I'm happy that Novotny posted it here, and I originally found it from someone else on the Ubisoft forum too!

Steam is a divisive community issue, but I hope people give it a chance if they haven't tried it before (or back when it started out a little 'rough').

I think most here would agree that Oleg and 1C deserve success, plus as much money as they can get to put towards making more sims for years to come :)

Your Not going around UBI by buying through steam
UBI is the publisher
Steam is one distributer

UBI gets its money and so does steam
Yee gods people smarten up:(

if thats the case what do they need UBI for? oleg is the devolper and steam is the distributor and since i have seen fuckall from UBI interms of advertising the game they appear tobe redundent....Oleg should just put a link on the front page of this forum that says "CoD pay here, and ill e-mail you the game, one time online actication fee...enjoy"
and get rid of the middlemen :)

Many in the Il-2 community believe it is due to contractual obligations dating back to the beginning of the development of SoW:BoB.

Posted articles and information, along with some clues posted by Ilya indicate that the DD version of CoD will have nothing to do with Ubi, and will not put money in their pocket.

good for oleg

This is all great - but where the hell is the game in steams upcoming list? For heavens sake they have games there which are 6 months away...