I'm one of the people that decided to wait. The reasons are many and i don't expect everything to be the way i like it, but through a strange twist of fate every single one of RoF's design and marketing decisions are the exact opposite of what i'm expecting from a modern flight sim.
If the online requirement was dropped i would probably order my copy today.
If there was more AI aircraft to accurately represent the 1917 theater of war, plus a properly done dynamic campaign to fly with and against them, i would probably order it as well. Look at Black Shark for example. It's only one flyable, but there's an entire war around you with dozens of AI units. It evens out pretty well.
If there were more flyable aircraft i would probably order today as well. Mind you i'm not talking about 30 extra aircraft. Between 4-6 flyables would be both good and reasonable. I know these next-gen models take time to develop and Oleg said himself on an interview that it might take a single person as much as 6 months to do a SoW-quality model.
The thing is, i don't expect everything i wrote to happen, but i expected some of it. As it stands in its current state, the reason i am going to wait for it to mature a bit is that absolutely none of these things are in the sim yet.
In regards to the aircraft/content issue, Oleg is going for a dozen of flyables right out of the box for SoW. We have also seen a lot of screenshots and videos from the early RoF days (when it was still called knights of the sky) with different aircraft, so it's not because they don't have time to model additional aircraft, some of them are already done. Not to mention that WWI aircraft have limited systems when compared to WWII or modern ones.
I think that a lot of the controversial decisions were made when the companies merged and the project was renamed from KoTS to RoF. The gennadich team was also a group of experienced people in the IL2 3rd party community, so they probably know how succesful the IL2 business model is. So why change it?
Well, the only thing i can think off is that they ran out of money to finish it, an investor came along and said: "Here, take this money, but you'll have to change some things first". And then came the online requirements, the lack of aircraft, micro-payment add ons and so on. Ever wonder why we used to see the Camel and the Dr.I in all the Kots videos, yet RoF was released with a Spad and a D.VII? It's simple, someone thought that having two of the most iconic aircraft of WWI in the initial release might be all the casual sim gamer would want, thus never buying anything extra.
All the measures taken seem to suggest an approach to securing as much income as possible, from the copy protection method to the way the add ons are handled and how these add ons become a necessity through a lack of initial content. Nothing wrong with a developer cashing in on years of work to be honest, but it pays off to exercise some moderation. Otherwise, if you go with a brand new way of doing things in every field imaginable and give the impression you're in it strictly to milk the proverbial cash cow, you simply run the risk of scaring away a load of people and having the entire thing backfire on you. To a certain extent this has happened. What remains to be seen is whether they can stay afloat long enough to address some of these concerns, at which point they'll start getting a lot more sales.
Just my 2 cents
