SoW proposal: Merging different realism preference players online

[AndyJWest]

he proposal's only challenge is setting the ratios correctly so that there is no ideal sweet spot setup where one gets the most score.

This isn't just 'a challenge' it is probably impossible. Whenever a particular set of rules is established, people will look for the easiest way around them. This isn't anything unique to combat flight sims, or even to computer games in general. In any rule-based scoring system, people will find the best way to exploit he rules. The only way to avoid this is by not keeping score. That is probably to radical a suggestion for most online IL-2 players, but having spent years playing offline, where the only thing I could sensibly measure myself against was my own past performance, I don't have a particular problem with it.

If people find this difficult to handle, I'd just ask them one question. What was the final score in WWII? If you can't give a sensible answer to this, then why does scoring matter?

[MikkOwl]

I don't mind having no score at all either, and I would even encourage it. But IL-2 has score (on all servers I have ever tried, at least) and I did not think it would go away, thus if there is score, then apply penalties. Without score, there's still the ranks

[csThor]

1.) If I were to fly on a server I would want to see it ensured that everyone is flying at the same level of difficulty. No mixing between various levels.
2.) Score means squat. I mean it. You can't and won't change player attitudes or what they do (i.e. shoulder-shooting) by fiddling with something like score. That's a complete non-entity in that regard.

[MikkOwl]

Originally Posted by csThor

If I were to fly on a server I would want to see it ensured that everyone is flying at the same level of difficulty. No mixing between various levels.

Does it mean that you would prefer to not allow people to turn off their HUD icons, speedbar, and if it is possible in SoW for example, not to allow them to change fuel pump primer settings, manual fuel tank management and so on? The division of even those who fly together today would be very divided if your preference for uniformity was applied.

Score means squat. I mean it. You can't and won't change player attitudes or what they do (i.e. shoulder-shooting) by fiddling with something like score. That's a complete non-entity in that regard.

If they are motivated by say, score and only score, they will attempt to find the highest level they can fly well at and score kills with (with this proposal). If they don't care at all about score, then they may care about the ranks showing their settings to everyone. And if they don't care about ranks, then they might care about the limited performance envelope they can get from using any kind of aids. And if they don't care about even that, then they can just fly at whatever level they think is the most satsifying for them regardless, and still be able to fit in.

[Desode]

Originally Posted by AndyJWest

This isn't just 'a challenge' it is probably impossible. Whenever a particular set of rules is established, people will look for the easiest way around them. This isn't anything unique to combat flight sims, or even to computer games in general. In any rule-based scoring system, people will find the best way to exploit he rules. The only way to avoid this is by not keeping score. That is probably to radical a suggestion for most online IL-2 players, but having spent years playing offline, where the only thing I could sensibly measure myself against was my own past performance, I don't have a particular problem with it.

If people find this difficult to handle, I'd just ask them one question. What was the final score in WWII? If you can't give a sensible answer to this, then why does scoring matter?

What was the final score in WWII ? Geez , I understand what your getting at but, It will never work. Competition is at the very core of any MP experience. Its the desire to strive to be the best. Therefore one cannot be the best if there is no score. This is even more so in Flight combat. I mean thats what made a Ace a Ace. Sure you can have ranks but a rank carries no weight if there is no score attached to it.


As for the final score in WWII ? I can say this, Nazi Germany lost so many planes and good pilots that they lost air superiority and that was the start of their End. Even though I don't know the exact number, of aircraft they lost. I know that it was great enough that they could no longer defend the skys over their land.

More importantly , just as you asked "what was the final score in WWII ?" to make a point. I will in turn ask " How many people know what Ace shot down how many aircraft ? "
I'm sure just about anyone on here, can tell you how many planes each Ace shot down.

Now if a flight game was say a persistent MMO style battle where one side as a whole won every 6 months, based on a Ticket bar that just represented how one side was winning or losing,,,,,,,, Then you may be able to do away with individual scores, however I doubt it. I personally could deal with that, as long as I knew it was helping my side. Thats just me though and I'm a very team work kind of gamer.


DESODE

[MikkOwl]

Originally Posted by Desode

What was the final score in WWII ? Geez , I understand what your getting at but, It will never work. Competition is at the very core of any MP experience. Its the desire to strive to be the best. Therefore one cannot be the best if there is no score. This is even more so in Flight combat. I mean thats what made a Ace a Ace. Sure you can have ranks but a rank carries no weight if there is no score attached to it.


As for the final score in WWII ? I can say this, Nazi Germany lost so many planes and good pilots that they lost air superiority and that was the start of their End. Even though I don't know the exact number, of aircraft they lost. I know that it was great enough that they could no longer defend the skys over their land.

More importantly , just as you asked "what was the final score in WWII ?" to make a point. I will in turn ask " How many people know what Ace shot down how many aircraft ? "
I'm sure just about anyone on here, can tell you how many planes each Ace shot down.

Now if a flight game was say a persistent MMO style battle where one side as a whole won every 6 months, based on a Ticket bar that just represented how one side was winning or losing,,,,,,,, Then you may be able to do away with individual scores, however I doubt it. I personally could deal with that, as long as I knew it was helping my side. Thats just me though and I'm a very team work kind of gamer.


DESODE

I want to add my thoughts on the purpose of scoring.

The problem is that there's no wingmen that vouch for your accomplishments to the squadron/wing commander. There's no rewards. Nothing to prove how good you are performing to yourself and others, how much you have really helped your armed forces. And, without score, one cannot even compare one's performance to others (beyond statistics, which do not care about one's accomplishments, only keeps track of how long, how much, how many).

This is why I like score. But I don't like score that is not implemented well (shoulder shooting should not even exist mechanically. Steps should be taken to assign the kill to the person who did the most system critical damage and so on). When score is badly implemented, it promotes bad behaviour, and so then I would rather not have score to discourage that behaviour.

[robtek]

for shoulder shooting part of the cure would be that if just one of your bullets hits a friendly your score would be nil and you must join again.

[Blackdog_kt]

I can see your points and while i disagree on certain items i could see a use for it, of course based on the only fundamental truth in gaming "let's make it a toggle and not mandatory, so everyone can be happy".

Some things i probably misunderstood as well, some i liked and some i disagree with, but in any case thanks for explaining

One final note though on the actual complexity and how many controllers you might actually need. This post of yours was what got me thinking.

Originally Posted by MikkOwl

Would you be able to go through a long startup procedure, different for every plane, bind controls for all kinds of features (maybe twice as much as now) including fuel primer pumps and propeller blade pitch angles for every engine, individual radiator flaps for the coolant of every engine, and individual oil cooler flap for every engine, individual fuel primer pump lever for each engine, individual buttons for changing fuel tanks, for pumping fuel between tanks, manual fuel pump, manual oxygen controls, manual selection of engine start power source (including a button for switching the aircraft battery between each of the engines for start).

As you can see, even people like you and me, with G940, can probably not handle all those things, because it is too complicated if we want to learn more than one plane, with all the keyboard binds we have to use and so on.

If you want to force people to have to bind all those things, and learn to use them, then it will divide the pilots when it is just unecessary. Even if some of those things above are done automatically for some pilots it does not affect the gameplay for the others. And that is why this proposal is useful - they can still fly together, at quite high levels of realism.

This sounds a bit harder than it actually is. I have a simple MS sidewinder precision pro and i can do most of these things in IL2 already. You don't need separate throttle,mixture,prop pitch and radiator controls for each engine. The solution is already in IL2.
Press "select engine 1", start it up with the controls provided (manual or auto). Press "select engine 2" do the same. Press "select all engines and start rolling. If you take damage and need to throttle back one engine to "synchronise" their power output and avoid the need to trim for assymetric thrust, simply select one of them again and move your throttle and prop pitch sliders a bit back until the needles overlap. That's why most allied twins have a single gauge with two needles and also why 4 engined heavies have two gauges with two needles each, as long as needle #2 overlaps needle #1 your engines are producing identical power.

Seriously, it's only a month since i started delving in that stuff and i don't even own the sim i practice and learn these things at, i just fly it whenever i visit a friend on his PC and it's way easier than it sounds.
Wanna know how to start a P47 in real life? It's done in a mere 5 steps!

1) Hold the brakes just in case, battery and generator on, this thing won't start without some juice right?

2) Select the main fuel tank and turn on the boost pump. It can be the auxiliary too, but again just in case, we select the fullest tank. We need some fuel, plus we need some way to move it from the tank to the engine. Normally the fuel is sucked in by vacuum when the engine is running but now it's not running yet, hence the boost pump.

3) Turn on the ignition (both magnetos) and set mixture to rich (ie, full). Again, the fuel might be getting pumped but if the fuel valve on the engine is closed (mixture lever) we can't start. If everything's working as it should you get the specific fuel pressure that the manual says. Unless there are random failures implemented in SoW it will always be correct and even if they are, i doubt that many servers will run with those enabled. In single player, if you want to you can enable it and pause while you read the manual. Even easier, every gauge and needle in the cockpit has a green zone to tell you what normal operation is without having to memorize all kinds of numbers.

Again, it's all pretty self-explanatory up to this point as long as you ask yourself "what does an engine run on?".

4) Prime engine 2-3 times for warm conditions, up to 6 for cold conditions. You have a thermometer in the cockpit that tells you how the weather's like.

5) Time to engage the starter! Ever jump-start a car? You know, get it rolling downhill on neutral with ignition on, then you suddenly punch a gear in to force the pistons to turn and make it start? It's exactly the same principle and crude enough to fit the brute image of the Jug
The starter is a just big disk with a lot of inertia. You spin it up with power from the battery (switch left to "energize" label), when the high pitched wine you hear has stabilised and not "rising" anymore in tone it's at its full RPM. At that point you move the switch right to the "start" label, the disk connects to the engine via a clutch of some sort and transfers its spinning energy to it, turning it around.

You got fuel in the engine (we primed it and set all fuel systems to on), you got power going to the spark plugs and you just gave the thing a good kick to get it rolling. Congrats, you have a turning propeller in front of you. From this point on just keep the needles pointing inside the green arcs and you'll be just fine

Now let's see how we can do this without the need for click-pits that are usually disliked by combat simmers. I'll assume no fancy hotas, just a normal stick like the Sidewinder series and a keyboard. I'll also try to suggest ways that will retain functionality between different airframes and not be specific to one aircraft at a time, so that we can cut down on the amount of total controls needed. I will only look at controls that don't already exist in IL2, so that we can get an idea of how many extra we'd need.

In step 1 the extra controls are battery and generator. In multi-engine planes it would be "select engine 1" and then "toggle generator" and so on, eliminating the need for multiple keyboards assignments of the same controls per each engine. So, we have 2 on/off toggles so far.

In step 2 we have a fuel selector. Let's work this with two controls, like the flaps up/flaps don function we already have. One is "fuel selector up/clockwise" and the other is "fuel selector down/counter-clockwise".
Allied birds have rotating ones, i think some axis birds have levers, hence the double function for each one, so we can keep the necessary controls to map to a minimum. Just look inside your cockpit, decide where you need to turn it and press the corresponding key. Critical control on one hand, but if you're changing tanks at the last possible moment before combat you're already doing something wrong, so no reason to fret for having to glance down to the cockpit floor for a split second.

Why not have a single control that will cycle the selector through all of its possible positions you might ask. Well, because most fuel selectors have an "off" position too and that's not something you want to encounter before combat while you are changing from drop tanks to internals.
Also, some planes have more than one fuel selector, for instance the Jug in our example has one for internal tanks and one for drop tanks. A control to select them one at a time similar to engines could work in this case, "selector"+"1", "selector"+"2" on the keyboard and so on. All in all 2 controls to rotate the selectors and one control to choose between more than one selectors. We're up to 5 total so far.

In step 3 we have magnetos and mixture that are already modelled in IL2, so no change there. Step 4 brings us the primer, one more new control for a total of 6.

Finally, step 5 is the starter, which as you notice is a three-way switch with energize, start and neutral positions. In order to cut down on the amount of keyboard bindings, why not make this sequential? This can't harm anything (unlike a sequential fuel selector control like we discussed before). Furthermore some planes have a single starter button, some have a two-way switch and some a three-way one, so if we can simplify it it makes sense to go ahead and do it. So, in planes with a starter button, pressing the key we mapped just corresponds to pressing that button. In planes with multi-position switches, each press of the key corresponds a different switch position, done in the logical sequence. In our example of the Jug, pressing "starter" key would move it from neutral to energize, pressing it again would move it from energize to to start and pressing it one final time would return it to neutral.

In total, we need only 6 new keyboard bindings for a totally authentic start-up of this warbird. Others will require more (for example, the mk.IX spitfire is a bit weird) and others less. Case in point, we all have seen those Luftwaffe mechanics crank up the engines on those 109Es. What are they doing? Well, the 109Es (and possibly later models too, i'm not sure) also have an inertia starter, but they don't spool it up from a battery. It's the mechanic that spools up the starter with the hand-crank, before the pilot engages it to start the engine.

In this case it would make more sense to have a "ground crew" tab in the comms menu to request things like an external power source or a mechanic to hand-crack the starter and....OH MY GOD, it just hit me after writing all of this diatribe. I'm off to post the idea in the poll thread about systems modelling

[Jaws2002]

That's a good way to ruin it for those that go trough the pain of learning to do things right.
My interest for IL-2 died when everyone and his little brother started using their own home brew online. It killed it quick for me. The feeling that we were all on the same playing field was gone.

[MikkOwl]

Originally Posted by Jaws2002

That's a good way to ruin it for those that go trough the pain of learning to do things right.

Would you really feel that everything was ruined for you if, for example, you used manual fuel system priming pump levers and fuel cock levers when someone else had set an aid on to automate that part? If yes, why is that? If no, why not?

My interest for IL-2 died when everyone and his little brother started using their own home brew online. It killed it quick for me. The feeling that we were all on the same playing field was gone.

Although not entirely related: why do you feel as if the playing field was no longer level with user custmisation?