Quote:
Originally Posted by Blackdog_kt
To be honest, this is the worst side effect of dividing the community over such issues: losing well known members of the community that had a useful and long term impact over the years and i'm not talking about ElAurens specifically. Old timers are usually strong willed and hard to argue with, but this community wouldn't be half of what it is today without the people who obsessed for years over aircraft performance charts to correct flaws in the game or creating skins and campaigns for the rest of us to enjoy.
Sure, we need new blood but if we lose the core simmers and gain FPS players, who's going to "train" these new guys and ease them into embracing the added difficulty and complexity of it all? It won't be much of a sim community if 95% percent of people fly at 30% difficulty in servers with no historical context and in such a case, it won't even be their fault...it's just that there might not be enough of the old guard around to draw them into the deeper aspects of the hobby. Something like this would definitely ensure the survival of the software companies that make our sims, but at the same time it would transform the community into a sim-light variety.
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Good thing there are people outside this community that bring people in to flight siming. I for one am part of another community that trains and introduces new people to flight sims. Just because we are younger and also enjoy FPSes doesn't mean we don't know anything about or aren't passionate about flight sims. Just because some one is older doesn't make them more valuable either. Everyone must move forward, and Steam WILL introduce flight sims to a whole new audience. Some of them will come for the graphics some will come because they see people on their friends list playing, and some will come because they (like I did) have that youth love of aviation and the magic of it.
I actually got into FPSes because of flight sims, and not vice versa. It's a genre that up until recently has been dieing because of the very insular nature of the flight sim community at large. We often discount new people's views and opinions and information, and quite frankly run off new blood. Perhaps, I hope I am incorrect here, losing some old timers might actually be good for the community. If we can't get past being willful and xenophobic the genre will die. Steam may put a new face on flight sims and open it up to a younger crowd without having to deal with some of the messiness that comes with trying to integrate into a very clique group that many of us flight simmers are part of.
My community of flight simmers put a fun and inviting face on il-2:1946, and with all the recent buzz for Cliffs of Dover we've brought in quite a decent number of new blood to the genre, and they are learning fast and enjoying it. They tell their friends and get them in so on and so forth. Just because it isn't the way we as simmer like to play doesn't make it wrong, and just because making it fun doesn't teach the historical aspect doesn't mean it won't evolve into that.
03-08-2011, 05:00 AM
Hybrid Mode
