New user to FS2 this week, and like many others I am impressed with the potential of this game. It's great to see devs making use of modern hardware - multi core cpus, x64, DX10 etc out of the box, rather than the bolted on solutions we have been using in FSX etc. I think the time is right to bring out a new flight sim as the games market for simulation generally is on the up and people are starting to cotton on to the enjoyment to be gained from an accurate simulation whether it's trucks, planes, race cars or whatever.
Gamers are growing older, and with it comes the appreciation of depth and the patience required to enjoy it. Quick fix arcade games perhaps don't appeal quite so much to the kind of people that will be arriving here in the coming months.
Anyway, my suggestion is that the forum be split into logically organised separate sub forums to cover things like physics/UI/graphics feedback, technical support, suggestions, off topic discussion etc and maybe also a dev read only area to provide updates and weekly news like the DCS World forum does. Before long the forum might become large and unwieldy in its current form.
I've been involved in the WMD Project Cars community for the last five years, and the power of feedback and contributions has enabled a relatively small dev team to punch way above its weight, as you can have an army of volunteers that will happily bug test and contribute for free. However, you do need to educate people how the process works to get the best out of it.
Aerofly FS2 clearly has great potential, and I have no doubt that the forums will grow enormously over the coming months and years. One of the things we learned from WMD1 was that many people don't quite understand the nature of a WIP sim and expect the same as they would from a finished title. Some of the comments on the Steam forums bear this out, so the more you can communicate with the early access users, the more positive the whole experience will be both for the devs and the players. A great deal of forum noise can be avoided with updates/news/buglists being available to read and a great many bugs can be found and squashed along the way.
I think you will find a lot of good will out in the sim community (as well as the compulsory trolls :confused:), and there is a lot of enthusiasm around for FS2, especially after the OrbX deal was announced and the way it plays in VR, so best of luck to the team and I hope you can make the best of the opportunity.
