Dialogue on coms use in a WWI sim:

I posted this at SimHQ as a response to someone, but thought we should also talk about it formally here as well.

I know that I would probably have not bothered to stay in online flying, in a "squad" or have built all the friendships that I have if I never got to speak to anyone, or even continued flying IL-2 at all after the first year or so. What can I say, it's also a social thing for many of us.

I would love to have missions, and online wars where voice coms are not used, and clearly that is fundamentally how it should be, despite the fact that in the real world visual communication via hand and head signals is a little easier than in the sim at this point. I have yet to figure out how to marry the rather difficult to merge goals of historical and combat fidelity with the simple reality that I'm playing a video game in the modern era with some modern (well, a few of them) online friends.

Another issue in the same vein (that people usually don't mention) is the fact that so much knowledge has been accrued with respect to aerodynamics, ACM/BFM, and tactics that the simple fact that I'm a modern pilot, trained in modern tactics and aerobatics, who then spent quite a few years flying a virtual WWII and modern combat sims means I'll never be a historical opponent to anyone - unless I try to be. In all of these sims I've observed the errors in thinking that real world period tactics employed, and when writing our training materials we almost always end up with novel tactics, novel formations, and fundamentally new lines of thought that simply work better etc (the simple example is the finger 4 formations vs a combat spread).

Thinking about all of this as it pertains to historical matchups quickly brings any rational lines of thought to the same place - if we want historical we would pretty much need to fly according to a script of historically correct maneuvers, tactics, and as much as possible use the same basic thought process about battle and as such we really are playing the part of historical reenactors. As a reenactor the outcome is known before the battle starts. . .if I use tactics that were not employed or understood in WWI no matter the specifics, then we are aren't being historical right? So does that mean that we can't be competitive and dynamic while being historical? Clearly most of you are not interested in an *online* system of simple reenactments right? For me that’s something that would be better suited to single player campaigns, not so much for the more social experience of online flying.

So where do we draw the line? I think that will be a rather challenging thing to determine for the "full switch" crowd unless we just agree to some sort of compromise on a case by case basis.

TX tends towards the full switch experience in most every case, but I’m certain that we’ll have no guilt as a consequence of the fact that sometimes we’ll have scrims and wars using no TS, and in other cases it will be the 60 player IL-2 style online war, online dogfight, or 1v1, 2v2 etc using voice coms. . .why? Because this is a friggin video game that we are playing with our friends and we’re here to have fun in the many forms we can have it with a great flight sim, and we recognize that for the more historical battles we will also need a specific historical ethos that applies ot much more than coms and missions details. . .these things are probably better executed within a single player environment.