Don't forget about us please

Eh,, Im an old fart,,, I only use this Forum to keep up to date. I agree with what you said about PC responding to questions on other social media channels, but that was an "Announcement" (not a reply to a question) that was made, a significant one at that, and it wasnt made here. I would not have known about it if it wasnt forwarded here by others.

With respect, PC's FB post was apparently sent on Saturday. That post shared the photo of the week and news of the setback. Social media being what it is, word traveled to the the second poster, within three hours apparently. And within a few more hours of the initial FB post, PC had issued a further message on FB to calm down an put the pitchforks away.

If you look at the time stamps, it seems likely to me that PC clocked in Monday morning, posted their appeal for calm in this thread and then seven minutes later, posted the latest photo of the week. PC has been posting those photos of the week in this forum for three months now. It seems pretty likely to me that if not Saturday, then Monday... when they were "back at the office"... that they'd post here.

Is it really that egregious that that PC didn't post here on the Forums until Monday morning? It's not as if a school, the police, or a hospital had news about your child being in an accident and simply chose not to contact you. As crazy as we all are for DCS, the the news of the setbacks aren't the same level of urgency. If this comment comes off as ugly, it's not meant to be.

But genuinely, I wonder at what our expectations are and what we feel entitled to know and when.

AFAIK PC do use ED's forums as their primary means of communication.

 

People complain there's not enough communication ?

 

PC add FB and discord, so users can ask informal questions and give their feedback directly.

 

What would you like PC to do when a user asks a question on discord - ignore the user/question, cross post every answer, hold a meeting to decide if, where and when a answer should be given ?

 

If you want to know "every" detail, sign up to social media, discord, etc., otherwise don't.

You are mistaken now.

Having extra channels next to DCS forum where product is sold and all, ain't bad. But using extra channel to make announcements, patchlogs, and anyways communicating to customers who paid you, is not good.

When the studio has news, that it comes forehand to tell it to public, it should happen first in this forum so it is available to everyone.

But it doesn't matter as Kiowa Warrior is cancelled project now and likely doesn't ever see a daylight....

What, didn't you follow their #polychop IRC channel for news?...

You would have guessed this to happen if you would had read the announcement last week on their newsgroup....

Sad that you didn't know that G+ page was down....

But someone told at the back alley that so did happen.

Seriously, it is just best when community seeks help, news and all through single channel, that holds the public record of the communications in chronological order.

As one asking help as first one, can help others to find answers to their problems before they need to ask it again.

The announcement, news, tidbits and all should come to forum first.

ED forum is the community, not the discord, not the Facebook, not the Geocities or Google+ or IRC....

If someone want to discuss about something among friends over discord, it is fine. But company selling products for ED customers shod use ED provided official forum for #1 communications for everything.

If we scatter the information all around at all possible channels, majority will never find it nor hear about it, unless someone else than the company (responsible for the product) doesn't retransmit it to other channels. But it cuts there as now that channel people don't have access to original place, a broken telephone effect happens, misunderstanding happens, surprises happens and so on, all because two things:

1) Community gets divided to pieces because someone wants to use discord, Facebook or Google+ or newsgroup....

2) Company communicates reporting problems through multiple channels, one can't get all to everywhere.

Only real fix is that all communication is directed to one location, this case ED offered official forum. And it is not difficult thing, easier really as you have all neatly here. It as well saves time when developers need to only manage one channel, not multiple. Anyone who does this as job, knows that when you manage multiple channels it becomes far more time consuming.

As you noted, if someone wants to get now all the information, they need to register, install and handle multiple different channels... And everyone should be expected to do that.

That is exactly the same as would be only one channel that everyone is required to follow, that is ED forum, and everyone would get all the information without hassle, without going through all different channels.

But as history teaches, a control of masses happens by "divide and conquer" method. You make people think they are alone. You control by controlling information so bad things doesn't "leak" elsewhere so you minimize damage.

When you do bad things, you can block it out from other channels and just perform damage control in the corresponding location and deal it quickly and easily.

And you can push this very far and further as you get everyone not to have good changes to affect anything as you get people fight against each others because you give them "you have one vote to use, but it doesn't matter as there are Xzillion others" by causing disorder and deny the cooperation by praising competition.

This happens in PR, you deny people needing help and assistance from getting access to it. It happens in business all the time. And it is a root for many problems when community can't communicate in one place.

So yes, Discord and Facebook should be used to direct people here in this forum. Replies "Please, post that question here: https://forums.eagle.ru/forumdisplay.php?f=434 Thank You."

Eventually it really means that it is better to be without those other channels so everyone knows that this is the place to get help, and this community stays strong, can help each others in one place, for the future as long as ED stays in business and forum servers stays online.

If I want to communicate with a specific company, I need to contact that company. I can't expect to get service for the company products by going other company customer service.

That is as well expected that company communicates through the place where the product is sold, managed and supported.

If someone wants support/information for company T-shirt, they can go to company website where is the E-store that sells it, not here.

If someone wants to get it for DCS module that is sold here, they should come here and not go to elsewhere.

@Alec Delorean

Please, stop talking about an issue when you have 0% of insight what happened. We do not depend on that change yet as you mentioned about the graphics. If you think you are smarter then we or ED is, ok, you can have our jobs.

Just for you, to make you feel special and getting my special attention, as you ask for it seems in every of your posts, The issue had nothing to do with the displays showing grafics,

It had to do with something way deeper in the code, where the Kiowa did not read any numeric data at all anywhere.

So you see, you are speculating and as Albert Einstain once said it wisely: "All I know is the fact that I know nothing!"

@BIGNEWY

Yeah as soon we got everything back to a working status, because there has to be some stuff adjusted in the code that will take a couple days, do to the fact that the Kiowa Warrior s way more complex then a Gazelle in terms of the ammount of code lines´, we will release some new news.

@DrummerNL/ Daan:

I know you will messege me when you see this post ;), but sometimes things have to be said

Sven

You are mistaken now.

 

Having extra channels next to DCS forum where product is sold and all, ain't bad. But using extra channel to make announcements, patchlogs, and anyways communicating to customers who paid you, is not good.

 

When the studio has news, that it comes forehand to tell it to public, it should happen first in this forum so it is available to everyone.

 

But it doesn't matter as Kiowa Warrior is cancelled project now and likely doesn't ever see a daylight....

What, didn't you follow their #polychop IRC channel for news?...

You would have guessed this to happen if you would had read the announcement last week on their newsgroup....

Sad that you didn't know that G+ page was down....

But someone told at the back alley that so did happen.

 

Seriously, it is just best when community seeks help, news and all through single channel, that holds the public record of the communications in chronological order.

As one asking help as first one, can help others to find answers to their problems before they need to ask it again.

The announcement, news, tidbits and all should come to forum first.

ED forum is the community, not the discord, not the Facebook, not the Geocities or Google+ or IRC....

 

If someone want to discuss about something among friends over discord, it is fine. But company selling products for ED customers shod use ED provided official forum for #1 communications for everything.

 

If we scatter the information all around at all possible channels, majority will never find it nor hear about it, unless someone else than the company (responsible for the product) doesn't retransmit it to other channels. But it cuts there as now that channel people don't have access to original place, a broken telephone effect happens, misunderstanding happens, surprises happens and so on, all because two things:

 

1) Community gets divided to pieces because someone wants to use discord, Facebook or Google+ or newsgroup....

2) Company communicates reporting problems through multiple channels, one can't get all to everywhere.

 

Only real fix is that all communication is directed to one location, this case ED offered official forum. And it is not difficult thing, easier really as you have all neatly here. It as well saves time when developers need to only manage one channel, not multiple. Anyone who does this as job, knows that when you manage multiple channels it becomes far more time consuming.

 

As you noted, if someone wants to get now all the information, they need to register, install and handle multiple different channels... And everyone should be expected to do that.

That is exactly the same as would be only one channel that everyone is required to follow, that is ED forum, and everyone would get all the information without hassle, without going through all different channels.

 

But as history teaches, a control of masses happens by "divide and conquer" method. You make people think they are alone. You control by controlling information so bad things doesn't "leak" elsewhere so you minimize damage.

When you do bad things, you can block it out from other channels and just perform damage control in the corresponding location and deal it quickly and easily.

And you can push this very far and further as you get everyone not to have good changes to affect anything as you get people fight against each others because you give them "you have one vote to use, but it doesn't matter as there are Xzillion others" by causing disorder and deny the cooperation by praising competition.

 

This happens in PR, you deny people needing help and assistance from getting access to it. It happens in business all the time. And it is a root for many problems when community can't communicate in one place.

 

So yes, Discord and Facebook should be used to direct people here in this forum. Replies "Please, post that question here: https://forums.eagle.ru/forumdisplay.php?f=434 Thank You."

 

Eventually it really means that it is better to be without those other channels so everyone knows that this is the place to get help, and this community stays strong, can help each others in one place, for the future as long as ED stays in business and forum servers stays online.

 

If I want to communicate with a specific company, I need to contact that company. I can't expect to get service for the company products by going other company customer service.

 

That is as well expected that company communicates through the place where the product is sold, managed and supported.

 

If someone wants support/information for company T-shirt, they can go to company website where is the E-store that sells it, not here.

If someone wants to get it for DCS module that is sold here, they should come here and not go to elsewhere.

Fri13, We as a team hear your feedback, no worries. There was a reason why I posted it just as a small info only on one channel, discord. I recieve constantly via discord or facebook a daily messege with the main question" when will it release?". My intention was, because I did not know yet how long it would take to find a solution to the issue by the time I posted it, to let the hardcore fans or discord users, which are part of the community know, that we were hitting an obsticle that was serious. I am also asked weekly, when the next stream will happen and so on. Even virtual air nation had an idea and asked me if we would want to pull this off, a airshow wioth the Kiowa Warrior in which nearly the whole team of us devs and the SMEs fly. I cancelled all these plans on that day on my side aswell for now, cause we had no idea how long it will take. So we try to communicate to the community as open as we can, or choose to do for numerous reasons. Yes this forum can be conciderred as gate 1 to the customer, sure, but as we all know, this forum hosts a lot of people, some are cool, some are not so cool, each character for its own, no problem, but I did not want to kick off a huge discussion about what went wrong, pitchforks flying in all directions that mutate during the flightphase to a H bombs, as it very likely happens in this forum by 98% of bad news.

So my post was sigled out only on discord, to not be to loud, but for the people that want to know every little bit of what we do, or interact with us directly and some of our SMEs, I wanted to at least be openminded and let them know with a friendly messege "guys, we have a brik wall here to tear dwon, we only have small hammers, we do not know how long we will be stuck infront of the wall, but eventually we will tear down that brickwall!"

I can only ensure you, that DrummerNL/ Daan is doing a great job communicating to the community as "white house" speaker and I am happy to have him around and call him a freind. But even he has a private life, and things happen, like loosingh a friend, work stuff, family, and so on. As you have been able to witness during the past year, if it was really important that we felt everyopne has to know, Daan posted it across all 3 mainchannels of our communication tool, ED forum, FB, Discord.

You will not miss any info, I can guarantee you that, just some channels are happening later or sometimes not at all, for reasons as mentioned above about that "little" announcements I made last week.

I try to think of better solutions for next time, at least on my side.

Sven

Peoples. I would like to offer a sincere apology at this point for pretty much being responsible for fanning this little flame into an inferno. I over reacted and I'm very sorry for that. Perhaps someone else would have done it anyway if I hadn't but I was in first so take responsibility.

Backstory:- I'd had a crap couple months of chasing people over various "financials" and had several of them blatantly lie to me on multiple occasions, saying they'd done things when they clearly hadn't. Told me what they thought I wanted to hear just to get me off their backs - despite the fact that I'd been totally calm and courteous on every call with them. Ended up costing me money - not a lot thankfully but enough to be infuriating.

After all that I was wound pretty tight at the time I read Polychop's post on FB. No excuse I know. One of the golden rules of forum etiquette is never to "post angry". I ignored that, my bad. Won't happen again.

One thing I would like to say to the Polychop guys however - you need to take a moment before posting news like that. Your original post on FB came across as "OMG we're screwed! We've no idea what happened and we're getting no help!" When in actual fact it turned out to be "We've hit a snag and it's fairly major, but we're on top of it and ED are helping us work through it. We'll get back on track soon enough."

Pretty big difference between your initial panic posting and what actually happened. I'm not trying to take blame away from me over reacting - just saying that we ALL need to consider what we post and how it will be perceived by others. If you'd taken a moment and posted what really happened instead of that impulsive panic posting, I probably would have gone "Dammit, that's it blown for this year!" and moved on, even though I was wound tight at the time.

Anyways, sincere apologies again. Best wishes to all.

Hi Hunter_5E,

We do not usually post about setbacks like this but this one in particular was and is more serious than you might anticipate. The fact that we have identified the issue and found a solution with ED's help, it still requires several days to implement the adjustments to the code. For the Gazelle 8 lines of code were affected by this change of the SDK and we were able to fix this within minutes after identifying what was causing the issue and the method of fixing it. For the Kiowa, with 2 multifunction displays a radio screen, many pages and subpages, the amount of code that has to be adjusted runs up into thousands of lines and many days of work. That on top of the time the development was halted brings us close to 2 weeks of development time in which there has been no progress. While we still aim at a 2020 release, setbacks that take 2 weeks are quite a big deal.

I made a promise for us to be more transparent towards the community and letting you guys know about issues like these make sense to me.

you can have our jobs.

How about a workshop? The agenda would be:

1. Public relations:

- How to find better ways to communicate with our customers and the community

- Who are our customers and potential customers? What do they want?

- Professionalism: what to communicate and what not

- How to keep always being honest, keep telling the truth

2. About learning and being a professional developer:

- Analyzing fails and mistakes from the past 4 years

- Deep analyzing other dev's modules: what are their strongpoints? - why are we not able to reach their level, even on core features?

- What is DCS? What makes it different from other software/game/simulation platforms? What are our responsibilities if we take part in such a longterm development platform?

- What are standards in DCS? How can we meet those standards?

- Get an overview of todays available hardware and features that are supported by DCS (huge list)

- Leave the bubble we created for ourselves and are stuck into

3. Rebuilding company reputation: Rethinking strategy to regain the trust of customers and the community

A. take all we've learned from 1. and 2.

B. Fix the Gazelle first? May bring back trust from existing customers

C. Invest time and concentrate on marketing this "new" gazelle (from B.), be honest about mistakes and show A/B comparisons in detail: What was bad and why - what is fixed and better now (show proof on youtube, social media...)

4. Release of the Kiowa module

- take everything you learned from 1. 2. and 3.

- have a good time, finally get the sales you deserve if you release high quality products for DCS

Quote: "How about a workshop? The agenda would be:"

Is this a joke?

This is kinda sad. Polychop and ED seems to have been pretty forthcoming with information about this issue. They announced it, are working to fix, expressed it would take time. I don't understand what more we can ask from them at this point. Let them work, without the torches and pitchforks and I think PC, ED and us users will reap the rewards in the end.

How about a workshop? - blah blah blah blah blah

How about you have your own workshop -

1) Am I boring ?

2) Am I obsessed ?

3) Should I stop talking like an expert on matters I don't understand ?

4) How can I - moving forward - best shut up and go away ?

I'd pay to attend that :D

And thread lockdown in 3.....2.....

@Extranajero

:) Oh, i really hope you attend to that. For you it's free of charge!

Quote: "How about a workshop? The agenda would be:"

 

 

Is this a joke?

Sadly Barundus, it's not... I'm sure you have overwhelmingly noticed by now that there is certain subset of people on the forums that think they know more about something than anyone else. Especially when it comes to telling developers how to run their business or telling pilots who actually flew the specific aircraft being modeled that they are wrong.

Comes with the hobby unfortunately. Best to ignore them when they are being hyperbolic and take anything they say with a grain of salt.

This is kinda sad. Polychop and ED seems to have been pretty forthcoming with information about this issue. They announced it, are working to fix, expressed it would take time. I don't understand what more we can ask from them at this point. Let them work, without the torches and pitchforks and I think PC, ED and us users will reap the rewards in the end.

This

@ moderator:

Please close this thread. I just asked PC to not forget to post their weekly screenshot here. They did :)

The OP got his weekly drug dose. Thread can be closed