A sensational title, but an interesting video.  I'd be curious what people think:

 

I have a comment, but not on the public channel.

The second post (by @k98_zock_tv47) in the comments section in Youtube pretty much sums up my feelings. Paraphrased:

• "Anyway, nowadays the game becomes a dogfight simulator only. There are only few servers which are playable and to be honest - they are not that good either. Nor Finnish is realistic and certainly not the warm up server called Wings of Liberty. You want to play exclusivly only on Rheinmald / Normandy ? Go than for Combat Box. You want P38 Lightnings over Stalingrad and a ground target cluster with tank garages? Go than for Finnish. You want to never fly with your buddies together? Play on TAW, if you get a seat there. On which server, beside on TAW (all 2-3 months if you are lucky and the crew did not just split up) can you fly during night - at cloud overcast of 400m during a snow storm? Nowhere, right? Flying the old prop planes is more than just a sunny safari without clouds. Its more than dogfighting. Ground attackers and bombers did not got big love - not from the devs, not from the server creators. There are no events, not a dedicated very good server from the developers, in fact - they should care with such a MP server for the community."

DCS suffers from this in WWII and Cold War also and the minimum amounts of WWII and Redfor Cold War planes is also stifling robust multiplayer. 

For IL2, the fact that the Devs haven't been posting regular news isn't such a big deal for me. I'm okay to wait until there is concrete news. There have been regular patches with new content.

I have no idea how affected SP is on the whole but SP people are also complaining on the forums.

The decline in players may also be due to the fact that both games are well past middle age at this point.

EDIT:

Enigma makes good points about the two Mission Editors. We have several people in JG1 who can make missions for DCS (in various levels of complexities according to skill levels / experience) but currently only one in IL2 due to it's super steep learning curve. 

5 hours ago, Vonrd said:

Enigma makes good points about the two Mission Editors. We have several people in JG1 who can make missions for DCS (in various levels of complexities according to skill levels / experience) but currently only one in IL2 due to it's super steep learning curve. 

I really think that this is the key issue.  And it plays into the long discussions we've had about how important it is to have a solid backend to your sim.

The IL-2 mission editor is very hard to learn.  And that hampers would-be events or servers.  Complex builds with variety are challenging in IL-2.

Whereas, with DCS, the mission editor is flexible, allowing for easy lua scripting and enhancement.

Additionally, the DCS mission editor keeps getting updated with more features added and with GUI enhancements that make things more and more simple.

 

I would have loved to do mission editing for WW1 but I saw right away that the learning curve was going to be way too steep and even experienced editors get very frustrated. I enjoy the DCS editor even though I still have a lot to learn.