Quoting: CharlieTheMadHatter- Moving toward increased ad revenue and partnerships (adding sponsored content/ads in Firefox and related services), raising concerns about monetization vs. privacy

- Heavy financial dependence on Google search-default deals (large portion of revenue from Google), raising conflict-of-interest and independence concerns

See, they do not really want to be dependent from google, but all other alternative funding methods failed or get user revolt! Adding some default bookmarks or simple ads to the default page that have no user tracking or "personalized" is fine for me, if do give mozilla some money and don't really affect my privacy. i don't like ads, but as long as i can ignore them if i want, it is not a issue. I can't demand mozilla to stop accepting money from google and have no other funding source!

i bet this AI is also another way to try to get some funds, like higher AI limits or something like that. As long it is optional, they can try it

Quoting: CharlieTheMadHatter- Removing or deprecating user-favored features and products (e.g., Pocket shutdown, ...) that alienated loyal users

- Accusations of questionable third‑party partnerships (e.g., monitoring/identity services, ad/analytics vendors) and integrations that conflicted with earlier privacy commitments

Again, when pocket was integrated in firefox, many people complained... now they they removed it, many people also complains.
most people over react to anything that is done. For instance, the cloudflare dns... it is optional, it works really well, it have no user tracking (cloudflare do aggregate what sites people access, but not what one individual user do... and do it for security, not for ads or sell), it can be changed to any other DoH service. Not everyone need it, but for many people this is a great feature. yet, people that don't like it complain a lot while people that do like it usually are silent.

Trying to prove that a ad service can exist without tracking was a great idea... but just reading mozilla and a ad service make a agreement triggered everyone in rage without even knowing the details. No where mozilla said that they would add a tracker to firefox, but that was what people assumed!

it is easier to complain (specially when only know half of the story) than to report it is a good decision

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The article say it already:

"AI should always be a choice — something people can easily turn off."

if they allow one to turn on or off the AI, all fine to me
AI can be useful, but it is not something any one keeps always on and too dependent

Between a TLDR article that i read only the top lines and a "summarize this" (only when i want)... guess what is better!

it is just like the translator, not needed most of the time, useful on some situations.

Now lets hope is that adding AI do not break other stuff, something is a optional feature, other is shove in your face

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Quoting: M@GOidIf it had a single player mode where I could fly any aircraft without any restriction, you know, how sims used to be, I would agreed to pay AAA money for it. But to be forced to do stupid stuff to "earn" the right to get a better fighter, or to pay a lot of money for temporary access to those? No thanks. And still had to deal with cheaters and kids on the multiplayer? I rather play IL-2 1946 with its old bugs.

to just fly, you can do the test drive ANY premium vehicle and fly and explore those planes. Sadly this do not work with normal vehicles, but i will actually open a bug for that

you also have dynamic and single missions, but i think most of then require you already to have the vehicles
finally, they do have 2 missions packs, for single player missions. they are extra DLC and do not require multiplayer, as far as i know, but they are WW2 missions only

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Quoting: TermyHow's the native client going nowadays? Haven't played it in a long time since EAC got introduced and back then the native client was more or less useless.

Much better now, the vulkan port did improved the game a lot in linux, from the old opengl4 (and then back to opengl3, shared with mac, as opengl4 was only used in linux and they wanted to free resources for vulkan developement)
previous release did had sometimes a hole in the sky, but in this new release i still didn't found any problem.

Performance is good, i do not have windows to compare and i avoid wine/proton. I play mostly realistic battles and had no problems

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Helicopters were already deployed in a test on last year 1 April, and worked fine... it was delayted as they were fixing some issues, creating more units and balance then... but most of the work was already done as it reuses most of the planes features. They were also adding modern tanks, as having helis vs WW2 tanks was too much a joke, they needed to add modern tanks before the helis. So that also means that helis are tier 6, before that you didn't had any helicopters.

you will have to make your way to tier6, but probably there are always some premium helis, if you are in hurry, you will have to pay some money.

Boats are in beta, i play several times on weekends, its more fine-tuning, create more maps and boats. it takes longer because it requires many new features and new game modes... many fine tuninig and tests, like they said, boats are harder to make fun, because real boats are slow, specially big boats, so they need to see what works or what not

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Quoting: BrisseI wonder if this improves performance on Linux because I used to play this on Windows way way back and it ran well, but when I moved to Linux i got awful frame-rates even on low settings.

Quoting: TheRiddickIt actually causes graphical issues on Linux and performance reduction by almost half. It warns you that OpenGL has issues on launch.. so this update has made things significantly worse for Linux users sadly.

For me, using mesa drivers for a RX480, performance increased about 30-40% with this upgrade! those problem may depend of the hardware/drivers, or is just stating what is known, their port to opengl is heavy (or at least have problems with mesa drivers). Even in intel, i saw a increase in peformance (about 20%-30%)

i can only test in the radeon and in a intel and in both i do not see the game scaling correctly. Using in the previous version, low settings or high settings generated almost the same FPS... now things are better, but still my card is still only using 50% of its GPU and in a low frequency (400Mhz from a max of 1.3Ggz)... i do not have windows, so i have no idea how the same hardware behaves in windows

With this new engine released, the info we have is that they will work in vulkan, as they didn't wanted to to try to add vulkan to the already in progress new engine rewrites
I hope they finish the vulkan port and the performance finally increase to great levels.

Quoting: razing32As a fair warning , the grind can be a pain.

all this free games are like that, you grind quickly the first levels and then start to get slower and slower the higher you go, mostly to see if people give then money, but also because after reaching the top, people get tired of the game quickly. New machines are always the bait to keep playing and in a quick research tree, they could not produce new tanks and planes fast enough to keep the new machine bait working.

Quoting: KorhakaI played the update last night, graphics pretty broken for me and another guy I know that uses Linux. Tried again today after a small patch was released and its now less broken.

What card and drivers are you using? again, in intel and amd rx480, using the git mesa i do not see any problem other than some (very few) quick texture flickers

Quoting: ninjasftwI was quite obsessed with this game for a while. Never really played any of the air battles but loved the tanks!
Ended up being quite put off by the amount of pro Russian bias in the game though.

Air battles you really do not have bias, each plane works differently and you have to adapt. They are also very good, after you learn how to use each plane and their weak and strong points.

For tanks is almost the same, you have to adapt... the t34 bias is because there are several t34 tanks and all then are very fast, agile, quick turret and have a good gun, so good for people playing it as a firs person shooter (FPS). German usually have lower turret rotation and are harder to play that way. If you let t34 flank you, you are dead... then you reach the tigers and the t34 will have a much harder time to kill you.
Russian and German tanks are clearly the best tanks, the other countries do have some good machines, but they also have lot of bad tanks (or tanks that you need to learn exactly how to play then, they are not flexible as most russian and german tanks).
Some people complain that they do not match the tanks in historic way and that is why it looks unbalanced... but if they put to play 5 tigers vs 20 t34, as in historic battles, people would also complain :)
Basically, in realistic and simulation battles, everything is balanced, in arcade, if your team is not good and you get flanked, you probably will die. t34 is a good flanker and there are several of then... so there is why it looks russian bias... notice that i play all the countries and team play is usually the most important (or lack of). Of course, they are always fine-tune the balance, so maybe you were playing in a time that balanced was not good. try it again and check... or simply play realistic and skip the mostly FPS from arcade, where you may see more t34 FPS guys

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