No offense taken, Dishwasher. We are open to honest questions around here.
About point number 1:
Someone awhile ago ran a wonderful regression statistic (I think it was Milo), but I don't have it now (my old computer crashed).
Anyways, Freespace 2 came at kind of the last gasp of the long reign of the space flight sim. It was a great game, although the publicity around it could have been done better (for instance, I loved FS1, but was totally unaware of the existence of FS2 until I saw it in a bargin bin at Media Play. That's my ancedotal proof, but there is more proof. Marketing was a little weak, that must be admitted.).
What we have going on here is that Loaf has come to believe that since FS2 was the last, the shortcomings that occurred regarding it's publicity and marketing (and what he considers to be poor gameplay, although I wonder if he has ever played it) were responsible for actually killing the space flight sim genre, thus making compaines like Origin think it would not be profitable to produce another Wing Commander.
In other words, the claim is "Freespace killed Wing Commander."
However, this is a case of spurious association, because there had been a steady decline in space sim sales already (due to market flooding by a rather large line of lack-luster or poorly executed titles [a la Battlecruiser pre-patch] eager to take a share in the profits and growing interest in other genres). FS 2 inherited a market that already had one foot in the grave, so to speak, and would have required a great deal of effort to revive. Could FS2 have been the magic bullet to spark new interest? Possibly, but somehow word and availablity were not up to the task. But that is another discussion altogether.
The point is, the regression analysis showed that there was
no statistically significant change in the slope of space flight sim sales and profitablity at the data point occupied by FS2. What does that mean? It means that FS2 did not kill the space flight sim, nor did it actually do it any harm (whereas other titles had), it just merely failed to revive it.
That's a different story alltogether than "Freespace killed Wing Commder." It's more like "Freespace 3 and the next Wing Commander shared the same fate."
(To HLP hardcores, please forgive the mention of Freespace 3!
)
There was a time when this info was posted at the CIC (it got me banned once for bringing it back up), but as you can guess, it has all been deleted by the admins.
It's much easier to appear right if one hides all the evidence of an opposing view. Just as it is easier to excuse the senseless banning of all Saga members by hiding the post by the person who exhonerated them of the charges being levied against them.
That being said, we do not wish any ill to the CIC community. I want to make that point very explicit.
And welcome aboard, Dishwasher.
Oh, and for the record, I actually like that HW2 mod a lot.
