Flew transport all Beta with a HOTAS, here's what I'd want fixed

First off, I don't work on this game, I've got nothing to do with Bulkhead, this is just my own opinion after spending most of the Beta flying transport. Wanted to make that clear before anyone asks.

Background on me: I fly Helis and planes in sims with a full HOTAS setup, so this is a pretty niche perspective. Some of it applies to everyone though.

Starting with the good, because there's a lot of it.

The flight model is astonishingly good. You actually feel the weight and the inertia of something heavy hauling itself through the air, and that makes it feel extra epic when you pull off a really nice manouvre. Most games I fly Helis or planes in don't get anywhere near that. And the presentation, kudos to whoever modelled these birds because they look the part, and a massive kudos to the sound designers. Comms, rotor noise, all of it feels special. That AAA feel in a sim environment is rare as hell and it's the whole reason I care enough to write this.

Okay. Now the stuff that's lacking.

No tracker support, and no way to work around it

Not every game has head tracker support, fine. But if there's no tracker support you at least need to let me bind an axis to look around. Right now even if you fiddle with bindings in third party software to make it work, you're still stuck holding the "Free Look" button, and holding it disables your steering axis in the Heli. On a full HOTAS. So I can't look at my LZ and fly at the same time, which is sort of the entire point of flying a helicopter.

Bindings need to be more than just bindings

When you let someone bind their HOTAS to your game there needs to be more than just the binding, you need to let us tweak it. When I first bound my Throttle to Collective it wasn't using the full span of the Throttle, so I had to fiddle with the sensitivity back and forth to make it fit. Sort of fit. And I still don't know if my stick or rudder are precise, because there's no way in game to tell me whether 100% on my physical stick is actually 100% on the game controls.

Give us a calibration screen with a live axis readout, deadzone, saturation, curves. Every sim has this. It's probably the smallest thing on this list and it would fix the most.

The Attack Heli guns do almost nothing

At least the little bird with the 2 miniguns. I was spraying the pilot of another little bird right in the face for 4-5 full seconds and it seemed to do almost no damage. Tried killing PMCs on foot with it, did very little to him. Then later I was the guy on foot getting blasted by the same vehicle and I still had time to shoot him down and survived with half health, when I should've been riddled with holes.

If this is deliberate balancing for the cash economy then say so, but as it stands it just reads as broken.

Getting teamkilled as a pilot costs you everything and costs them nothing

This is the one that actually made me put the sticks down for a bit.

I was transporting a bunch of peeps, really well too for that matter. Anyone who got transported by FarbrorBengt during the Beta can vouch for that, I flew fast and got most people into the CZ safely. Then one run I've got a full bird and there's this dude with no mike just spamming the "Drop me here" thing, and I'm literally already on my way there to drop him off with the other passengers. Apparently not good enough, because he shot me in the face with a rifle. Heli goes down, everyone on board dies, him included.

And then everybody gets revived. Him included. Me included. And I'm the only one taking a financial hit, because I'm the one who bought the bird, so I pay for every single dead person on board because some asshole decided it'd be fun to shoot the pilot. There isn't even a report option for intentional team kills like that. I should not have to pay that shit.

Bare minimum, give us a report option for it. Past that, do something about friendly fire on the pilot seat, or move the cost onto the guy who pulled the trigger, or just don't charge the pilot when it's a confirmed TK. Pilots are already carrying the most expensive thing on the map and taking the most risk with it. If shooting us down is free and has zero consequences, people stop buying Helis and the entire logistics side of the game gets worse for everyone.

Let us bind anything to the HOTAS, not just flight controls

I've got the full STECS Max throttle and I've bound maybe 15 buttons on it. The rest are just sitting there doing nothing. I'd love to put the cassette player on there. Emotes. The pre-recorded voice commands like "Yes" and "No". Just expose every action to every input device instead of keeping half of it keyboard only.

The lil minority group of us who fly with sim gear all run wildly different setups, and honestly we love to tinker and get it set up our very own way, that's half the fun of it. Letting us map whatever we want costs you basically nothing and buys a stupid amount of goodwill from exactly the people who'll go tell every sim community about your flight model.

That's it. Thank you so much for the work you've already put into making HOTAS possible in Wardogs, I loved it. Most studios don't even bother, and the fact that it's in there and the flight model is this good means the hard part is already done. The Heli category just needs a tiny bit more love.

You've already got a fan right here either way. See you in Early Access, I'll fly all of you to the CZ.

o7