The DCS Community was heard: The F-5E Livery Competition Boycott

In recent years, Eagle Dynamics has started trying to interact a bit more with its community, which was something that was generally well received. The livery creation community enjoyed a couple of successful contest, with the winners being rewarded with ED miles and the inclusion of their work into the game.

The latest livery creation competition announced by Eagle Dynamics was for the F-5E Tiger II, specifically for the new remastered version of the module. Although, this time things did not go well, and it was ED's fault.

Within the span of a couple of years, and with the release of new assets such as the remodeled versions of the S-3B, B-52H and B-1B; Eagle Dynamics changed the way that their assets were encrypted, making it impossible for their users to look at the models even through official means with the use of ModelViewer2, the built-in model viewer tool. This made it functionally impossible for creators to make liveries for these new models, including the remastered F-5E. Access to this model and some way of viewing it is essential for anyone who would like to create a livery for this module in any sort of human-tolerable timeframe. Livery creation became basically impossible for those that wanted to participate in the contest, which is something the Livery Art community immediately noticed.

To protest this new encryption and the way that it affects the livery creation community, and the fact that ED hadn't done anything about it nor had offered an alternative to solve the issues; many members of the Livery Art community decided to join forces and boycott this newly announced F-5E Remastered competition.

This was in light of many community-level grievances, as well as a general feeling that the community felt used and mistreated by Eagle Dynamics. Their grievances, ignored. Complaints, thrown to the side and put on a pile. Many creators felt used as what amounted to free labor by Eagle Dynamics, despite the fact that some prizes were offered by the devs for the winners of some of these competitions. The community was polite with this movement, and almost no one stepped out of line publicly with rude comments towards the devs. They stayed firm, making their points known in the best way possible.

After the lack of entries was evident, ED decided to halt the competition and acknowledged the issues the community had brought up. I am very proud that this was the result that came out of this protest and of the way the entire community aligned themselves under a single banner to achieve this goal. I, personally, also did my part as a member of the community by not participating in the event, even though I did not air my existing grievances with the platform and some of their decisions in any public manner.

Hopefully we will see a change in attitude from Eagle Dynamics, and an improvement to ModelViewer2 so that we can finally see those new models and make some awesome liveries for them without having to spend several hundred hours.

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About the Author

Santiago "Cubeboy" Cuberos

Longtime aviation fanatic with particular preference towards military aviation and its history. Said interests date back to the early 2000s, leading into his livelong dive into civil and combat flight simulators. He has been involved in a few communities, but only started being active around the mid 2010s. Joined as a Spanish to English translator in 2017, he has been active as a writer and the co-founder of Skyward ever since. Twitter | Discord: Cubeboy