It seems that until very recently, a substantial number of people have been sitting on the AH sidelines, burned out by the deplorable gameplay that has been seen in the MA in recent weeks. Of course, the pork-horde gameplay has been with us for years, and to my mind is far worse on the small maps. That’s why I used to play on the larger maps, and take breaks during small maps weeks. I once suggested that AH needed some form of structure/rules – eg TOD or an RPS, or even some larger maps – anything to break up the late war monster uberplane hordes. But noooooooooooo – came the cry from certain quarters. We can’t have rules in AH. But every game has to have rules. Here’s some examples:
- Soccer – Back in its earliest days, the players probably positioned one of two of their guys at their opponent’s goal mouth, and then when getting possession in their own half could simply kick the ball forward to one of the men waiting at the goal mouth, who would drive it to the back of the net. That would have been a farce, and so the offside rule came into being, which basically says that while in your opponent’s half of the field, you cannot have the ball kicked to you unless there are at least two defenders in front of you, otherwise you are flagged as offside, and the opposing team is awarded a free kick.
- Cricket – A rule was implemented to address the deplorable gaming of the game seen in the 1932/33 “Bodyline” series. Bodyline involved the placing of a least five players close in to the batsman and the bowler continually bowling a barage of short pitched balls, these balls would quickly rare up from the pitch placing the batsman in danger of serious injury. To counter these rising deliveries, the batsman would be forced to adopt defensive batting strokes, which would regularly result in catches to the close in fieldsmen. This gaming of the game resulted in a change to the rules by which the fielding side could place only two fielders behind square leg.
- Tennis – It was found that some closely matched players could draw out a match for many hours because of the requirement that a set be won by at least two games. Thus a set could be won 6-0 or 6-4. But play would continue if the score was 6-5. I remember one match at Wimbledon finishing with a score of 19-17. So to deal with this, the Tie Break rule was introduced.
In Aces High until last week, we had uberplane numerical smashdown/Pork-n-Auger. When AH was first deployed to the masses, there had been
no need for any rules – just as there was no 30mph speed limit in my home town 200 years ago.
But times change. It’s naïve to think that a game can go on ad infinitum with the rules that existed five years ago when there were about one fifth of the players. So now we have a self-policing rule which says that if your side has a numerical advantage, your choice of plane will be limited to planes of a lesser ability than the ones you might prefer to fly.
The posts I have seen about this fall into two broad groups: 1) Those who whined immediately at
the very thought of having to fly something other than their favourite P51/LA7/YAK9U etc. 2) Those who have been sitting on the sidelines, waiting for the mess to be sorted out and have returned to the game and like what they see. I am in the second group, and I am far from alone.
Some people think that rules are a “restriction on freedom”. People think they are “being controlled” by the new rules. But I see it for what it is – balance. Surely any grown man would quickly tire of the fragfest that existed before the golden moment at which Patch 8 was introduced.
