Very well put Kurt (Btw back from the Hurricane).
I agree that in all games that allows you to choose your side you will never find balance. It did not happen in AW, WB, and has not happened in WWIIonline where there are only two sides.
There will always be a side with more and side with less. Most nights except for sunday the sides are relatively close and the worst of that happens with the ENY thing is that the top planes are turned off.
However, I think the new ideas are going a little bit too far. We already have:
- Reduce cost of perk planes
- Restriction of ENY planes as the the number spread increases
- FHs, BHs, VH at fields rebuild in 15 minutes
- Barracks stay down for 2 hours and can be killed by 1 250 lb bomb.
- Fuel being harden (or the fuel damage forumula changed) so that it can't be taken down under 75%.
And now you want to add on an increasing ack lethality and building toughness. It is already incredibly difficult to wage an offensive operation put these two in place and you make it more difficult.
And yes, I know there are those who say that this is a flight sim and it is all about dog fighting. Well gentlemen there has never been a case except in World War I that it was purely about dog fighting. Air power and air craft were always used and are still used in conjunction of waging war and either seizing territory, denying the enemy from seizing territory or attacking tactical and strategic targets and infrastructure.
Without a purpose of focus basically you are left with just furballing. Yes, its fun but after a while without a purpose for squad operations the game becomes stale and pointless. Remember even in FPS there is capture the flag (which basically the base capture and reset here is a much expanded version of) and they too have goals (most kills in a set period of time wins).
Basically I these tweaks are more and more removing the focus of the game. I do not believe they are encouraging side balancing. And as I have said and have shown by tracking before most nights you don't have a huge imbalance. On sundays you do.
For the simple reason that many squads and many people have sunday night as their squad night. Friday nights quite a few don't fly because of other events like FSO. Plus Friday and Saturday night wives and girlfriends want to do things .. sunday night is clear for many of us logging on and spending 3 hours flying.
Also stop and think for a second. The bishops and knights are able to field 15-170 pilots at times on weeknights. On sunday they don't .. on monday they do. Its a conscious decision to avoid sundays. Programming code will not change this in a major way. You are dealing with human behavior here and can not program people to behave differently.
You can however, keep putting things in place that will end up driving people away from the game.
