Quantity in the MA, currently, is far more important than Quality, hence the hordes. It's pretty simple, you can fly 1 vs 20 or 20 vs 1, most people try the former, grow tired of it, and then switch to the latter. Hence you avoid the problem and actually become part of it. Personally, I'm more than tired of trying to defend against overwhelming odds on almost every attack that arrives because I know my actions probably don't make much of a difference. Why, because there is no attrition and my attempts at defense are only promoting the same horde from returning over and over and try and pick up kills on me through sheer volume of sorties/pilots they can generate.
I really don't buy the "fear of death" arguements. Firstly, nowhere does it say you have to "fly with your hair on fire" until you die. That's the choice of the individual and honestly suits the Dueling Arena better than the MA. Secondly, half the complaints I hear/see are based on individual "A" winning angles but being unable to stop extension, hence the other person simply leaves. Guess what, that's fair. If you are at a disadvantage and your options are to press a "bad" situation or extend then most people will extend, even the ones who cry about people having a "fear of death". Lastly, from a quantity vs quality standpoint, death SHOULD mean something, if it doesn't then you are simply promoting the quantity aspect even more.
My solution, as I posted in the gameplay forum, ram all the furball/fly-till-you-die group together and give them what they want, the instant action with no death consequences area. It's the dueling arena with "scoring" I guess, either that or an isolated area of the map. That concentrates all the like minds and should provide constant action. They can never really be happy flying against guys who may try to stay alive long enough to accomplish something (ie,players who choose not to engage because they have other plans/ideas/goals).
For the strat guys, to balance it out, you are going to have to adjust the play so quality means something. One method to do that is attrition, local and personal. You want to balance success/failure to not be overly restrictive but to clearly hand advantage to the victor. Most engagements in that model would be exactly like a squad duel in the Dueling Arena, over within 1-2 minutes with clear victors (ie, you don't have to deal with constant "re-enforcements". You can argue people would be even more "timid", possibly, but someone who is not involved is also not helping their strategic situation, eventually you can usually force them to engage you (or entice them) but if they choose ultimately not to then they are just spectators and wasting their time. If you have "less skill", bring superior numbers, if you have "more skill" then you can probably make due with fewer pilots. The horde can still come but if it's defeated in the air/ground then it can't simply "come back to finish the job", it's defeated. Defense in the MA would be possible with this, not essentially hopeless like it is now. You'd likely see more defenders willing to try and overall the skill level of the average player would have to improve in order to have a chance of success. Defeated people would have to change fields, hence you also get the benefit of spreading things out (or at least rotating them around to some extent).
What this would mean, you die you move on. Doesn't matter if it's intentional (suicide) or unintentional (ya just got beat), once you die/bail/crash/etc you have to pick another location and decide what you want to do from there. Suiciding would be possible but mostly a desperate action, just like it should be, because you would know going in that it's a one-shot deal.
Two examples:
1)The other night I was running defense with 1 other guy against only 5-6 guys. They had altitude on every engagement and either were shot down or crashed while suiciding. Eventually they win as I have to land a damaged aircraft and there are no hangers up anymore to respawn and the other friendly was vulched on the re-arm pad. Kill/Death ratio for us, 24:1 but we still lost. Tell me where the fun is in that... I guess it looks good on the score page or on film, if you care. The enemy simply wore us down with superior sortie rates and fresh aircraft each time... we hung on as long as we could, I got credit for a kill on the same guy 5 times.
2)Second, last night, Rooks defending against Knits. Knits put more aircraft in the air and honestly had no coordination of effort ( I was Knit at the time). The Rooks ran a much better defense but couldn't really break out simply because they were out-numbered all evening. A to the Rooks for hanging in there but honestly they should have kicked out butts back to our base in no time had attrition been on. They beat us soundly in the air, unfortunately they couldn't sortie quite as many guys constantly as we could.
The horde/sortie rates won both those engagements even though it shouldn't.
There is a strategic attrition level also, Kweassa and Pongo have suggested it in the past, but it's a complementary idea in my opinion. The simple model of "death-and-move-on" addresses local flying at an individuals level (ie, you can only hurt yourself). The strategic attrition addresses "Resources" that could be tied into field damage, factories, etc. That would represent an airfields ability to host lots of sorties (for everyone). It would also have some impact to quantity though and hence they complement each other. The strat attrition would really lead into bombing improvements/results and control over the speed at which large groups (hordes) could actually launch and likely give more recruitment/positioning time for defenders.
-Soda
