Well, I have been out of AH for awhile but got bit by the bug again a week or so ago. I thought about it and decided my schedule would allow me a few hours or so a week to play a game again SO! I go DLed AHII and discover, to my chagrin that I need a new vid card......hmmmm....I'm a divorced dad paying child support and excess cash is very thin BUT I bite the bullet and go get a new vid card....ouch. Plug the sucker in and FINALLY get AHII to run. I piddle around offline, checking things out and once I feel that I'm somewhat comfortable with the game again I log back in, create a new account and go to MA. First thing that happens, I cant fly the plane I select. Already not liking what I'm seeing but I find another base and can get the plane I want and fly 3 sorties. I can tell some differences but still am not sure what has changed so I come here to see if I can discover what is new.
What I see so far does not make me happy. After reading over all these post the thing that comes through most evidently when reading between the lines is that the game isnt as fun. This is NOT, repeat NOT a good thing. Listen, I'm a huge history buff. I've loved history since I was a little kid, always have. I've read books on Air Combat but I play AH for FUN! Pure and simple, FUN! I have a life, I work, I have friends, I go to the gym, I love to ride Mtn Bikes, I have a pseudo girl-friend (dont ask :-) I have two kids who I dont see near enough, I go to church, I have a house to take care of, a yard to keep up and cat who depends on me to feed him
so my only reason for playing (read playing, not living) AH is FUN!! FUN! FUN! FUN! When I played before I would come in, check the arena, find the biggest fights I could find, up in either a Typhoon (if I felt like cherry picking the fur-ball) or a niki if I felt like lowering my head and charging into the middle of a big nasty furball and blazing away. I did what was FUN to me. I didnt care who flew what, who had more numbers, who porked what base or suicided here or there or anything else. I just did whatever I felt was going to bring me the most "ENTERTAINMENT"! Sometimes that might be suiciding in a low lever bomber, or jumping up in an Ostie, or manning the guns on a BB or finding a good GV battle and grabbing a tank. I just wanted to have some fun for 1 or 2 hours (which was about all the time I could spare to PLAY a game).
I wasnt looking for "true" realism of what it was like being a WWII fighter jock. If I want that I'll go play a scenario, thats about the only place you can even get CLOSE to what real WWII aerial combat was like. Mass formations of planes, flying with a wingman with a specific mission that you'd spent either days or maybe just a few hours planning and preparing for. Waiting in the ready room with your buddies waiting for the word to "man your plane!" Flying scenarios to me DID feel like what I had always read about in books about WWII aerial combat. Formations of the same planes either jumping or getting jumped by another formation of the same planes. A few minutes of wild melee followed by the errie feeling of suddenly being alone when only moments ago the sky was flilled with flying, burning, turning, falling planes and bullets flying everywhere. Now you're alone, low and low on ammo and the only thing you care about is finding a friend and getting home alive. THAT was fun! But is it something you can even come CLOSE to replicating in the MA?? NO WAY! Impossible!
Now it seems as if things are being done to "manage" the MA. Why? The objective of the MA is fun, at least it is in my book and I have a feeling that it is for most other people as well. I now read that HTC is planning TV ads and more print ads to increase membership. Who do you think most of these people are going to be? Die-hard grognards who know every detail of every plane that ever flew in WWII? No, they're going to be your average joe off the street who thinks that playing a WWII fighter game looks FUN. Pure and simple. Most will come check out AHII to see if its FUN!
I hadnt expected many things to have changed in my time away from AH but I certainly hadnt expected HTC to begin gerrymandering the arena to achieve......what? balance? Playability? In who's opinion? AHI was fine as it was before, not perfect but it was fun and thats what playing a game is suppose to be all about. The gunnery was fine, the hit sprites were fine, the plane usage was fine, it all added up to something that was fun. Keep trying to make it more "realistic" by making it more difficult to get hits, more difficult to see the hits, more difficult to fly the plane people want fly, eliminate furballs, stop porking, force the MA to ALWAYS have even numbers, stop land grabbing or whatever else some few who will write to HTC or complain on a message board dont like and before long you WILL see the lights go out once again on a good, fun WWII flight sim GAME.
I started playing AW because it looked FUN! It was fun! TONS of fun! I wanted to get better so I bought some books on ACM, I read, I talked to people, I learned and I got better. I dont consider myself any kind of ACM guru but I know I dot better and I learned. KEEP the game fun and more people will come to play and more importantly want to keep playing. If they keep having fun and keep wanting to play then MAYBE they'll want to learn ACM and do what all the rest of us did, learn ACM. If they dont want to learn ACM but still have fun playing and keep coming back then who am I or anyone else for that matter to tell them that they should learn to fly other planes and learn ACM and learn how to "play" the game the way someone else has arbitrarily decided the game should be played?
I'll play my free two weeks and hope that what I'm reading here isnt true. I HOPE I have fun.
Ok, Rant over
And as always these comments are of course....IMHO:D
TMASTodon
