IMO it is not a matter of real or unreal heavy ack effectiveness against fighters. The problem is that this is a game, and heavy ack ruins the fun of players and do not add anything else to the game.
Currently all the fights are always near some place with heavy ack, it is very rare to find a fight in the middle of nothing.
Would it be less frustrating for you if flaks were removed from its normal positions, and then grouped and heavily concentrated near major strat./tact. facilities or important sky paths by the dozens, so the entire sky around that area is filled with explosions, and the chances of going through the skypath unscathed becomes incredibly smaller than what it is now?
Or would it be less frustrating to stay as it is - a small but random chance of flak hits spread apart over the entire map?
Im not concerned with concentration. There may be a valid place for flack bursts in the game, but it certainly isnt in the middle of a fight with planes that are friendly to the 88 battery.
So where would be a 'valid' place for 88mms then, when the whole MA revolves around capturing individual fields, which naturally makes the field itself the most important object on the map which require some kind of protection?
Remove it and stock it away at the corners of the map, or circle them around the HQ where typical enemy presence would be like 2~3 planes during an interval of 3~4 hours?
The frustration I can understand - nobody is a stranger to a clandestine meeting with the flak.
However, what you are suggesting is to practically remove the 88mm presence altogether from the game, because a random event that might happen maybe once in a day, is so unbearably frustrating for you.
Frankly, you should feel lucky that the 88mms are nothing more than occasional frustrations in the game - since concentrated batteries of 88mm shells were clearly meant to do much more than frustrate someone occasionally.
People can't stand randomness because they love to think everything is cause and effect - you have to do something wrong to die, and when you do nothing wrong you won't die.
Except, the 88mms don't work that way - neither did they in real life, nor do they in the game, nor should they in the first place.
I agree to some of the suggestions to make flak bursts something that makes sense - like non-line-of-sight flak fire that should be fixed.
Reducing their effective range so that flak fire will have a limited altitude(maybe something like 18k) would also be a good idea.
Having flak stop fire when friendly plane is nearby an enemy plane, would also be good.
However, there is nothing wrong with randomness itself - especially when the probability itself is set so low that the flak has almost no tactical value in the game.
If flak batteries would work the way it should - powerful concentration of explosions all around the sky - , now that, would be a gameplay threatening problem, since nobody would venture alone inside flak alley in the first place.
The very fact that people venture within flak range and then go complain about it when actually gets hit by one - itself means that the flak is basically insignificant in terms of gameplay in the MA.
If an occasional accident or two is a gameplay killer I'd say we remove Fester or Shane or these kind of guys from the MA, because whenever I "randomly" meet them in the area where I'm operating out of, I tend to die.