Zanth! I enjoy your posts! I had the best laugh I've ever had on this BBS when you said "...unless the LA7 pilot is a complete idiot. Granted, there's a 50/50 chance of that"
My last complete tour (T49) ended about a year ago, and I lost interest in what the game had become. Many of the reasons for that are the very things being discussed in this thread. ^
SLO has a thread going, asking why he should come back. Well, there's new planes, new graphic effects with smoke/fire - but (and someone beat me to it by saying this) if that was what floated my boat, I could enjoy all that offline, and not have to pay $14.95/month. Going the graphic effects route is like rating a movie according to how many crashes/fires/explosion there are. (Watched ConAir last night - was embarrassed to have stayed up for it)
As to the community...
Originally posted by lazs2
... thinking the new guys were like us... they aren't... They have no interest in getting good at air combat. They are extremely frieghtened of being beaten.... even tho they must know that the only way that they will get good is to fight and die... Instead... they tell themselves that they are working towards a "goal" and "teamwork" evewn tho even the lamest amoung them must know that the goals are silly and pointless compared to actually beating another human in virtual combat.
But... we need these losers... we need em to pay HT and co. and allow him to stay in bussiness. Sure, they are pale, spineless untalented, mouse weilding building battlers that most often ruin the game but... I guess we need em. Otherwise they would be spending theri money at some star trek convention or role playing game. Fortunately most don't read this BB so they don't know how laughable and pitifull we think they are.
...someone once said (I think it was SOB) that Lazs and I are flip sides of the same coin. With regard to the game, what Lazs wants and what I want are diametrically opposed,
and yet... I sort of agree with SOME of what he's saying here. Or at least I feel the same way about the people he's talking about, but for different reasons. I certainly agree with Lazs that the people he's talking about have no interest in air combat. That much is obvious from the way they will only fly from a 5 plane subset of the 70+ planes provided, and will whine - even threaten to cancel accounts - if those 3, 4 or 5 planes are unavailable.
But I don't agree that the goals of base capture are "silly and pointless". ACM is clearly going to be a key skill in a game like AH (or at least it used to be) but in isolation would not hold my interest. Imagine a game like Cricket or Baseball - or even football (by which I mean
football, played with a round ball) - in any game like that, there are skills/techniques - but there is also a scoreboard. When a side is down, they have to fight like tigers to avoid losing the game. It's the score - the
objective - that's driving them to win. Without that objective, those games would look the way they do when a side has the game in the bag, and is merely running the clock down - triangular passing in football, stone walling in cricket etc. Sure, the participants are using their skills - but it's boring.
