Originally posted by Morpheus
You should come back in when things settle down for you and you have a few minutes to get up in the air.
Well that's very kind of you to invite me back.
I know you enjoy this game as it stands, but different people have different expectations. There would have to be quite a few changes to make me want to come back. I think you know me well enough to know what those changes might be. I don't want to hijack your thread - you know I'd never do a thing like that
- so I'll mention a few things just briefly.
Looking back, one of my biggest AH regrets was the way the community became polarised between furballers and nonfurballers. I came from WB, and never knew this to be an issue in the years I was there - 1998-2001. A further source of woe (for me) was the way such a large segment of the community exhibited reluctance, or even refusal, to fly anything but a tiny subset of 1945 überplanes. Now I know you're a tnb fighter pilot, and a good one, but for my $14.95 I want to see the whole spectrum of WW2 warfare in AH being used, not just a small sliver - the air to air combat sliver. For me, that was good when there was a purpose for it - an objective, but tedious if the gameplay degenerated into nothing more than a series of silly skirmishes whose only purpose was to determine the "best pilot", and to add entertainment on Ch200. I have seen films posted by furballers supposedly "having a blast", and for me it was like watching "My Dinner With André".
I want to see actual missions with actual goals. I also hate the way that buffs in this game have been marginalised to such an extent that the only time I saw them used was for making suicide runs to a CV.
ALL of the above ^ issues may be resolved by TOD. We'll have to wait and see. But in my experience, a flightsim community has never split itself evenly across two arenas. The tendency is for one arena to reach "critical mass" and for incoming players to go where the crowd is. We've seen that in AH when a supposedly unpopular map like pizza has been up - there would still be 300 in the MA, with penny numbers in the DA/CT. (It may also have been that pizza was not as unpopular to the community at large as some would have us believe!)
Guys like Nopoop & Lazs may remember what happened in WB when it went Axis v Allied. Everyone thought it was a good idea at first, but it was a catastrophe. Many members tried to initiate a return to the MA, which was never taken away, but none ever succeeded. I left there in 2001 because of gameplay suckage, and came here.
Even if TOD is deployed, and even if a 50-50 or similar split is achieved between TOD and Classic, this board will be awash with self righteous threads about which gameplay style is the best, who are the "real men", yada yada yada - the whole damn pissing contest.
