Quote: "I bet the 190 pilots went to the Allied Air Command and said "That P-51 is too damn uber...remove it now!!"
a) 190 vs P51 is not the problem Tex. If the LW pilots had to fly Me109E's in the same "arena" as the P51's I'm sure they would have kicked the german aircraft designers asses, for not being able to produce competitive planes.
b) Early warplanes for scenarios only? great... so you get nil combat experience in a (non exsistent) RPS frameset - you only get a chance to fly the bird in a scenario... oh boy.
c) What-if's vs realism. U'll never get full realism in a flightsim because "real" warfare consisted of "hours of boredom and minutes of sheer terror", as one pilot put it.
AH is FULL of what-if's for GAMEPLAY.
What if 109's fought 109's, what if there was no night - only GOOD weather, what if everyone flew with icons displaying range, what if C.202's fought Ta152's, what if you could die and come back to life... what if etc etc etc.
So basically it's a question of degrees. A matter of steps between Air quake and a tad more realism....
To me more realism IS FUN, others are content with air quake - maybe they play AH because in the real quake you only get to fly when you step on a jump pad? I dunno, really...
What I'm trying to say is: stop using the "so you want full realism? well then this and that will happen blah" argument. There can be no "full realism", I KNOW that - we are talking about degrees of gameplay features... a balance between dumbing down the game to boost the newbies ego (I can fly/kill in a Fw190 after joining the game 10 minutes ago, man why'd they take 3 months of flight training to master their planes?), and the hardcore simmers who would accept 8 hours of real time flying to bomb targets in Berlin... You can't please 'em all so you have to find a golden middle - where that golden middle is, that's what we are arguing about...
AH is a "young" sim so we'll have to hang on in there and see how it grows up. At the moment I have a feeling they don't want to go anywhere WB has been, just because WB was there, but IMO WB wasen't "all" wrong and AH isen't "all" right...
d) another favorite argument: "There are not enough ppl in AH to split them up in different arenas". hmmm, I dunno... I fly at high peak times, when there are 150 online and I fly at low peak times with 20 ppl online. I still get my fights no matter what - basically the only ppl of interest are the ones in your line of sight. I don't "see" the other 140 ppl in the arena, they are busy elsewhere, so they might as well be in another arena - they have no affect on my restricted airspace.
With low peak times I'd decide wich arena I'd join like I did in WB: Either go where everybody was (MA), or enter the HA ALONE and grab a buff. Usually someone would come by, shoot my buff down, I'd grab a fighter and we'd go 1v1, others would come in and we'd fight 1vs2, 3vs3... whatever.
WB offered a choice at least... I don't care if you guys didn't like the HA, you still had the MA. I don't care if you were pissed that ppl would choose the uber planes in the HA, thus unbalancing either allies or axis, I flew LW no matter what, adapted, and had FUN even vs allied numbers - it's not a question of the HA being matter of factly a bad idea because YOU didn't like it... it's choice that matters.
at least to me
Effdub