I agree with Levi..
IMO AH was designed from the start to accomodate people who were already familiar with basic on-line combat flight sim control interfaces, such as tower movement, hangar selection, basic flight features and etc etc.. While not officially, AH probably can be considered as a successor to AW and WarBirds, the same key staff who made WB made AH, uses many simular concepts and system controls as the previous games, and many of the players who started AH were ex-AW/WB players.
However, people shouldn't treat AH as if it would always be the same people we used to know playing the game. Quite many years passed since AH first came. Kids who were in elementary schools are now teenagers showing their first interest in flight-sim games. It is entirely possible a good portion of the AH population has never played WB/AH before. In about ten years (though a sad fact...) the old AW/WB generation might become a disappearing kind.
What then?
Being "User Friendly" is now an irreversible trend in the game industry. While I hate to say this as an devout AH fan, there are currently many problems with Aces High as a game, that goes unnoticed or overlooked just because most of us are old-time flight sim enthusiasts.
We used to play games that were entirely text based, for crying out loud!
For us, the current interface is more than enough, quickly adaptable, and to a degree very familiar - but that's just because we are getting old. Compared with some of the other on-line games, their basic manuals are getting thinner everyday. In some cases there are no paper-printed manuals at all, the game sells with only with a simple document, and all the rest of the troubleshooting/FAQ issues can be accessed entirely via the game. Visual/video explanations, practice sessions and lessons, in-game tutorials.. pictorial guides, etc etc..
Currently, all of the above, in AH, is taken care of by a handful of volunteers. However, as a complete game, in reality AH shoud have been preparing such measures from the start. Come on guys, even the official home pages planes/vehicles section hasn't been updated for a very long time.
Like Levi said, it's not a matter of gameplay. It's a matter of basic caretaking for the newcomer to the game, the new generations who'd first start out flight sim games with AH. And in that sense, AH is, unfortunately, wholely unprepared. Accessing the functions are terrible. The simple mouse wheel functons don't work. People have to type in dot commands. The arena settings are often hard to understand, and in most cases the effects and such aren't even explained in the help files.
Like HT's own words, it is because AH started with a core group, serving a small number of flight sim fans... "making some money while we make the game we want"... everything starts out small, and while it was small these problems weren't that a big thing. However, like it or not, AH is now the foremost leading game in the on-line flight simulation genre of the entire world. The AW/WB competition is dead. Other online-WW2 games are struggling to perfect what they have.
As a matter of fact, this discussion goes along the same lines with the graphics discussion. Times are changing, game customers are getting more and more picky about the visual qualities of their games. AH was okay when every body in the MA used to know each other, started out from the old WB and AW when graphics were simple. But now we have players who were in their cribs when we were playing flight sim games. These guys became teenagers in the late 90's. They grew up with graphics. When all of us go old and tired, unable to play AH anymore, will the new generation of gamers still stick with AH? Graphically lagging behind times, unfrinedly to new users?
Frankly, IMO, it is only a matter of time before some large company takes interest in WW2 vintage aircraft combat genre... create a big hype, user-friendly websites, cool graphics, simple and easy to access game functions.. and the worst thing is that the younger people are gonna flock to it, rather than stay with AH. We can laugh and scorn all day long, while MA numbers go down one by one. Who'd have ever thought AW or WB would meet such a quick demise? What's there to stop AH from facing the same fate?
IMO, innovations - that's to stop AH from meeting such a fate.
