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Oh, I was wrong![/size]
^ The blank lines above are there so that you can position the above text in your browser window the way you want it, and then print it off to have framed to hang on your wall!
I'm only just posting here, partly because I was away when this thread was going on.
Yep, I am on record as saying that RPS would never happen in AH. Clearly I was wrong, but I've never been so delighted to be wrong! I owe hitech a lunch, but that would be difficult to organise (a long way for him to come) so I might just have to restart my account instead! What sort of lunch can be had for $14.95 in Grapevine?!
How's this new arena working out? It sounds like it would appeal to me, as indeed the CT did, before it became a mini MA. But an RPS would not appeal to Nopoop, and making an arena which more closely resembles the real WW2 would not appeal to Lazs, so I don't suppose those guys will be around....
...but I can see why. Nopoop, Lazs and myself were old WarBirds veterans. When the Axis v Allies thing was tried out there, nearly everyone thought it was going to be the best thing since sliced bread, myself included. It was, after all, the only time the entire subscribership migrated away from the MA, which itself became obsolete, despite various player initiatives to have it reinstated when the full extent of Axis v Allies suckage was realised, months later. But who would have thought that it would be a leading factor in the demise of the game? It wasn't the axis v. allies setup that sucked so much as the plane match ups. As in AH, not every plane type built and flown in WW2 was modelled in WB, so it was difficult to provide a
balanced plane set. IIRC, for this reason some planes were introduced to the RPS ahead of their actual deployment in the WW2 chronology. In the early days, the 190A4 would appear on Day4 of a 21 day cycle. Good news for me, as I always sucked at TnB (I took a WB holiday on Days1-3 LOL), besides which the amount of ammo lost to netlag in WB would be proportional to the square of your geographical distance from the server.
I needed manly cannon rounds!
Or .50 cals at least...
Well then some wise arse came along and pointed out that the sequence of plane deployments was not historically accurate, and so this had to change. They were hell bent on realism, to the extent that some people forgot it was a game, and then it was no fun at all. The 190A4 no longer appeared on Day4 but came much later. At any one time in the RPS, one side would always have the upper hand, or the
avion du jour as we knew it in Europe. The Americans knew it as an aircraft's
day in the sun.
And this led to the other major problem with an RPS: Side switching. As soon as the axis had got their avion du jour, a whole swathe of scorepotatos would switch to that side so they could have the best plane. As soon as that plane got trumped by a new allied wonderplane, they'd all switch back. I campaigned vociferously for the sides to be locked at the start of a tour, but nothing happened until much later, when a small concession was made - the minimum time between side switches went from 15 mins to 1 hour.
There was a brief period of balance (2 days) when the Spit IX came out to rival the 190A4, but then it was allies all the way. By the end of the war, the allies had jabo bombers which, having released their bombs, became excellent fighters - F6F, F4U - and which could operate from the CV with 2x1000lb bombs. The best CV based jabo the axis had was the zeke, with a 50kg bomb.
So guess what happened? Time after time, the axis would get trounced in the last days of the tour. It just wasn't funny. The allies had heavy bombers that could operate at 25K (B17, B24); the axis had the ju88 which would wheeze and wallow at 12K, plus a few jap bombers with an unimpressive payload. One squad night, I flew an easymode™ P51D and scored 27 kills without even being pinged once - it really was that easy.
Will this new arena hold the interest of its user base? There is no doubt in my mind that the
MAsses will want the best/easiest/fastest planes all the time, which is why the P51/La7/Spit usage was out of all proportion to the rest of the planeset when I was around. Will the sides be locked? If not, expect to see major side switching as each new plane comes out - unless matching planes are released into the RPS on the same day, which is not how it was in WW2, of course.
I'd like to try this out, and you'll all have fun, whupping my arse! But not just yet. For one thing, I want to give it a few weeks to see if its popularity holds. If not, then it would be toodle pip, again. I'm afraid I have no interest in what the MA had become last time I was there, c08/2004.
