To me the problem isn't that I can't ride my ride.
To me the problem is that I can't fight my fight.
If you read the posts, it seems this is what a majority of the people are complaining about.
Logging on and finding a fun environment to fight in has become a major hassle.
Logging on and finding the friends that you look forward to hanging out with has become a major hassle.
The old MA was great because with numbers so large, you could always find the style of gameplay you wanted, be it furball or land grabbing.
If one base was being hammered, you could always up at another and you still had a very good chance of finding a fight.
The sudden avalanche of complaints you're seeing here, in my humble opinion, is evidence of a bigger problem facing the game, a problem that has not been addressed by HTC, but is as important for the long-term health of this game as any they can make in the arenas.
That is that these boards have become dominated by a few players who will brook no deviation from what they consider the proper way AH should be played. They will flame, flame, flame until only there voices are heard.
And, unfortunately, HTC seems willing to not only let this continue, but also to take the voices of these people as the voice of the community.
A vast majority of the AH community can't be bothered with going to the boards. They happily log on and fly and have no care about what's said on the boards. IF you'd polled these people on sunday, none would have said changes needed to be made.
That is why AH is strong, because HTC had hit upon a formula that most of their customers liked and enjoyed. How could you not love being able to log on at anytime day or night, be virtually guaranteed to find a fight and have your choice of flying any plane that caught your fancy. were there problems? Yeah, but they were minor annoyances. People liked the big numbers. That's why the MA was always filled and the other arenas only attracted a minor number of people who wanted something else.
That is the reason people are complaining now, is because the formula they loved has been replaced with a formula that they don't like. They'd voted for many years on this by participating in the MA and not the peripheral arenas.
Even then, I think most people would have been willing to give changes a chance. But this plan was implemented in such a clumsy way that even people who were willing to give it a chance were immediately faced with major problems that made them flock to the boards to complain.
One common thread I see in the posts is disbelief that HTC didn't think things through to recognize even the most apparent problems that would be faced or, even more unbelieveable, knew the kind of problems that customers would encounter but didn't really care enough to address before implementing the system.
Think of how many posts would have been avoided if the new system had included a simple way for squads to communicate.
Think of how many posts that would have been avoided if, instead of a series of new arenas, they'd decided to take a baby steps approach and created only two new arenas.
