Originally posted by Mugzeee
quote:
In all you infinite wizdomness...explain what was broke about it.
I see a lot of posters that think that it was not broke. This implies that they were enjoying themselves the way thing were. Pyro already said it wasn't a technical problem. This means it was an opinion. Share yours as to exactly what or why there was a problem.
I see it like this...
The base capture methods have evolved steadilly over the last ten years. There have been numerous points where it became too easy and it was made a little harder via game design and mechanics. There was a time when 2 -3 guys could take a field in about 60 seconds! The last major things done in AH to make it harder was the limiting of porkage and the creation of cities with a maproom. This sorta had things at a good middle ground. Five players could still capture a field in under five minutes. Seen it done dozens of times, even participated in a few. But if defenders upped against the five attackers (and had any skills and/or determination) they could prevent the capture. So folks started attacking with 10 guys, then 20 then 30. Even a 30-man attack can be easilly thwarted but it takes a larger number of skilled and/or determined pile-its to stop them. Large numbers of skilled and determined pile-its has been becomming rare in any single location over the last year or two. I'm not saying it doesn't happen but it doesn't happen as much as it used to.
So when one large group of guys who are willing to fight to take a base meets another large group who are willing to fight to defend it you have a...gasp...FIGHT on your hands. Sometimes they turned into large and long lived furballs in between the two bases that could last for hours, with some ebb and tide as the fight moved back and forth. Now, I'm sure many of the folks b1tching about this change would say that is not fun, and it is an ineffective way to take a base. I'm sure many of them would do one of two things:
1.) Take up a group of 12-21 fluffs from another base, come in at 15K or higher and go pulverise the FHs, thus killing the furball and all the fun so many of those guys were having.
2.) Look on the strategery map and find another base that had little or no bardar and go attack it instead, thus avoiding the fight.
What was wrong with the game is too complicated to boil down concisely into a sound bite for you but it had mainly to do with maps and squads that were too large for the existing strat mechanics to deal with. The game mechanics therefore were literally encouraging folks to avoid a fight. I see that as a big problem in any combat sim of any genre. I mean if you only want to blow stuff up, you can play offline, or pick up a boxed sim and do co-op missions with vox to your heart's content. So, in a nutshell...the MMOL combat sim was intended to allow you to FIGHT other human opponents. The evloution of AH-MA, and the influx of new players, and the huge populations in the MA were all consipiring to make these fights less and less common.
Also I should add...
HTC has made it clear that they too recognized the game was in need of a fix, so this is not the opinion only of oldtimers and the BKs.