Originally posted by SlapShot
I read every bit of your post and I believe that I comprehended perfectly and there is nothing canned about my responses ... no more or less than yours.
During off hours you want just 1 arena and the heck with what everyone else might want ... as long as it suits you. You don't care what arena is active, EW, MW, or LW ... just as long as there is just one arena available.
While you don't care what the plane sets are ... you might just wonder if the others do care. There are some that are ecstatic about the EW plane set and don't ever care to fly Late War monsters ... so what do you do ... push them to an arena that they don't want to fly in ... so you could have fun ?
Think about ... if people ARE in those other arenas then THEY chose to go to those arenas and it doesn't matter what their reasons are for wanting to fly in those arenas.
If they were as bored as you might think and felt the same as you, don't you think that they would all migrate to just one arena so ya'all can play together ?
LOL, you guys just don't get it!!!!! I wish Hitech would take this to the ultimate extreem in arenas and offer 25 differant arena's, so that during prime time the avearge in each of the 25 arena's would be 10-20 players max, then maybe you thick headed idiots that mostly fly when the player base is large enough to support 4 arena's would start to see what the real issues are afterhours!!!
2-10 players per arena does not make for fun, mise well save my 15 bucks and fly in 8 player free arena's
10-20 players per arena is still very painfull unless you are just looking to furball or milkrun
20-30 players in a single arena still makes the land capture game boring as hell.
40-60 per arena is the bare minimum to make the land capture game interesting because remember half these players are still only furballing or milk running.
60-80 players per arena is playyable for land capture types, but still a little low
You really need at minimum 80 players or more in the same arena to make land capture type play truely enjoyable (again remember half these players are still furballing/milk running). During non prime time this is now an imposability to get 80 players in the same arena so you are leaving 50% ( the half that really enjoy the stategic land grab win the war type) of the player base bored as hell if they can only mostly play after hours.
If there were only 1 arena after hours everyone could have fun. The furballers could still furball (After hours there are not massive numbers of ubber palnes, even in the LW arena the planes in the air seem to be more evenly distributed for some reason, probably becuase of European players are flying more Axis stuff during these hours).
The milk runners could still milk run, but would just have a little harder time padding their scores.
Set it up so the arena type (EW/MW/LW) rotates weekly or after a map reset (war win). LW still seems more popular even after hours so make the rotation favor that ( ie... LW then EW then LW then MW). Their would be the added benefit that if the current after hour arena type was not currently your favorite type then acheiving the goal of winning the war would have the added benfit of changing the arena type to one you may prefer better.
If HiTech keeps the Non Prime Time Arena's set up like it is currently, and the number of players don't start to grow enough to truely support multiple arenas ( ie... at least 60 plus players in an arena) then i feel that they will start loosing the strategic land grab type of player that can only play during these hours. Maybe that is only 10-15% of the current overall player base, I don't know, but a 15% loss in revenue hurts most companies.
After 3 yeras of loving this game I am very close to quitting, probably the only think stopping me is the hope that TOD (if it is ever released within our life times) may bring the fun back to the strtegic land grab war win type of player. I will probably only stick it out for 3 more months though to find out, because the fun and love of this game is dwindeling more and more.
