Again, if you want to pork fields, go right ahead. If you want to capture bases, that's fine too. You and your squad I am sure are stand up guys and wouldn't play the "griefer" and continue to pork the arena by "winning the war." A large influx of people who, through carelessness or ignorance, would continually pork the arena in the name of trying to pad their rank or in the name of pure griefing is what I fear would happen.
The settings are made too hard for a single person to capture a base for a reason . . . a former squaddie of mine in a now-defunct squad used to pork the arena as a matter of course. We asked, begged, cajoled, and otherwise tried to impress upon him that what he was doing was annoying those who like this arena. He refused to stop, so he got booted from the squad (the squad later disbanded for unrelated reasons). About that same time the staff members began regularly adjusting settings to make capture more difficult.
You as an individual or your squad, being stand-up guys as far as I can tell, would listen to reason and not do what this particular squaddie kept doing.
If you didn't listen to reason, the AvA community is presently small enough to apply the appropriate peer pressure to either convince you to stop or make you enough of a pariah that you would hopefully leave out of discomfort.
Now imagine that larger community again. In the relative anonymity of a large group, peer pressure is less effective. Check out the posts from 6 months ago when the MA split -- the catchphrase of the day was the "slum behavior." Hitech believed the anonymity of such a large group of players in one arena was the root cause of much of the "undesirable" behavior and bad sportsmanship that was rampant.
While I disagree with him that the MA was ever quite that bad, I do have to concede the overall logic of the point. Where the AvA is concerned, where good sportsmanship is by and large one of its assets, I can see much "damage" being done by a sudden large influx of people that the proposition (rank on the main page) would likely cause.
I want the AvA to grow and thrive. But to maintain that which makes it unique from the MAs, the growth needs to be slow enough that the new players "get it" and are integrated -- otherwise, it becomes just another MA (which is what I and several others are trying to escape from once in a while).
Look, its a long way of saying, do what you want when you are alone or it is just you and your squaddies, as long as you don't pork the arena and thus ruin the fun for the other regulars.
When there are other regulars on, please, by all means come join the fight since that is why most come to this arena. If you want a "goal" of taking a particular base, that is as good a reason as any to have a fight. But, the key is to fight.
If you refuse to fight, don't be surprised if you catch some verbal grief for it.
Because after all, if all you want to do is pad rank and milkrun bases, we have an Early War Main Arena for that. Go test you metal there where rank "means something" to some who populated it -- because you will be nearly alone if you think AvA rank means anything to those who go there.
The views expressed in this rambling post are those of LTARget and do not reflect the views or opinions of the LTAR squad, AvA staff, HiTech, the AvA regulars, or anyone else (although they should).
