The arena, before the war (and when the war is not running) never has had more than 10-15 people in it, if anyone at all, except on rare occasions... I'm sure it was fun for those 10-15 people to have their own personal arena, but the war does actually appeal to a larger player base.
This of course is based on the year and a half I've been around... if 5 years ago the AvA was packed with the old kind of set up, that's great, but quite honestly it's wholly irrelevant.
ok this is a long one...
Yea but lets not forget what happened the last time the land grab set up was put in place, which was very similar to this. The first week or so it was pretty good fighting, then some of the MA squads ended up having squad nights in the AvA. Unfortunately those squads tended to be big on the milk running rather than fighting for bases.
The natural balance between milk running and fighting was lost and the arena quickly turned into milk running bases for the capture points. I remember one night the Axis ran a crap load of JU88's up the coast line followed up by goons and captured about 5 Allies bases. The Allies turned right around and recaptured every single one of the bases, one of them was within 5 mins because the Axis didn't defend them at all.
Reason? They got points for new captured bases and if they lost the base 5 mins later it didn't really matter, because as long as the had that captured base screen shot it was all good. The arena slowly started moving to that kind of milking along with NOE raids and that's about the time I stopped showing up. AvA slowly died again after that, because the balance between fighters and milk run hoarders was lost.
Now, I'm not saying this set up will lead to the same thing, but IMO the focus of this game should be about fighting. Winning the war and capturing bases should be used to help shape the fight and the war, however it shouldn't over take the fighting as the primary focus. If it does it will then it will turn into typical MA milk hoards and NOE missions. In short the land grabbers will find what ever way they can, to fight as little as possible because it's all about "winning the war" and the arena will end up dieing once again because of a loss of ballence.
This doesn't mean there can't be room for both groups, but we need to find a way balance out the need for both groups. With that said, there is a natural tension between both groups of players when the focus is about capturing bases. The furballers get a good fight going and they will get ticked off in some milk runner comes in and drops the FH's. On the flip side, the Win the war guys always get ticked off at the furballers because they drop the FH's and wonder why the furballers won't shoot town buildings.
So these two totally different types of players end up getting forced to play one or the others game play at various time and it always ended us making one group or the other not happy. The thing we need to do is figure out a way to make each group useful but not force one group into some sort of game play they don't want to do. The problem is, with what we have to work with, it's a tall order and a very hard task.
With that said the original poster does have some valid points. and I'll add base capturing tends to lead to a lot of the dweebism that goes on in the MA's. The bigger side always pushes the smaller side back to the point the fights tends to turn into what we had last night. A big hoard of aircraft hovering close to a base praying on easy kills in the typical pulling the wings off flies because they can type MA flying. The focus on fighting turns into "lets see how many easy kills I can get" rather than hey I'd love to fight a great fight.
This ends up killing the fight because the team with no chance stops upping, the fighter guys don't give a crap about the base capture, so the win the war guys get pissed off at that as well. With this map the bases are so far away in many situations, that the guys getting hoarded don't bother to fly from another base and just end up logging off.
The other side of the coin, is the base capture system always ends up leading to capture the base any way we can with as little fighting as possible. It always ends up the very thing meant to spur the fight, ends up killing the fight. This leads to the Whack a mole syndrome that we saw in the last AvA land grab set up and what we often see in the MA's.
I don't really know the answer to solve the problem, If I did there would be a hell of a lot of happy players for about 5 days before they figured out some way to game the game.
I do know this.. historically fighters and bombers were not used to capture bases they were used to hit strategic targets or defend things. So why do we focus on capturing bases to win a war? This is just some random thoughts off the top of my head, but maybe it's something to work with.
Why not harden base ack and FH's so they can't be killed. Take the focus away from actually capturing a base but still leave the ability to target things like fuel, troops & ords. We then make all the strat targets like troop factories and ammo factories the main objectives for winning the war. The front lines could then be moved around by damage done to strat targets or another option would be to move the front lines by a historical timeline.
You would have to harden the strats up and make them tough to kill, so a lone guy couldn't go around easily porking all the bases or strats by him self, the key would be figuring out a set up that encouraged team play for he win the war guys, while letting the furballers do their thing and not be affected too much by the win the war types. A set up like this could allow each group of players to have fun but also not affect each other too much.
Now the cons to a system like this, is it would take much more time for the CM's if winning the war was calculated by damage points so that is a major draw back. Another problem is if the win the war guys are just off bombing and attacking strat targets, there wouldn't be a lot of players who would be willing to defend against them.
Like I said those ideas are just off the top of my head, but I do know there are problems with them. On the flip side I always know the focusing of winning the war based off capturing bases allways leads to head butting between the furballers and landgrabbers, besides that as I said about the base captures always tend to cause a lot of dweebery. The solution has to be somewhere in that mix around the base captures IMHO.
