Pluses I see in AH:
-View system. While a little bit on the permisive side, it's better and more realistic to have this freedom of views than the highly restricted (and completely irrealistic) 2DoF views present in "other games".
-Player base: both quantity and quality, AH's community is by far the best of any flight simulator today. Helpful, informative and large.
-Customer attention: top notch. No other company comes close to the immediate feedback and support you receive each time you have trouble trying to play Aces High.
-MMOL. As much as there are tries to emulate it (and there are), "other games" servers will never equal AH's. 64 people online may seem a lot, but in AH you can get hundreds of virtual pilots flying in the same server, in a given day. Noone can beat that.
-FM/aircraft performance. Open channels of communication with a very good development team, and (more or less) known sources for the planes FM in the game mean that you might be in disagreement with some plane's performance numbers in the game, but still those numbers are backed up by a good deal of well known information. You might think the developers have chosen a more or less representative data for a given airplane, but at least you know that data exists, is true, based on real WWII sources and not from hot air.
"other games" use sources unknown by anyone out of the development team (and my bet is that they are also unknown by them, lol) and the performance numbers/FMs of their planes is highly questionable to say the least.
Of course I also think there are certain areas AH could improve in...
1-Gunnery/damage model:
Certainly damage model in a MMOL is limited by the same nature of the game itself, you can't detail it too much or you would use too much bandwith. One can live with it, but if it could be improved it won't hurt
.
However Gunnery...I don't know wether it's for lack of a detailed model, or for gun dispersion being too small within the game, but a WW2 air simulator that allows for relatively easy hits at distances of 1000 yards (and with certain guns, catastrophic damage caused by said hits) is a simulator which should improve that department. In WW2 hitting fighter-sized planes at distances over 300m was extremely rare, most kills being achieved at almost knife distance.
2-Icons
I'm all for icons. Once upon a time I thought we should get rid of them, but after experiencing what an icon-less air simulator is, I have to say they are needed. Compensates for the lack of lateral vision and the lack of steoroscopic vision a player has in front of his screen. In real life it's much easier to spot and judge closure rates of another plane than what it is in an icon-less game.
However, in my opinion, icons should be rethought. An icon shouldn't really be a neon billboard you can instantly see as soon as you are into 6.0k distance from a plane ,and that almost kills the chance of surprise attacks unless you're attacking an AFK plane or someone without the slightest degree of SA.
Icons could be more subtle and do their job while still giving the chance of a good surprise attack: Make it so Icons don't pop out instantly as soon as you enter 6.0 range, make them so you get max brightness of the icon at close ranges (D0.6 and less) and slowly fade away until they are at 6.0k and dissapear completely.
Right now a simple scan of the sky around you will put you in alert if an enemy plane is 5k away. With the system proposed you might not see the very faint icon if you don't do a thorough search, and the next time you scan that part of the sky, he might very well be already attacking you...
just as in real life
3-Graphics
Lets admit it, there are games with better eye-candy around. But who the hell cares...I don't
s!
