Just for posterity's sake, I'll mention that about 2 years ago or so, the DA had a somewhat different layout and was used differently. At that time, there was no furball lake area and everyone towered-in to A30 at the head of a canyon as Bish. There was no Killshooter so you could kill same country planes. People took up a plane, asked someone right there to duel (sort of like you might in the TA) and moved away a bit from A30 so not to bother anyone else, and had at it. No waiting, no flying 3 minutes to get in range of your opponent. You could have duel after duel after duel, within ten minutes time if you wanted.
There were some basic rules that most everyone followed that made it work. No shooting from the runway at anyone, no vulching or shooting anyone taking off or landing, and you were required to get or give permission to engage with anyone. And for the most part it worked fine. The occaisonal transgressor would get stomped-on by everyone else until they played by the rules. (Read, if they repeatedly refused to adhere to the rules, they got vulched contineously by everyone so they couldn't get off the ground until they promised to follow the rules. Unfortunate policing method, but for a long time it was very effective.)
You could easily find the better AH pilots in the DA at most any time of day and ask to fight, and often they would teach at the same time. They'd let you join their aircraft while they dueled against other accomplished pilots and you could see what they did in a fight first hand. Most everyone followed the rules of engagement after they learned them, but when AH2 really took off with it's commercials, and more and more people signed up for the 2 week trial, we got inundated by spoiled squeaker griefers who just want to hold down a trigger and spray at everything from the moment they spawned. It eventually got worse, though still, 95% of the people played well, but many complained about the griefers to HiTech, asking for some assistance like an MOTD explaining the rules. HiTech responding by simply turning on Killshooter. No more griefers and no more DA as it was.
Alot of people used to spend as much time in the DA everyday as they did in the MA, dueling, learning, and teaching. Now, all you got is 10 to 30 squeaker furballers and the occaisonal grudge duel, or a squad practise. Personally, I think it was a big loss to lose the old DA.
