Larry,
You have every right to practice your free speech and that's not an issue. On the same token I have every right to compare the attitude of that forum. Some of the comments in there are childish and down right disgusting. Most of my bad experiences in AvA revolve around you and JG54. Personally I feel such actions are ridiculous regardless of how someone plays (or doesn't) a game. I love historical match ups and it pains me to see bad attitudes ruin a great place for me to fly.
Steel
You have to understand JG54 is coming full circle. In some ways you can <gasp> lay some of the blame on me for the way they express themselves (not just what they say, or how they say it, but also why they say it.)
You see, I've been in the AvA since its Tour 1 - long before JG54 was around. At it's inception the players were heavily weighted towards ex-WBers who flew as squads/small elements. Some like me came from AW3 as it was tanking with AW Millenium, and brought in a slightly different "culture" - the one of individuality. I'd often get into it with those AvA squads (notice, not "skwadz") going up against them and having them turn into 3-4 v 1. AvA numbers have always been relatively small, and just as you see today with this "code" everyone keeps hypocritically referring to, it was hoping the arena would be a little more civilized than the MAs.
Fast forward to when JG54 came in... they'd be doing all kinds of newbie stuff like porking dar, milking bases, ganging and horde-ing even more so than the squads that preceded them. JG54 was one of the first "skwadz" in the AvA. You can imagine how'd I'd get all up in their faces about the way they were playing the AvA - and of course you'd see the usual, "we can play however we want to." All this back and fourth led to some epic battles both aerial and verbal between them and myself (and others on both sides of the fence.) A lot og JG54 honed their skills on me - and there are some good sticks to be sure. As they improved and wee among the more consistent AvA players, they somehow felt the arena "belonged" to them. I've always had a problem with this attitude coming from any skwad in any arena (points at some DA skwadz who've been getting recent lessons in smackdowns
) My overall impact is minimized by being an individual instead of a squad.
Important aside: People wonder why I'm so "mouthy." Some get it, some don't. For those of you don't, it's very simple. I either motivate you to get better (so you can shut me up) or faciliate taking the "lameness" to the extreme. In me vs Skawdz dynamics, this means even more ganging and picking than usual (so they think, "hah, we'll do the things he whines about even more - that'll show him!" But.... eventually the circle either comes full or they burn out, simply being stuck on suck for way too long. I have no problem with wing and flight tactics, but too often people make claims of "teamwork" when it's anything but. It's rare to see proper wing/flight tactics displayed in any arena - and only slightly moreso in the special events.
Fast forward to approx '05/06 (before i took my break) and you saw JG54 evolving with their gameplay (less milking, porking - but no so much less ganging. I guess from their entry until my exit they'd developed a defensive attitude - as you can still see today, but which in itself isn't so much different than any skwad's "circling the wagons" when confronted with some adversity or whatever.
Fast foward to fall '08 when I returned. Ahhh, Jg54 is still around and I'm seeing them having evolved even further into the "the fights the thing" mindset (and ironically whining about the very same things they used to get upset about me whining about.
) They're not quite there, yet, obviously and it's always made more difficult by the influx of new squad members who need to be "helped" along.
What I'm saying here is, while JG54 has their hearts in the more or less right place, they haven't quite matured enough to be a more positive force in the AvA for a variety of reasons from, personalities to pretensions. This results in a lot of conflict with the casual AvAers, as always. Nothing new here except the names involved.
I just wonder if the irony escapes JG54. Cod knows it was fairly easy enough to wind them up and revert them back into a luftberry when I came back a while ago.
Now to the main focus. No one can tell another how to fly (well, you can, but yanno?) It's up to each and everyone of us as individuals to decide how we fly/fight. Ideally we'd all be on the same page, altho maybe in different paragraphs. Smaller arena numbers intensify *everything.* Meh, I am who I am and it's not who you think I am.
