As a preface, my schedule only allows me to fly after 10pm west coast time, so if I want to see any action, the LW arenas the the only place to be. MW sounds like fun, but it's a ghost town at night.
I've been in AH since the beta, and in WB since it was in beta as "Confirmed Kill," and I can't really say that the style of fighting has changed all that much in my eyes. Yeah, there's more strat, and there's GV, but the furballs seem about the same to me. The number of HO's seem about the same. The Vulches seem about the same. The cherry picking (formerly called "Many v. Many Tactics", aka "smart flying") seems about the same. The number of 1V1's seem about the same. Pony's still stay fast and straight. Hurri's still stay slow and turn.
The two big changes I see since I started playing are:
1. The shrill whining on channel 200 about any perceived injustice or problem.
2. There's a scoreboard and a leaderboard.
The first creates immediate problems that everyone can immediately understand, and it detracts from the game's "Quality of Life" like graffiti tagging on a neighborhood building.
The second creates an insidious problem that encourages players to "game the game" for a good score at best, or perform dishonest acts like vulch shade accounts in MW in the dead of night at worst. At the very least, it encourages that half of the playing audience who care about score to land their kills via any tactic possible (HOs, run away when not flying in a horde, etc.), while the other half just flies and dogfights until they're dead, with basically no middle ground.
So here are my modest proposals to improve the overall gaming experience in AH.
1. No more scores. No more leaderboard.
Sure, let the servers keep track of this for the purposes of commanding the CV, and sure, let players see their own stats, BUT DON'T LET ANYONE SEE ANYONE ELSE'S SCORE. DON'T LET PEOPLE SEE WHAT THEIR RANK IS COMPARED TO ANYONE ELSE. Keep the individual "who killed who" pages to keep everyone honest, but that's it.
When there's no reason to lie, cheat, steal, claw, run, HO, and vultch your way to the top of the standings, there will be a lot less if it.
2. Announce who killed who as it happens, in semi-realtime, sort of like how WB used to, regardless of whether you live or not.
This would provide instant gratification to those who dogfight who like to see their name "up in lights" but wouldn't require what some perceive as cowardly "running away in the face of multiple enemies." Messages could be like:
SHAWK landed kills of LLAMA, Agent360, and DoubleD
or
LLAMA was killed, taking WingOver, Condor, and Aztec with him
3. Employ a non-automated whine-abatement program on CH200.
Cities paint over graffiti to improve citizens' quality of life. Most whines on CH200 are the same thing - oral graffiti -and it detracts from everybody else. Deputize certain players with the authority to issue warnings, and then mute, and then kick, players repeatedly polluting CH200 with whining. As time passes, you'll need LESS policing, not more.
Suggestion 1 requires 20 minutes of programming.
Suggestion 2 requires a few hours, I'd guess.
Suggestion 3 requires real effort and has real pitfalls, but I think it's worth it.
I bet all three would change things for the better around here.
-Llama
