I'm sorry Moot but I call bullcrap....very few of the self-annointed furballers put themselves in harms way...many of those I have mentioned are the first to run when a co-alt bogey shows up...to suggest otherwise is foolish...
Uh.. no. I don't know how you ever got that impression. I was practicing with Bighorn a while back and he brought up a few points and all I could say was.. Dang, you're right.. all I do is fly defensively. I don't attack anymore, because they just run away. That was the truth and pretty much all the furball-oriented players I've talked to echoed it.
and for Grizz....I only mention his stats because his own squaddie (Zazen) would not deem him worthy of respect according to a previous post...I was using it as an example of the pompous attitude exhibited by the folks who want to tell others how to play the game...If Zazen didnt know scotch he wouldn't talk to him...This is much more the attitude that causes folks to abandon ACM and stay with what IS fun for them...
Your argument breaks down on the last point. What does one guy coming off as pompous have to do with the inarguable fact that ACM is the key to ability to survive and furball (whether for its own sake or during a mission, assuming the mission is seeing combat against players able to defend themselves and not just denial of hangars or porking desert base), which is what's fun.. Otherwise why play a multiplayer game at all? This is completely independent of whether Zazen comes off one way or another in whatever he says. If that is the reason given for not sticking to learning ACM, the player has some other issues.
My point is that IF furballing and ACM was the ultimate fun then only masochists would abandon it to gv, buff, jabo and capture fields. Perhaps people who like the social context of the game find the other aspects of the game more conducive to playing for hours instead of a few sorties. Crazy to think that most players could care less about who spent more time learning a cartoon airplane, throttle control and track-IR BUT instead pursue what gives them pleasure. If they were truly only part of large squads because they sucked at ACM and they really didn't like the pther aspects of the game...you would think they wouldn't spend $180/year and find another game to play.
No.. ACM is just one manifestation of combat. Combat is a martial art. It's not just one tactic, or strategy. It's not just one goal or way of doing things, it's a purpose: defeating the enemy. In AH, we don't have a war, we have a game taking the general mechanics of a specific part of WWII (air combat, plus some scraps of ground combat) that best adapt into a game. When you GV or Buff or Jabo, etc, you are recognizing the "enemy" or "problem" and coming up with whatever solution fits it. Like crafting a key you don't have for an unknown lock. The problem is that the game is no fun when you repeatedly come up with the same big sledgehammer tactic for any given lock. Furballing rich in ACM is so much higher on the fun pyramid than one-element insta-missions because it's more varied and gives the player more tools to pick that lock with. More ingredients for whatever they want to cook up.
It's the same with every other part of AH. In GVs, it would be absolutely boring to simply have a totaly square column of GVs coming right from the spawn and capturing the base, with no peril, no challenge, no unknowns, just one big steamroll. It might as well be AI.
I didn't say you had to suck at ACM to go for big squads.. But the overall trend is definitely that the big squads don't breed the best sticks in terms of acm. They're attractive mainly because they more or less guarantee the safety (in numbers) those players couldn't gain on their own by properly climbing the acm/sa/gunnery/timing learning curve on their own. That's a general trend, not an absolute rule. I'm not trying to be condescending.. It's just what's been obvious since I started the game. And it's pretty similar to some dynamics that you find in reality, with people's way of life.
As demonstrated earlier in this post...furballers can't even police their own arena (the DA). Maybe they should figure that out before they demand that squad C.O.'s dictate gameplay in the MA's.
Pigeon holing. e.g... The blue knights or muppets have
nothing to do with e.g. the TAaerofighter squad or the mass of tempest/25k A6M/timid griefers. Nothing.
But yes... As the leader of such large squads that you yourself admit accepts so many in its ranks, so indescriminately, you do have some responsibility for what all those green players turn into. It would be responsible to have them learn proper ACM, etc. Whether you then lead them on to furballing or base taking or whatever, is totaly up to you and not anyone else's call. But at least make whatever you do do justice to what AH is supposed to be about. Air Combat. Not Air Porking or Air Drones.
