Would there be that few in Blue? On Tuesdays it seems I hear around 10-15 guys going on about how much TT sucks. Seems to me if there's that many who are vocal, there'd be a half-decent sized group of people who would not want large arena play and gravitate to the smaller arena, wouldn't they?
Also, as I said before I've got a sneaking suspicion that 400ish people may not be all that horribly 'unhealthy' anymore. A lot has changed in online gaming since 2006. It strikes me odd that single arena play is supposedly a problem, when I log in on TT and see ~600 people on, and on other weekdays, the total of the two LW arenas is ~400.
I realize it could possibly be because it's not all the time, but I don't believe that's the case entirely.
Wiley.
I agree with wrongway. One arena would have 400, the other would be made up of the milkrunners hiding from fights, and a few of the fighter types "looking" for a fight. After chasing the hiding milkrunners, they would move over to Orange just for the targets in the hopes or running into someone who wants to fight.
I like flying Saturday afternoon in the "off hours" arena. There seems to be a nice class of people in there, doing all kinds of things be it landgrabbing, or GV battles, small fights, or big ones. After the switch I know my fun is limited, I have maybe an hour or so. I'll start in orange as that the arena that fills the quickest. Before long the dweebery really gets going. HOs increase as quick as the population, hordes for, and missions that were running 10-15 guys are now over 25. Defenders don't bother to up any more. So now I either join the horde my country is running, or I try to fight against one of the two hordes attacking us. Switching countries doesn't matter now, because it looks the same from each side. Time to switch arenas.
Blue has lower numbers most of the time, but the dweebery is still running rampant, only with smaller numbers
Yes in all of this you can hunt down a fight here and there sometimes. Maybe hang out outside the horde and get a guy to follow you out and go at it. Problem is he's calling for help before he's made his first pass because I won't let him come at me with a HO.
This along with new players getting lost in the shuffle is the reason the arenas split in the first place. The game is a bit over whelming in and of it's self, add in idiots that do nothing but mouth off on 200, give BS info to the new guys as a joke, or just plain ignore them because people are on "teamspeak" or skype" and can't be bothered talking to a nobody and people wonder why the numbers aren't growing like they use to.
Not that Hitech would listen to me, but this is what I might do if it was mine.
1. Turn the training arena into the newbi arena. First time in you go to Ready Room 1, a mission is layed out on a board, with instructions on how to accomplish the mission. First mission is pick a plane, get out to the runway, start up, roll down, take off, circle the field and land on the runway. When you tower out if you do so from the landed plane you get a "Congrats" and are sent to RR 2, if anything other than a completion, its back to RR 1 and a retry. 3 strikes and you get a date with a trainer. RR@ has you shoot down the drones, RR3 has you dive bomb radar tower
, RR4 has you bomb a town from a buff. Once you complete the "school" of 5 or 6 missions you graduate and are allowed into the Mains. Heck make the "training arena" a free arena, with the lessons being the simple stuff just to get you rolling it would only be a handfull of hours anyway. Once completed, your locked out out.
2. get rid of outside coms, no skype, no teamspeak, no roger wilco, nothing but the ingame coms. People feel isolated enough as it is not knowing what they are doing, isolating them by talking on a channel they can't get isolates them more. If "chatting" is more important to you, I hear AOL still has chat rooms available.
3. horde busting. whether its localized ENY, tying the town down percentage to the number of attackers inside the radar circle or some other means the horde must be penalized, or just flat busted. A new guy might like to hide in a horde for saftey, but in the long run it's not going to help him get better at the game. Like the stall limiter, while it helps a newb fly with out the frustration of stalls and such, it's the first thing EVERYONE tells a newb to turn off! The same goes for the the guy hiding in the horde. If he sucks at hitting a target with his bomb he will continue to suck because there really isn't a reason to get better as his 25 buddies has his back.
4. Moderators. They have to be a bit more heavy handed, and while their identities MUST be kept under wraps, their "presents" in the arenas MUST be more visible. A police cruiser parked across the street from a stop sign will cause more people to come to a COMPLETE halt than handing out tickets. If their was a "host" message stating so-and-so has been muted for 10 minutes for blah,blah,blah will go a long way in curbing some of the excessive heated chatter. Newbs will see that there are controls in place, the regular crowd will know better than to step across the line (after all we ALL know where the line is even if we don't want to admit it), and newbs won't be hammered so bad with BS info as the Mods can and should step in to halt it.
I understand that the game brings out the competitive side of everyone, a good game should. But I'm not going to go to a pool hall if there are fights going on all the time, and the cops are always asking me what I saw before the bullets started flying. You want a good game of pool, ok lets go, you want to argue about pool, or shout as I shoot, or keep spilling my drink when I'm shooting, I'm out of here. I'm here to have fun, and that isn't the kind of fun I think HTC is selling. What do I know. I've been here almost 10 years and hopefully will be for another 10 at least. I think things are starting to get out of hand, but maybe thats the way HTC intends them to go. I hope not.
