the reason the tank towns are empty is because of supply and demand of cover and concealment.
TT on Trinity has hardly any cover.
Not really, mostly of TT's are empty cuz they put the spawns too close and they are easy to camp, we got some other that got the spaws pretty far so they are hard to camp, and that ones are the full ones.
Not really. TT on Trinity is completely empty, but the spawncamp battle at V135, where two spawns are almost on top of each other often rages on for hours each day the map is up.
What may have killed the TT concept is the classic "what the customer asks for is not always what he wants."
We have more realism with trees, hedgerows and mounds to hide behind. Now, you cannot see the enemy to shoot at without moving and looking for him, driving into an ambush.
This is actually one key issue that started the downfall, another one is
I reckon that whatever caused it, it hasn't repopulated just cause of crowd "fad" dynamics. No one goes cause no one's there, vice versa.
TT was alive and well in Blue for a long time this evening.
What you can see in TT on Ndisles is just a mere shadow of the past in terms of activity.
The downfall of Tank TownFor newer players: The "golden days" of Tank Town:
Back in the day, at least 4 maps did have an area called Tank Town. Their setups were quite different, from single spawns for each country that happened to be very close to each other and easily being camped (NDisles, the "original" and most popular TT) to multiple base/spawns systems with some distance to the actual killing zone (for example Trinity).
But all of them had action constantly, at any given time you could find a quarter to a third of the arena population in there. Almost safe from enemy bombs (Trinity), or heavily bombed and fought over in the air (NDisles) - it didn't matter.
So what killed it?
There are two initial causes: Terrain changes and the arena split (though not in a way some may think now), and one additional one that gave the coup de grace: Population pynamics.
1) When the big split came, all big terrains were removed for over a year. Thus NDisles was the only map left that had a TT.
2) About a year or so later, there was a huge terrain update as well as a redesign of Ndisles Spawns (in two or three steps). Tank town went from single, very close spawns a very small town and light cover (a few patches of woods and a few hills) to multiple spawns, pulled far back, with very heavy cover (the dreaded hedges - way more than there are left today). The intentions may have been good (to prevent "silly" spawn camping), but after the final change numbers in Tank Town fell off quickly. I guess the huge amount of cover and having either only very short (a few hundred feet from hedge to hedge) or very long engagement ranges (from the mountains to the TT are, several K) and thus the lack of intermediate combat ranges was killing it. More and more players were reluctant to move, simply lying in wait and listening for enemies rolling nearby. Sometimes it reminded me more of a game submarines... listening for enemy contacts, reluctant to move and increasing it's acoustic signature... who moves first is dead.
However it worked exactly, most players quickly got bored with the "new" TT and left, leaving only very few diehards behind.
3) With only one dysfunctional TT are in game, the
idea of TT died. You have to keep in mind AH's population is not stable and ever lasting. New players are constantly replacing older ones. Players that are staying for many years are just a minority. And new players take the game as what it is, they learn not only the "rules" but also the game concepts and game culture from what they see happening when they join.
So after 1-2 years you had a majority of players that never had really experienced the old Tank Town tradition. And when Trinity came back up after about three years... the tradition was broken. I vividly remember that evening: "Hooray, Tank Town!" I thought,went there immediately. I found a few AH vets there that had the same thoughts (I recall Shawk for example).. but that was about it. A dozen old boys simply wasn't enough to get things started again. The majority of players was not here long enough to know about it, the concept of spawning to a central area without any chances to capture (or at least so save) a base seems to be forgotten.
And now you see the crowd dynamics at work: No one goes there because no one is there. Even on NDisles, where the number and density of that dreaded hedges had been reduced significantly, activity s just a poor remnant of it's past.
There had been a few tries to get the ball rolling again on Trinity, but they all petered out after 1-2 hours. The very ironic thing is: We have a perfect Tank Town, very effiectively shielded from lazy bomb****s by 20k mountains... and regularly we have players asking here on the BBS for a separate tanking arena for "undisturbed" tanking.
So I do what the rest does: I go to V135 where I either camp, or spawn in to die within 2 seconds...
