Being relatively new to Aces High but far from new to online air combat (ya I know, one would think I would have gotten better by now). I thought I would throw some internet historical perspective in on the HO question. That internet historical perspective revolves around NETLAG.
The best primer on the netlag applied to air combat I found back in the slow, slow dial-up ages (ping below 1000 was great) was this
http://www.errthum.com/troy/warbirds/tests/netlag.html. That link is discussing collisions (use to be 10^6 times the problem it is today) but much of it applies to gunnery as well. If you scroll down you will see a graphic for a Mustang and Dora going head to head with the Mustang maneuvering away at the end. Imagine that the Dora opened fire. On the Dora's front end the bullets would hit the Mustang causing a hit packets to be sent to the host. The host sends these hit packets on to the Mustang who receives them then explodes into fiery scraps of digital aluminum. The Mustang pilot is terribly surprised, incensed, and throwing the joystick through his CRT monitor because he knows there is no way the Dora could of hit him from what he saw on his front end. The Mustang pilot did the correct thing by maneuvering away from the HO and is penalized by the structure of the internet and game software. This is the primary reason the dial-up HO became an evil action, its' practitioners to be ostracized from the community. An attitude that has persisted from the Commodore 64 300 baud dial-up era into the fiber optic home supercomputer age.
The secondary reason the HO is not considered a valid tactic is that the entire time you are flying straight at the enemy you are giving up the potential to lead turn and gain significant angles on your target. A clear insult to the fine art of fighter combat tacits and maneuvering. All fine and good if your in an one-on-one fight but slightly less applicable to an e-fighter vs. angles fighter and maybe not at all applicable in a high threat environment (red cloud around you).
The tertiary reason is that newbies falling straight out of the nest into their first dog fight will maneuver only to put and keep the pipper on the target. Since none of us glorious aces like to be thought of as a fledgling the HO is also associated with noob behavior.
The fourth reason is that on the internet lives are cheap and you instantly reanimate (Ace Zombies High). So another internet behavior is to press the straight in attack - you just might win the joust after all. A truly dweeb behavior that dispenses with the a real pilot's aversion to having high speed lead, steel, and aluminum flying straight at their oh so fragile craft and single life body.
Enough of my old dude self-styled wisdom. I would like to know from knowledgeable people, given the netlag origin of the HO taboo, how much netlag effects the game in its' present high performance form? Has anybody tested it and posted ace saw/dweeb saw side by side comparisons? The film viewer doesn't seem to do the flight path smoothing of planes around us we see in the game so I'm not sure that makes for good comparison data.
And finally before screaming HOtard on 200 or PMing perhaps you should consider that what you saw on your monitor is only one out of the hundreds of perspectives all different seen by the other pilots on line. Especially if reason 2 may apply (a HO^2, or HO squared?). If however HOtard to the forth power applies scream away.
