Hardcore Arena

[Puma44]

No insult intended. 

[bustr]

The AvA fails from the start because it bills itself as an adjunct to the DA culture in it's spirit. Not as an adjunct to the MA culture. You guys want a country club where everyone is playing on two sides of WW2 while DAing. So it fails when the riff raff from the MA show up and play MA. Then you guys have apple ducky, yell at them, mod them, big brother is watching you oversight them, and they don't come back. But, your chastity and gentlemanly virtue is intact even if your arena is a cricket farm.

The DA gods infrequently show up because they have their own arena to play god in. Even though for years you've kept waving the welcome mat saying we are worthy because we conform to DA standards and even mod the riff raff. The DA gods got their fiefdom from Hitech, and don't need another one.

The CT or AvA could have easily been a  quarter of the DA bordered with 27K mountains for all the foot traffic you get with your patrician rules to control the plebeians. And you get to see just how many paying customers want to be rule bound for $14.95 when they have the MA. FSO and other SEA WW2 events work because the rules are for helping several hundred willing players get off the tarmac in one piece and have the fun of playing WW2 air war for several hours. Not, you are a bad Aces High paying customer game citizen because you are MA riff raff.

The CT\AvA rules insult most players who didn't sign up to Aces High to have someone telling them how to play the game and labeling them a bad citizen for ignoring big brother. And then you cannot control the Pareto principle or maybe you exacerbate it trying to be an exclusive country club.

Reference back to the DA arena self segregation of the duelers and the furball lake window licking, Hoing, picking, running, greifer coward riff raff. But, those AI imbedded missions in the AvA may work. As long as you stop trying to control how players want to kill the AI or each other. You will have to let the riff raff have the run of the place on their terms just like the MA does. Free market versus centralized control for everyone's own good.

[jimson]

The AvA fails from the start because it bills itself as an adjunct to the DA culture in it's spirit. Not as an adjunct to the MA culture. You guys want a country club where everyone is playing on two sides of WW2 while DAing. So it fails when the riff raff from the MA show up and play MA. Then you guys have apple ducky, yell at them, mod them, big brother is watching you oversight them, and they don't come back. But, your chastity and gentlemanly virtue is intact even if your arena is a cricket farm.

The DA gods infrequently show up because they have their own arena to play god in. Even though for years you've kept waving the welcome mat saying we are worthy because we conform to DA standards and even mod the riff raff. The DA gods got their fiefdom from Hitech, and don't need another one.

The CT or AvA could have easily been a  quarter of the DA bordered with 27K mountains for all the foot traffic you get with your patrician rules to control the plebeians. And you get to see just how many paying customers want to be rule bound for $14.95 when they have the MA. FSO and other SEA WW2 events work because the rules are for helping several hundred willing players get off the tarmac in one piece and have the fun of playing WW2 air war for several hours. Not, you are a bad Aces High paying customer game citizen because you are MA riff raff.

The CT\AvA rules insult most players who didn't sign up to Aces High to have someone telling them how to play the game and labeling them a bad citizen for ignoring big brother. And then you cannot control the Pareto principle or maybe you exacerbate it trying to be an exclusive country club.

Reference back to the DA arena self segregation of the duelers and the furball lake window licking, Hoing, picking, running, greifer coward riff raff. But, those AI imbedded missions in the AvA may work. As long as you stop trying to control how players want to kill the AI or each other. You will have to let the riff raff have the run of the place on their terms just like the MA does. Free market versus centralized control for everyone's own good.

There are no rules. There was once a statement on the special events page indicating that there were some sort of gentleman's rules but that was removed years ago. There is very little moderation in the arena, and never any warnings or mutings-bootings given for hoing, ganging and the like.

I have never encouraged billing the AvA in such a way. I only want it billed for the things we can control, otherwise we set up expectations that may not be met. Just as soon as we say "come play here and you won't get ganged or ho'd" someone will come in and get ganged and ho'd and complain about it.

There are a lot of  things that work against the AvA.

1. We cannot use the perk system. It just won't work to have Grizz zooming around in a 262 during the Battle of Britain.

2. No objectives. We cannot set it up to have a win the war map reset because our custom tables with historical planesets cannot be pinned to a terrain that would rotate in, and we cannot set up an ordered map rotation. It could rotate to the TA for all we know. With no tangible reward for objective play and base taking, bombers sit idle and it becomes a 2 sided limited plane furball.

3. Players cannot always find their favorite hot rod plane available in the arena.

4. We have no sort of event logging and cannot get it, therefore there is no way to have scores and stats match our weekly rather than monthly "tours"

5. The LW is referred to as the "main arena" and the main arena has to be the place to be right?

6. We can't even enable the acheivement system if we wanted to.

We are sort of in no man's land without the key features that make the LW successful and without the key features that make the SEA successful.

You can add a percentage of the AvA community railing against that "MA crap being brought in here" but we are well behind the eight ball long before that comes into play.

The staged missions may add a new dynamic because even if the players only want to fly fighters in escort or intercept roles there will be plenty of AI to fly the bombers, and we can make missions that have victory parameters as in percentage of target destroyed or protected. Of course that still requires manual tabulation, but at least the AI won't complain about getting ho'd.

[Charge]

3k friendly icons and no enemy icons. Simulates best the difficulty of recognizing your friends from foes.

 

-C+

[bustr]

The AI missions may well save the AvA but, you might want to speak with Hitech and rebrand the arena name to remove any previous stigma once the AI missions become a standard game offering. And the whole concept of the original CT really could be placed into the DA by having a 27-30k mountain range wall cutting off 1\4 of the arena and setting up tiny wars there. Other wise that's a lot of wasted space.

Everything else was simply observing the CT\AvA for a decade. The most fun was the few times a density of players was reached that conformed to 80\20 and the sharks weren't making the 80% feel like it wasn't worth the effort to up a plane. All while big brother kept telling them they were bad people for trying to do anything to get even in the short time they had to play that night.

The sharks don't pay the bills, the 80% do. The sharks like to think because they are the sharks everything is about them. Sharks never consider their survival depends on the 80% being happy first, to keep paying the light bill, and have a place to abuse 80%ers. Sharks by their nature believe, if not for them, there wouldn't be any game. The 80% are happy to play with the 80% and wouldn't really notice if all the sharks dropped dead.

In the real world this is why it's so easy for cultures to stratify into classes. With a ruling class of about 20% of the population controlling 80% of the resources and the freedom of the 80% lower class population. And just like our sharks in AH treat our 80% with peer bullying and social ostracization, so does the real world 20% tend to act out many forms of tyranny against their 80%.

The irony about all this. You pay $14.95 to HTC so someone in bunny slippers and their smelly boxer briefs can tell you that you are an unfit human being. Simply because you don't go piu, piu, piu his way in a kiddy cartoon game because he's a CM or is more equal than you in the Aces High Animal Farm.

The greatest lie told in this game, is your dignity as a man depends on your ability to measure up to the sharks on their terms. And that's how the 80% are conned into being a lower social class to the sharks while paying the same $14.95 they do. Not very fun being an 80% buying into this lie and all the other garbage about the rules of how to play this game for $14.95.

[Puma44]

You might have had a vague point in there some where but, the name calling and false accusations completely erases any credibility you may of had, turning the rest into "blah, blah,blah, blah, blah........".

[gyrene81]

Bustr must have gotten into some sort of politics or something in real life...seems his soap box has gotten bigger and rife with partial truths.

[Triton28]

 

Someone has a severe inferiority complex. 

[jimson]

The irony about all this. You pay $14.95 to HTC so someone in bunny slippers and their smelly boxer briefs can tell you that you are an unfit human being. Simply because you don't go piu, piu, piu his way in a kiddy cartoon game because he's a CM or is more equal than you in the Aces High Animal Farm.

You might get a more serious conversation if you could refrain from crapping all over the CM staff.

1. People prefer to play in the all planes from every country enabled at all times arena. Special events satisfy a lot of the historical market, leaving less of a base to gather in a 24/7 arena at the same time.

2. Numbers draw numbers. When there were 2 LW's, everyone tried first to get in the one that had the most people in it.

3. Those who may prefer an AvA type setup will sacrifice that to play right away, rather than be the first in an empty arena and have nothing to do until someone else shows up. It happens all the time, when we were testing mission tuesday morning, other folks saw people in the arena and popped in just for that reason, they weren't aware that it was a mission test.

4. Numbers 2 and 3 are true only because it all begins with number 1.

[bustr]

I guess the AvA as a venture didn't go well because the customers failed it then. Or the product rebelled and conspired to make management fail.

As for the rest of what I discussed. Management has to heat those coals and grill themselves in the real world with that garbage to try and discover how they are failing. Closing the doors is generally managements fault if the market or location isn't an obvious looser for the time and place. Not the customer. The AvA is your hobby and costs you nothing. The MA is Hitech's payroll and his future.

Aces High is unique in being like a sports bar. Customers out of control or deciding the bar is their territory can destroy a sports bar by driving away other customers. But, that still comes back to management allowing it or, even being part of it because they identify with only one segment of their customers.

The CT\AvA being two countries only, was handicapped before you even got to the problems with 80\20. Most 80% are not good enough as casual players to avoid taking an ongoing kester whuppin in the dog rides of a 2 sided historical matchup arena. So the AI missions may well pan out if there aren't any serious bugs. The odds are much lower you will run into a lot of sharks. Unless a group of them decides they want to teach the 80% some kind of a lesson about being cowards for playing against the panzy AI instead of real people like themselves.

Wonder what kind of names the AI mission players are going to be branded with for their $14.95? Considering there was at one time a good deal of interest in the original Tour of Duty and AI development. How many players could AI missions potentially remove from the active roster of targets in the MA for the sharks? Or, just to get away from all of the perceived evils we label as lame game play because of no structure or rules?   

Six Sigma training can be translated into two useful directions in corporate America. How to identify who to fire more easily to get a boost in your stock offering while avoiding responsibility for someone's failures. Or, how to systematically identify why you failed and a starting place to work yourself out of it by taking responsibility. But, then this usually means money and futures are at stake while all the associated actors can't just walk away tossing their income down the drain.

So did you guys ask HTC to run the AI missions in your AvA or, did HTC ask you to run their AI missions in your AvA?

[USRanger]

   What in the holy hell have you been smoking?!?  Not one sentence of your gibberish is true.  Wow.  I'm actually in awe of the outright lies you have posted in this thread with absolutely nothing to back up your (I'll say it) INSANE opinion of an arena or population you know absolutely nothing about.  Normally I ignore the slandering/condecending gibberish you post about other players, but this is just over the top.  You buddy, are a lying nutbag.  Come out of the Matrix and give reality a try.

Wow, still can't believe the outright lies I just read.  You are waaayyy out there for sure. Wow.... 

[ink]

   What in the holy hell have you been smoking?!?  Not one sentence of your gibberish is true.  Wow.  I'm actually in awe of the outright lies you have posted in this thread with absolutely nothing to back up your (I'll say it) INSANE opinion of an arena or population you know absolutely nothing about.  Normally I ignore the slandering/condecending gibberish you post about other players, but this is just over the top.  You buddy, are a lying nutbag.  Come out of the Matrix and give reality a try.

Wow, still can't believe the outright lies I just read.  You are waaayyy out there for sure. Wow.... 

"smoking" has nothing to do with it.....

[Tupac]

why halve icons? Why not double them? That would be more realistic. 6 kilometers is 3.75 miles. Realistically you can spot and ID many planes large AND SMALL out to 8-10 miles.

I fly airplanes for a living. Ocassionally I can spot something 10 miles out, but it's a speck. A weeny teeny tiny speck. I was following a Skywest jet (probably an ERJ145 or CRJ) he was 8 miles out, and he was a dot. That isn't a small airplane. I'd say to truly identify an airplane unless its enormous, you need to be 2-4 miles away so I think HTC has it right.

[Mister Fork]

I fly airplanes for a living. Ocassionally I can spot something 10 miles out, but it's a speck. A weeny teeny tiny speck. I was following a Skywest jet (probably an ERJ145 or CRJ) he was 8 miles out, and he was a dot. That isn't a small airplane. I'd say to truly identify an airplane unless its enormous, you need to be 2-4 miles away so I think HTC has it right.

. Which is why our friendly icons are set to 3k.  When we set the standard for no icons back in 2010 Jaeger, Oldman and I figured it was the closest to realistic distance to ID a friendly so that those with smaller monitors are not punished unfairly and to balance gameplay.

[guncrasher]

. Which is why our friendly icons are set to 3k.  When we set the standard for no icons back in 2010 Jaeger, Oldman and I figured it was the closest to realistic distance to ID a friendly so that those with smaller monitors are not punished unfairly and to balance gameplay.

and yet my eyesight wont let me identify which is the plane and which is the shadow at 400 yards in the ava when flying close to the ground. but I can clearly identify airplanes at 3 or 4 miles as they land at ontario airport .




semp