It is becoming more and more clear to me that the biggest factor in the lack of equal sided furballs is that one side always pushes in to the other's field and then invariably the team on the back foot loses numbers quite fast. Half the fighters may remain for a while defending the vulch but after a short period of getting dogpiled and shot on the runway leaves the defending team down to one or two players while the attackers may have upwards of twenty players fighting each other for the easy scalps.
The disillusioned defenders then move off to another base and start their own vulch fest. So now we have 50 players all avoiding each other and whining about ack hugging and manned ack dweebs.
The old days did not actually have that many more players who 'wanted the good fight' in my view. It was the base puffy ack that held off the attackers from furballing so close to the field unless they really intended to push in for the capture.
At the moment we have land grabbers AND furballers pushing right into the enemy's field and creating poor gameplay in general.
There are two solutions I can see. One of them involves us policing our own behaviour. We could, as furballers and fighter type pilots, hold back and wait for the enemy in the middle ground. This I see as quite an unlikely event to occur as we, as well as humanity in general, have proved throughout all time that monitoring our own behaviour seems nearly impossible against human nature.
The other solution I could see is to bring back the puffy ack at the fields. We don't see vulching going on in the WW1 arena for this very reason. Yes, I know, that arena is nearly empty most of the time. But when I have seen reasonable numbers in there, there was little to no vulching due to the puffy ack.
Yes I also remember the puffy ack whines. But really was it so much worse than the stale vulchfest gameplay we often see now even during peak hours?
The only way we can make this change is to convince Hitech that we would like puffy ack back on at fields.
We can start to make a difference now by NOT pushing in to the fields unless we want to attempt the capture.
I am sure this will receive a plethora of negative responses from most of us. So be it. But I truly believe the single biggest factor in the gameplay nose dive over the last years is due to the fights being orientated around the bases and not in the no-man's land where the legendary furballs frequently used to and now rarely still do occur.
While I agree with what you said. I don't think the system "death star laser" puffy ack would do anything beneficiary for ANY party involved. From the enemies getting gunned down and 'no one getting credit for the kill" to the Friendly coming in to land his perky plane and have the puffy ack hit him (like cv ack).
Right now combat is centralized around a few areas. Bases and towns being #1, no mans land (meet between two bases and fight it out like civilized people) and finally in an extreme distant 3rd, strats and HQ.
Personally, I think we need more areas of combat *cough* like railyards, steelmills factories.. etc. Not so far out from each other that you get the perk farmers out. But not so close where you can level everything in one pass either. I think having a system similar to the old system (Where the facilities instead of being singular and spread waaay out, are instead still singular, yet within a sector), with an airfield in the middle of that sector for defense. Add a gv spawn or two and wala! Combat...
Not fool-proof but right now all the combat is funneled into different areas. Like Bustr has said many times before, many players don't want to take the time and fly out to have combat, they want it in the 'arcade style' of 'insta-gratification'. So they go to the enemy base to pick 'HO', and even vulch. Even though it's a sandbox game, it seems we keep getting funneled combat.
While I know 90% fact that this is a PLAYER issue. It's quite hard to argue with someone with the mentality of "it's my 15 dollars and I can play how I see fit".
Not really sure what HTC could do to diversify combat. Instead of the usual Base/Town/Strats routine.
Respectively,
Tinkles
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