MA Off-peak is dying

[SirNuke]

But by adding more value for the money, you could increase active account numbers and have better retention of existing players.  Not to mention the extra development, features, and playable objects could also completely revive a stagnate brand (and yes, it is a stagnate brand nearing the end of it's product life-cycle).

An extra $5 - or charge $19.95 per month, means a 33% increase in operational revenue.  It means Dale and Doug can do more with 33% A lot more.  Just a thought.

no game on the market in that expensive. That account value thingy doesn't hold any water, we're not in limited supply

[Nomak]

I still would be interested to hear what kind of 'new content' you are thinking about in general. In the 7 years we got a lot of new content added to AH: 26 planes and 13 vehicles (not counting the refurbished ones), new terrain and graphic improvements, new strategic system, new arenas, entirely new vehicle control system. So I would assume you are thinking about new gameplay mechanisms?

All the additions you listed do matter.... yet in my eyes its the same game with the same gameplay I left 7 years ago.  Not bashing at all, just being honest.  So yeah.... I am talking about more than maps and new aircraft models.

I will offer a couple things here that I think would be good since you asked.... however as I said in my original post I really would prefer to leave this stuff to the people who do it for a living.  People who are far smarter than I honestly.

One thing that I really LOVE about all the "Lock on Modern air combat" games is the true feeling of speed you get when flying.  Especially when flying close to the terrain.  It just feels like I am going fast.... all the time.  You can almost get that sinking feeling in your stomach like on a roller coaster when in a dogfight.  AH on the other hand feels slow and almost predictable in terms of graphic terrain and overall feel.  I do understand that we are "flying" WWII model aircraft here and not a supersonic fighter but 400MPH is still damn fast.  I think it should feel like it.  It doesn't.

Second.... AH offers no "Immersion" whatsoever.  It does offer the best online dogfighting anywhere.  Yet I never feel that I am a pilot.  Remember when AH1 was becoming AH2 and there was talk from HTC about AI aircraft?  What happened to all that?  Give me the ability to load terrains, draw up way points and flight paths.  Let me set up 100 AI bombers at 30k over a historical map.  Let me and friends if they are available roll our Mustangs from the runway to the way points to intercept and protect the bombers.  

Make it more of a simulator in terms of the actual operation of the aircraft.  IL2 offers "Complex engine management"  Opening and closing cooling ducts, tuning engine mixtures and so on.  I am not saying copy their stuff.  I am saying give me an engine start procedure like an actual pilot follows.  Something..... anything except just hitting "E" and rolling off every time.  Currently Its all way to arcade until you are actually in the dogfight.

Just my thoughts.

Dave/Vorc

[Aspen]

Its a chicken and egg thing.  You need desirable stuff to recruit and retain customers and you need capital to get desirable stuff to market.  In a situation where revenues are going down, that capital usually needs to come from somewhere other than product price increases.  The risk of driving total revenue lower and losing base while you work on the new and improved product is big.  Often a lower price is used to help with retention in the interim.

[Lusche]

Second.... AH offers no "Immersion" whatsoever.  It does offer the best online dogfighting anywhere.  Yet I never feel that I am a pilot.  Remember when AH1 was becoming AH2 and there was talk from HTC about AI aircraft?  What happened to all that?  Give me the ability to load terrains, draw up way points and flight paths.  

Thank you for taking your time to answer in such detail, much appreciated  

Regarding to the AI pilots, that is implemented in the form of "staged missions", which can be put to use in special events, custom arenas and the AVA... where indeed AI missions were flying over historical terrains 24/7 at several extended occasions in the past 2-3 months. However, the player response to that (AvA) seems to have been lackluster, despite quite some bit of advertising by the AvA team.

[Brooke]

So is it even worth me spending $15 a month again on Aces? Seems not much has changed from Feb when I quit playing.

Yes!  It's still the greatest hobby there is!    Also, come play in "This Day in WWII" events with us.

[guncrasher]

An idea I've put forward a few times is to reward players for fighting while outnumbered. Every time a player scores a kill a score multiplier would be applied based on the number of red and green icons visible at the time. So more red than green = higher score and vice versa. This punishes those who hide in hordes picking and rewards those who up to defend a field from a horde. It gives the score-obsessed a reason to engage a more numerous enemy and so should mean more combat for everyone.

so you would reward players who only pick and run.  I have fought as many as 20 while flying alone a couple of times.  but I had about 10k advantage.  I nailed 5 or 6.  did I actually fight for those kills?  nope, I wasnt really any better than they were when they started vulching the base.

so the question becomes is what is actually fighting?  if a couple of guys up to defend against a horde then they get called ack huggers, hey couple here did in this thread.  if you dont hide in the ack till somebody makes a mistake then you become just a pick kill and vulch when upping again.  if you come from another base to get the "horde" then you are yourself just picking while not really fighting.

then let's say 5 or 6 guys up and kill the "horde" attacking while some rtb due to ammo or fuel.  then the uppers become the "horde" as they chase the guys back to their field then themselves start vulching.

point I am trying to make is whatch what you guys call "pickers", "horders", "ack huggers", ad infinitum, we all are the same.   is like trying to argue if the shot was a front 1/4 or a ho.  the line is very fine.  and all the others walk on the other wrong side, except of course yourself.

semp

[Greebo]

If you remove the "picking" from my idea it doesn't alter the principle. I pick and everyone else does from time to time, it is just there are too many players who do nothing but that and it is making the game less fun for many players, just less fights/time basically. Score is what drives many of these players to fly this way, so why not alter in a way that generates more fights? It was more the hiding in the horde thing than the picking anyway, it is far easier to kill when many vs few than vice versa, so why shouldn't score reflect that?

In your example of staying 10K over 20 guys and picking 5 of them off you still ran the risk of someone showing up with alt and forcing you to fight. In that situation you risk getting sucked down into the horde, while he can use it as an escape route. If this player wanted to improve his score under my idea he might let you extend away a bit and fight you out of icon range of his mates. A refinement to the idea might be to factor the range of the icons into the score equation, so 3 nearby green icons might balance six distant red ones etc. So then a bunch of red icons far below you would have less of an effect.

[guncrasher]

If you remove the "picking" from my idea it doesn't alter the principle. I pick and everyone else does from time to time, it is just there are too many players who do nothing but that and it is making the game less fun for many players, just less fights/time basically. Score is what drives many of these players to fly this way, so why not alter in a way that generates more fights?

In your example of staying 10K over 20 guys and picking 5 of them off you still ran the risk of someone showing up with alt and forcing you to fight. In that situation you risk getting sucked down into the horde, while he can use it as an escape route. If this player wanted to improve his score under my idea he might let you extend away a bit and fight you out of icon range of his mates.

greebo if most players choose to fly in a horde isnt it because they actually enjoy flying with the horde.  so your statement making them not fly with a horde wont actually make it less fun for the majority of players instead of making it more fun for less  players?

for example today at a81/a85/p67 area there was horde against horde.  and if anybody from either side says that they were just holding back the horde I'll call them a lier to their face.  it was one gigantic furball that was fun for a great deal of people.  if you had wanted to break up that back and forth "hode/furball" it wouldnt have been as fun for most of them who were there.

so it goes back to what exactly is the problem with some guys.  do you prefer to fly in a 1v1 fights and if so then ask others who prefer to fly the way you do or do you want to fly in a big free for all furball where either you have numbers or they have the numbers but it's fun either way?

do you want to please the minority of players who want quality "fights" or as I call them "bs fights where they want a guarantee they win every time" or just "go dive in and see what happens" kind of fight?

I pay my 15 bucks to go dive in and see what happens and have a good laugh and drink a few with a couple of friends.  if you want me to participate in "your idea of quality fights" then I am off to play wot.


semp

[Greebo]

All I am trying to achieve from this is to give an incentive to score-driven players to engage more often in situations which are not a surefire win for them. Personally I don't expect to get a fair one on one fight in the MA and I'm more likely than most to be one vs many the way I fly. I even get a kick out of seeing how long I can last in that situation.

But often now I log on and see a big red bar over one field and a big green bar over another and no other fights. So it is either join a horde or fight one. With the score mod I'm suggesting the more score-driven players on both sides might be tempted to go fight the red bar than join the green one and then everyone gets a more even and fun fight. The take-the-base players will still want to create a local imbalance to achieve their aims and the score mod wont stop them doing that.

[guncrasher]

greebo,  I totally understand what you are saying, on the other hand try to understand what the other players are saying.  most dont log in to win the war or have "quality fights/bs fights/my own term".  they just log in to shoot laugh and have a god time for maybe an hour or two, perhaps three.  as much as you wan to make somebody to follow a "order of how to the game should be played according to fugitive"  and i am just mentioning fugitive just for the heck of argument.  try to understand that most players just want to have a good time for an hour or two.

have you been in the middle of a furball and look at the names in the furball and realize that most of them are actually long time players?  they arent noobs that just log in the day before.  these are players that have 1 year to more and longer and just want to get into a a fun fight before they log off.

what most guys fail to realize is that it isnt just the guys who joined two weeks ago in the "horde" and I call that in loose terms (spell check doesnt work after 8 beers) but guys who have been in the game waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa aaaaaaaaaaayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy yyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy longer than that.

so how do I know that?  well mostly because when I am for/against the horde  who kills me or I kill are mostly players that have been around for more than a couple of months.

some players that have been around for 5 or 6 years or longer love to say that only noobs fly in "hordes" but the truth is that "noobs" just follow the more experienced players into the "hordes" and if you look at the hordes you will see that just as many "noobs" as "long time players" are in the mix.


which brings back to the original question.  do people fly in the "hordes" because they dont know better or just because they know there will be "another horde" waiting for them

semp

[Greebo]

If someone just wants to "shoot, laugh and have a good time" then what I am proposing will have no effect on how they play whatsoever. It is only people who care about score that it will affect and they will either adjust their tactics to the new score system or simply score less highly than they did before.

[ReVo]

If someone just wants to "shoot, laugh and have a good time" then what I am proposing will have no effect on how they play whatsoever. It is only people who care about score that it will affect and they will either adjust their tactics to the new score system or simply score less highly than they did before.

I would rather have friendly fire turned on in the MA and penalize people for shooting down allies by both lowering their score and deducting a large number of perk points. Those who make a real habit of this (Such as people who might decide to shoot down allies for fun.) would be removed from the game. Plenty of other games have friendly fire and it works fine except for some occasional annoyance. It's not difficult to out-fly or escape from multiple cons but it's much less likely when you turn around and see 5+ late war uber-planes wiggling their rudders and spraying cannon over one another. I figure the horde will eventually self regulate and stop doing things like this, or they'll all shoot each other down. Problem solved.

[Hap]

All I am trying to achieve from this is to give an incentive to score-driven players to engage more often in situations which are not a surefire win for them.

Why?  What's to be gained for HTC as a business, and what's to be gained for players?

[SirNuke]

Why?  What's to be gained for HTC as a business, and what's to be gained for players?

he's trying to give players a reason to fight the horde and bring balance to the MA.

"Hey look he's got an idea lets flame him!!!"

[Hap]

he's trying to give players a reason to fight the horde and bring balance to the MA.

"Hey look he's got an idea lets flame him!!!"

Okay understand the first part of what you write.  I've flown since 2002, and I don't know what "balance" in the MA would look like.  Unless you mean all countries having roughly the same # of players in flight at roughly the same time.