I'm 50 years old, retired military and have been playing video games when they could only be found in an arcade. or tell me you've been playing the game for a bazillion years and
I'm 50 years old, been playing video games since the beginning, have been playing on-line WWII aerial combat since 1988 (when Air Warrior started), and *I* say . . .
Welcome to the game, and I'm glad you are here with us! Please stick it out for reasons given below.
I had been looking for a realistic war game, specifically a WWII aerial combat MMOG for a long time.
You will find kindred spirits here.
it's the rudeness of the people in the game and the still mind boggling complexity of the game...
Alas, it is true that some of the player base includes rude people who apparently are either dysfunctional or woefully inept in ability to interact with people (maybe never learned how to interact with people and so have a child's grasp of it even though they are adults). They degrade the enjoyment for many and, on occasion, drive off good people.
But they aren't the entire player base. It just seems like it because of the volume of verbal diarrhea they spew. There are a lot of good people in the game, too. Fortunately at least some folks are tough enough to ignore the jerks and not let it ruin their fun. Who cares what jerks think, anyway? The world has a lot of jerks in it. There are even a lot of them out there who would like nothing better than to kill you or me, but we don't let it ruin our days.
There's fewer than 120 people logged most days in the US and fewer than 450 on the weekends...those are abysmal numbers for a mmog. If you still don't believe me then why is there no longer two late war arenas and rarely more than 10 people in the others?
AH and Air Warrior before it is a smaller market than for things like Eve Online or WOW. What matters to a given player is not whether there are 120 or 450 or 4000 people playing overall, but what the fight is like around you. In my opinion, a good fight is 4 on 4 or greater. But even with more than 600 people on (or in events with a lot of people), you generally didn't get into fights larger than about 10 on 10 in your combat vicinity. In Air Warrior, the player base was much smaller than current Aces High, and it still was a blast -- as long as you got several people fighting another several people.
A) Quit treating every new person as an enemy! So what if there are spys? You think the average person can't figure out there's a bombing mission on your starts after the first week? Get over yourselves and welcome the newcomers.
Only dolts treat new players badly. There are many people who value new players, answer their questions, etc. I've seen it directly many times in the game. But there are fluctuations in any statistic, and it could be that you have been unlucky enough in the times you play that you were one with just some of the jerks.
B) Invite the newcomers into your squads.
There are probably squads that do that. Me, I'm not much of a squad player, as I like to log on whenever, play some wherever I want on the map, etc. I don't get as much time to play these days as I would like, so I'm just on sporadically when I can.
The game is too complex, which really, REALLY, hampers playability.
It is a complex game, but it doesn't take that long to get up to speed once you know how to fly. Here's a guide that covers some of the basics (although the guide is a bit out of date):
http://electraforge.com/brooke/flightsims/aces_high/startGuide/startGuide.html#_Toc91409091 I) Persuade AH to create an automatic landing procedure.
A person can practice landing offline and be able to do it after a little bit of practice, but if they botch it and crash instead for a while, the consequence is that they get a little less in score than they otherwise would get. But that only matters if you care about score, and a beginner isn't going to be a high scorer anyway.
II) Convince AH to publish game hints like "How to take a base" (the Knits could learn from that one!) or "Carrier tactics" or "Squadron Tactics" or "Hints on how to win a map" "The importance of Strats" etc etc. Don't just assume people know it or will pick it up before they've decided to bail on a game that's taking their money, boring, and where everyone is a D*ck...
True, extra guides could be helpful. Some of that is in the game's help file available from the home page:
http://www.hitechcreations.com/support/support-help III) Convince AH to Update the plane characteristics! Having old info is a DEAD giveaway the game is losing membership. I almost didn't get the game after reading them. I knew they were last updated in like, what? 2007?
Not sure which characteristics you mean.
Last but not least listen to new people.
Some people do listen to others. But keep in mind that there are people in the game who have their own opinions. Some are former fighter pilots, airline pilots, air-transport pilots, people who have flown P-51 Mustangs, people who have piloted B-29's, people who have piloted B-24's and B-17's, people who are private pilots, people who are aerobatic pilots, people who have Ph.D.'s in physics and mathematical/computational modeling, people who are WWII historians, people who have read dozens of books on WWII aviation, even at least one WWII vet, people who have been playing this sort of sim for over 20 years, people who have worked in marketing, people who run small businesses, software engineers, etc., and they have their own thoughts based on their backgrounds and long experience of what works and what doesn't, what are improvements, what are not, etc. There is a long history of debate over aspects of the game, the modeling, aircraft, and everything else, and folks tend to have their own strong opinions on things.
By the way, as a new player, I invite you to play in special events, which have a lot different style than the Main Arena and can provide a different style of fun. I run "This Day in WWII" events and help put on "Scenarios".
This Day in WWII is this:
http://ahevents.org/events/this-day-in-wwii.htmlThe next one is on April 18.
Scenarios are this:
http://ahevents.org/events/scenarios/about-scenarios.htmlThe next one is in June.
