In the ETO it was figured 70% of fighter losses was to light ack over airfields and other ground installations. German AA crews sometimes hit their own fighters who were willing to chance flying through ack to clean an allied fighter off their tail. As a rule, german planes tried to not be in the air near by while their airfield was being attacked. Ack does not care who it hits.
Here in lies our real problem. Ideally your base or CV ack will be color blind while you take your chances with it. In practice we would loose any field being captured because we couldn't up from it to defend it until the enemy killed all the ack. Add to that we couldn't up to furball if one attacker kept skirting the edge of the activation range for the chance of you running through the tracer stream. If ack really was color blind to it's targets, but only being activated by the presence of a red guy, we would take the chance on running through the ack projectile stream. Especially with our 5inchers as we blasé away at a single red con in the middle of 6 green guys. Ch200 would really light up, along with range VOX, country text and these forums the first time a newbie sqweeker wiped out a mission lifting from the CV with the twin 5 incher. That is exactly what would have happened in real life if the 5inch crew opened up on their own planes on take off.
ACK could be set to not track us but, if we are in the wrong place while it tracks an enemy, oopsies. Then when you press the ack hugger back onto his feild, at some point he may regret not standing and fighting. And if your 5 inch gunner is throwing rounds willy nilly after your kill, and you take damage. Or the auto puffy from your CV tracking someone at 8k while you are trying to nail him damages you. That would be realistic. Or one of your countrymen who you PO'd a few minutes earlier suddenly opens up with a 37mm while you are landing.
This complaint is myopic.
It's assuming somehow the other paying customer who is running away is a bad, evil, and cowardly person who somehow has decided to help destroy the game and personally the fun of the OP. No two players in this game have the same risk tolerance. It's obvious about 80% have a very low threshold. If 20% are scalping 80% every time they up, that's a lot of paying customers who won't be back. Having a reasonably safe home base to run to, and defend from, is logical to keep their $14.95 coming in every month.
The 80% are never going to "man up" or whatever arbitrary BS shine the small percentage of high risk tolerant players demand they "man up" to, to live up to their personal expectations. You are lucky the 80% is paying their subscriptions and keeping the doors open just so you can call them less equal than yourself for being different.
Dear HiTech, please punish the 80% of paying customers because they are running away again. Some of the 20% are not amused for the, hmmmmm, umpteenth billionth time in 14 years.
