This post has been eating at me a long time. This game is dying on its feet. I’ve been watching the arena numbers shrink week by week. Anyone who thinks otherwise has their eyes willfully shut. One only needs to see that the game only rarely breaks 300 players, even at peak. As a MMO game, it’s only viable for about 3 hours a day out of 24. That is insufficient for long term survival.
This post is based on 16+ years of game and software engineering experience including building WWII MMO Air Combat games. Believe me, don’t believe, I don’t really care. I’m not here to play “debate”. This is addressed to HTC and they can either read it or not. It is, after all, their livelihood. If they choose to ignore, so be it. My conscience will be clear as I at least pointed to the obvious fixes before it was too late.
All of the below suggestions are based on these simple ideas. First 3 are the most important. The last two refer to ways to evaluate and build new features.
a. THE GOAL IS TO KEEP MORE PLAYERS PLAYING OVER MORE TIME: Not just GVers, not just base takers, not just furballers, not just bombers, but more players. If the current player population, plays for longer periods, that effectively increases the numbers playing which will in turn encourage new players to play. Any player that comes into the arenas in the off-times now, WILL leave because there is nothing to do.
b. BENEFIT THE GREATEST NUMBER OF PLAYERS ALL THE TIME: Aces High is too SMALL to cater to special interest fanboy groups. Features that worked when the arena held 1000+ now have negative effects on the small population. Features benefiting a small segment to the detriment of the rest need to go.
c. MORE PLAYER INTERACTIONS IS BETTER THAN FEW: Whether people want to admit it or not, interactions over time is what drives MMOs. Whatever increases these interactions is a good thing.
d. SOLID COMPREHENSIBLE GAME PLAY: It is a cop out to say that AH has a steep learning curve and just leave it there. A player should be able to take off, find a fight, shoot, drop bombs and rockets, without asking anyone for help. Please get, I didn’t say they need to be successful, but only be able to do the basics. If a player can’t discover how it works, then they aren’t going to be playing.
e. ONLY INTRODUCE COMPLETE AND EASILY UNDERSTOOD FEATURES: Again, if they can’t understand it, they aren’t going to it. So all the coding done to make it happen is a waste of time. Figure out how they figure it out before you build it. If you can’t, you need to seriously re-think whether you should build it at all.
New features are NOT going to save the game. No killer new feature will instantly repopulate the arenas. No graphics update or new vehicles/planes are going to reverse this trend. What will save the game is people being able to actually PLAY against each other.
As the first four are all subtractions there should be a minimum of new code required. Fifth one is the least important but still an annoyance.
1. GET RID OF THE BIG MAPS – NOW! Particularly after 1 am EST. You can meet (a) and (c) above by just this. Recognize the world has CHANGED. AH is not drawing the numbers it was. It won’t get back to those numbers unless players can find each other and interact. In the beginning, when the game was small, you had smaller maps. Why do you think a ginormous map will work now? Having a handful of players on a giant map is like a small number of BB’s in a 55 gallon oil drum. Yes, they may meet but the frequency will be low. This is obvious NOW. Hold off on new features until you have a complete set of appropriate size maps. This may require you to build them yourselves. A complete set of maps is the single most important thing to focus on.
2. GET RID OF ENY, PARTICULARLY WHEN THE ARENA HAS LESS THAN 100 PEOPLE IN IT: ENY as a balancing mechanism is dubious. It may function to get people to try different planes but is that really the goal? Here is what everyone figures out. In most cases, I and my countrymen are going to be flying inferior planes. I’ve seen nearly a whole country log out when ENY kicks in late at night. You can argue whether the high ENY planes are truly inferior, but no one really cares about your subtext of “I’m virtuous and a good pilot cause I fly a high ENY plane ALL the time”. It’s a not very subtle way of tooting your own horn. The end result is people log off. Who wants to stay on to get a pounding? See (a) above.
3. GET RID OF THE “FEATURE” THAT A SINGLE BOMBER OR SMALL GROUP OF BOMBERS CAN KNOCK OUT THE RADAR FOR A COUNTRY. What is the best outcome of this feature? You make one bomber pilot happy, perhaps some proportion of his countrymen happy and you make 1/3 of the people on line (one country) leave or want to leave. Guess what? They do! If you must implement something like this, for crying out loud, put a radar ring around the target!! It makes NO SENSE that every podunk airbase and vbase has radar but the big strategic targets do not have any radar coverage at all.
4. GET RID OF THE JETS: This violates (b) above. You make a very small percentage of people who have the perks happy and you tick off everyone else. A well flown 262 or 163 is very, very difficult to shoot down. It may not get lots of kills but it won’t get shot down. The pilot has to make a mistake to get shot down. With the small numbers, this is more likely because ENY will get out of whack. For the most part, these are being flown by guys who can get kills in other planes (this is why they have perks to spare), they don’t need these. They love these because it allows them to indulge in low risk, baby seal clubbing. Meanwhile all their opponents have to spend a lot of time watching for these opportunists. Putting them back into regular planes only evens the playing field. This allows a privileged few make 1/3 of the people get frustrated and want to leave. How does that help?
5. FIX THE ACROBATIC BOMBERS! Here is how real bombers work. They do not loop and roll as it makes it difficult for the crew to do their jobs. 5 to 10 individuals work the various guns in the plane. They have different skill levels, different visibility limitations and these are impacted by the maneuvers and G’s pulled by the plane. Though the plane might handle it, gunners would NOT be able to shoot much above 2 G’s with any accuracy at all. In the current implementation, I’ve seen bombers pulling loops and rolls, firing all the time. ALL gunners shoot at the skill level of the best gunner in the plane, with perfect visibility.
