on a Sunday evening (1:30 AM local / 7:30 PM EST), trying to get a few minutes of massive multiplayer air combat action...
...and what did I find?
No, our radar wasn't down.
There were just no red darbars anywhere. There were no battles. In a few minutes I was staring at the screen, rooks captured two bases against about no resistance at all, and were already hording up for the next round.
This wasn't midweek off hours. This was on a weekend, end of Euro primetime and start of US primetime, with 280 players on a huge map.
It seems that the only time I can get somethin akin to the great battles of old is flying on a big map like Ozkansas is to play on a Saturday at 4 am, the height of US prime time with numbers hitting just over 300. Unfortunately that's hard to do with having a family now. Being mostly limited to reasonable daytime/early evening hours, I simply don't know what to do on these maps with 30-120 players online. Until last year I was doing the strat game then, attacking and defending the central strats - but that's a thing of the past.
Tomorrow, when my wife comes home from work, I can log in for another hour and see how about 80 players are being spread all over that map. I can only hope being fortunate enough that my chesspiece comes under some surprise CV attack during that time.
It's quite depressing.
(And yes, this is a whine, and I actually eating some cheese right now, so thank you)