It's not any one country that does this.
Couple nights ago I noticed our city and HQ were flashing, no dar bar showing, so I figured it was an NOE raid. Upped from nearest base and got the the city and HQ to find......nothing. Dar bar flashed up once, so I figured the enemy was making his move and going for alt before dropping. I circled between the HQ and city looking for the cons, never saw anything at all. Meanwhile, other guys had upped fighters and grabbed altitude..........and found the enemy plane(s) at 30K.
So.........defend your strats, that comment I do understand. But when the map is glitchy or buggy and you have no real indicator of where to look, no one can say you didn't try to defend your strats. My thoughts are that some folks know what maps are buggy and are gaming the game as it were. They don't seek combat, they don't want a challenge, if they can find a loophole in the game, they will exploit it. One player put it this way, to paraphrase: If he might get intercepted, he won't even try. Mind you, he is the best bomber pilot the game has ever seen, stats otherwise, and he never attacks an HQ above 10K(even tho I have film of him and others at alts of 22-32K).............
And last night, I noticed an enemy dot passing through the edge of a dar circle, headed towards our strats. I upped a P-38 and climbed on an intercept course, hoping to at least ID the cons and get an ID from film if I could get close enough.
I found the con, B-17's, at about 17K, heading east towards our strats. I positioned myself up sun from him and slowly closed in. As I got into position for an attack, I rolled over to split-S down on him...........only to see three B-17 hulks falling to earth. He bailed when I got close.
To each his own. Some players crave combat, they love the challenge. Others appear to do anything possible to avoid combat.
I was discussing last night with some squaddies how much I missed Mathman's HQ/strat raids. He would get on the open channel so everyone in the arena could see, "Hello despised enemies" or something very like it, and let everyone know a raid was coming. You could watch the dar bar, normally a huge one, form in the back area of the country he was flying with, and watch it's progress.
A lot of us would continue doing what we were doing, but we watched the raid head our way.
Then, you would see a lot of friendlies start taking off to intercept Mathman and his raid. He always had escorts, always had a ton of buffs in the raid, and..........it was always fun, for everyone. The point of his raids were to encourage combat.
Sometime, somehow, since I joined AH back in 1999-2000, the game changed.........now it appears to me that some players place a higher value on being able to avoid combat rather than testing their mettle actually fighting, which is what the game used to be about.
Anyway, rant mode over, carry on.....................
