MA Off-peak is dying

[Wiley]

That is so boring I would be gone. Freedom of how you want to play the game is still the best way. I hated the forced structure games.

100% wholehearted agreement.  Unfortunately we're a minority in the gaming community.  I like the freedom to fight an enemy that has the same freedom to do anything we want.

And that's the problem.  I think in the backwhen a lot of people were putting up with the open world freedom because AH was the best WWII PVP game available for a long time.  When WT and other similar games came along, it became popular because among other reasons, they get a quick relatively fair fight.

You can have those kind of game mode arenas in AH, you just make an arena for those game modes while keeping the MA as it its.  For example, there can be an arena that is PvE staged missions and another with PvP staged missions.  With HiTech's recent post about some of the game modes he's working on, I think that's the direction AH will be going.

I think so too, and that worries me because I've seen so often in the past where additional game modes either get all the dev attention, or people perceive that they are getting all the attention, and the old game mode languishes.  Attendance drops in the old mode as people move to the new shiny, low attendance begets low attendance, and the diehards like myself either quit or put up with low numbers.

Hope I'm wrong, but I could potentially see new modes saving the game but turning the MA into something resembling AVA or EW.

Wiley.

[Yankee67]

Pictures speak a 1,000 words...........Rooks aint buying this new 5 min rule for HQ

Dundee, those numbers aren't that far off from what they were months ago.  I play most mornings EST on rook, and the bish morning shift is pretty active pretty much every morning.  One thing I would note is that it's usually the knights that are tail end charlie when it comes to morning numbers, not rooks.  I think looking at today's Rook numbers and trying to tie it to the 5 minute rule is akin to trying to add 2 and 2 and coming up with 17.

[EagleOne]

You cannot legislate fun into a dying playground. The more get involved the worse you make it. Your starting to sound like a bully

Something I was thinking about after I posted in another thread.

The game is really struggling at the moment in the off-peak hours.With 50 people logged on the MA is not much fun .When you look at country numbers
there are about 30% of people "in flight" . So they are either in gv's or sitting in the tower looking for something to do , or afk.

The usual pattern is a bunch of gv'ers wandering around somewhere , 10 people in buffs bombing strats and undefended fields,
leaving about 6 or 7 people flying fighter planes looking for some sort of fight or engagement.

So what typically happens is I log on - look around the map  - see occasional little blips of radar across the map  (buffs usually)
so I either log off , fly around for a while bored , or go make a coffee , (1 more sitting in the tower).

I know people whine about the old days all the time , but this didnt happen in the old days because "everyone" was flying a plane.

So I was thinking of a couple of solutions.


1. Numbers in MA hit < 75  , GV's are unavailable.

and/or

2. Numbers in MA <75 , Map switches automatically to a small map (finish the war - give everyone some perks)


This problem at the moment is self-perpetuating , less people in the air = no fights = less people logging on to fly.

I know this will probably sound silly to some an unplalatable to others , but I can't see the numbers heading anywhere but down given where they are at now. At it's heart and soul Aces High has always been about Air Combat , we need some off-peak.


The game used to have a pretty strong community of people outside the US flying in off-peak , along with the shift workers an US night owls , they are dissappearing.