I was in AH1 when the events took place that caused Hitech to introduce ENY. Until the last 4 years, ENY was never a problem impacting player perception of the game's fairness right, or wrong as it does now. It responded to a grave injustice enacted against the community by several groups along with the pied piper effect due to the effectiveness of their actions that expanded their numbers weekly. Regardless of how bad it made game play, with some canceling their accounts, you had to respect the success of the project. It massively paralyzed the MA and made life for anyone not part of the operation miserable. More miserable than ENY does today, and lately ENY has been a bit miserable.
After alpha and beta testing AH3 for two years, I've been playing a bit less lately. I didn't realize building a terrain after all of that could take the edge off wanting to look at a terrain for fun. So I get on mostly on squad night and for FSO with maybe one or two nights the rest of the month. It feels like ENY has become my new best friend.
Starting about two years ago ENY seemed to become a frequent condition of squad night, for the whole 3-4 hours in some cases of that evening Pacific coast prime time. Being a large squad we had the advantage of numbers and many years of experience to face all of the P51D, Doras, Tempests, 262, La7 and spit16. And we groused along with everyone on range VOX. And the uber riders showed up in their uber rides to shoot, runaway rinse and repeat. And we would be in our ENY dictated slow rides having to work our kesters off to counter them instead of having a fun evening like they were, running around at will at high speed. Who pays to play a game like this to "work"??
Eventually one evening we got fed up flying our winged under powered beer cans and Priuses and decided to country switch thinking it would help our current country and zero out ENY to even out the fights. NOPE!, NADA! no soup for yous.... There were about 12 of us and we really believed it would help. Shows you how much we didn't know about ENY that we thought we did.
So here we are in the present, last night was squad night and we were practicing with our next FSO ride the A8. And the other guys had their P51D, Tempest, 4Hog and so forth. We all eventually got slaughtered but, we delayed their gratification while we "worked" to delay the end. Now this started out at no ENY imposed and was our choice, for the practice flight to get to know our next FSO ride. But we wanted to come back in our own uber rides and make them work for what we gave away.
Ahhhhh ENY right when we really wanted to have some "fun". If you know nothing about the K4 other than it has monster WEP and crappy ballistics, it is not a good "jump in it ride" to go get revenge against a group in non-ENY impacted rides who are familiar with them. We did stomp them but, we had to drag them onto the deck and use our squad numbers to over whelm them. We had to "work" instead of having "fun". That's what FSO is for once a week.
This is becoming a common scenario for my squad on squad night lately. And it's an obvious stinker listening on range or reading text. Even when I come on other nights, ENY is there waiting. The MA is beginning to feel like being one of the Mr. Kraby clones in the DA three years ago flying garbage rides for his invitational fiascos called "Kill Kraby". All the clones ended up HO'd and picked to death by a herd of hero's in uber rides. I only did it because I liked Kraby and he needed the clones for his guests to shoot at.
It occurred to me last night that until ENY kicks in and my country and squad is doomed to garbage rides, you don't see as many hero's as we attracted in their uber rides to pick and HO the easy meat. Another phenomenon, the times ENY would clear up and my squad showed up in those uber rides, all the hero's were no where to be found to fight heads up. ENY is beginning to take the fun out of the MA.