Player numbers down?

[Dawger]

As a recent returnee to Aces High after five or six years away I can tell you why I left and why I only log in to AH to fly AH and our squad night (which is only 1 or 2 sorties now because the fight disappears).

It is way too hard to find an aerial fight, especially an aerial fight outside of the range of AAA/Wirbles.

GV and manned guns give players someplace to hide when the going is rough in the air.

GV's are good short term for HTC's bottom line but they are long term suicide but Hitech is probably pretty close to ready to retire anyway.

[Lusche]

By reading this thread one could easily think the majority of players are in GVs these days 

[Vraciu]

Maybe and no. Physically, maybe, due to higher resolution of reality (consider getting a 4k screen to solve the problem). However, doing 300+ mph at 50' you'd be quite busy watching for other things and flying the airplane. GVs are nicely visible at that distance in game. Dieing has no consequences, and workload for flying is minimal. Quite an advantage over reality providing more time slices to visually scan the area for GVs.

Busy flying the plane?   Pretty second nature.   I can fly an airplane all day long looking at my just wingtip (or any other method I wish to employ).  Unless I collide with someone the only limitation I have is fuel/boredom. 

Where I am from people fly airplane's looking for FOOTPRINTS.   Is it dangerous?   Sure.   Is it routinely done?  Yeah. 

Watching for other things?   Only if I choose to.   I have the freedom to look for whatever I want.   Where I CHOOSE to look should have no bearing in how visible a GV is by its nature.

[Devil 505]

Except for the troops I don't see your problem. A bomber clears a town in max. 2 passes, even a rocket-loaded M4 can barely do it with one load and takes much longer. Fighter-bombers can attack GVs much more reliably than other GVs can. This includes being nearly untouchable for the GVs (depending on the sanity of the pilot - not on the uber powers of the GVs). Reliably taking down IL2s with Wirbs? Only by continuously respawning, waiting for the pilot to mess up, unlike doing so in a fighter, where the fighter can be basically untouchable by the IL2.

Lack of patience, and really really wanting to push through is the problem. Going what may feel like the easy way and pushing through forcefully creates a vulnerability, that you seem to perceive as an imbalance.

However, going the slow and safe way increases the risk of becoming a victim to enemy fighters. They have more time to set up an attack. Even friendly fighters as support won't help much, because also the enemy fighters like to push through to get the easy kills, instead of going the safe way. This behavior is supported by in-flight radar and aircraft icons. In reality it was much easier for ground attack aircraft to avoid being spottet, or to get away at least. The enemy wouldn't be stupid enough to follow to the deck even if able to maintain visual contact, and continuing pursuit through ack.

The entire game these days seems to be about capturing bases - don't pretend that troop running is some side show.

The defenders park their tanks in or near town and wait to ambush the M3 and the attackers bring their tanks to clear a path for the troops. Once any plane shows up to hunt tanks, out come the wirbs to get easy kills - and yes, it is far easier for a wirb to kill a plane than vice versa.

[caldera]

Wirbels are the worst thing to ever happen to this game. 

[nrshida]

Wirbels are the worst thing to ever happen to this game.

And the ultimate evil of ACM workaround, the 88-mm 

[Vraciu]

Wirbels are the worst thing to ever happen to this game.

And the ultimate evil of ACM workaround, the 88-mm 

+1 to both.

[bustr]

Clouds right now have problems with FPS and Hitech is coding a new cloud function that his testing shows has removed much of the FPS issues. Large fronts may be a reality soon. As for cloud base, his rule is 2000ft AGL at the moment.

Building realistic terrains, I suspect most of this audience has never tried from their comments. And my first terrain bowlma, has large cloud systems, and everyone fought in the air at first like I designed the terrain to encourage for it's first two rotations. Then gradually the "not loosing" sickness came back and the normal flying above 15k in a hoard to a furball 19 miles away took over. I filled that terrain with minimum distance airfields to promote quick action, what do many do now, circle up over 12k before taking the quick 19 miles hop to furball. In response, everyone crawled back into field guns and wirbles instead of be a group's kill toy for the evening. Yep, no one fights in the air anymore for some reason. How do I know what happened with my terrain, I had a vested interest in keeping an eye on how it was being used to see what worked and what didn't, by watching it being used. Not listening to opinions in these forums.

There are two primary limitations to creating anything realistic looking in the terrain editor, minimum polygon size controlling how detailed you can create topo features, and time investment to create the features you are able to once you understand the first limitation. This can become a mind numbing and daunting task unless you streamline your creation processes.  At some point with any terrain in any game, some poor dumb sunufabatch has to sit down with it and go nutz one tool stroke at a time. Or it won't fool your brain into thinking it looks like something other than a fast import that was robo produced. Buzzsaw anyone, funny how I recreated it's core heightmap raw file with a spiral gradient while learning to create the heightmap file for my new terrain.

Below, results of a week of mind numbing process refining, you can see the polygon limitations in the color blending and some of the runoff canyons. The skill is in using those limitations. This is only a small window of much more work on this island. I'm attempting to emulate Pacific volcanic island mountain ranges after reviewing topo maps of the Solomons and Oceania region. I cheated to solve an issue the strats created for placement by looking at Tepui from South America. Please show me your emulations, I like looking at other terrains to see how the creator worked with the same limitations I'm limited by. I might learn something to speed up my process.

[Toad]

Terrains are pretty and definitely add eye candy to the game.

I recall early days though in Air Warrior, Warbirds and AH where the terrain was flat green and the sky was pure blue.

The fights were awesome.

[Vraciu]

Terrains are pretty and definitely add eye candy to the game.

I recall early days though in Air Warrior, Warbirds and AH where the terrain was flat green and the sky was pure blue.

The fights were awesome.

+1 The fight is what matters.   Some of the best dogfights are over the water.   

[nrshida]

Some of the best dogfights are over the water.

Agreed. Often trying to start fights just offshore of an enemy base. Sometimes I fly so low I have to stand up to see over the waves! 

[JVboob]

I find it runs OK even on inexpensive computers (down to, say, 2.4 GHz dual core Intel, even things like older Core 2 Duo and newer, but inexpensive, Pentium G's) as long as you have a graphics card that is about as good as a GTX 750 Ti (which is currently about a $110 graphics card).  With that, you can still get about 60 fps as long as you turn environment map slider to none, reflections and shadows off.  If with those off you still don't get fps you want, try setting textures to 1024 and disable post lighting.

i run with a GTX 720 and with minimum settings and keep 40 ish frames

[AceHavok]

Everyone has their own theory of why player numbers are down, but my own theory about the lack of player is the lack of advertising and possibly the subscription fee.  I'm probably going to get a lot of flak for this, but I personally think the subscription fee might be an issue.  If you look at games that are free like War Thunder, World of Tanks, World of Warships, and a few others.  They all have massive player bases, but they all run off micro-transactions which is a serious downside to a lot of people. $15 a month is a pretty steep price for some people, especially kids. 

Just my 2 cents.

[JimmyC]

I doubt the subs are too big of an issue, although it might deter the younger customers.
As a game its got quite an old clientele..
Advertising is definatley an issue I reckon, The interesting thing is as its such a niche game it does not need too many people, the advertising does not need to get loads of people, too many new folks might actually be a problem..
If we doubled numbers that would be epic.. but do we need more than that?
the numbers we are talking are quite small in the over all gaming scene I would imagine(just thinking of the ridiculous large numbers at wartblunder WoT etc) so some precise targeted advertising to key demographic (youngold fart plane /WW2 enthusiast, gamer) might be very effective.

Disclaimer: I know absolutely nothing about these things and the opinions I give on all such opinions and related  topics are provided 'as is' without warranty of any kind and are subject to change without notice. The entire risk arising out of their use remains with the recipient. In no event shall JimmyC and/or his respective squaddies be liable for any direct, consequential, incidental, special, punitive or other damages whatsoever

[NatCigg]

The price point curve would be interesting to see.  From 15$ to free vs.  3000 to 3 million.  It could resemble buggs bunnys trip through Albuquerque.