My perspective from a long time, very involved Warbirds veteran (Head Trainer, creator of hundreds of scripted events, and in my last iteration flight modeler extraordinaire and deeply involved in the code itself) who is on his second round of Aces High.
When I started in Warbirds in the last century, it was $2 an hour to play and it was pure aerial action. Fields were captured by landing on the runway in anything. The "squadron" I joined was actually 5 squadrons with over 200 members.
Radar was all seeing above 200 feet.
An anecdote serves to illustrate the difference between those days and now. One fine evening in Warbirds late in the last century we were capping a field in our P-38's and one of established groups was rolling in opposition. Our groups had a intense yet friendly rivalry in the game. I personally killed 17 of them on that sortie as they desperately tried to mount a defense. It was a glorious time for all, the vulched and the vulchers.
And then the Main Arena was changed to Axis versus Allies. It shattered the established groups into little pieces and folks started leaving.
And then AI was introduced and wing men for bombers. Ground vehicles started appearing. Numbers were down but not drastically. Aerial action was harder to find with players retreating to ackwagons instead of rolling a fighter at a capped field. The community was permanently split and rancor developed. Ego's were bruised by simply dying in the game.
This rumbled along for a few years until Warbirds let a fellow named Crump mess with the FM's. The result was painful enough for our group at the time, 475FG, to leave our home of many years. We came to AH and found a new home but after 2 years in AH, we noticed that after about 10 PM central time it was difficult to find an aerial fight. Range channel sounded like Saturday night in the Tennessee hills with all the GV drivers. Guys slowly drifted off bored and I hung on, migrating to the Furball Lake and the no icon, airplane only AvA for my aerial fights but I, too, left when HTC shut down the no icon AvA for reasons unknown. I played Silent Hunter occasionally and flew real airplanes a lot.
I was out of WWII flight sims for several years when an old friend from Warbirds convinced me to come back and work on FM's. I built some fabulously fun FM's with torque and realistic stall characteristics, digging into the code and fixing some very old math hacks that caused a lot of the FM silliness in the Warbirds FM. There was loads of push back from folks whose ego's could not take FM's that rewarded smooth flying and respected the limits imposed by real world physics. The push back led to my eventual ouster and the 475FG was once again back in AH just in time for AHIII.
I was super excited to be back in a much more developed game. My excitement has dampened quite a bit in the intervening 8 months as I have realized AH is plagued with the much of the same core problems that has resulted in WB's having a single digit population in its arena most of the day.
Game play is more hide and seek than combat. Instead of Axis versus Allies as the root cause of the division, HTC has extremely long side switch times building that wall. Players retreat to GV's instead of airplanes, players remain in the safety net of short range radar for them only and the AAA. FSO is now only orbit in your radar ring over the known target when on defense until the offense arrives at T+45 (give or take 5 minutes). Graphics are below average. FM's are built to cater to the lowest element (probably necessary considering the market demographic AH is in, folks who can scrape together $15 for the subscription but not the $1000 for the gaming rig) and are generally silly.
There are a lot of things I really like about AH and I will probably remain as there is no other option for the persistent arena model I grew up with but it is slowly committing suicide by boredom. My time in the Melee arena (now only once a week) is mostly a struggle to find a good fight with my group.
I don't expect agreement with my assessment but it is my personal viewpoint. I go online to engage in simulated aerial combat against human opponents in the most realistic flight models I can find. As Skuzzy has said, I am upset when I can't find enough folks who want to play my way. I am part of the problem. I guess I should embrace manning a AAA gun or spawning a cockroach-like ackwagon.
