If no one plays for score or rank anymore, then why are there still daily people who bomb and bail or bail from a plane rather than even entertain the thought of engaging in battle with another person just to make sure the other person does not get a kill, and they by proxy, do not rank up a death which is a bigger hit to your score than a bail?
I don't believe that is the main motivation. I just think they don't want to get shot down or don't want to bother with that "contact with an enemy trying to kill them" thing. They did what they wanted to do by dropping the bombs and want to get on to the next run as soon as possible.
Do the vast majority of players do this? I would say no... but the members of the groups who are most vocal about winning the war are by far the vast majority, and since they tend to group up, you end up seeing this style of play which I think is more detrimental to the game than anything.
It wasn't too long ago I was out in my 262 just playing around. I ran across about 6 sets of buffs with a few 110s running an NOE mission. The second I began to descend down to engage them, the entire group bailed over the ocean rather than even attempt to defend themselves. 1 plane versus 20+, and the 20+ all bailed.
We can sit here all day long and argue whether hordes or unbalanced sides are the problem, but I think the main issue has been and continues to be the people that are there tend to not want to play the game. They would rather grief another country, "WHY NO DEFENDERS AT A7?! WE JUST TOOK YOUR BASE HAHAHAHAHA!" or grief another player by wasting 20 minutes of their time they took to intercept you by bailing out before they can fire a shot.
Yup. Happens every once in a while. I've just come around to thinking "mission accomplished" if I make them drop their ords or bail before drop. They didn't hit what they were after, I did my job.
I don't understand the desire to play a multiplayer game and spend most of your time killing hapless buildings and avoiding the enemy, but it seems to be a popular gameplay lifestyle.
The bailing bomber at 20k+ is just something that's going to happen once in a while. In some cases more often depending on your play time. You can either accept it's going to happen from time to time or stop chasing high bombers. Myself, I don't like giving a guy a free shot at our strats just because he can climb. YMMV.
I haven't read this entire thread, but I have a question. When the numbers were huge, isn't it true that there were not nearly as many MMO, FPS, console games and phone games as there are now? Why is it surprising that a game such as this, while being great fun for a select group of people, doesn't do as well as it used to? This game has legs. It has a loyal following and it has an incredibly devoted owner and support team. I feel that, rather than constantly whining about people who won't play the way you want, or that HiTech won't change the game to benefit you and what you want to do, BE GRATEFUL!!! Thank you HiTech, Skuzzy and all of the volunteers who so graciously put up with our BS.
My personal feeling is in the heyday there weren't a ton of alternatives that had WWII planes in them. People tolerated the open world gameplay because it was the only game in town where you could dogfight with a bunch of people. Along came WT and IL2 and suddenly they had something that cut out all the extraneous things like trying to decide what to do, and climbing out. You didn't have to spend 5-10 minutes heading over from the next base to avoid getting vulched. Everybody takes off at the same time, and it's always got fair numbers, no getting horded. And I think that's where we lost a bunch of people is because that was more the gameplay they wanted.
Personally, the gameplay here is what I'm looking for. If I wanted a game like the other games, I'd be playing them instead. That's why I disagree with people coming in and saying, "Great game. They should do x y and z to make it like the other games and bring in more people."
Wiley.
