Late war planes unbalance the game compared to mid war and early war planes. Mid war planes unbalance the game compared to early war planes.
Late war planes are better than mid war planes, mid war planes are better than early war planes (faster, better climb, more guns, higher calibre, better energy retention etc).
That is why everyone is flying late war planes, because they are 'the best' without a cost, so everyone is able to fly them (you don't see 262 163 and Tempest very often and that is how it should be with late war planes and mid war planes, you should see them more than 262 but not as much as we currently do)
And if you perked all the late war planes everyone would fly mid war planes and those would be the top ten. Nothing will have changed unless you just prefer the mid war plane set and want to make everyone fly mid war. You still haven't explained why arbitrarily forcing everyone to fly mid war planes would be better.
The thing is, for most of its history this game HAD an arena where mid war planes were the standard rides and late war planes were either absent or perked... and people stayed away in droves. The late war arena had literally hundreds of times as many players as the early and mid war arenas did. The main people who showed up in early and mid war were there to farm perks and avoid combat at all costs. The players spoke, and they wanted late war planes. If you prefer something else, that's fine, but who are you to force your preferences on a community that has overwhelmingly chosen something else?
Idealy it would be best if all the planes were perked starting from early war planes and you would be accumulating points for the higher tier planes,once you unlock a better plane you get a few uses of it and while you have your uses you retain the points so you can move forward to the 262, the later war plane the less uses and if you use up your uses of the plane the points get reset and you go again from early war plane.
No, no, no, no, -10,0000 no. The LACK of such a system is why I prefer AH to all the awful pay-to-win "World of" games out there. The perk system is already bad enough. The people with the uber, uber rides are exactly the ones who need them the least, and keeping the points if you land safely means that people fly 262s and Tempests in such a way as to never, ever take the slightest risk of dying (which, with a plane that goes 550mph, is not that hard to do). And I can't think of a better way to ruin any hope of new players sticking with the game than forcing them to fly Ki-43s and I-16s while the veteran players zoom around in jets and other late war monsters.
I wouldn't mind seeing a rolling plane set (but the same for everyone), or maybe a different plane set defined for each map, but again, players have indicated they want the late war planes and there's no good reason to force your or my preferences on everyone else.
If you haven't done so, I'd urge you to try the various historical events which have their own plane set appropriate to the battle being depicted and which are designed with balanced fights in mind.
(On another subject, game IDs, I gave up years ago asking Skuzzy to change my forum account to "Loki". The problem is, you need to register to read the forum, and a lot of people, like i did, want to read the forum and even be able to ask questions before starting their online account, and the parameters for forum account names are less restrictive than the game. When I signed up for this account I had no idea I wouldn't be able to be Crash Orange in the game, and "Crshorng" would just have been unpronounceable. That's why my avatar pic says "Loki" in big red gothic letters, but some people still don't seem to make the connection.)
