I came here for fighter combat after I saw a cockpit section of Mistsubishi Zero up close in a museum and thought what balls to fight in that. Figured there must be a WW2 flight simulator available by now and found Aces High myself.
I flew at the furbal lake and duelled a lot around when The Few and The Muppets were active. I was only interested in ACM by this point. As numbers slowly declined - initially most likely due to the recession & other games with no subscription (no more squeakers for example) - the paradigm slowly shifted in fighting. Especially in the MA it became reduced to a game of who could fly the Dicta Boelcke Rule № 1 flowchart the best.
The dedicated ACM-heads mostly left either through frustration or from initiatives by HTC which seemed focussed on giving more and more alternatives to air combat. New fighter aircraft stopped coming, new tanks came, the 88-mm came
The 12-hour protest saw the ejection of 95% of those remaining that I used to duel with every morning*.
So the high-fidelity flight model-based, edge-of-the-seat, 'all-in' ACM-based dogfights I came to love are now EXTREMELY hard for me to find, especially on my timezone. I'm left with the occasional old-school opponent like Trogdor, Copprhed, and some others, the occasional competitive duel against Blade or Rud3boi in the (now utterly ruined) Match Play Arena, or literally giving small gangs my 6 and trying to swim out of it. Or trying to hunt down infuriating examples of what's left - like certain unsportsmanlike, infamous Corsair pilots - whom I have to fight with one ACM-hand tied behind my back because I know they'll dive out, run to friendlies, ack, or mama CV at the drop of a hat.
The game has been reduced to one arena, to almost no new players, largely just a bunch of old hands, grinding out the same self-absorbed gameplay day-after-day, with narrowband ACM, but extremely experienced and effective in risk assessment and exploiting every method the MA now offers to save their cartoon lives when the advantage is lost. Then defending their actions by bragging about their indisputably better score and rank.
Asking why, in the name of Satan's flaming underpants, this would be attractive to any new players for free - let alone paying $15 a month for the privilege - might have been a good place to start considering radical gameplay / game-balancing changes. A great and applicable paradigm from Kansei Engineering and Design: if you try to please everybody, you end up pleasing no one. You are condemned to navigate the average wishes of an ever shrinking puddle in the desert.
What boggles my mind personally is why the direction for a game uniquely distinguished by its perfect balance of flight model and simulation versus gameplay has for the last - I dunno - five years has been apparently anti-air combat. It would have been less disingenuous to have changed the title long ago.
*Regarding this issue - around this time the analogy was given that AH was a house, and you don't start bustin in telling the house-owners what to do (I didn't perceive that was the behaviour myself). I remember thinking at the time how unnecessarily confrontational and combative that difference of opinion became. It rather looks by this point that the better analogy is that Aces High was a hotel, and a hotel that doesn't consider the experiential feedback of its regular guests while at the same time unable to compete with the new, cheap or free house-sharing / couch-surfing competition ends up with a lot of closed rooms.
