While players have gotten more toxic both in the game and in the forum I don't think thats near as bad as they have gotten less welcoming to noobs. Its been one year exactly since I left and the K/Ds for Jul 2018 is actually 1,000 less then 2017 so theres been no progress, and Jul 2017 was so boring I'd usually take off once and bail because it just wasn't worth my time. So here is what happened to ////aces High written by someone who isn't even going to read your responses.
Right about the time of WW1 was the beginning of the end. Players stopped supporting, training, welcoming noobs and instead settled into their familiar groups and really didn't want new people in them.
The introduction of WW1 planes that nobody wanted to fly, even tho they said they did, "I warned you", coincided with the introduction of even more ground vehicles that took players out of the air, putting them on the ground where they could chat with their familiar friends while lobbing tank shells from miles away. As well to much time was spent building early war planes, again that nobody wanted to fly, because they were slow and underarmed. As a purist I understood the desire full a full Historical set but the statistics confirm what I say is true and eventually killed off the EWA's and kept WW1 a ghost town. The stats also confirm nobody wants to fly the early war planes now either.
So more wasted energy and resources were also spent remodeling planes nobody wants to fly. More time too. As numbers dwindled the big maps made a game that was beginning to become boring and unwelcoming even more boring and unwelcoming. In the end who cares if a plane that gets 200 to 300 K/Ds a month gets remodeled?
But the biggest mistake was allowing the game to go stale and boring while sticking strictly to Historical accuracy in plane sets. Add the lousy big maps to the dwindling numbers and you get a game in a death spin that can't recover. Was a Battleship that important? Or an i-16, Brewster, fi-156, PT boat, Jagdpanthers, 87-G2, SD-251, new KI-67, Mossie bomber, Sea Hurry, Betty Bomber, WW1 planes...ect worth it? The stats answer that question.
You should have created a 1946 arena instead and stretched History some. The planes existed, either in fact or in design, and their performance specs could have been recreated, or at least close enough. So on the bright side you do have a Historically accurate game. On the bad side you have a Historically accurate game that people don't want to pay a monthly for because its no fun. Noobs are meat for existing players because there are no new players for them to compete against. The old crowd likes having noobs to kill but don't want to hang around with them.
But more then anything the game is very, very, very boring. Hell even a Korea arena with just a limited intro of new planes, along with the advanced late war ones,would have been a far better move then the decisions made.