Late war Plane dillema

[TWCAxew]

Maybe HTC should allow slower, turny planes to be flown for free then?

As long as your not breaking the TOS you should be allowed to play, but do you know that some games like Mechwarrior Online have gameplay specific terms of service? If you try and hide to just delay your enemy winning the round (and stopping everyone else from enjoying/moving on to other matches) you can be kicked/banned from the service.

No fights are a detrement to the game, specially in times like these.

What can be done about it?

That's also something I would be a big supporter for. A similar game to ah with the same payment model has this as well. I made me play the game and subscribe later to it. It would probably also increase the player count. The 2 week trial is confusing at best because you need to enter your credit card information when creating an new account. It looks shady if you don't know the company yet.

DutchVII

[novice]

I would venture to say a lot more newbs in d9 or spit 16 would turn and fight a g14 or something along that line than another Spit 16 or god fobid La-7.
   i'll fight a G14 in a spit 5-8,9,16-even though i don't like them the spit 14 as well.

just because a late war plane is faster in most cases than a late or mid or early war plane doesn't mean LWP's can't be shot down-it takes 2 items to factor that--type of plane and pilot vs type of plane and pilot. call me stupid if you want but i'll fight anyone with any plane against any plane at any time-except the Match play arena.

I think you misunderstood what I meant by that because the way I wrote it.

If a newb is flying spit 16 or an 8 as he should he is more apt to turn around and flght a skilled player in a g6, ki61 as opposed to skilled player in la-7 or spit -16.

I know from my personal experience that after a while you get a feel who might be in that Spit-16 and just plainly would not turn against someone who I know will kill me on the second merge every time, time and time again.

[AAIK]

The 2 week trial is confusing at best because you need to enter your credit card information when creating an new account. It looks shady if you don't know the company yet.
DutchVII

Wait, is this true? I don't remember having to put in a CC.

[Wiley]

So the litany of grievances seems to be:

- long climbout times
- unpredictability of the enemy
- ability to run
- numbers imbalance

among others.

The problem is the open world.  There's no need to bother "funneling people into an area" when you could just take away the open world and have a small map and a simple objective for two balanced teams with whatever group of aircraft is deemed "fair" to fight over it.

Open world ongoing PvP is just not popular and never will be, because of the consequences to having that kind of freedom listed above.  Personally I like it a lot better than the alternatives, which is why I'm here.  But it's a niche within a niche within a niche.  In the heyday of AH, there were lots of people because there were no good alternatives that had the short, bite-sized rounds of gameplay most people want with no long climbout times and "fair" fights.  When alternatives showed up, the people who were tolerating the open world to fly airplanes went elsewhere where there was more structured gameplay and a skinner box hamster wheel to grind for pretty things and "progression".

Wiley.

[TWCAxew]

Wait, is this true? I don't remember having to put in a CC.

I believe it was anyway. Haven't created a new account in some time though.

I used to use my mom's cc back in the day to pay for aces high. And own a cc just for ah my self when I left the house. Since a year or two PayPal is accepted so I canceled my cc and started using PayPal.

DutchVII

[The Fugitive]

You seem to have missed the point.

People get to play the way they want to. If you find that boring then it is your problem.

The plan to nudge other people in a certain direction with perks and ENY will not change how people choose to fly.
It may even make things worse.

Therefor the only practical option is for the OP to change his behavior since you cannot change other people.

Nice of people to try to help him but he's made it clear he's not listening.

I'm sure when. Hitech and his crew designed and built Aces High this is the type of play they envisioned.  Players avoiding combat anyway they can. Sneaking bases instead of fighting for them. Players ignoring 95% of the planes and vehicles they put into the game in favor of the the top uber rides.

All is not well.

[CptTrips]

The problem is the open world. 
...

Open world ongoing PvP is just not popular and never will be, because of the consequences to having that kind of freedom listed above.

I'm not sure I agree with that 100%. 

I hate to continually harp on the Battlefield series, but that and AH are the games whos design and game-play I'm most familiar with.  I've played about 10 years in each cumulatively.  I've spent a lot of time thinking about their similarities and differences over the years.

In Battlefield, you have an open world.  It is a much smaller open world.  It is scaled appropriately to the player numbers so there are not vast regions of emptiness.  You have all kinds of emergent behavior as players connive all kinds of exploits and counter exploits to take advantage of the environment.   That's a feature not a bug.  It is amazing to see some of the creative stuff people come up with.  lol. 

There is a collection of bases to be taken.  A number of bases scaled appropriately to the number of players in a server.  It is as open a sandbox as AH.  The bases tend to be taken in linear fashion for tactical reasons, but sometimes you want to sneak a squad through the lines and take a rear base to force the enemy to react and take pressure off your front line bases. 

The Battlefield series is very popular.  Each of their games does about 20-40 mil$. 


Here are some notable design differences (besides the obvious infantry vs AC)....

1.  I think the BF maps are scaled better to the number of players. If keeps the action fast and tight.

2.  Time-to-Action is very low.  That keeps loss aversion low.  Sure you get pissed when you get killed, but you can get back in the action so fast that you don't worry about it too much.  A death cost you about a minute of non-combat time instead of 15-20 minutes. So you get back in to get revenge quickly and forget about the last death.

3.  (This is an interesting one.  Possibly important.)  When a side has more bases than the other, the losing side starts bleeding "tickets" like a ticking clock.  When a side gets to zero tickets, they lose.  I think there is always an odd number of bases so you never get even stasis (I might be wrong on that but maybe that is a good idea. ).  That discourages a dug in stale-mate.  If you are not winning, then you are losing and the clock is ticking. That provides effective focus to motivate base capture in a timely manner.  You can't afford to lolly-gag around and not engage.

4.  The thing I always like about BF was one way or another a game was over in a reasonable time.  In about 20-30 minutes, you either won or lost.  In a nights gaming session you could have a game play story arc that had a beginning, a middle, and an end.    As opposed to logging in, being in the middle of a map, play for hours, take a few bases, lose a few, log generally with no resolution.  Maybe the same map is still up the next day, maybe some EU guys won it when you weren't there. It is hard to get emotionally invested in that kind of grind.  20 minutes?  OK not for AH.  But maybe so type of time critical driver so that one way or another maps are won or lost in 2-3 hours.  You snooze, you lose.


Battlefield has 10's of millions of players.  It is likely that any new player trying AH has had their expectations of cadence and pacing formed by games like that.  I'm as much an AH fan boy as a BF fan boy.  I'm just offering some insight as to how a new player might see AH.


$0.02.

[edit]  Oh.  And BF is two sided with balancing.

[hitech]

The 2 week trial is confusing at best because you need to enter your credit card information when creating an new account. It looks shady if you don't know the company yet.

DutchVII

Now this just plane pisses me off. Saying we look shady by talking out your back side, when we have never in the history of AH asked for a credit card to have the free trial.

HiTech

[Wiley]

In Battlefield, you have an open world.  It is a much smaller open world.

4.  The thing I always like about BF was one way or another a game was over in a reasonable time.  In about 20-30 minutes, you either won or lost.

This is exactly the distinction I'm talking about when I say "ongoing".  BF not an ongoing open world battle, it's a 20-30 minute rounds-based game.  The world is "open" only in that you can go anywhere in it.  You have that bite-sized bit of gameplay that lets people have a win/loss in that short period of time.  They're led by the nose to complete or fail at that set of victory conditions in the limited context of the round.

The only other active game that's comparable to AH I'm aware of at the moment is Planetside 2.  It's pretty similar to AH, relatively big map, 3 sides (I wonder if there's a possibility that the 3 side thing didn't come completely out of HT's backside?) and ongoing fight until victory conditions are met, which can take hours/days.  It's more infantry focused though.  And again, player numbers are miniscule compared to stuff like BF or Counterstrike because of the distinction I mentioned above.  Rounds- based even teams vs open world ongoing.

EVERYTHING else on the market is more like battlefield.  Round based, short time to victory, 2 even sides.  And as you noted, they're wildly more popular.

If that's what somebody wants, fantastic!  They invented it and it's called WT.  For some people like me, if I wanted that kind of gameplay that's where I'd be.  I don't want things to be that simplistic so I prefer to be here.

Wiley.

[CptTrips]

This is exactly the distinction I'm talking about when I say "ongoing".  BF not an ongoing open world battle, it's a 20-30 minute rounds-based game. 

OK.  I see what you are saying.  They are both open sandbox, but BF is time constrained.

The time constraint does generate intense action because you can't afford to sit around and pick your nose. 

So my next best suggestion would be to just keep shrinking maps to maintain player density.

But, if you like the current pace, then you are in luck.  For a while.  But the pace won't appeal to many new players based on what they are used to.  The current population continues to evaporate off, through exhaustion, frustration or dying of old age.

[novice]

I'm sure when. Hitech and his crew designed and built Aces High this is the type of play they envisioned.  Players avoiding combat anyway they can. Sneaking bases instead of fighting for them. Players ignoring 95% of the planes and vehicles they put into the game in favor of the the top uber rides.

All is not well.

This here, I beleive you could remove all the early and mid war planes from MA and no one would complain.

And yess there is DA but its tough getting anyone to go there, yesterday we had 4 guys in Match play  and thats the absolute most I seen since my 3-4 months with AH.

[Wiley]

OK.  I see what you are saying.  They are both open sandbox, but BF is time constrained.

The time constraint does generate intense action because you can't afford to sit around and pick your nose. 

So my next best suggestion would be to just keep shrinking maps to maintain player density.

But, if you like the current pace, then you are in luck.  For a while.  But the pace won't appeal to many new players based on what they are used to.  The current population continues to evaporate off, through exhaustion, frustration or dying of old age.

Exactly, which is why I say by its very nature this game will just never be that popular.  IMO by changing it to be like those other games, it's effectively the same as shutting it down and creating a new game.  This game is awesome with 500 people in the arena.  Unfortunately, without that kind of numbers the fun level diminishes rapidly.

It simply boils down to the gaming community has moved on and expects more of a game than an arena like it is here.  Giving people a world and letting their emergent behavior create gameplay is just not sufficient for today's gamer.

They need to accomplish something in about half an hour.  They need to see a number in a database go up a few points over time so they can show "improvement" (which actually means just putting your time in) I haven't played BF but I bet you still progress even if you lose every round and die a lot more than you kill.  They need some kind of developer-created content to work towards and spend their ingame earned points and microtransaction money on, like hats or new vehicles or new paint jobs for their vehicles.

And above all, they need things to be "fair" however they've decided to define it.  Can't have advanced planes fighting early planes, can't have a heavy numbers disparity.  Ideally there should be some kind of ELO skill balancing.

This is not that.  For the vast majority, that's a problem.  For some, it's what they want, if the numbers are there.

Wiley.

[CptTrips]

Exactly, which is why I say by its very nature this game will just never be that popular.  IMO by changing it to be like those other games, it's effectively the same as shutting it down and creating a new game. 

Would you prefer HTC to shut down and have no AH at all as opposed to changing something?

It won't happen tomorrow, but eventually it hits some critical mass and then everyone leaves at once.  Just ask MySpace.

Giving people a world and letting their emergent behavior create gameplay is just not sufficient for today's gamer.

AS I stated, there is a huge amount of emergent behavior in games like BF.  People come up with stuff the designers could never have imagined.    It's just that a map doesn't drag on for a week with no resolution.

You rank up a class based on earning points for kills, capturing bases, and winning the match.  I don't think you get penalized for dying.  They want to promote action, not timid loss aversion.

As you move up in rank, certain more advanced weapons are unlocked that you can purchase with your earned points.  So yeah, you get better players with better weapons.  War is Hell.  You can't buy more advanced weapons.  They tried to sneak a little of that into Star Wars Battlefront and got burned alive.

They balance side numbers.  some servers will attempt to balance skill levels and some will shuffle players, squads between matches to keep evening things up.  If things get too uneven, players just log off, just like in AH.


In the first 6 years or so I played AH starting in 1999, there were enough planes in the arena to blot out the sun.

I left for a while and came back when WWI was first introduced.  There were still (Lusche?) 350 or so on a good night.  I was kinda concerned but there was still fun to be had. 

I left for a while and came back when I saw AH had VR support.  On a really good night there are what? 180?  There is still fun to be had if you are really patient, but it is getting thin.

Back when they first split the LW I would get infuriated and logged if I couldn't get in to the main LW and got shunted off the the spill over that only had 180 people on it.  LOL.  Now those numbers are an occasion for Shuffler to come on the BBS and brag about the big turn out.    On most nights it's more like 150?
 
You don't have to be Lusche to grasp the implications of that trend line.   Luckily for HTC, they have a stubborn clientele so that slope is shallow, so they have so time to re-vector.  But I'm afraid of someday tripping that critical mass trigger. 

What was that Hemingway line about how a character went bankrupt? 

"Slowly at first.  Then suddenly."

  I'd like to see that not happen, even if that means change over time.  They are a home-town company.  I've always rooted for them and always will.

[Ack-Ack]

This here, I beleive you could remove all the early and mid war planes from MA and no one would complain.

I would.  Not only would I complain, I'd cancel my account which has been active for 19 years.

[TWCAxew]

Now this just plane pisses me off. Saying we look shady by talking out your back side, when we have never in the history of AH asked for a credit card to have the free trial.

HiTech

I am only looking from the perspective of a new player. I did not intent to offend you or anyone.

I thought this was the way it was when you would fill in the forum which popped up on account creation.

To be clear this is not how i look at your company or at you. I always have been a happy costumer and a big supporter of your game.

Sorry if i offended you.

DutchVII