You raise a valid point.
I left the game because people do not want to furball. I joined because it was a place for fighter pilots to do fighter pilot stuff. Fewer and fewer people wanted to do that so I left.
What do you think they want to do? What is your opinion in how to boost numbers?
Good questions. There has always been a significant number of people who want to help their team win the game. So long as their participation is directed to that goal, they don't care whether they fly a P-51 or a goon - or even whether they're in a plane. This group of people has probably existed since the inception of AH, but I can tell you that it was there in late 2001 and has been there since.
Similarly, there is, and has always been, a group of people who just want to fly with their friends. For them, it isn't even critically important that human opposition exist, so long as they can stay together in a common effort. Some of the big squads, just before the Great Arena Split, personified this group.
The game has always allowed all of these factions to co-exist. There has always been tension between them. As numbers decrease, those tensions are just more evident.
As to what should - or can - be done to increase numbers? I doubt that we will ever again see 600 people at one time - and, when I first joined, that would have been considered an unrealistically high number, too. Really, I don't miss it. Those huge numbers encouraged what I thought was bad game play and a sewer-like atmosphere. I do think that we can get better numbers than what we have now. I have no new suggestions, but I think these have promise:
- A game manual. It doesn't even have to be comprehensive. One like I get when I buy a new computer or a cell phone or any other device - a "Quick Start", that illustrates how to set up the controller, how to select a plane, how to bring up the chat buffer, and where to find more information and youtube-like video. All of this information currently exists, in a variety of places, but it suffers from (a) being TOO comprehensive, discouraging people from wading through it to find the answer, and (b) not being obvious.
- A longer free trial. I understand that the vast majority of new people don't stay more than a few minutes. We weren't going to hold them in the first place, and probably we never have. For the small subset of people who do want to go further - and really, we don't need a huge number of them - I've never thought that two weeks was sufficient to get a real handle on the game.
- oldman
