First, lets get back to the topic. the OP I think was talking about "fights". not land grabbing.
There are two types of "fighters" in the game, those that like to fight for the fun of the fight. Shida, flippz, MARK4, Simon, Yucca and so on. You know these guys as they come in mid alt, and will fight to the death on the deck in what ever plane they are in. The second group are the score potatos. While many will say "I dont play for score" they are also the ones that seem to be the guys who point out how many times they have been ranked #1. You can also spot them by how they fly. In groups at high alt. Only engaging when the other player is busy (picking, clearing your 12 oclock...), and then running like they have 100 guys chasing them until they can get back to that high horse they were perched on.
The problem is there are not that many "fighter" guys that really want to fight. Id say it about 1 in 5 are real fighter guys. Of the guys that fly fighters in these groups there may not be more than 400 total, so thats less than 100 fighter guys. The other 400-600 players are split between bombers, attack planes and GVs and their objective isnt to fight, its to aid in the capture of bases and sometimes the defense of those bases.
So out of the 1000-800 player we have playing the game less than 100 are fighter types looking for a fight. Add in time of day/population locations IE euro, asian/fire rim, west coast, east coast that gives you a dozen fighter types playing in prime time. Its not going to change until/unless the numbers go up. This is the hardest hit group of players in the game due to numbers.
Most players are doing what they want in the game and can still do it as the numbers still support their type of play. 6-8 players for a base take, 4-6 for defense, gvs 4-5 per side makes a great battle, but with only a few fighter type out there they have a hard time finding other fighter types and for whats left, most of those guys dont want to fight.
Someone said you cant change human behaviour with code. Change the code so when a team takes two bases against one opponent all other bases against that opponent are locked until the team takes a base from the other opponent. Bish take 2 from the knights so they have to switch fronts to take at least one from the Rooks, but not more than 2 because they would have to switch to the other front again. This way you wont see a night long run of pushing one team down to 10% of their fields. With the force from the code players have to fight other enemies instead of rolling just one. The double gang would almost disappear because we know most of the action in the game is generated by the base capture guys.
I know we need more numbers. Half of the complaints in the games would disappear if we had double the numbers we have now.
I also believe that a few minor changes in the code could add spice to the game and negate some of the minuses to help with the numbers.