Lazs if there were no perk system, everyone would be flying the Tempest, Arado, and Ta152, and later on, the me262 ALL the time.
No perk system will mean the other, less performing/earlier war planes would rarely be used. Just look at the C202, SpitV and zeke now... you rarely see them in the arena. Make the tempest free and you will see everyone being forced to either fly it or get killed by it. A vet pilot in a tempest (aka, Vulcan) would make massacres, a newbie pilot in it will have a tremendous advantage over a vet in a 109f4... once they find out they can miss their shot and run run run like hell.
"Why do some guys "deserve" to fly vastly superior planes in an otherwise balanced arena? Why the hell would they want to??? Why not just make every plane available all the time within it's area or time frame? Why not give everyone the same plane choices? "
The arena is not balanced. If you made era-only planes avaliable in each time frame you will spend the first 10 days without access to the other 2/3rds of the planeset. I will hear you whine that you are paying 30 bucks and being restricted about your plane choices then. Making the planes be perked with varying prices depending on the time frame would make people SPEND their perks if they want a better plane (aka, C205 instead of C202). The guys that "deserve" to fly "vastly" superior planes deserve them because they have acquired those perks in other planes besides the perk ride they are spending their perks in. If a pilot cant get perks in other planes because he doesnt have the super speed of the tempest + its cannons then what makes you think he will fly anything else BUT the tempest?
perks are a reward system. you do well in other, less performing craft and you get a shot to fly a vastly performing plane for 1 or 2 sorties. If you dont do well, you dont get perks, and you dont get tempest.
"vulcan you prove my point. you can basically be in a perk plane any time all the time if you are a much better than average pilot. Newbies who can only get one perk plane every 3-4 weeks will not appreciate this fact"
Anytime you want? Lazs, even a vet pilot will take some time to earn enought perks to fly a tempest. You get an average of 5 perks per every 4-5 kill sortie (in P-38L, which gets more perks than 109g10 109d9 and other killer planes out there per kill). Even vets gets a 4-5 kill sortie every 5 sorties or so.
I'd say a vet makes barely 50 perks a day depending on how they perform on a given day (unless they fly the 202, you can get 11 perks in a 4 kill sortie heeehe). So you can think of a vet making enough perks to get a tempest every 2-3 days. They spend it in their tempest, dweeb around, fight other vets (and heck, a tempest is a MAGNET for other vet pilots... its an envy kinda thing..."must kill he with the tempest, my pride forces me to kill it...".
A newbie will not make perks to fly a tempest in 2-3 days, maybe in 2 or 3 weeks. Do you really want to see vets AND newbies in the tempest all day long? The game would go to hell, talk about extreme imbalance.
"Newbies who can only get one perk plane every 3-4 weeks will not appreciate this fact"
And I think the rest of the non-newbie (not meaning vets but vets and regulars alike) would not appreciate seeing clouds of newbies flying tempests. Its bad enough with n1ks and chogs as it is.
"there are too many flabby vets wanting to make this a private game"
I think carlos is wrong. There are too many newbies and arcade FM pilots who refuse to learn ACM skills and are whining that they cant get access to a super plane which they would undoubtably be "l33t" in. A 109f4 vs a tempest is the equivalent of a p-51/109g10 vs a Zeke. A zeke can survive such an encounter by using its better turn against the other planes which will have to boom and zoom it.. and at one point those boom and zoom will run out of E or run away when the zeke's friends show up. And let me tell ya something, the tempest will NOT stick around to kill a 109f4, tempest pilot wont risk losing his ride in a prolonged dogfight.
All this sounds to me that you cant take being killed by a superior pilot in a superior plane that the superior pilot earned in inferior planes, and you whine to have the chance of flying the same superior plane vs the superior pilot for free... and get your bellybutton whipped anyway. Seeing Vulcan in a tiffie is bad enough, imagine him in a Tempest all year round.
