The idea has nothing to do with the fact that *some* of the most highly skilled AH players don't care about rank *all the time*.
Everyone needs to remember that a player's motivation is not the same or driven by the same factors in each and every TOD a given player takes part in.
For example, drex doesn't care about score. But I distinctly remember him working on breaking a 100 kill streak in WB (I worked on this too at one time), and I also recall him working on being awarded all of the 'medals' in WB.
Why? Not because he wanted to do these things to 'prove' anything to anyone. But it's a challenge to be completed. When you've played online flight sims for years your reason for playing them can change month to month, even week to week.
Rank does not equal skill. But there are some highly ranked players *in any given TOD* that are very skilled. They are just in the mood to try and get a good rank for that TOD.
But this isn't about the top 3% of the MA in terms of skill in any way whatsoever. It's about the 65% (?, I don't know the exact %) of the MA that has (some) of their behavior driven by rank, score, perk points, etc.
Rank, score, perk points - matter to a large group of players, and affects their 'behavior' online. Rank, score, perk points - don't matter to me (anymore...score hasn't mattered to me really since the end of my first year of WB, a long time ago) and many others but the actions of the MA in general matter to everyone flying in the MA don't they?
I've got a buddy who saw me play WB for a long time who is just now getting into AH. He can't really compete vs. the top 50% of the MA in terms of 1 on 1 skill, but he sure tracks his rank, k/d, etc. Rank, k/d, score - these things are goals to be worked towards when other goals (shooting down your nemesis, who is way way better than you, winning 1 on 1s on a regular basis, etc.) are not attainable and won't be without many more months of practice.
People complain about 40 fighter bomber suicide 'waves' to set up 'organized vulches', all enabled by one team have twice the players of another team. What do you think causes these things? People vulch for one of 2 reasons in general I think:
1. To capture an airfield, i.e. to keep any defending aircraft from taking off and interrupting the deployment of ground troops attempting to capture said airfield.
2. To rack up lots of easy and safe kills so they have a 'nice looking score'.
2A. To rack up lots of easy and safe kills and land them for lots of perk points.
Everyone needs to remember that the person they are in AH today is not the person they always were in WB, AW, etc. At a certain point in terms of skill (barring a total lack of cojones or some deep psychological problems) the biggest 'rush' for many experienced AH/WB/AW types (myself and many other long time online flight sim types that I know included) is a really really down to the wire sweat on the joystick 1 on 1 fight against a good opponent. In the MA the cheap substitute for this is anything that is far from easy and involving direct competition - fighting 3 foes with a 'new guy' and coming out of the fight with the 'new guy' alive, biting on a 4 or 5 to 1 fight and living to tell about it, etc.
But there was a point, early in WB, where landing 2 kills - any 2 kills - was a big deal for me. There was a point where killing 10 or more enemy aircraft for every aircraft I lost was a big deal.
Score, rank, perk points - they affect your online experience in the MA even if you 'don't care about them'. They affect the behavior of a large % of the MA.
I agree that eliminating score and rank would do some interesting (and probably good) things, but I don't think you'll see it happen. Too many 'new to online flight sim' players care about this - and 'jaded' 'veterans' of online flight sims need to remember that a 6 month 'veteran' of AH has zero in common motivation-wise with someone who played AW for 3 years and has played AH since beta.
And it's a bad thing to not have lots of new players coming in to a sims 'MA'. Sims and communities stagnate and become like communities of grumpy old men without new people arriving into the mix. I never flew AW. I recall actually being excited about 'meeting' (flying with) a whole community of guys I never had any contact with when I came to AH. Boy was I let down when I realized how badly they all sucked.
Joking.
In short - alot of 'pack' behavior that people don't like in the MA is driven by the scoring and rank system in my opinion. Altering the system to change it sounds like a reasonable *experiment* to me.
Mike/wulfie
