Looking through all the current threads and posts there is a very bad trend forming.
The number of negative posts about AH and gameable scoring and rank calculations and poor damage model and lack of good maps and over simplified strategy elements and no-good contests are really piling up.
I hope there is something in the works to reverse the trend and let people get back to talking about how cool this game was/could be again.
The unfortunate part in all of this is that AH has the potential to become the ultimate combat sim, but the real-world implication of becoming more of a sim and less of a game is the financial impact of lost revenues. It's the common denominator of the easily distracted and short attention spans of the majority in the public domain that force the gaming industry to put more effort into point and click fun rather than developing something that can engage the thinking mind.
If you think about it, it really doesn't make a lot of sense.
When you get a boxed game, do you send the most time playing in the H2H arenas, or playing the off-line campaign or story?
When you got Half-Life, how many countless hours (continuous) did you spend trying to work your way through all the levels and get to the end? Eventually, you probably tried the H2H arenas and had some fun there too.
About how long did it take for you to get bored of the constant re-spawning and killing and being killed by the same guys over and over again? Probably a lot less time than it took to get bored of playing the off-line campaign.
Why? Because in the off-line campaign, there was a goal. There was something to work for and things that had to be learned in order to win. You had to try new strategies and tactics and work to find the best means of survival.
Once you played H2H for an hour, how much fun was it? You always ended up in the same basic map with no need to figure out a strategy to win, just go out, find the enemy and shoot him.
The AH main arena is getting like that. Strategy is all but useless because it has not real effect on anything. Trying to use tactics to gain the upper hand is pointless because the enemy never runs out of supplies to fight back.
It seems like the only way to win a battle in AH is by over-whelming numbers. Eventually, one of the combatants gets bored and gives up and either logs off in frustration, or goes somewhere else to make a new fight.
It would be nice if winning the war was something that was accomplished with strategy and planning, rather than a constant rolling pig-pile on the country with the fewest players.
