I follow all the various boards on this BBS, and was dismayed when I came down this morning to find no fewer than six locked threads in General Discussion alone.
On closer inspection, I see that there have been many complaints to HTC, and then complaints about how those complaints have been processed. Seems some people are never satisfied.
I am reminded of a situation many years ago in Scotland, when I was on holiday with my brother and parents. One Sunday Dad, being Dad, thought we should all go to Church. I think it might have been a Scottish Presbyterian – I don’t really recall. But I do remember the sermon. The minister began by holding up a piece of white paper about two foot square, on which a large black spot had been drawn with a marker pen. The spot was about 3 inches in diameter. And the minister asked everyone, starting with the younger members of the congregation, what they saw as he held up this paper. Each and every one of us said “a big black dot”.
”Does any one of you see anything else?”, asked the minister. Nope, we looked harder but all we could see was the black dot. And the minister went on to say that every time he preached that sermon and held that paper up, nobody could not see anything but the big black dot. We looked harder still, but the only thing on that paper was the black dot. And then the point of this exercise was made...
”All of you see the big black dot, but can none of you sees the white piece of paper”!, bellowed the minister. And then we all felt a bit silly. Of course – the two foot square piece of white paper had a black dot, but that black dot occupied only about 1% of the total area of the white piece of paper. And yet it was the black dot that had caught our attention, not the white piece of paper. The point of the sermon became one of counting one’s blessings one by one, instead of focussing on life’s problems.
Ever since I’ve been playing online sims, I have been in awe of the ingenuity of same. To produce a flight simulation of just one plane was once regarded as an achievement, but here in AH we have many different types of plane to choose from, and arenas where people from every country can meet and fly against eachother in an online environment. If all the whiners would just stop to think for a moment about what goes into making a game like AH... there’s the modelling of the individual planes, the artwork for the cockpits, the different performance values for each plane, the gunnery, damage models etc. Then we have all the terrains, the strategic targets, the effects like smoke and fire, flight models for partially damaged aircraft, and then the packaging of all this to make it into an online game. Then there’s all the game strategy (should you wish to use it – I know many do not), and ships, PT boats, GVs... I used to be a programmer in an earlier era (mainframe COBOL – lol) and based on my experience there, I can only imagine the complexity of the code for Aces High.
After 14 years as a programmer I moved into Database Admin. And it is my experience there that makes me realise what Hitech, Skuzzy and the other boys and girls are up against. What they are doing is basically a thankless job. They’re doing their level best with the resources available to make AH a quality WW2 flight sim that will set the standard for other sims to follow. And what thanks do they get?
“Waaaaaah, one of my deaths was unfair – terrain rollover etc.” “Waaaaaah, my tank blew up when I ran over a shrub”. “Waaaah, perk this, perk that. Unperk this, unperk that. Waaaah-waaah-waaaah-server lag-waaah-waaah-waaah”. The request for reinstatement of a life that was ended by terrain rollover (if I understand it correctly) was a classic, and gives an insight into how obsessed some people can become. Very sad. What a pathetic bunch of ungrateful, self-indulgent whiners
I bet the only thanks that Hitech gets when something goes right is when the phone falls silent, or the BBS dries up. I know that’s how it used to be for me. Never a word of thanks for getting something right.
I very rarely complain about this game/sim. (That’s not the same as having no issues with the gameplay! But gameplay is a wide issue with the participants, not the game itself) I have posted a couple of issues in the Bugs forum, but that is all. If I see server lag, I know it’s only temporary, and that HTC probably knows about it – or perhaps the problem is at my end. I’ve had GVs blow up when I’ve run over an obstacle, but do I whine? I do not. It was frustrating to roll an M3 into town and get blown up for rolling over debris the first time, but now I know – it won’t happen again.
When I look at AH, and the great strides forward that it has made in the year or so that I have been here, it is clear that HTC has a team of expert programmers, fully utilising their expertise. For those who have never programmed, what may seem like a minor change to you might actually involve many man hours of coding effort, and may overlap other game issues. It’s not a simple matter of tweaking a parameter or pressing a button. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again now: AH is a brilliant game! Forget about silly issues like one particular kill not being registered – we’ve all seen that, but stop and think how much game time that incident took up as a proportion of the length of time you spend online.
After that Church service in Scotland, Dad was saying he recalled how, when he had been the organist at a performance of Handel’s Messiah or other similar oratorio, someone came to him afterwards to complain of his playing three wrong notes in the course of the evening. Actually Dad was flattered, considering that the entire performance had entailed the playing of about 40,000 notes. But... some people can only see the black dot.
So I say to all AH BBS whiners – get over your black dot fixation. Move your head away from the frame so that instead of seeing a few brush strokes/pixels/whatever, you can see the whole picture. So what if one particular kill didn’t register, or one death seemed unfair, or someone warped when the server was stretched to capacity? AH is a work in progress, but is still a masterpiece. Many people derive many, many hours of enjoyment from Aces High, for only $14.95 a month. The HTC guys/gals deserve more thanks than they’ve been getting.
