The root cause of field-porking is the whole arena reset system, combined with the perk system. Countries try to reset each other, which means a good run of perk gain in process and a larger award upon victory. To get the reset, you have to capture fields, and to capture a given field you usually have to pork the adjacent nme fields so they can't provide defending reinforcements. This means 3-4 fields get porked for every field under actual assault. Thus, the natural result of the whole arena reset/perk system is field-porking on a massive scale.
It seems to me that it's impossible to separate field-porking and resets. I doubt there'd be much, if any, movement of the front lines without the ability to pork fields. And what movement did occur would be due solely to one side massing utterly overwhelming force to just overrun the defenders. No strategy, just brute force, like in DOS AW.
So, the real question as I see it is, are you so annoyed by field-porking that you'd sacrifice the whole reset system to be rid of it? Do you like resets better than the old DOS AW system of fixed country fields and just a few capturable fields in the center of the map, and no strat system to speak of? (strat didn't work at all, and thus there was no porking, in the DOS RT arena for most of its existence).
I doubt many would choose to go back to the old DOS AW arena rules. Always the same thing, everybody in the arena fighting over the same couple of fields all night and little or no changes of possession. It was fun when that was all there was, but times have definitely changed.
So, looks like we're stuck with field-porking in AH. That being the case, can it be improved in either cause or effect? We can dispose of the effects issue easily because there are only 2 real options. The porkage can either limit the missions a plane can perform (due to shorter range, no bombs, no troops) or can lower the performance of planes. AH does the former, AW did the latter. AW's system utterly sucked, so AH has got it right on this score. That leaves the causes of porkage as the only area open for possible improvement.
There's a lot of whining about kamikaze porkdweebs, in all their forms from divebombers who don't pull out to unescorted B17s coming over at 300' AGL. How big a problem this really is, compared to the number of legit pilots, is open to debate. But for purposes of debate, let's assume that it's a big problem. Kamikaze porking is, after all, the most efficient porking method under the arena rules. The faster you die after doing your damage, the quicker you can get back up and do more damage, so your side advances to the reset faster.
The big problem with combating the kamikaze porkdweeb problem, assuming it's big enough to really worry about, is that kamikazes use the same game mechanics as legit players. How can the game know what type of player dropped a given bomb? And it has to be able to tell this, because prophylactic measures can't be applied here. If you make the targets harder, or shorten their downtime, or whatever, you make it that much harder for legit players to pork fields, which in turn makes it less likely that fields get captured, leading to a more static front line and no real arena-wide goals to achieve.
So, how can the game tell if the bomb was dropped by a kamikaze? IMHO, it can't look at any given case in isolation but has to look for trends over a number of sorties. Simple reason for this. The guy we want to punish is the type who takes off with the intention of doing a kamikaze attack, and who does this on a regular basis. But everybody who takes off with the intention of making a legit attack sometimes finds themselves on a suicide run, due to bad intel or changes in the situation while they were en route, or just being the 1st guy into the ack at a cherry field. To the defenders, both guys look like intentional kamikazes, but one of them will do it again next hop while the other won't. Any anti-kamikaze system must be able to tell the difference.
This all means that HTC will have to decide on a number of parameters and track them for all pilots over several sorties. Assuming this is possible without bogging down the server, it still won't be perfect. Legit guys with a run of bad luck would get caught by it on occasion. And in the meantime, the real kamikazes will know that they have a couple of freebies before the system cracks down on them, so there won't be that much of a decrease in intentional kamikaze attacks on the average.
So at the bottom line, I don't think there's much hope of ever getting a system that automatically weeds out all intentional kamikaze porkdweebs. That being the case, I guess the best defense is for us to keep notes on the porkdweebs ourselves and report them to HTC.
