Hazed,
I’ve read your initial post a couple of times. It seems that the AH community is diversifying to some considerable extent. There are two broad groups. The furballers, and the strat players. And it seems that the two do not make good bedfellows. From your text I can tell that you fly strat missions, but not exclusively. And I can relate to all the difficulties you cited in your post. The problem is to garner any sort of support and/or understanding of the problems from the community. Half of them (the furball half – the exact proportion will be known when AH2 is released) have not the slightest interest in strat, except to say that they won’t like it if you were to bomb their fighter hangars because that “limits their choices” as to which airfields they can fly from... which is sort of the whole point of the exercise, but let’s move on...
It should be clear to anyone reading this BBS that many, many people are brassed off with AH gameplay as it stands today. In fact within the past two weeks, the quit posts have been pouring in, and that is not good news. People are sick to death of the
line-‘em-up-knock-‘em-down-turkey-shoot-farce that MA gameplay has become. How did we get to where we are now?
I come from WB, developed originally by the same guys who developed AH – Hitech and Pyro. The subscription fees were high by today’s standards - $2/hour. And it really mounted up. I’ve had many 3-digit monthly bills, and some guys expenditure on WB equated to their monthly car payments! The silver lining of this cloud was that we had mostly serious players – guys who really understood ACM, and taught me a lot, and guys with an extensive interest in WW2 aircraft and of course WW2 itself. The reasons were simple. Anyone prepared to make that sort of financial outlay was dedicated to flightsimdom. Sure, there were some suicide dweebs/HO wallies, but they didn’t stay long after they got their first bill, and there was usually a challenge to be found. We didn’t get
The Kidz in there, as they simply would not countenance the $2 hourly fee. The numbers in WB were never as high as I have seen in AH this past 18 months. But it didn’t matter. The hourly fee took care of that.
Then came AH, which has always been flat rate. Suddenly the doors are opened to a whole new player base. $1 a day, now reduced to about 50¢ per day – big difference from $2
per hour – but that left a big problem. No more megabuck account holders. How to make up the shortfall? More accounts. The game had to be made attractive to a wider audience, and the flat rate went a long way towards achieving that. And along came
The Kidz – in droves. Now the sad thing about
The Kidz is that many of them have no interest in WW2, no interest in planes, no interest in ACM, and certainly no interest in strat. They just want the simple camera functions – point and shoot, and hopefully see something blow up. Many seem not to care if they get shot down. No interest in analysing what happened – and why should they care? A new plane is just a mouse click away. Aerial Quake, indeed. Of course, The Kidz have no skills, and therefore have special needs in the form of easy-to-fly wonderplanes. These needs are met by an inexhaustible fleet of N1Ks and LA7s. Ask yourself this: When was the last time you encountered a N1K when he
did not turn towards you in an attempt to force the HO? When was the last time you saw one which made an effort at ACM?
So now the strat players/buff drivers are disgruntled – too many opportunist cherry pickers, especially on the children’s maps, with the 163 a real pain for buff drivers. A situation exacerbated by the bardar facility. That and the Mission Editor which, in the past, has been abused as a gangbang generator, combine to pork every honest attempt at a stealth capture mission. The enemy is simply lying in wait, every time. And the only way to get the job done is to use numerical strength. Skill goes out of the window, and the only strat – as Lazs has observed – becomes the numbers involved in the ensuing numerical supremacy smashdown.
What to do? Well I find Lazs’s 50,000’ mountain range idea interesting, but we have an anomaly here. Lazs does not believe in multiple arenas. But if that 50,000’ mountain range really is impermeable from both sides, then what’s the difference between that set up, and having two separate arenas? The only time I saw an arena divided in that way was a few years ago in WB – the Generations concept. Damn good idea, in which the map was divided into sections offering different types of plane – IJN, LW, RAF, USN etc. But no impermeable wall, so things were ruined by guys who would fly from the other side of the map in 109s and 190s to beat up zekes...
Hazed is right, and I believe the trend has been to cater increasingly to the guys who want an instant kill fix, and guys who want to see how many instant kill fixes they can get each hour. The more the game moves in that direction, the less appealing it will be to strat players. But it’s not just the strat players that have been affected by the rapid insurgence of the latest arena menace, the Newbie Steamroller - A particular problem on the smaller, children’s maps – and one of the reasons I prefer Pizza and Trinity, but not the only reason – there are others!
In recent discussions about the impact of the Trinity map on arena gameplay, I have come away convinced that the interests of the furballers and the interest of the strat players are mutually exclusive. My question is, why don’t the furballers move to the DA, or some other strat free arena? It makes no sense for the furballers (and the newbie steamrollers) to occupy a strat based arena when they have no interest in strat. It makes even less sense when, as a result of no arena separation, the furballers with no interest in strat make demands for changes – to strat!
The MA rather resembles the American Wild West of the 1800s – no rules, no structure, a free for all melee of which many, many people have grown tired, with the account cancellations rolling in.
Hazed said: ”This all for yourself attitude is NOTHINg like the way the war was fought. They emphasised TEAMPLAY and sound tactics not gunho ramming and suicide attacks 24/7. What i see of late is the people who are AVID aircraft and WW2 fans and are often well versed in ACM and well read on the history of the conflict being forced to fly in a way which CANNOT sustain adult interest for very long.AH seems to be changing into a fast paced checkers game where learning the intricasies of the world of wartime aviation is ignored in favour of becoming a fast shootem up player.I love it , furballing etc IS FUN. BUT it cannot sustain longterm interest.
Indeed, indeed. And the furballers (and maybe even the newbie steam rollers) will tell you that they “don’t care about YOUR war”. The arena has been designed with “freedom” and “more choices”. But more choice for Newbie Steamroller is going to mean
less choice for anyone else. Hence the pissing and moaning about the impact of the suicide fuel porkers, amongst other furballer complaints.
When will people begin to realise that it’s
because of the “freedom”, and
because of “unlimited choices” that MA gameplay has become the frustrating bore that many people find it to be today, with conga lines and aerial vulching/gangbangery, and Newbie Steamroller ripping us apart. Even guys like Apache now see the need for an RPS. “No! No! No!”, I hear you cry. “We want to fly what we want, when we want. We don’t want YOUR war.” OK, it’s not just YOU who gets unlimited choices. Doofus-Dweebius gets the same choices, and spoils it for everyone. You want freedom, more choices? Fine, DD and NS get them too. You like conga lines, gangbangs, suicide TYPH missions against your bases, suicide LANC missions at 300’ to your CV? Good. Because that’s what you are going to get, until some semblance of order is created. Anyway, this whole debate will all be buggery-doo when AH2 appears. Any cosmetic quick-fixes are going to be tantamount to rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic.
Most of the guys I’ve asked are looking forward to the mission concept, with only a few dissenters. Could be that the mission arena gets a much better attendance, in which case the furballers will be disappointed. Next thing you know they’ll come cap in hand to the mission arena, but it won’t be long before these non-strat guys are asking for changes to the strat. Kind of like what we have right now – lol.
”Imagine a game where the developer provided the toys and all the kids in the sandbox were free to make their own choices about what constituted "fun". For some of us, that'd be heaven. For others, freedom of choice like that is scary or disappointing or "unfair" or something a nanny should do for them.”
Yeah, right. Look where that’s landed us.
