Originally posted by canadagoose and paraphrased by GoFaster
Tonight for at least 5 hours I was in the MA when the Rooks had a numerical advantage of better than two to one. .... If Hitech is going to continue to get numbers of players like this on they need to do some forced parity in the countries as far as memberships. ... I know if the play is like tonight on a regular basis it will drive some away the game, myself included.
It was an organized anomaly, a gathering of Rook squadrons under a coordinated command. You noticed that there were 8 to 12 attackers over each base along the front, rather than 20 or so pilots over just 2 or 3 bases as is the norm in the MA. It happens once a month, and is refreshing after getting hammered by Bishops the other 28 nights.
There was a time (before December, 2002) when numerical advantage was consistently with the Bishops and the Rooks were consistently scarce. HTC did do something about the unbalanced gameplay and introduced the weighted perk scale whereby the side with the most players gets the fewest perk points per mission and perk rides cost the most points to buy. For Rooks last night, a Me262 was costing just under 500 perk points and our perk multiplier was somewhere around 0.82. Meanwhile, 262s were on special clearance prices for Knights.
The Bishops still tend to have more pilots at any given time, but the numbers gap has closed slightly as individual players switch sides to take advantage of the perk system. I think the biggest beneficiary of this new style of side switching is Rookland. New players usually jump to the side with the most players (Bishops, for example) in order to take advantage of the "safety in numbers" strategy. Then, after awhile when they've gotten some skills and want to build a perk bank and try the perk rides, they jump to the side with the fewest players, which is usually the Rooks, in order to build perk points faster and get perk rides cheaper.
The Rooks also have one advantage in being smaller - Rook pilots keep seeing the same other Rook pilots each night and there comes a feeling of familiarity with each other, which breeds cooperation. Its hard to be anonymous when you know you're going to see that guy tomorrow night. The guy whose kill you steal today might be the guy who refuses to bring you supplies tomorrow night when your Tiger is dead in its tracks.
And of course there's the retribution factor. After rolling across the map unchecked last night, I fully expect Rooks to be rolled upon tonight, and the night after that, and the night after that, which really wasn't too much different from what was happend two nights ago, and the night before that, and the night before that. If I'm not mistaken, Bishops won the last 2 or 3 resets of this week's map.
