Originally posted by SlapShot
Muck has flown other sims .. I haven't, and I am just trying to understand your point of view, which I have no experience of.
Maybe I can help you here.
I flew AirWarrior for many years. I don't suggest it was better than Aces High, and I wouldn't want to go back. But my memories of it I wouldn't trade away. Maybe there is something of value in it that can be used by us now.
The company that provided AW supplied the planes and arena but let the players set the game. Their phylosophy was that the biggest advantage of a massive online sim was that it allowed the players to set their own goals and make their own rules. The game became a living entity, changing with the will of its players, limited only by the imagination of human beings.
The result was a great variety of game play. The arenas were set up so that they had different areas to play in along the country borders, where players could play the type of game they liked without interfering with each other.
An example of a game: The HammerHeads back then had a arch enemy squad called the Black Dragons. We would meet in the NW corner of the arena each night and fight each other tooth and nail. Our objective was to damage the other's bases and carriers and push them back to their rear base. We could kill their bases and make them unusable for a half hour, but not capture them. We had glorious fun and became great friends between our two squads. Many other squads in other parts of the arena were doing the same. And in the center, where the default spawn bases were, new or unafilliated players would play until they fanned out and joined the various squads (the massive never ending furball area).
But still we needed variety. At the time AirWarrior was hosting a minimum of 2000 players each night, maybe double that on prime nights. With a limit of 250 players per arena, there were a lot of arenas to choose from. Each had it's own character, so one could bounce around until you found something you liked. But they also provided two theaters, Pacific and Europe. The theaters provided the types of planes that belonged there, so if you get tired of being B&Zed by 190s, you could go munch on Zekes in a Pac arena. There was great variety.
Of course we still had our porkers, milk runners, alt monkeys, gangers, etc. But the community basically humiliated them to keep their numbers at a minimum. One of the greatest differences I've seen between AW and AH is that many of the activities abhored and ridiculed in AW are accepted and respected in AH.
To each his own.