Aces High Bulletin Board
General Forums => Aces High General Discussion => Topic started by: BaldEagl on August 04, 2014, 01:19:23 AM
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I've been thinking about the game lately. I'm making a bit of a return after a couple months off and an extended period of low play time.
My first thought the other night was that the "give-up" factor is a lot higher now than I ever remember it being. By that I mean enemy attacking a base will simply give up much sooner than in the past if there's a defense.
My second thought was that the fights are much better than I remember recently. I've been able to get into (largely) one-on-ones every time I log on. Oh sure, a countryman usually ends up joining one side or the other but you expect that in the MA. I'm rusty but it also seems to me the overall skill level of those willing to fight has improved.
I was also thinking about the long running land-grabber vs furballer debate/divide. I need to point out I'm neither but instead a strategic chess player or suicidal maniac as my mood and skill, or lack thereof, dictate.
I think when people join the game, once they figure out how to operate the planes and vehicles, they simply want to do something to help out their country, whichever it is. It's a basic desire to be liked by the community. If you do something to help people will like you. I know when I first started here, I'd look at the map and go wherever the odds were worst against us. I've gotten smarter about that but it was my way of trying to help. No one still liked me. I jest.
All these people looking for a way to help will follow different paths depending on their interests and skill levels. They'll congrgate in similiar circles. They'll form tight knit bonds, reinforcing their direction. They'll form squads and sometimes MEGA-SQUADS. Now imagine a player, online just hanging out with his MEGA-SQUAD looking at the map trying to figure out how to help and make all his squad-mates successful and liked by his countrymen. The choice is clear.
Now furballers... they really don't provide that much help to their country. Their game is mono a mono... fight and live or die. Rinse and repeat. Some of the aformentioned new people inevitably joined to experience WWI or WWII airial combat. They'll eventually become furballers but even they will sucomb to wanting to be liked, if only for a brief period. How can you be liked if you're not helping? How can you have fun fighting buildings. Oh the internal strife the furballer faces when he first joins Aces High. They blow up their last building before their head explodes although the blast radius is quite impressive I hear.
OK, actually these guys go one of two directions; deadly hunter or furballer (or target... can you imagine signing up to be a deadly hunter or a furballer and end up a target? Oops... might have made a bad choice). Also deadly hunter's are still helping by taking planes out of the sky. Aren't furballers doing that too? Well, yes, technically, but they're just other furballers and they don't count.
Well anyway, there's a bunch of wildly random thoughts after "coming back" so to speak.
I :salute the diversity within the game and all those players who have chosen differnt paths. There's room for everyone.
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Just glad to see you back.
Will read the post tomorrow! BED TIME! :)
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Welcome back :)
If you dont like it after two weeks stop paying your subscription :old:
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Furballers do contribute to their chess piece. They are attracted to big red bars and thus help mostly on defense, but also in offense NY establishing air superiority. Perhaps not the most efficient contribution, but who cares? They are having fun.
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Hmm bit of a double edged sword really...I like to get into a bit of a scrap and furball/dogfight...but my main like is to defend....now sure you may be appreciated by one chess piece...but if you cause enough grief on the take...twice as many hate you :lol :lol :lol :lol :lol...and that is my fun :t
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Welcome back! I have always respected you, Brah! You were always a fun fight. Glad to have you back.
A well written deep thought!
:salute
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I think when people join the game, once they figure out how to operate the planes and vehicles, they simply want to do something to help out their country, whichever it is.
Back when we had one-hour side switch, I would often switch chess-pieces every hour on the hour, depending on how the fight was going, including sometimes joining the fight I had already been in on the OTHER side if the tide had switched and that promised a more target-rich environment. My country is the United States of America and nothing I do when logged in to Aces High will render a penny's worth of help unto it. :devil
How can you be liked if you're not helping?
Meh, if you help the Bishops "win teh warrrzzz!!!" to make people like you, you'll just make all the wintehwarriorz on the Knights and Rooks NOT like you, so what's the point really? :D
Seriously though, wanting to be "liked by the community" is a character flaw. This relates to why democracies inevitably end up being led by charming, non-threateningly handsome people with good hair, firm handshakes, and the souls of lizards. But I digress...
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I go through all the different modes though I spend a lot of time on defense when we are getting rolled.
I may start out helping the Country upping a Bomber to affect the enemies ability to bring ords themselves.
I then may GV either attacking a town or base where the ord is down. Then defending captured base from counter attack.
Up a fighter to support a raid or hit incoming bombers.
Also like at the end of last night's sorties there was a great furball north of A-6 where 20+ planes were mixing it up.
Good fun all <S> :salute Do what your mood wants at the time and I wouldn't disparage any Furballer or Gver.
For killing the enemy and breaking things is what War is all about. :aok
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When the toolshedders realize they need the furballers help, just as much as the furballers need the toolshedders, the game becomes less stressful.
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Hmm, well, my perspective is this: most people take a big hairy dump about once a day and produce little else. These "turd dispensers" care little about whether they're liked or even think about other's perspectives much at all, so long as the dump is sufficiently large and hairy to relieve what internal pressure they feel...
As for AH, I too was gone for some time. When I returned, the numbers were down but it seemed, anecdotally, like those that were left were a bit more hard core - better flight skills, game knowledge, etc. I see less baby seals, in other words. As for the toolshedder versus furballer action, I'm actually with the laconic Masherbrum on this one, though with a twist. I think the average toolshedder appreciates the furballer more than is credited. After all, the toolshedder knows what hangars he "should" hit and from whom he needs cover. I think less appreciated is what the toolshedder does for the furballer. One of the things I appreciate and look for is smaller fights, be it one on one, two on two, etc, I tend to look for smaller dars off the beaten furball path. The toolsheeder helps break up the "pee-wee soccer" (all players in one small part of the playing field) race to the bottom that results from most furballs. I don't know that most of the fighter jocks get that - but I do. Indeed, I'd like to see more rules that spread the fight out.
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Now furballers... they really don't provide that much help to their country.
Wrong.
The furballer kept your useless jabo-bomb truck alive so you could drop on the VH, miss, and have to make a second pass. Then he killed that niki on the deck scouring the earth for your squadmate's M3.
"You" and "your" as used in this post does not refer to the OP, nor any specific player, but is a reference to the general Aces High "wintehwarz" demographic that despises furballers because they don't help "wintehwarz." Somebody's gotta provide the CAP so you can make 2-3 passes on the hangar.
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Furballers are wasting your country's resources, just as the fools in 'tank town' do. They should be reported to HTC, just like side switchers, females, or statisticans. :old:
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Furballers are wasting your country's resources, just as the fools in 'tank town' do. They should be reported to HTC, just like side switchers, females, or statisticans. :old:
Careful you or I will get my salt shaker :bolt:
:salute
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As a German, I'm venturing you likely feel the same slight discomfort I do with the notion of regarding individuals as "national resources", even in a game. :devil
Furballers are wasting your country's resources, just as the fools in 'tank town' do. They should be reported to HTC, just like side switchers, females, or statisticans. :old:
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Really? "... wanting to be "liked by the community" is a character flaw. "
What is 'not wanting to be liked by community'?? Look it up.
JGroth
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Really? "... wanting to be "liked by the community" is a character flaw. "
Indeed. You see, you can gauge the intelligence of any group by finding the IQ of the smartest person in that group. Then divide that number by the number of individuals in the group. Thus you will thus derive a good estimate of the working brainpower of any board, club, committee, parliament, etc. :devil
The most famous democratic/communitarian decision in history was forcing Socrates drink poison. Budweiser vastly outsells good ale on the market. By this and many other examples, any person with eyes to see will grasp that the "wisdom"/will/pleasure of the crowd is a terrible guide to one's actions. The thinking of the collective intersects with what is right, sensible, and/or tasteful only rarely, and by accident.
What is 'not wanting to be liked by community'?? Look it up.
JGroth
Didn't find anything. However, I submit the following for your perusal:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groupthink (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groupthink)
Also try looking up sheeple, sycophant, toadie, zombie...
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(http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Z8C1e2cWoe8/UdfGWajZizI/AAAAAAAABEI/9gxjXEaYHOM/s1600/2niqt75.png)
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(http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Z8C1e2cWoe8/UdfGWajZizI/AAAAAAAABEI/9gxjXEaYHOM/s1600/2niqt75.png)
:rofl
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Furballers are wasting your country's resources, just as the fools in 'tank town' do.
To be fair it's not the furballers or GVers fault. The war is designed very poorly, the biggest flaw is no matter how many times you bomb a base, no matter how many players you shoot down in a furball.....
The base never runs out of aircraft or tanks. You can have two sides furballing for hours.... Side A is a bunch of hot sticks and side B not so much, and are dying by the boat loads. But because of the fact that AH has unlimited plane sets side B can never run out of aircraft. If aceshigh modeled some form of attrition warfare then furballers and GV campers would be preforming a useful function of eliminating aircraft and tanks for some period of time..... Even if it was unintentional.
Cavalry
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(http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Z8C1e2cWoe8/UdfGWajZizI/AAAAAAAABEI/9gxjXEaYHOM/s1600/2niqt75.png)
You are not a human. You are a gastropod.
And what exactly is that stick figure complaining about? Hasn't every male at one time dreamed of being stranded on a remote island with a lovely flock of sheep?
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You are not a human. You are a gastropod.
It's not about me. :P
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(http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Z8C1e2cWoe8/UdfGWajZizI/AAAAAAAABEI/9gxjXEaYHOM/s1600/2niqt75.png)
Cute, but if one pays $15 of one's own money to play a game and then feels the need to play a certain way purely to please perfect strangers, that is very automaton-esque indeed. :D
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Cute, but if one pays $15 of one's own money to play a game and then feels the need to play a certain way purely to please perfect strangers, that is very automaton-esque indeed. :D
Never underestimate the power of peer pressure. Like The Shadow, it can cloud the minds of men.
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The war is designed very poorly, the biggest flaw is no matter how many times you bomb a base, no matter how many players you shoot down in a furball.....
The base never runs out of aircraft or tanks. You can have two sides furballing for hours.... Side A is a bunch of hot sticks and side B not so much, and are dying by the boat loads. But because of the fact that AH has unlimited plane sets side B can never run out of aircraft.
No, that is why the war is designed AWESOMELY. Being able to fight, die, rise again and fight some more, ad infinitum? That is at least one culture's vision of heaven (Valhalla), the only difference is that AH players have to provide their own ale and delicious pork products, BYOA&P as it were. But hey, that's still a pretty good deal, considering we only pay $15 and don't have to die in battle first. :D
If there was some kind of attrition built in, you'd see noobs criticized for trying to fly fighter at all and the player base at large would be discouraged from flying with any balls whatsoever. No thank you.
What makes air/ground superiority mostly irrelevant in the MA is the hangar dropping dynamic combined with the variety of difficulties in reliably intercepting jabos and especially heavy buffs on their way to drop hangars. It is far easier to take a base via hangar dropping than it is to take that base by beating all defenders down to the ground and keeping them there long enough for the troop transport to carry them in. Not nearly as much fun, but easier.
Whichever side first has a player who decides to end the fight via dropping hangars, and who possesses the small amount of competence requisite lack of a boredom gene for that mission, that side tends to win the fight. Thus, furballing/fighter-on-fighter violence IS mostly irrelevant to winntehwarzing. However this is not a problem, because feeling the need to be "useful" to an arbitrary chess piece side in a video game where no one ever really wins or loses anything tangible, that is a bit mental wouldn't ya say? :devil I am entirely content with being completely useless to the pixelated territorial ambitions of armchair generals.
This leaves only one problem with the game, namely the fact that this statement You can have two sides furballing for hours...
Is hardly ever true anymore, and this lack of action is the main reason behind the player numbers death-spiral.