Originally posted by Zazen13
There's no need to 'hard-code' solutions to gameplay player balance issues. Players balance themselves over time. The economics of finding good fights and human nature will alone achieve balance if left unmolested. When you start monkey'ing with individual freedom of choice and emotional attachements between friends you're playing with fire. HTC has the good fortune of being able to look back at a rich history of massively multi-player WW2 Combat Flight simulation's trials and tribulations when making game design decisions. HTC knows full well Airwarrior existed 3 times as long as AH has with the same population demographic just on a larger scale and was balanced perfectly for that entire duration by simply allowing complete and total individual freedom of choice. It works, it's been proven, why HTC chose to mess with something as fundamental as this when it works fine on its own if you are patient and allow it to naturally unfold is unfathomable.
Zazen
Except the demographic of the community has fundamentally changed from the type that populated AW's arenas.
There is too much emphasis in AH about "winning" the reset and less on creating good fights. What is very obvious is the overall degradation of the average individual's technical skills. This combination results in clumping, people don't want to achieve balance..they just don't want to die.
Much has been made about the time Rooks spent in the bucket. I know because I was there. The country at that time was very different in feel than now. A lot of the "furball" groups switched over, a lot of hotsticks came over....basically guys looking to stay sharp by fighting those types of bad odds.
That was a different era of AH both in demographic and player focus than now.
People now do not want side balance, they want to "win". They're smart enough to realize that odds cover a lot of weaknesses and they will never, ever leave that cocoon. As we've seen, people will quit this game before they willingly go balance the odds.
As Urchin said, odds and planetype or the 2 biggest factors in deciding a fight. Since players refuse to give up the safety and stats boost from odds, HT is trying to prod them by affecting plane type.
