Originally posted by Traveler
HiTech, can you please define for me, "Heard Mentality" ? If two Squads join together on a mission to attack a target, does that make them a heard? If 20 players not in squads, join together in a mission, does that make them a heard?
I keep hearing the term "Heard Mentality" used but I can't see how it is either accurate or revelent to a war game simulation set in the WWII time frame.
If people only want 1vs1 dog fights, I thoiught that was the purpose behind the DA.
When I see furballs taking place and they can be fun, they are never 1 V 1.
So if there are two groups of aircraft furballing , are they not two "heards furballing"
I'll take a stab at ... mind you this is only my viewpoint.
Back in AH1, there was a time that when 240 people were online ... that was huge.
Now for arguments sake, lets say that the arena was balanced at 80 players per country.
Now ... when the Knights ran missions you would get around, on an average, 10-20 people in the mission. That group in no way could march across a map with ease ... they may capture a few bases, but once the word was out ... others on the opposing teams put up an opposition and it only really required around 10 people to do it and to get 10 people to put up an opposition was not a hard thing to do. That was a "mission".
When the MA raised the limit to 750 people, we were seeing countries with a populations larger than all the people logged into the older MA of AH1. With that, coordinated attacks (missions) in this arena could contain between 50 or more people and I have seen attack groups numbering close to 100 as the original 50 began the "roll". Now this is "herding" and it is extremely hard to get enough people together (diversity on what people want to do while online is the limiting factor here) to stop the "herd"/"horde" or whatever you want to call it.
Now where ever the "herd" went, no matter how others tried to cull the herd, for all intents and purposes, it was futile ... and I would surmise that many people were very unhappy with that and I would also surmise that HT and Co. saw that the 2 weekers were dropping like flies ... not good for HTC.
Bringing the arena numbers back to a number where critical mass (herds) cannot control the whole arena is what they are trying to accomplish ... IMHO.
