The future may bring many changes to AH, but I'm almost willing to bet most proposals in this thread are not amongst them.
For example disabling score: Some players will outright leave...other ones may stay but not react the way some tend to believe. When RTB'ing and getting points doesn't matter anyway, I doubt you will see much more "honorable" gameplay behaviour - but a lot more suicide porkers, Ho'ing, Lancstukas, in other words: More AirQuake
Ah yes - you can then make all bases uncapturable, remove bombers from game and so on, until you cater only to a small number hardcore players. Sounds like a good business plan.
But seriously: It's exactly the broad spectrum of gameplay that's possible for everyone in AH that's part of the success story.
I'm one of those growing up with books and 1/72 models of fighter planes and I came here years ago. But if AH just had been a "pure" fighter sim, I doubt I still would be playing, at least I would have taken more and longer breaks from this game. Having so many aspects & possibilities is keeping me. Sometimes I'm more GV'ing, sometimes I'm more into the basegrab, in some tours I try to master a specific ride, then it's buff hunt, then the score game for a tour or even furballing...
Still, I feel much less excitement playing AH then 3 years ago (or even 8 years during my first 2weeks) - but a huge part doesn't come from gameplay changes but from "having seen it all". And the expectations are rising, what I would have considered a good fight years ago it would hardly be noteworthy today to me
Only a very small number of people would be dedicated enough not to get bored by a pure "furball" sim over the years. If AH would still be like in the glorious BETA times (with better graphics, of course), you would still see a lot of "It ain't the same game today, it sucks" posts on this BBS, even if nothing had changed at all
What I'm not saying is that the air sim player base hasn't changed over the last 10, 15 years. That's a natural thing, times are changing, players are changing, games are changing...and the older we get, the more annoying the squeakers will be
On a related note (but not directed to anyone specific in this thread), I frequently spot a lot of hypocrisy or at least ignorance about this topic on CH 200. Players that happily camped GV spawns with me when we were both new to this game, do now lament without end about "lame camping n00bs" and how gameplay has degraded... go figure
Just my 2c of course
(And now back into the breach..having much fun tonight while fighting the horde)
