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If you could shut off kills landed messages for yourself, would you?
I'm not talking about shutting it down for everyone, but just you, so that anytime you happened to land kills, no one would know it. There me be 300 other people who leave it on and land 74 kills in their Spit 16 of vulching doom, but your 6 in your 51D are known only to you.
I'm just curious how important it really is to people?
Do you think you'd fly differently if you didn't get your name in lights and the 'attaboys' that follow?
Nope, I wouldn't, mostly because if I had the option I couldn't be bothered to make the effort. Personally I don't play for score or to see my name in lights, I play for the fights and the kills but it's still nice to see the message pop up when I land a mit-full.
How important is it to people? LOL, it seems it is very important. To read some of the posts in this thread, the best thing to do is to get rid of the whole damned thing because it's ruining the fights don't you know. And while HTC is at it they should ditch the score system as well.
I've been at this type of game for better than a decade and I'll admit that for awhile I got sucked into the "the fights in here are really starting to suck and it's the score/name in lights causing the bad fights" deal too, but I got over it.
The quality of the fights in this game haven't changed a great deal and are pretty much the same as those I found in AWII/III. What has changed, and always will change as a player gets more accomplished in the game is that player's perception of the quality of the fights they get into. When noobs get their skills up to where they finally managed to win a hard fought kill or two it leaves a mark. As the vast majority of players are of noob or average skill levels, the vast majority of the fights an noob or average stick gets into are against those who are more or less at their skill level. They remember those fights as being something special, difficult, etc. I'll bet they remember some of those fights in detail, I do, but I'll also bet dollars to doughnuts they can't actually remember anything else that was going on around them during their memorable fights - hence the myth of the vast quantities of solid gold 1v1 fights back in the good-old days. As they progress beyond average, the quantity of quality fights they find declines - hence the myth of the decline in the overall skill levels in the game.
Do the "attaboys" make me fly or fight differently? Nope. I fly to fight and fight to get kills. In that regard my goals in the game and the attaboys line up pretty nicely.
Cheers,
asw