My 2 Cents...
Prime Time and Weekends has become a 'toxic environment'. The arena is at near capacity, latency and frame rates amongst horded areas make the game nearly unplayable, and there are no fights happening outside the horde because everyone thinks you can't 'Win' the game anymore unless you relentlessly roll bases. Because of the numbers, the only way to accomplish this is with EXTREME numbers. Unfortunately where a few skilled pilots could take a base in a 2 arena setting, even having 20 people will rarely take a base due to the mass 'horde' of defenders that quickly ups from a base.
I'm not complaining about defense, and I'm not complaining about the hordes in the traditional sense. I just see that numbers are now dictating game play, to the detriment of a large number of AH players.
The simple solution would be to roll it back 8 months or so...
2 Arenas during Prime Time, 1 Arena for "Off Hours" and a 1 hour side switch rule.
Right now your only chance to do something 'different' is to log into EW or MW which is LW on Crack as far as the smashing undefended bases, spying, shading, sharing of accounts and every other gamey thing you can imagine... or jumping into the DA where you have nothing to do but avoid HO's from Tempests and 4Hogs running around in F3 mode. Neither of these are appetizing...
To be honest... I downloaded world of tanks yesterday and played it all day rather than logging into the arenas because I'm sick to death of the game play. I most likely will be spending the majority of my time there and away from FSO. At least there the computer balances matches and if you want to be 'gamey' all you have to do is pay an extra $5 a month...
[EDIT:] Oh, and you can knock over trees, shoot through leaves and roll over other light objects that normally flip or stop a 50ton tank.....