Agree with Changeup.
edit - Tequila, SimHQ didn't write much about Aces High until after it was out of beta. Andy Bush is a friend of mine, and actually wrote for us at combatsim.com prior to writing at SimHQ. I introduced him and the other friends I had at SimHQ to Aces High, after several articles had already been written by us (it was our favorite sim/game period). You're right though, at our site and at SimHQ when they got around to covering AH, very little support was shown by the actual AH community there. There are various reasons for this, IMO AH attracts a certain type of player and person, that isn't necessarily just a "sim" player, where as Simhq/combatism type readers were more attracted overall to the Falcon 4/DCS sort of pace. It's like living in a big city or the country - the two types don't often mix in my experience.
I posted something similar to this over there at SimHQ last week.
I worked at a competitor site to SimHQ back when they started, and we were a larger (hence hated) site than they were in the beginning, with a fair amount of animosity between our owner and the SimHQ people. They even posted this long diatribe on their entry page how they weren't going to be a "commercialized" site like ours, and have only simulation "fans" write reviews, to avoid bias in their view. It was pretty funny stuff, I personally didn't care, and had friends and former writers that worked at SimHQ I got along great with.
One such was their editor in chief at the time, "Spoons" Sponauer I believe his name was. He was a very experienced sim guy like all of us were, and had flown everything sim-ish just like all of us had from the B17 Intellivision game and everything else up until around 2001, when this was going on. I had been flying AH since 1999, and had gone through the whole humbling experience already that Changeup describes. I had been taken under wing by Citabria/Fester, and had improved pretty rapidly. I offered to bring some of the SimHQ guys over to show them what I was talking about way back then, how offline, or even small number multiplayer sim pilots at our site at the time (combatsim.com) and SimHQ had NO idea what competition and good flying even was, as the MMO environment of Aces High, and formerly Warbirds, AW, and even FA were a breed apart, and above the average sim guy in terms of ability and knowledge.
After letting the guys from SimHQ fly around a bit, I took them into the MA, where they were promptly demolished by average joe AH pilots. I then did some 1v1's one with, and killed them in a few turns, or less, every time. "Spoons" actually wrote about this experience, and how humbling it was, right after this happened. I have the article around someplace, I'll post it, but the editor senior writers from SimHQ at the time all agreed that their eyes were really opened after flying in a MMO game, and that it humbled them big time.
