Most of this is ACM players want to harvest the average players becasue it's a quick win and makes for a feel good when the kills landed message goes out.
Bustr, you've got some pretty weird and - I'm sorry to say - uninformed ideas about MA balance and your so-called ACM-sharks, Lions and now Air-samurai players as you're calling them. It's almost like an idea springs to your mind, and instead of testing its validity you just keep refining how you write it and with every new iteration become even more convinced of your own correctness since it reads more smoothly. Keep moving towards your ever-so-comfortable nirvana of correctness, don't let reason or balance get in your way...
I'm amazed I have the energy to bother posting here on this forum the state it's presently in, perhaps just for the sake of novelty, I thought I'd address your momentous ongoing attack on all things ACM with some alternate perspective. At least once, for the record...
You seem to be positioning yourself as an objective, unbiased, for-the-good-of-AH campaigner. But I'll remind everyone one of your earlier maps was designed expressely to train all things anti-fighter, so in the first instance I think your anti-fighter bias runs pretty deep.
Let's examine your predator-prey analogy: firstly it suggests there is once group which purely predates on another. Untrue. Untrue because the herd are also armed and want to eat the predators. And they try that with larger numbers. Has it ever occurred to you that ACM-centric players arise as a reaction to that and not the other way around. No. Of course it didn't, because you can't peek over the top of your own container.
You propose a division of the AH air combat-world into two discrete groups. Also untrue. It is more like a spectrum with noobs at one end and your ACM-sharks at the other. You further imply someone on the more advanced side always wants to predate on those to the less advanced side. Untrue. Untrue, ignorant and naive. For those who have committed to becoming skillful at ACM, you must seek, fight and be defeated by those to the more advanced side than you. Hence you must look for those who can challenge you and your present set of ACM theories & practices. Anyone less able than you doesn't do that and results in what you do with your writing: reinforces unfounded material.
But then here's the kicker (especially for you) the spectrum's not even a line, it's a 2D graph, the y-axis denoting experience. So you'd have a huge, and now increasing (thanks to reduction) bell curve in the middle of ACM ubernoobs. Not particularly skilled at ACM but magnificently experienced in knowing when they have momentary advantage and when they do not. When to attack a -e plane, to literally trip over each other to attack a damaged aircraft, to run in groups, run away, dive away, to friends, ack, CVs, hop in an 88-mm what-have-you. Those are the group which predates on noobs and ACM-masters alike. Because simply there's more of them than anyone else. Always has been, and that group is your sacred 'Average Joes'.
With an absence of ACM masters at one end, and an enormous herd of Average Joes with their heads down grazing all day long. The herd is unchecked, unchallenged, unaware of its surroundings. So new players come in, look around and leave very quickly - this is exactly what HiTech's stats reported. Would you stay, honestly, if you were new and inexperienced?
Do you know how many new players come to my Breakfast Club, by proportion? It's a lot. So much for your 'they all want to avoid combat' motif.
Any healthy natural system has a balance or is moving towards a balance. If it is not it is moving towards extinction. The balance is gone now, and when HiTech runs a minor test to explore a re-balance (and initiating all kinds of change suggestions) you all start with your ultimatums and tantrums and 'don't change nothing' nonsense.
Congratulations. WTG on stiffling any furter experimentation. Side-swapping to low numbers side untested. Zone ENY untested, cycling maps untested, etc. Won't likely be when your 'average Joes' immediately threaten to leave en masse if you change anything. And you say the ACM-players pressure HTC. Outragoeous and hypocritical behaviour. You lazy, inflexible crybabies.
Keep it then. Keep it exactly as it is. And as it is right now it is dying. Enjoy your decreasing savanna of green grass while the desert encroaches rapidly around you. Just keep looking down!
You're spraying your vitriol in the wrong direction old man.
