Well, I've been in the MA for about 4 or 5 days now, and here's my (obviously profound) thoughts. They may hold some value, because they will illustrate how the bomber modelling impacts the experience of someone new to the game.
Air to air learning curve is MUCH higher than bombing curve. It is also much higher than bomber gunnery curve. In a bomber, you are shooting from a stable platform.
My style of play is oriented around teamwork, and making a contribution to my team's effort. I have found that the only contribution I can make as a fighter jock is to soak up lead and die so maybe another of my team can get an easier kill. On the other hand, I can actually be of some use to my team (and have a lot of fun) flying a buff/goon or manning a gun in an Ostie or in the Task Group.
Is soaking up lead in a fighter any fun for me? Only if it's part of a coordinated team effort, and those are few and far between. Most of the better pilots on my team (the Rooks), and on the others (I would suspect), seem to be hunting perks, not attempting to defeat the other countries.
As an example, let's take the action of the last couple of days. On Monday/Tuesday, the Rooks got wiped out and the game reset. When I logged on yesterday morning, we had anywhere from 11 to 25 Rookies on the roster. But those few began working together. By the time most players got off work/logged on, we had made substantial progress.
I was feeling quite good about this. Once we got 50+ teammates online, the efforts began to fragment again. But we still had two main areas to concentrate on, one Bish and one Knight.
We were doing really well, but I noticed that we began bypassing what were obvious strategic targets in favor of the shortest path to the HQ islands. Didn't make much sense to me, but my fellow newbie (Niblitz) and I took our buffs along on the Knight offensive.
Suddenly, about midnight US EST, I see the first truly massive organized mission come up (all jabo). Some of the hot sticks started a mission called "Reset the Knights". Being new, I thought this was a push for revenge from the pasting we took on Monday, so I'm going "yeah!". I told the team that I had two buffs, and what could we do? Dead silence
We were already heading on a mission to the base the l337's were heading to, and went in and took out the FH and fuel, and a few odds and ends (they didn't leave much, there were over a dozen of them, heh). Dead silence again, LOL.
By the time we RTB'd and bombed up again, it was basically all over. Well, that's fine. We got to make our small contribution, the game had reset, and we had groundhog day
Then the channels all lit up with "don't log yet", and "woohoo, perkies!!!!". To be fair, there were a few "WTG, Rookies", as well. I sat a watched the posts, and it was all about perks and points. About 'rados and 152's. Not much (um, not anything), about the coordination involved, or anything else about teamwork.
No salutes to the opposition, just "woohoo, perks!"
.
And I noticed that the "reset the nits mission" had started almost exactly six hours after most people would have logged on (at least in the US). This, all of a sudden, made sense, given the post in the game that "everyone who has been in for 6 hours gets the points".
This has probably been beaten to death in the years that I haven't been here, LOL. It's probably a fact that the only way to keep the long-time players interested in the game is with the points/perks/rank system.
I don't think I like it much, though. It reminds me too much of hated Quake-type Ladder Games.
And it smells to high heaven of elitism.
