I'm not so sure about that. MvR kept firing until he was sure of a kill, and Mannock rejoiced in seeing his target in flames.

In multiplayer people continue to shoot at a landing aircraft because a kill is only awarded if the target crashes or the pilot is killed. If you force an opponent to land in your territory (he doesn't crash) you get nothing.

My comments were in regard to the typical, general behavior of the real pilots, not an absolute. MvR and other aces may have been more aggressive, but we would need to correlate the outcomes of their engagements with what we see in RoF given my premise that we gamers are generally more bloodthirsty.

And I understand the reasons why MP folks keep shooting. As Bandy mentioned earlier, the stats system provides incentives to kill until dead.

Ah, RoFfan, you missed an important part of my post where I mention players strafing (sometimes repeatedly) already stopped/downed and crashed/sometimes burning aircraft. You know who you are, and I remember your online name. However, not an isolated incident by just one player, but fortunately not too common either.

Hopefully it isn't a sign of things to come, because that sort of behaviour breeds more of it -- it happens to you, you get pissed off, and you pass it on...

Mannock I think was hiding his nervous tension and extreme fears with very dark humour and bravado, although you can't keep killing people and not have it desensitize or otherwise affect you.

MvR had that quote of his, "When I have shot down an Englishman my hunting passion is satisfied for a quarter of an hour. ... Only much, much later I have overcome my instinct and have become a butcher." Bravado or butcher, or both?

IMHO it is important to understand not only the conditions but also the prevailing culture of the times. MvR and many like him were raised for the military at an early age. Even for those drafted or joined voluntarily, it was duty - expected. Attitudes towards war and killing were simply different in 1917 than they are in 2012.

Then duty, expectations, etc. met reality. Killing repeatedly, watching friends die routinely, and facing death yourself on a daily basis. Combine that with the duty, expectations and even the thrill of combat and you can see where a little conflict might set in.

Online? IMHO if a plane is in the air it is a target. Wheels down it ceases to be a target. Strafing wreckage is the online equivalent of tea bagging - classless.




P.S. I find this interesting - just like real life. At the start there may be a sense of chivalry. In the end attitudes harden and chivalry goes out the window.

And also is rather gamey, if Winged Victory is anything to go by. From reading that, pilots generally loathed ground attack operations as that brought them too close to ground MG fire and they considered that the far greater threat than AA.

If there were a way to track "victories" based on when a plane that was shot up landed in NML, friendly or enemy territory there would be far less strafing.

Yes, this game does not manage to model the 10,000 men (each with a rifle and the training to use it) that you would be flying over on your average trip across no man's land.

Right, it doesn't model the masses of soldiers. But, again, it was the MG fire that they dreaded rather than all those bolt action rifles. And, no, they were not trained to fire accurately at fast moving targets such as aircraft. But per the book, the Germans seemed to get more accurate with MG fire as they had copious practice during late 1917-1918 as the RAF engaged in frequent low level bombing attacks over their lines. Ground bombing and strafing was dreaded because they couldn't identify when and where MG fire would come from as opposed to air-to-air combat where they could predict where the threats were.