A past dream, revisited

Long ago, in a time before bots were even a consideration to help populate regular, random battles in World of Warplanes, I had this dream.

Clear your mind and imagine, if you will, a map called Asian Border and both teams are flying jets. One side would be in North American F-86 Sabres, the other would pilot their arch nemesis, the Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG 15. Immerse yourself into the high speed aerial action and interesting ingame cross chat, sound like fun?

However, this was also a time before the Mikoyan-Gurevich line was even introduced to the game, so I settled on the goal of what I believed to be the next best, current-for-the-time alternative, the Yakovlev Yak-30. I thought that the F-86 might have been the more popular choice and somebody has to fly those "enemy" planes.

Over the years, it has been a start and stop endeavour, breaking into jets with the tier VIII Yak-15, wander off and play other stuff, return and push up to the Yak-19 at tier IX and detour myself again to other things....

The jet propelled Yaks had that playstyle I was looking for, highly maneuverable, decent rate of climb and they could turn exceptionally well. The trade off was fairly poor weapons accuracy, guns that overheated too quickly for my liking and they really couldn't take a serious hit. Despite that, these aircraft delivered a speed and fun factor that I hadn't experienced before and couldn't wait to try and make that dream battle into a reality.

Sadly, that didn't and won't come to pass.

The bitter reality of the here and now is there are more bots than real people flying in sorties, thanks to all the events that took place over the passage of time. Many players who already have acquired a F-86 and/or the later released MiG 15 have moved on to other things and far too few new players are comfortable with playing other aircraft in different tiers. To even organize such an event these days, would take a monumental effort and one would have to secure prizes for the participants, since the impression I am left with is people will only play for a tangible reward, not so much the experience of the moment. The golden era of "what could have been" has come and gone.

However, I still hold on to that dream, even if it is to satisfy my own goal of scratching it off my game "bucket list" and took out my Yak-19 to terrorize the skies....