Yes guys, it’s time for another WWIIO:BE post! (Have no idea how to abbreviate this hellish title 
) The reason being ofcourse that I recently bought myself a joystick for the simple reason that I Believe I Can Fly…or at least I Want To Believe.
After reading up on how to get airborne, how to land and how to rock and roll I was completely put off. The kind of “put off” I would be if anyone suddenly demanded me to take that physics examn again, which I flunked so hard in my last year of high school (Hey, what do I care about how a ray of sunlight reflects through a drop of water?!). But what better driving force than the idea of having spent hard earned cash on a piece of hardware I would never use, so I loaded up WWIIONLINEBE, booted up a training session and suddenly found myself in a fierce flying metal fighter-machine (which I suspect is actually made of wet cardboard).
After crashing loads of times without ever getting my wheels off the ground, a small voice popped into my head: “Use the force, Luke”. As my name isn’t Luke I decided to ignore both the voice AND the rather wellwritten pilot-guide I was holding, and trying to do it My Way. I then finally succeded in getting in the air…and 30 sec later I was ready to try a take-off again! My point here is that many of those guides on how to fly planes in WW2BE are really helpful, but also written from the viewpoint of a guy who knows exactly what he’s talking about without knowing YOUR level of entry, so my suggestion here is to remember to try and keep it simple at first and just get a feel for the plane as you go. Then you can always consult the guide again, and you will probably have a way better chance of actually understanding what is meant by the author. (It can be frustrating reading about how you need to trim your plane when it doesn’t have either hair or abdominal muscles).
Although I have yet to get my first kill and so far only ever hit one moving truck, a whole new area of this game has openend up for me, and this is really where WW2O:BE has something quite special and rewarding to offer the new player: There are more than just a few gameplays to figure out here, and most of them takes a while getting used to, and probably years to master. The great thing is that you can feel yourself getting better all the time. Improvements in your own skill might come in small margins and loads of deaths, but they are there and you can feel it if you aren’t allergic to dying!
I’ve never been much into flight-sims, so I’ve been wondering why I suddenly like all this air-action. It took a few runs in a tank and a truck to figure out why I’m enjoying these different types of gameplays in WW2ONLINE:BATTLEGROUNDEUROPE but not in other games: It all comes down to the MMO-aspect of this game. When I fly I always know that somewhere underneath me there are other players sharing my goal, and I know that what I do in that plane will have an impact on their game too. Even when I’m in a 1-winged spiral towards the ground with a trail of fire and smoke behind me, I know that while the enemyplane was surgically taking apart my own plane, his attention was dragged away from the trucks on the ground from where infantry spawn into enemy towns. And maybe..just maybe one of those trucks played a part in us getting further into enemy territory! (That is at least what I tell myself when lying on the floor screaming in despair over crashing yet again)
Right now I’m looking forward to recieving some hands on in-game flighttraining from my more experinced fellow squadmembers (Squads being the equivalent to guilds in other MMOs) and THEN I’m sure to get my first kill!
Related posts:
For me one of the most rewarding parts of the flight game is to transport players in the C-47 or Junkers, getting them over a town and getting back to base to fly another sortie. Flying into heavily defended areas is great fun, flying low then climbing at the last moment to drop troopers.
Looking forward to trying that too! Problem is that while training I only have access to a small fighter-plane, and I’d love to practise landing these larger planes before I head out with a bunch of paratroopers in the trunk!
Nice post Ffaff.
I’m in pretty much the same situation as you are. I can get off the ground fine now and land ok too. In air to air combat I’ve hit a good few enemy planes but haven’t managed to kill any. I’ve killed a few enemy guns on the ground, as well as infantry. Many wounds have been caused by my plane too to ground targets without killing them.
My bombing isn’t going much better at the moment, I’ve managed to get into heavily defended areas to drop my bombs but I seem to miss the target most of the time. My bombing kills so far amount to 1 ATG and a couple of Infantry, lol. I’d love to have seen the rifleman’s face who was hit when I dropped my entire payload onto his head.
We’ll get there Ffaff, many deaths will occur and many hours will pass, but we’ll get there.
Got my first air to air kill.
A 109 was removed from the sky. 
Damn! You are ahead of me then, Yeti
Congrats!
The challenge and the knowledge that the 88 gunner I just shot in the back of the melon has pitched his mouse and keyboard across the room and shrieked incoherently at his monitor is what has kept this game awesome for me for so long.
Hey, at least you can get off the ground. 8 years plus and I can just now taxi around the runway without hitting buildings.
Good job!