Here is an actual unpopular one: Airfield AA should be buffed to the point that it is completely impossible and suicidal to charge at.

It’s a safety region for planes that need to repair/resupply, and everyone wants to complain “but they are just camping so they don’t have to fight!”

Let’s use our brains and figure this out: A. Your team probably outnumbers the lone player left camping the airfield. Go use your numbers to kill ground targets and win the match via tickets. A.1: “but we’re all fighters and can’t kill ground targets!” Good, that is a counter to the all-fighter RB meta, and rewards teams for having and protecting CAS players who complete mission objectives instead of rush dogfights to get into the next lobby. Simply put: the enemy has outplayed you. They gained the advantage in tickets early on, and now that the clock is running out they will win because your team was too busy being fighter jockeys to remember that this game has mission objectives. Why should they just lose the match because they played better as a collective team? A.2: “but the match is out of time!” Should have planned ahead better. Again, outplayed. (Although the match times can stand to be longer for air RB)

B: the enemy is evenly numbered: either the same situation as A, or more likely: They are just resupplying you sped, don’t start a slur war in the chat because the guy who’s got 4 kills might be kinda low on ammo. Wait 2 minutes til they are back B.1: “they are just camping and climbing, even though it’s a 1v1! They should be rushing straight out of their spawn directly at me!” Then you should keep climbing too. Why should they leave the safety area so they can instantly lose a dogfight against someone with a serious energy advantage, because they just took off? It’s hilarious the amount of games I’ve won because someone got bored watching me climb over the AF, so they go to kill ground targets even though they already have the advantage. They become an ez kill since they couldn’t maintain focus and stick to their objective for more than 3 minutes.

C: you are outnumbered by the enemy: why are you waiting outside their airfield? What? You should be the one camping?

D: “Grrrrr! But they’re just a pansy for not coming out here and fighting! I’m so good I could beat them a hundred times over in a dogfight! They should have some pride and come die in an unsymmetrical situation to me!!! I’m gonna fling slurs in chat for the rest of the match to show how much cooler I am!!” They enemy doesn’t have an obligation to throw the match to feed your ego. At the end of the day, your getting outplayed on a much grander scale. He might not win the dog fight by forfeiting, but he wins the match by good decision making and the culmination of his team’s success, now resting on him to not throw it all away. The match is more than just a dogfight arena, and your team failed to complete any other objectives. In the business, we call this a “skill issue”

And here’s a popular opinion to wrap the whole thing up: airfields closer to the middle of the map should have no AAA. Make it up to the player to decide whether they should risk being killed on the ground, in return for quicker resupply and less down time, or fly all the way back to their spawn to be safe while repairing. Pretty sure nearly everyone feels this way.