I have been playing WWIIOL for 15 years. I have to actually restrain myself from loading it up because if I do, I'll be up until 1 or 2 in the morning, killing Allieds in muh Panzer. Not the best graphics (not even good by modern standards) but pretty realistic ballistics and a great community. It is supposed to come out on Steam sometimes this summer.
Basically it's a giant sandbox shooter with a single server hosting a 24/7 campaign that can last for weeks or months before either the Allieds or the Axis emerges victorious. The sandbox stretches more or less from Hermeskeil in Germany to Hastings in England. The server can handle thousands of players at one time. When you log in you can spawn anything from a rifleman to a Tiger to a He-111 to a destroyer. The learning curve is pretty steep though. For the first few weeks (or years, in my case) kills are hard to come by and you often have no idea what killed you. Later on, though, you learn to distinguish the sounds the different weapons make, and you can sort of map out the battle lines in your head.
Sometimes people claim that someone is speed hacking or hacking through walls but no one has ever produced evidence of it. I do remember one guy a few years ago that had found a bug where his graphics card didn't render bushes, so basically he could conceal himself but no enemy around him could. He would infiltrate into our lines and snipe us. A couple of times back then, my card didn't render the bushes either. The honorable thing to do in that case was to log out and log back in, but I didn't do that, I took full advantage of it. War is hell. Haven't seen that in years though, so I guess the developers fixed it.
The allieds are a really Jewy bunch, always complaining even though they have all of the advantages. For example, their tier 0 ATG (2 pndr) can spawn from mobile spawn points that can be set anywhere and take out our best tank, which is the tier 3 Tiger. Another example is that the developers believe that the inferiority of the Sherman is a myth, so the Sherman 75mm is a better tank than the Panzer 4G, and the Sherman 76mm is a better tank than our Tiger. Also, they give the M10 way too much armor. So the tank game is not balanced, but all I play is panzers and I have no problem maintaining a kill/death ratio of 2:1 against their tanks and ATGs and 5:1 or better against all targets.
Pilots also agree that the air game is unbalanced in favor of the allied fighter planes. I tried flying about 10 years ago, it was fun but I never got good enough at it to try to stick with it. For a long time after that, I decided to become the best rifleman in the game, and actually was for one campaign. Then I joined High Command and was a pretty successful combat commander, putting together fun panzer columns that were successful more often than not.
Even though the game is tactically balanced in favor of the whiny Allieds, it really doesn't affect the outcomes of the campaigns as much as you would think. What matters more is the leadership of the High Command and the morale of the troops. Good leadership can win some towns, raising morale, causing more players to play longer, leading to more towns won, rinse, repeat.
I log in every now and then, but the one problem the game has right now is that we don't have the numbers playing that we used to. Hopefully Steam will change that, and we will once again see panzer columns with 100+ tanks like we used to have.
https://www.wwiionline.com/
