My solution to MP availability… Talk a friend into purchasing every MP flight game I have. At the worst of times, I have at least ONE person to fly MP with at least 2-8 hours a week.
When starting out with F4, there is a lot to learn and working with AI is part of that. It’s good to know what to expect of the AI in a multi-player game so you can make best use of the human contribution.
When you have mastered single play, MP is there to move you on to more game satisfaction. Despite the availability of human players on various hosts, more often than not, experienced players with something to teach but don’t have the talent or calling to teach, are very intolerant of mistakes and will not fly with newbies or will only once, maybe soon to bail on you.
Take advantage of those here who have invited you.
If you admit up front you are new and need some advice, you’ll find players willing to jump in with you rapidly dwindling to few or nothing on the servers.
Again, a friend learning with you is the best way to go if you can. In the mean time there are documents you can read about radio procedures and multiplayer technique so when you jump into the large servers,
you no longer need to pronounce your newness and have better luck finding flyers.
This was my approach and when I joined a virtual wing and took the formation test, I passed all of it without any training from the wing because I had practiced their procedures and chatter with my friend.
Bottom line, most regular online pilots consider their time valuable and usually want to spend their time actually accomplishing missions and will prefer a cadre of close friends they can rely on to make the most of their investment.
Notice that I qualified my generalizations of online pilots. If you can find one or more tolerant online trainers/teachers, they are rare, but very valuable assets.
My impression is in the early days of SuperPak when I was getting into online wings, there were enough other people who were also learning at my level, the enthusiasm for just having anyone to fly with was higher than it is now.
-Pv-