I had a similar experience, yesterday I sent my laptop in for upgrades (which is what i was playing ArmA on) so i decided i'd check out all the PR action that i'd been missing out on while i was using my older computer. what really prompted me to DL the new PR was the huey, i love huey and the model looks great!.
so when i installed it i started out on battle for qinling(sp?) i got the hang of taxing which i liked, i also liked getting rid of the message spam, so i got on the runway and ended up taking off into the "off-limits" zone, wasn't that fun but my fault nonetheless.
I then started a local jabal to play around with the new hueys

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I wasn't really a an of the ammo drop, i much prefered the "ammo from the vehicle method" my reasoning behind this was the fact that in PR you are very rarely stationary, therefore a mobile ammopoint would be alot useful than any crate o' ammo. I never liked the Blackhawk in PR, it's flightmodel was terrible and it accelerated FAR too fast, not to mention it would have a tendency to do barrel rolls without your permission. I figured the huey would have an awesome flightmodel, I was wrong, the huey still accelerated too fast and that was a bit of a disappointment.
Then I joined a Basrah server, I was happy to see someone was using the merlin for something other than scrap metal, though the rest of the team was fairly reluctant to utilize his assistance. I figured that this patch must have somehow improved the players attitudes, god seemed displeased at my pleasure and sent a god-forsaken eight year-old into my commander squad who begged and pleaded for a sniper kit.
I never got a chance to gun the scimtar but i did drive it, which was very nice, it was fast and had excellent handling over hills and good speed in the open. i did however get annoyed by the little map delay, i didn't really see it improving gameplay, it seemed more like an annoyance than a "realism feature". the minimap, a feature i wanted to remain in PR was removed in an appropriate manner, I didn't really have a problem with this.
after that round i switched to insurgent to quickly be disappointed by the jihad music =(. the IED and SKS were both very well done, I like the SKS alot more than the sagia (though i would like ot see it in another class).
I was also fairly dissapointed once again in the ammo department, not being able to use my truck as an RPG base made me alot less effective. it's good to see the VCP uncap, which did help the insurgent strategy.
sorry for the long post, just my first reaction to the new version.