This range gets uptiered to fight F-104s, T-2s, and Mirages nearly every game. They go 1.5 times your speed, have superior missiles, and are almost always half or more of the opposing team. I’m at the point of just j’ing out if I get intercepted by more than one less than halfway to the fight. It’s ridiculous. Why is there no br cap?
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Hard BR limits are bad in my opinion.
The issue is, is that 9.0+ is extremely compressed, and Gaijin has not done anything to mitigate that.
I kept hitting roadblocks thinking about how to decompress it without creating something like completely detached and peerless 16.0 jets. I think a hard 9.3 or 9.7 cap would work. Very few or no supersonic fighters capable of zooming in and out of your effective range forcing you to turn and bleed your energy for a 95% chance of being obliterated instead of 100, and the theoretical top dogs like the G.91 YS are still in the same agility and speed bracket as those a full 1.0 bracket down. Sabres and Harriers can punch just as hard, just won’t get crushed by supersonic enemies
The issue with a hard cap is that it locks certain aircraft into permanent uptiers, and permanent downtiers.
I think that the transition from subsonic gunfighters to supersonic missile capable planes is very hard to balance, especially since supersonic gunfighters and subsonic missile slingers exist.
Doing lots of decompression is the best solution.
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An F-82E can beat a Ki-84 hei by simply outplaying it. A G.91 is gonna have to get lucky or be immensely better than even a T-2 to reasonably face it. The jump from subsonic to supersonic jets is like that from props to jets. You can counter missiles with good predictive positioning to not let anyone behind you, which rapidly diminishes in feasibility if your opponent is 500 kmh faster than you
lol, not really, about as likely to happen as the g.91 to t2 problem
hard caps arent worth the permanent uptiers/downtier problem
Most of the supersonic aircraft at that Bracket turn like a brick and you can usually evade by pulling hard away from them. The issue imo isnt defending against them, its killing them. The amount of times ive spent 10 minutes chasing after an F-104 in something like a Hunter or Sea-Vixen is really annoying. They cant touch me and I cant touch them.
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However, 9.7BR hardcap worked so well until F104 and EEL comes.
No, it didn’t. It just invalidated literally any jet that wasn’t meta above 9.7 because you couldnt see downtiers and 10.0 could see top tier at the time.
If “outplaying” is a headon, sure.
IMO the 8.7 and 9.0 jets don’t struggle excessively to compete against most of the 9.3 and 9.7 jets. Usually, the aircraft are still gunfighters, but there are some of those far-flung missile planes which are the main culprit of making the BR worse to play imo. Looking at you, Ayit, A-10A, F8U-2. (please move the Ayit to 10.0 snail)
I do think the BR is far too compressed, because the F-1 and Mirage III C have 0 reason to be in the same game as a Sabre. I don’t even know what you’re supposed to do about a R.550 that got flung at you in any 9.0 jets.
On the other hand, 9.3 and 9.7 have a very tough time against the 10.3 and 10.7 opponents too. Still due to compression. T-2K vs J-7D is pretty bonkers. Good luck dodging a PL-5, Magic, AIM-9L without countermeasures. I really hate compression, but Gaijin never seems to care about trying to fix the biggest and most urgent issue in WT. Compression shows up everywhere, but yeah the 7.3-11.0 range is absurdly compressed.
A hard cap is a bad idea. That’s how you get a set of planes that’re always meta and suck others into full uptiers nonstop. IIRC the old 9.7 cap made 8.7 rubbish to play, but I wasn’t around for that. Though at the same time we’ve gotta have some sort of cutoff so that flareless jets aren’t pitted against 30G missiles. Maybe a 1.0BR buffer across the board that means they can only downtier or full uptier, no partial uptiers. Make those fights rarer.
Anything with a 15+G missile should go up IMO. The F-104A faces 30G all aspects in an uptier, has 4xR60 carriers like the yak 38 at its own tier, and downtiers into subsonics. It’s somewhat workable in an uptier, but plainly unfun in a downtier because you can’t touch anything and they can’t touch you. I dread full downtiers in that thing, but I dread full uptiers because there’s nothing you can do if someone wants you dead. It’s blatantly OP, yet boring or annoying to play.
The only solution IMO to the shitshow of F-104s and MiG-21s at 9.3 is to move every supersonic up indiscriminately by at least 0.7BR. I don’t care if it’s crap like the MiG-21F-13 or if it’s a funky bus like the Lightning, move it up and give some breathing room to the subsonics. Then move up the 15+G missile carriers like the A-5C, A-10, MiG-21SPS-K, Harrier and yak, etc. Then once again move up anything with an all aspect missile. Give some room for each technological leap, because they each represent a big shift in capability. Each of these steps is like the biplane to the monoplane, or the prop to the jet, except there’s no tradeoff like poorer low speed thrust or manoeuvrability.
In 1.0BR we go from pre-flare jets starting to get Aim 9Bs and Es to all aspects with hundreds of flares on bad platforms, and high G missiles on meta platforms with flares. Compare it to low tier where we increase the BR of a prop by 1.0BR for having moderately better guns with no noticeable FM impact. Compare it to the shermans that go from 3.3-3.7-4.0 for having marginally better agility and survivability. It’s utterly stupid.
And Gaijin keeps giving better weapons to older vehicles to compensate. For example we’ve now got Aim 9Ps on the T-2 to make it somewhat workable at 9.7, but it still sucks because it constantly uptiers into all aspects, 30G non-all aspects on faster and more manoeuvrable platforms with flares, while it has no countermeasures. It sucks regardless of what missiles it has, whereas it was OP when it was first moved to 9.7.
We thought BR compression was bad when the F-100D was 10.0. And now it’s 9.3, yet still crap. And Gaijin keeps on giving us a load of powercrept premiums at this BR, which only exacerbates the issue. Idk, maybe give us dynamic BRs based on loadouts or some arbitrary modification that lets us use better weapons in a battle, if you want to start trying to make inadequate platforms more competitive by giving them better equipment? Let us experience the early days of missile combat with the 9Bs and Es and Js without having to contend with all an R-60 or Aim-9L in our flareless early supersonic, or god forbid subsonic.
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I was on there but, didn’t have any issues for playing 8.7s and 9.0s until F104 comes because BR wasn’t compressed so hard like current days and 8.7s and 9.7s didn’t have huge performance differences.
The issue was Hunter FGA.9 and CL-13B Mk.6, Shenyang F-5 but, all of them were possible to send to hangar with MiG-15bis, if you have decent duel skills or force fuel fight.
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IMO, at this time, rotation BR matchmakers like SBEC is really needed for ARB games.
It has some issues like everybody spams meta plane but, compare to current matchmaker problems, it isn’t not huge problems.
Quit before the match starts. This game is very rigged, it’s your only chance.
That shafts your team though. At this point in full uptiers without flares I tend to measure my worth by how many missiles I can make them fire at me and how long I can hold their attention before I die. If I can get a 10.3 out of missiles in my 9.3, or get someone to spend a few minutes running me down, then maybe that’ll give my team a better chance. It’d be nice if I had some avenue for skill and strategy expression like prop uptiers though.
JIP exist sometime in first 20 sec
Also, why would I care about my team or winning?
Ehh, it’s not guaranteed and a lot of people disable it, myself included. Winning more gives better rewards, you can have some personal pride in win rate, and it’s worth it to get in the habit of thinking of the battle and the team, rather than just yourself. 2 kills, a death and a win usually nets more than 3 kills and a loss. Though I’m not sure how well that holds up with the skill bonuses, tbf. Certainly holds up for assists.
But if you don’t kill anyone or do anything, the multiplier on the reward is useless. 20 x 0 = 0.
2kpb is higher than the average by a lot, so that number is bad odds.
Death points? It’s a bit of a stretch. What about AI kills, or if you manage to get one kill or assist in before someone gets you? Might as well try, even if it sucks. If it keeps sucking then I quit and simmer down for the night. Leaving every full uptier immediately is a bit stinky.
You can blame Gaijin that they didn’t decompress 10.0BR+ at that time.
Focus to good points, 8.7-9.7BR wasn’t compress so hard and most 8.7s shouldn’t face against 7.7s with obvious reasons so, it was quite balanced below 9.7s.