I am going to avoid saying “Air RB EC”, because even though it will fix most issues, Gaijin has stated they don’t plan on adding this anytime soon. In this I’m going to lay out some issues, and In a reply I’m going to suggest fixes. If anyone else has Criticism and Suggestions, its probably healthy to put them out there
Low Skill players:
As we all know, ARB is in a rough spot, and the biggest issue plaguing the game is the players. Most players (80%) suck at the game, they don’t know how to fight using their energy and don’t know how to dogfight, so what do they do? Full commit head-on. Not only is this easy to counter, but its boring to fight, as 9 times out of 10 as soon as you merge with these players you can kill them in one turn, as they panic and pick an awful line, or they try to run away, where they dive to the deck and get picked off later in the game to someone who actually climbed. This is frustrating for the player who died, and boring to the player who killed them.
Air Field Campers:
Players will refuse to leave the protection bubble of their airfield if it looks like they are loosing the match. They wont try to fight, and they wont just leave the match. This just sucks for all parties involved.
Out dated battle rating system & BR Compression:
I shouldn’t even need to Elaborate.
There are a couple ways to improve this, Admittedly it cant be fully fixed.
Skill-Based Team balance, Try to balance out the good players and bad players evenly across teams.
Practice modes. Air Arcade is insufficient for developing skills for ARB. Improve the Bot planes in war thunder, where they can actually put up a good fight, Evade and punish Braindead Head-ons, and use tactics and dogfight. And put one player in a simulated ARB match. No rewards would be earned, apart from maybe giving you a Rank II or III tech tree fighter for completing it with over 5 kills.
Using the Improved bots, there could be 1v1 practice. The player can pick what plane the enemy flies, and they could just practice dogfighting the bot, maybe give it different levels of skill that the player can choose between similar to a Chess bot.
If a player is detected in their AAA bubble for more than 2 minutes, The AAA will either disable or straight up turn on the player that’s camping. This would solve the issue in one fell swoop, and be really funny at the same time. If the player leaves the bubble, the counter will pause, and after 2 mins, it will reset.
the game cant compensate for skill issue without SBMM which would destroy casual play for people that figured out which hole the shape went into as an infant.
the BR system is fine, lots of vehicles just need significant reshuffles.
Airfield camping is usually a symptom of last player being a coward and running away to the airfield instead of fighting, its all the other players can do in the meantime.
I can only say you need to just bear it until 8.7, then play nuclear escalation
2- I’ve not seen any of these players at all this year.
The only airfield camper type I’ve seen is the other of people camping enemy airfields instead of getting more score at the battlefield.
Ah, so rule violating behavior… this would just encourage more teamkilling.
There’s already an idle timer for players that are idle of 90 seconds.
1, I’m not saying teammates should turn on the camper, I’m saying the AI AAA should turn on the camper. literally no rule violating behaviour. I have no idea where you pulled that from.
2, the idle time only counts people that are stationary on the runway, or J’d out in the loadout screen. not actively circling the airfield.
and I have no idea how you haven’t seen an airfield camper, because personally they are in 70% of my prop matches and everyone else I talked to have them in most games.
1- That is still teamkilling & if AI does it, then players can do it.
Otherwise it’s hypocrtical.
2- Yeah, when they’re idle.
I’ve not seen a single person circle their own runway at all this year of the ~2000 battles I’ve played.
I’ve seen friendlies circling enemy runways while I’m trying to get more score, and premature endings to matches harm me infinitely more than the non-existent people circling their own runway.
I wish I actually saw the airfield campers you described, my matches would be longer.
Instead I’m stuck with 3 - 6 minute matches all the time [4 - 8 minutes in props].
1, No, it wouldn’t be team killing, it would be a game mechanic, the same way in ground battles, when you leave the AO, you blow up. In air if you camp you should get shot down.
2, sounds to me you either don’t play Props and just Top-tier, or you’re confused and think I’m talking about air arcade, because in 3.0-7.0 Air REALISTIC Battles, Airfield campers are rampant.
Edit, never mind, Checked your SS. you barely play fighters and when you do its a jet
Change the objective structure of the game mode so that no single class is able to win games on its own. Essentially “Miniature EC” for all intents and purposes.
Remove the “no active players left on hostile team,” “airfield destroyed,” and “all ground units destroyed” auto-win ticket bleeds.
In all matches with fewer than 16 players, fill those slots with player-grade bots (the named ones)
Adjust the ticket count so A2A, CAS, and Bombing each are only able to remove 50% of the original ticket total in incremental chunks. That way, no one class is able to step on the toes of the other two by simply doing its intended job.
Killing all player and all AI bot aircraft is what bleeds up to 50% of the ticket bar
Likewise with all ground units
Replace the minibase bombing objective with a building-based one similar to Deep Strike, but without any cracked SPAAG guarding it.
Lobotomize the Airfield AAA.
Extend match timer back to 1 hour - we don’t have the crafting events anymore that bombers in orbit would abuse constantly.
Allow people to queue with entire lineups of planes, but be queued based on their highest-BR one. You still get only one death, but are freely able to swap planes on the runway as the situation demands.
Remove the 4-bomber limit. Instead, assign the matchmaker to have dedicated “Fighter” and “Not A Fighter” slots it fills from people in queue. That way, the existence of Attackers and Bombers doesn’t automatically take up Fighter slots.
You could keep the exact same gamemode but reward players more for killing ground targets when you have like 3 or 4 fighters left, double or triple xp/sl rewards after a win and multiply my 3/4 after a loss.