The S-199 Sakeen of the Israeli tree has this feature where it lets you spawn thrice (and thrice again with a backup) in air arcade to compensate the fact that you start the tree with one single plane. Maybe premium tanks could have that feature too, since ground battles rely heavily on lineups even more than air arcade.
Idk if this could work as I basically never play ground, just an idea
They already have a high SP cost (so your suggestion is already implemented) and there’s no reason to give em a high SL cost due to the poor rewards.
iirc, the Sakeen can only spawn a fourth time with backups.
The solution is to do a complete 180 on how CAS is approached and dealt with. If nerfing it were going to fix the problem it would have done so already.
The problem for the most part is not really the CAS itself, its the players whining about it when it kills them. The game mechanics upon which the CAS operates are the other half of the issue. We’ve seen dozens of targeted nerfs but basically never have seen proper rebuilding of the underlying mechanics it operates on.
Now what are the problems in my eyes?
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“Rage mechanics” - things which seemingly exist as purely new player crutches or to make CAS annoying. Kill camera, midair spawns at high speeds, the giant “team capturing zone X” messages that effectively read as “hi enemy plane please bomb me I’m right here!”, the entire SP system demanding planes be “powerups” when the best counter to a plane is and always will be another plane, helicopter pads being so close to the tank map.
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Ineffective/unavailable counters - The SP system demanding aircraft be “killstreak powerups” also is part of this because the Fighters people would use to swat CAS are locked away similarly to CAS. SPAAG prior to radar tiers pretty much entirely relying on pilot stupidity to score kills, while having cripplingly short practical engagement distances that demand them be in the fray with tanks, yet be endlessly vilified when they kill tanks to even get to said locations in the first place to do their actual jobs. Radar SPAAG being fidgety with their radar locks. IR SAMs other than the Strela being rather gimped in how fast they obtain locks or how maneuverable their missiles are (Stingers especially). Helicopters being ridiculously hard to lock with IR SAMs, far more so than real ones are. Helicopters giving no Doppler Radar returns when stationary despite the rotor always being moving forward and away from any Doppler Radar system. Helicopter DIRCM being a braindead bubble deflecting even non-IR missiles. SCALOS SAMs being glitchy in their controllability. Top tier SAMs being artificially gimped. And last but not least a game selling itself on Combined Arms that mysteriously doesn’t make every user a Combined Arms player automatically, given Combined Naval already does this with aircraft.
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Complete Lack of Nontoxic Purpose and Sardine Can Maps - This one is pretty self-explanatory. Maps being puny means tanks have nowhere to hide, which CAS then deletes as fish in a barrel. Yet as soon as you look beyond this, CAS has literally nothing else it can even DO other than be the biggest pain in the ass to player tanks imaginable. There are no supply lines to sever. No supply bases to bomb to oblivion. No artillery batteries to silence to deny the opposing team Artillery Support. Airbases are both indestructible and guarded by aimbots that render strafing them a death sentence, same with Helipads. No bunkers or hidden AT guns to snuff out that are guarding cap zones. And again the great irony is that the game has most of these mechanics in its Naval or World War Mode assets already.
I vehemently disagree on the concept of “just make CAS more expensive to spawn and it’ll soon go away!” The game has tried all flavors of that in the past and it didn’t help. All it resulted in was a smaller number of aircraft arriving a bit later in the game without a single player bothering to spawn SPAAGs to try killing it with due to there not being enough planes to justify using a lineup slot on an AA anymore. If you merely make it SL-costly then only the veteran players will bring them out and you get the same problem. Nerfing CAS in any fashion DOES. NOT. WORK.
3 Likes
If only gaijin made more good maps instead of ruining all the good ones with reworks…
No gaijin, when I say I want a long range map I mean that I want to shoot people from 2km away, not drive for 5 minutes to see any combat
Old sands of sinai was my favorite map because it had both a good flanking route, medium and short range engagement areas and long range sniping
2 Likes
Tbf the average player is terrible at naval and no amount of SBMM would save them.
1 Like
So the possible flaw with this idea is that the gradient of scor/SL/RP per minute always slopes down. There is more score on average in the first couple minutes of any game than the next couple (starting when players get in range of each other). Caps are often taken once and kept. There are fewer players to shoot the closer you get to the end. And so on.
It is that gradient that encourages ODL today. Even in a win state, you’ve made most of your score in your first life so sticking around as the score per minute is dribbling down seems pointless if you can jump into another game.
As a result, increasing spawn costs for returning play in a game would only encourage ODL, not discourage it. Also, I don’t think decreasing player rewards overall by adding an SL spawn cost like you have in the extended-game modes helps anyone: the game economy is better than it was, but still pretty tight at times.
Gaijin has tried a few things to increase endgame net rewards (generally by lowering the cost of returning) but it’s possible there’s still more that could be done there.
As far as CAS, Gaijin made some good moves there in changing the BRs for the very effective planes in non-ground modes, among other things. I think they could afford to be more aggressive there yet, including extending it now to lower BRs.
Given rewards are totaled after the match ends I don’t see why they simply could not provide a bonus based on the percentage of the match you are (actively) there for for example if the match runs for the full 20mins and you are in the match from start to finish you gain +100% SL, if you leave after 5 minutes you gain +25%.
This should be based of the actual duration of the match, not like the new RP system where it is based of the potential duration of the match which encourages turtling.
I’ve had plenty of times there have been only a hand full of enemies left in the match, so my entire team leaves and we lose…