Thank you a lot for your feedback! Glad that someone who is playing since the beginning chimed in.
I will have to read this a few more times to take it in.
I have just one question for now.
How would PVP not end the round if all players from one team are dead?
I had some games on the dev servers with half teams with bot (6/8 vs 6/8 real players) it’s so much more enjoyable, and the games are not like 4 minutes long
I agree with some of your ideas, but not all
How would this apply to bombers who shoot down aircraft? They get nearly no reward for defending themselves? There’s also issues where someone would be forced to shoot down aircraft in an attacker in order to win or protect a friendly. There’s also issues with certain planes that are classified as attackers, despite being very good fighters at their BR, such as the F-84B and G. It nerfs rewards for contributing to your team, which is bad.
I completely disagree with removing enemy markers. It would make finding aircraft too difficult and annoying. It would not benefit the game in any way, either.
I’ve only been playing since 2015, which is a good few years since the dawn of the game in 2012.
Simple - just disable the “no active players left on hostile team” ticket bleed. There have been occasions after updates where it bugged out and didn’t trigger before. Game did not implode the moment the last player died, rather people just swept up the remaining ground units to end the round instead.
Also the recent Guardian Angel event to escort B-17s on a bombing mission doesn’t end until the bombers complete their objective, even if all German interceptors are shot down.
The main job of ground attackers and bombers is not Air PvP, thus any option to end the round solely by Air PvP means these classes of planes can literally never be relevant in Air RB.
I feel much the same way about attackers being able to win the game solely by themselves if left unattended, and about the old bomber airfield destruction automatic ticket bleed still present in very low BR maps.
None of those are healthy for the game long-term.
That is the point. Bombers and attackers going gunship mode, even in self-defense, would not earn much. Their main job is not to be gunships (outside odd cases like the YB-40 which we don’t even have yet). Their main job would pay well enough to more than compensate for reductions elsewhere.
This is intended. Fighters alone cannot be the sole thing that matters in the game mode, or the game mode can never evolve beyond the current “big dumb deathmatch” setup.
Because Fighters are currently the “king of the hill” in the mode, they must under no uncertain terms give up some of their importance to make room for nonfighters to matter in a healthy manner.
Hence why I propose altering ticket losses so that each objective only knocks out 50% of the tickets when fully completed. Then, fighters get to finish their dogfights and have their fun without depriving attackers and bombers of the option to finish their objectives, too. And vice versa. This does not directly harm fighter players in any way, except for the handful who think themselves too good for grass-cutting once in a while (the xBromanx’s and the UnknownDistance’s of the community).
If a fighter-exclusive player has no interest in cutting grass after the last player and AI planes are all shot down, they can go land at the nearest runway and leave the round.
In the rare circumstance they are the sole person left in the round, well they would have no choice but to do some grass-cutting to finish things off.
People would have to use their eyes and brains to spot people, and not have the computer do 90% of the work for them. Slow-climbing planes reliant on speed-centric tactics would become much more valuable. Bombers, attackers, and multirole fighters would no longer be instantly swarmed the moment they fly within 5km of anything.
If you want red enemy markers, go to Arcade. The game mode cannot evolve in a meaningful way to truly fit all of the planes it has if it tries to retain arcadey conveniences.
And it goes without saying that the Avenger and Blind Hunt orders would be non-functional in the mode like they are in Combined Ground/Combined Naval.
With universal dot scaling, you really wouldn’t need red markers to spot people anymore. Friendlies would still be marked out to 36km distance.
I think your ideas aren’t bad, but reducing the rewards does not make the game better in any way at all.
I am all for increasing rewards for planes doing what they were meant to do, but rewards should never be reduced under any circumstances.
A player should not be forced to get 1/100th of the rewards in order to win a match just because they chose the wrong plane.
Reducing rewards is never the right thing to do, and it makes me angry that people genuinely believe that it is.
Edit: What you want is something like this, Specific RP/SL bonuses for each vehicle type. This rewards players for doing intended actions, but it doesn’t punish players for doing other acctions.
The point here is to curb abusive play with various machines.
Fighters should not be cutting grass if they queue as fighters and take up fighter team slots. Bombers and attackers should not be abusing their airspawns to hunt climbing fighters (funny how Helldivers, B7A2s, and Dauntlesses get nowhere near the hate R2Y2s once did, even though they are leagues more common).
The intent is to make off-target use of machines unprofitable, and thereby curb the use of said machines in such a manner.
Plus, a reshuffling of rewards rather than a straight buff is more likely to be implemented, since while we all would prefer lessening of “the grind,” that goes contrary to snail’s business model.
I do not like bombers going gunship mode, funny as it may occasionally be, it is terrible for long-term game health. I do not like naval bombers abusing airspawns to go kill other bombers or even fighters. I do not like attackers abusing airspawns to kill other attackers or fighters. And while I personally may enjoy using multirole fighters for more than just air-to-air, I have played long enough to recognize that fighters cutting grass deprives purpose-built attackers of their job in the exact same way bomb truck fighters deprive dedicated bombers of their objective.
Thus, some kind of punishment to rein in that behavior is necessary.
I do believe that a reclassification of most planes ingame is necessary, so that if you want to use a multirole plane for several jobs in a match, you can go do so. Here’s how it would work:
Every plane has certain assigned jobs it can do in Air RB. When you hit “To Battle!” you get a small pop-up asking you to pick a given role to queue in. You then get that role’s set of reward bonuses and maluses.
Once the match starts, and after players inevitably get shot down, thereby opening up team slots in given tasks, you can proceed to land on your runway, J out in the same way as you would when changing ordinance loadouts, and then get the option to change your role, thereby getting that new role’s reward bonuses and maluses.
Available Roles would be:
If a P-47D with options for Fighter, Bomber Hunter, and Attacker wants to do ground attack, it still can. It would be queued as an Attacker and not take up a Fighter team slot.
If a Helldiver wanted to be a Fighter, it would queue as a Fighter, and not take up a non-fighter team slot.
Does this make more sense?
And that can be fixed somewhat by increasing rewards for players doing the correct task.
Rewards should never be reduced under any circumstances.
There are better ways to make players use planes for the intended purpose. Reducing rewards helps nobody. Your idea punishes players for playing the game in a way you don’t approve of. This is bad.
That is why a combination of ingenuitive, dynamic map, objective and gameplay design, a long maximum match time (2 hours) while introducting a real matchmaker lobby system (think Hell Let Loose) is the direction the game needs to move. A player could either A) wait for a new lobby to fill for a game to start or B) jump into an existing match.
ARB is currently just Live. Die. Repeat. on maps and objectives built over 10 years ago primarily for prop diriven aircraft.
I have read your post a few more times now.
I actually don’t mind this at all, but this just turns the match into PvE for the winning team, and I don’t think Gaijin will allow increased rewards.
But I am also unsure how much it would help make bombers and strike aircraft more playable and more useful. This only helps them if their teams wins, and most such aircraft are not that great at fighting. I think this again devolves into people only playing fighters, and if they win they would go back to base to get some ground pounding weapons. I don’t think a lot of “fighter mains” would be to happy to be forced into ground pounding after “winning”.
I really hate this. Imagine you are a strike aircraft or a bomber defending yourself and take down two enemy planes only to be shot down by a third. Not not only do you not get to do your mission, you get no rewards from taking down 2 planes.
I think this is the wrong way to go for fixing this issue.
Our post focues more on top tier, I haven’t thought about low tier planes at all to be honest.
I agree with this. Evasive maneuvers should help you stay alive under AA fire. For AF AA I say put bigger guns and more of them, so that it’s still deadly.
This more seems like a technical issue than a game design one.
We came to pretty similar conclusion as well. I agree with this.
A lot of top tier planes are fighters even though they can do ground pound just as well. Our whole post revolves around top tier. Some of your ideas fit it, but also a lot of them don’t.
We never wanted to force anyone into any specific playstyle.
You are trying to forcefully cram a solution into the current ARB, which we have proven doesn’t work. Why do you think these airspawns need to stay? People need to open their minds more, instead of going “This won’t work in current ARB”. Yes, of course it won’t, that’s why we are trying to change it.
No more negative feedback loops, we have enough of those in War Thunder.
“All plans got out the windows after you merge”, or something like that.
And yet economy updates will sometimes crater earning potential on a given plane to effectively yield the same result.
And no, there really isn’t a “better” way to encourage someone to use their plane according to its appropriate job. The job of a naval bomber is to bomb ships and/or ground targets, not kill planes. The job of a land-based ground attacker is to deal with tank columns and fortifications, not kill planes. The job of a heavy bomber is to stay generally high up and drop on runways or other large targets, not try bombing pillboxes or gunshipping planes. The job of a fighter is to kill enemy fighters so more specialized craft can survive. The job of a bomber killer is to kill heavily-armored planes such as bombers and/or attackers.
Under the system I proposed, you would earn ten times current rewards for the simple job of doing what your plane is supposed to do.
As far as I am concerned, any resistance to the idea implies you enjoy abusing airspawns to hunt climbing fighters, and therefore are the very abuse needing to be culled.
Multirole jets in high tiers are such a xxxxshow partially because of dedicated ground attack planes armed with advanced missiles using those missiles to kill Korea-era jets with no countermeasures at all. Such an issue would be far less of a problem under the reward structure I propose, because such unintended behavior would no longer pay enough to be worth doing.
Now go convince Ion_Protogen why his proposal of just bonuses for doing a plane’s intended job will never fly, using this exact same reasoning.
And this I frankly do not mind one bit. As long as it is possible to win games without nonfighter input, nonfighters will always only ever be able to be either 1) useless or 2) abuseable. With no ability to be anything in between.
And yet I cannot think of any other way to seriously curb such abusive behavior.
Ground attack planes are supposed to kill ground units, not hunt planes. Hunting planes is a fighter’s job.
Bombers are not supposed to roleplay AC-130s and gunship planes. Hunting planes is a fighter’s job.
Yes, it will remove some of the humor in the situations where you defend yourself using your attacker or bomber, but I am willing to sacrifice that if it means curbing all forms of airspawn abuse, gunshipping, and fighters doing attackers/bombers’ job better than dedicated attackers/bombers. I am proposing this knowing full well it will hurt ME as well.
You just said earlier how snail would likely never approve of just a reward increase for doing your plane’s correct job, so by all means please tell me what other options there even are here?
Top tier is in many cases problematic due to unresolved years-long headaches that began in low tiers.
The proposed combination of queueing as a given job in whatever plane suits your fancy and getting the appropriate set of reward bonuses and maluses would quite handily curb abuse of A-10s and Su-25s with all-aspect missiles dunking on fighters with no countermeasures.
And yet the desire to be as hands-off with playstyle is sadly the source of all the abuse. If “anything goes,” then people will gravitate towards what pays the most and is the most entertaining. The intent of both a large bonus for doing your plane’s intended job and a large penalty to current rewards for doing off-target jobs is meant to make off-target work purposefully so unprofitable that nobody will bother.
Go look up the definition of “freedumb” on Urban Dictionary. It’s being so hostile to anything that appears to encroach on your own personal choice that you forget your given choice is harmful to everyone else.
The point is to make such behavior permanently so unprofitable nobody will ever bother regardless of what fancy new planes get added in the future.
Changing the airspawn of one or three planes only fixes those one or three planes.
Upending rewards for all plane classes fixes the problem for good.
And yet snail is more likely to approve a reward redistribution as opposed to a straight reward increase, because grind is their business model. Would we all love to earn more of everything without cost? Of course. But the game currently will never work that way until the day when the official servers die and its rebooted on private ones.
If a fighter pilot manages to defeat the final opponent, but is too damaged to safely land, that is a pyrrhic victory.
You would also get 1 tenth the rewards if you even think about contributing to your team in an alternative way. I think rewarding players for doing actions is good, but punishing them for not doing the right actions is bad.
Take this hypothetical scenario: A team has eliminated all ground targets in the match. That team’s last plane alive is a bomber. The other team has 2 fighters that are alive, who need to kill the bomber to win. If the bomber shoots the fighters down, it gets virtually 0 rewards for that action, despite winning the match, and immensely contributing to their team.
Or why should a lone fighter pilot be forced to ground pound and get 0 rewards in order to win a match?
Why should I be forced to play an attacker as an attacker, despite it being a capable fighter plane?
What is your obsession with reducing rewards??? Any reward reductions are bad. End of story. If you keep saying they are good, you are wrong.
I am not fully against the rest of your ideas. I just think this one in particular is terrible.
Of course, Gaijin would reduce the rewards. However, that also harms the players. Are you really taking a corpos side on something like this?
Punishment harms the game and its players. Rewards benefit the game and it’s players. Rewards shouldn’t be culled because a plane isn’t doing what it was designed to do in a video game.
I am done with this conversation. If you think culling rewards is a good thing, please stop playing War Thunder.
I would rather see a reward reshuffling that actually gets implemented than be stuck in wishful thinking for just a bonus.
We’ve seen reward reshuffling actually get implemented with altering win/loss multipliers, and regular global economy multipliers on specific vehicles.
How is giving an additional multiplier based on the job you do really any different than all of those existing cases?
Because killing planes is not the job of a heavy bomber. Sure, it can, but that is not what it was built to do. Is it funny? Yes.
But hard lines must be drawn when what a person finds funny actively harms literally everyone else. I lump all forms of airspawn abuse, intentional gunshipping, and fighters doing attackers/bombers’ job under the same category of unintended play.
Assuming the fighter pilot is the last guy alive on both teams (an absolute rarity), there would be open attacker slots on his team. He would need to go land at the nearest runway and J out to the loadout select screen to switch his given set of reward multipliers to the chosen role.
Thus there would be a way to make occasions like that less problematic, while still making sure all forms of airspawn cheese, fighters queuing as fighters only to cut grass/bomb truck, and bombers/heavy attackers gunshipping people stays gone.
If you’re in a plane whose only role is Fighter, well then there isn’t much to be done. You just deal with it and move on to next round.
Culling rewards for play your plane isn’t intended to do in the first place is a net benefit to all of us as soon as you look beyond your preferences.
I would love an additional modifier, but there shouldn’t be any reductions.
But they are able to. A heavy bomber has guns on it for a reason. By using them, you are protecting yourself so you can do what you were meant to do.
If it was unintended, why is it allowed and possible? Gunshipping on bombers never works. Some fighters absolutely can play the role of an attacker, and vice versa.
Needlessly complicated, and doesn’t fix anything wrong with the game.
Culling rewards is bad no matter what. Why should a bomber be forced to earn pennies because it defended itself on it’s way to do what it was meant to do.
So I am forced to earn nearly nothing because I chose the wrong plane? What kinda weird logic is that?
You are advocating for the game to be made 10x worse and 10x more toxic.
And we all would love a nice bonus for no cost, but that is just wishful thinking.
If given the choice between a wishful thinking bonus that never gets implemented and a reward reshuffling based on what your plane does which actually does get implemented, I will always choose the latter even though I’m fully aware it will make funny abusive play permanently unprofitable.
Able to =/= Should. Top tiers are a mess due to fighters being bomb trucks and Warthogs slinging all-aspects at flare-less fighters. Fundamentally its the same problem - unintended usage of planes pays too much, intended usage pays too little.
And in multirole cases like that, your fighter can queue as an attacker and not take up a fighter team slot. Thus you still can be an attacker if you want, just not simultaneously while being a fighter.
The point is to allow changing multipliers in those oddball long games while ensuring off-target usage of planes remains intentionally so unprofitable people no longer use the machines in such a manner.
Because that bomber is not meant to shoot down planes. Its job first and foremost is to haul ordinance.
Got any other ideas which stand an actual chance of being implemented to make people stop using attackers or bombers to intentionally hunt fighters? Or stopping fighters grass-cutting when there are plenty of attackers already on their team to do that job? Or stopping fighters from bomb-trucking when bombers are already present on their team?
The point is to ensure such abusive play of given aircraft types is solved permanently no matter what gets added in the future.
Did he really say this? This would be great news!
God no. Pummeling defenseless bots in an AIR COMBAT mode is not a good way to decide the outcome. We are here for PvP not PvE. As it currently stands, air RB is a brainrot festival where the premium aircraft grind and is generally skilless. I would NOT like to see this made even worse by killing bots becoming the main objective.
Because this is an air combat mode. There is a place for these aircraft in the game, it is called GROUND RB. As people have been saying aout the A-10 and such, they are intended to be ground attackers, not meta defining threats in an air battle mode.
With most of the playerbase just bombing, being premium aircraft and unskilled pilots, teamwork will not end up working. In current air RB, having a team that works together is extremely rare and only ever happens in the very late stages of the game.
Air RB. It is in the name what the objective is, being air combat.
Go to sim, this has already been violently shot down in another topic.
I took the effort to defeat all of my enemies. As all of the enemy players are defeated, i have won the game. I should not need to waste my time on useless objectives or leave the game and lose.
Go play sim if you dont want markers. Spotting is already bad enough.
They werent intended to be good for air combat. Go use them in ground or naval.
There is no connection. A6M5 is so overtiered because bad players attempt to turnfight it. F4U-1A is generally just piloted by very bad players who will attempt to turn with the first thing they see.
Markers are great for game health. Removing them just generally makes paying attention to large amounts of enemies even harder. This is also pretty huge in missile tiers, where removing spotting you screw over everything with bad/no radar or rwr.
I can kind of see the benefit of no markers, I personally really like it in GRB - well, most of the time. I’m mature enough to know this is a fringe case, but my eyesight is a bit fucked even with glasses, which only somewhat fix my nearsightedness. It’s a weird case since I’m not BLIND without them, in fact I can se relatively well for a decent enough distance, but it has funny issues in WT specifically - regardless of if I’m on my potato laptop that needs to run on ULQ or on my PC that can run the highest settings, I tend to not be able to see unmarked planes well unless they’re either skylining with high contrast (green plane blue sky) or literally within a kilometer of me and moving erratically - even then, a lot of the time I struggle spotting them and the only help is if I catch a glimpse of that white shit coming off the wings when you turn (English isn’t my native language, sorry).
It’s usually fine for me in GRB, it feels fair since engagements are close anyway and I have my ways to be competent if I hop into CAS, but in ARB I’d be damn near entirely incompetent because I can not see a damn thing. I’ve even had issues of mistaking point blank destroyed tanks for live ones in GRB - either I’m even more blind than I think and my brain is substituting what it think I SHOULD be seeing with what I’m, well, NOT, or my brain is otherwise completely fried. Either way, no markers in ARB would make me entirely useless, and your idea would be pointless if they were something you can toggle bc who the hell wouldn’t toggle them on, eyesight issues or no?
Sorry for the rant and bad formatting. Eyes are starting to, uh, idk itch or whatever. Dry ass mfrs. I might have to start buying eye drops. My left one even gets blurry sometimes so I’m just rushing to type this.