lets hope its not a carrot on a stick situation.
it really sucks, cuz back in the day i absolutely LOVED air rb. could play it for hours on end, now its 1 or 2 matches and im just bored out of my mind.
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Maybe I’m being a Negative Nancy but doesn’t this mean that there is nothing about game modes in “Hornets Sting major and developments within”? Also it would nice if they could specifically list what the “challenges” actually are, because from what I heard there already was a ARBEC event in the past.
Feel free to ask what those challenges are. But it’s going to come back as “queue times, splitting the player base” and stuff.
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From air sim, challenges I can identify are:
- If they allow players to create their own lobbies, it’s going to be a mess. AIr sim is ruined by players making their own lobbies for zombing, rigging matches for event farming and stat padding. People also scout what people are in a lobby to either rag someone or avoid lobbies where they’d face too significant opposition.
Here’s some examples of match rigging:
Discussion on the event cycle - #26 by RunaDacino - If they do NOT allow players to create their own lobbies - how do you account for map preferences fairly (I hate playing on Denmark for instance because it’s horrible in props but bomber players spam it because it’s horrible in props so they don’t get hunted). More importantly - how do you handle the logic of “Should we put the player into an existing lobby or should we create a new one?” “How do we deal with the risk of a player joining a lobby that only has 15 minutes less and spawning in before they can accomplish enough cycles to gain reward.”
Even with our current lobby system, we get issues with people creating new lobbies leading to dead lobbies, or “ghost lobbies” where the game says a lobby had a 8vs8, you join and find 1 guy on the enemy team base bombing and nobody on yours (extreme case, but happens.)
Beyond these primary ones, there’s also
- The A.I is bloody broken at jet tiers. Seriously. Go join Air sim EC on a 120x120 map in a Me262, F80, F2H2 or similar early jet. Even an F86 sabre or Mig 15 works. Wait for “Intercept enemy bombers” objective to spawn. GO and try to do just that.
What do you discover?
Community Bug Reporting System
The NPC cl-13 sabre is flying at mach 1.4 or so and is basically impossible to ever catch unless it bugs out. It coincidentally bugs out on Denmark, thus the video catching up. However, observe the maneuvers and wobbling and turning it does and how it didn’t care about me chewing its tailplane off and kept flying straight. - Objective logic on some maps appears broken - objectives don’t spawn, or they only spawn for one side
- The whole airfield bombing seems impossible to balance. Airfields were buffed to the point where you need hundreds of tons of bombs to destroy one. Consequence? People started farming airfields as static and easy targets for score
And finally, these ones gaijin doesn’t care about but
- Useless Action reward system is something simmers put up with for the sake of getting to fly. However, it is very toxic and discourages PvP and teamplay. Instead, optimal play is to get ~600 score, hide somewhere safe until the 15 minute timer ticks over, land and repeat.
See my discussion on how ridiculous it is here:
Why does War Thunder players put up with this silver lion grind? - #25 by RunaDacino
tl:dr
Horton: 17.4k to spawn, makes 1430/min so 0.92x15x1430 = 19.7K. You make 2.3K in your first 15 minutes max assuming full score and landing. - A lot of reward systems blatantly rip you off. Flying for 15 minutes, you gain your first useful actions tick. you MUST land before another 15 minutes land, or you lose 20% of your rewards (landing bonus) as the second 15 minute tick overrides the first, completely voiding the first one. That’s -20% reward for doing too well and having an aircraft that can loiter.
Alternatively, it punishes you for RTBing 13 minutes in (as you’ll have taken off and engaging objectives and won’t get back until 18 minutes pass) rather than at 15 minutes and so forth.
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Actually I found a bit from smin about RBEC in a video. Still not convinced why at the very least it can’t be a mode like Heli EC(exempt from events,capped rewards, and players can leave and join anytime) ¯_(ツ)_/¯.
I don’t get why it can’t at least be tested like ARH missiles were last year. Running a test and collecting feedback is the least they could do.
Also you dropped a \ in your shrugie.
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But wouldn’t it make sense to fix those issues so the sim experience is better AND the game mode could be reused for the rb audience? IDK maybe aside from the lobby I don’t think the issues are fundamentally unsolvable.
I’d love for those issues to get fixed.
However, as demonstrated by the bug report linked and a lot of other posts in the sim forum, Gaijin seems opposed to doing so.
It is my hope that if they do get around to RB EC, stuff gets fixed but on the flipside, they can (arguably justifiably for the lobby rigging) cite these as major challenges.
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funny you mentioned the ARH missile tests, cuz i fondly remember how much more fun those matches were to play. partially because of a new weapon system but a big reason was because the much lower amount of players made fighting actually much more intense, cuz it wasnt just slinging missiles left and right, you actually had to think and plan your engagements, and one slip up meant it was most likely over for you
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Now its just fighters base bombing at every BR with landslide losses to ever has more base bombers xd ARB is in desperate need of a rework
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necro
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What else do you want to solve in this game?
Back in the day, ideas were just blooming on the old forum and how did it turn out?
A lot of players left…
Gaijin has never hidden the fact that his priority is combined battles and that’s where the biggest progress can be seen…
Air battles, I think if there weren’t so many players who only like planes, they would have been turned off a long time ago…
Look at the last 10-20 machines added…
How many planes are there?
Very little, while ground vehicles a lot…
Air battles are a stagnant grind, completely all modes…
The priority is ground battles, because they invested a huge amount of investment and time in creating ground vehicles…
All modes are built on the tactical level of a small battlefield and that is their priority…
No strategic battles on a large area, no 500x500 km maps, where you could use reconnaissance aircraft, refueling, bomber boxes, AWACS, etc. … there were so many ideas and … nothing!
I’m afraid that either the player has to, has to take this game as it is, or it’s necessary to leave…
After some time I play again and it’s still the same, players quickly descend and fly near the ground and either they are shot down or the game is over… and NEXT game…
So what most players want, Gaijin gives them, even if the players buy premium machines… Hallelujah…
If we are looking at just top tier, there has been few top tier MBTs added in the past 2 years, while plenty more new planes have been added.
I agree.
This isn’t true. Ground battles have a ton of issues, and Gaijin doesn’t seem to fix them at a reasonable speed.
Air RB needs large changes for it to be viable in the future, and I hope Gaijin realizes that soon, or they will start to lose players.
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I wrote about the last 10-20 machines… And there is a lot of ground technology here lately, not just MBT…
About machines, but it’s not so much about that, it’s about the direction and character of battles…
I’m skeptical about the ARB refit, in twelve years, there have been a lot of adjustments, but there are 3 air modes, there is still only one holy grail… TDM.
And the players, some will leave, new ones will come, some will stay… as long as the game is profitable, it will be functional…
Someone tell Gaijin devs that using alt accounts is against their own TOS
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I forgor to post it here
Surely this new “Aerial Warfare” will save ARB
The irony here is that fixing Air RB would also help address several problems in other game modes too.
Why do CAS aircraft flood into Ground RB? Because unless fighter players are lobotomized, CAS aircraft are worthless in Air RB.
Why do bombers of all sizes inundate Simulator EC to the point of having broken its economic loop beyond repair? Because bombers are so worthless in Air RB that they have nowhere else to go to just do their jobs in peace.
Obviously there are more factors causing those problems specific to each game mode, but due to its sheer numerical popularity Air RB’s rot is helping perpetuate systemic dysfunctions in other modes.
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Yeah I don’t have much hope unless the mode is intentionally designed from the ground up, no pun intended.
Aircraft engagements were almost always either in support of attacks over land, to clear the way forward for incoming attacks over land, or to defend against an opposing nation doing the same.
Thus having the mere ability at all to end matches solely by air-to-air action means nothing but stale PvP can ever hope to seriously matter. Why would fighter players care what becomes of their attackers if they don’t need to keep them alive to win the match? Why would fighter players care what becomes of their bombers if they don’t need to keep them alive to win the match?
We KNOW snail is capable of developing gameplay that intentionally lacks the PvP autowin - the old Guardian Angel event which re-ran like a year ago after a long hiatus is a perfect case-in-point, where the match continues until the bombers do their intended job, even after the last German interceptor is shot down.
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