This reminds me of a game-mode SIM has that RB doesn’t but has been requested for years.
Your argument would make total sense if Fighters were the only playable machines, whose main job is PvP.
But we have sometimes half of each entire tech tree consisting of planes whose main job is NOT PvP. If PvP alone is able to win rounds without PvE input, then the PvE-centric planes can only ever be dead weight to the team or they can be so efficient at winning before PvP can that fighter mains scream it into irrelevance.
A bomber or attacker with defensive turrets can in theory shoot down planes, but that’s not its main job. A bomber or attacker with significant forward guns can do the same, but that’s again not its main job.
Snail created this problem by initially making more than just Fighters as playable vehicles. If bombers, attackers, and specialist bomber-killer heavy fighters were merely AI-controlled set-pieces to give maps flavor, then your “but its a PvP game” would indeed be the only rational answer.
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Don’t bother arguing with them, they barely even play planes. I am not even sure why they are here when they don’t play ARB.
This is not what our suggestion is at all.
People who don’t play top tier ARB are welcome to keep their opinions to themselves. Top tier ARB is what this thread is about, as we stated in the first sentence of our post. You have no point of reference, and by commenting how our solutions are “needless” is very ignorant, as you haven’t even experienced the problems yourself.
I will gladly admit, I do not play top tier. I find it 1) far too grindy to be interesting and 2) it stretches gameplay problems originating in low ranks well beyond any semblance of their breaking points, leading to a gigantic mess.
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That wasn’t meant for you. I was frustrated with that other person calling our ideas and effort “needless”. I didn’t spend hours on this for someone who barely plays the gamemode to call my efforts needless or worthless.
While you may not play top tier you gave us your view of similar problems at lower tiers, as well as some specific ones.
@BleedingUranium I don’t think you were speaking with malice, but rather it was your lack of experience with ARB in general. I still think it’s quite rude to call someone’s ideas and suggestions “needless” when you don’t even understand why we are suggesting them.
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He has seen my ideas for Air RB before, and does not like them because I suggest it as even a possibility for planes whose main purpose is not air-to-air to have something to do after the whole enemy team is shot down.
In real operations, after air superiority is achieved, there’s still work to do, after all… Ingame, achieving air superiority is the auto-win, meaning there’s no incentive for non-fighters not to act like headless chickens rushing ahead of the fighters.
Hence why in lower ranks the only good attacker is the Wyvern and maybe the Pulkzerstorer, since those can run away from a lot of fighters before the initial merge. Everything else is gunfood at the total mercy of fighter pliots. The A-10s and Su-25s are high tier equivalents of slow gunfood save for their all-aspect missiles.
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My 2 cents.
I play Warthunder to play a fighter jet. I have no interest in fighting AI that are at the same place every time. I have no interest in killing an attacker that is a free kill beelining for AI. I have no interest in playing a game that offers me points simply because I chose a loadout and someone else decided to be a burden on the opposite team. I want to play my plane to its strength against someone who can give me a challenge.
PvE and PvP should be entirely separated in warthunder. I play a PvP game to do PvP. Some players wants to do PvE. Fine with me, but we shouldn’t be in the same match. The fundamental problem is that some people enjoy an extremely passive playstyle of “going straight to press spacebar over an immobile, undefended ground target”, while the majority of players want to use their warmachine to lodge a missile up the other’s engine.
One option that is viable, is EC. It gives long term objective on the map so air supremacy is as important as killing targets, and those target range from AI planes to ground target, to achieving air supremacy over a cadran of the map.
I fundamentally disagree with any gameplay change that would force the players into chasing attackers as the priority target. It’s incredibly boring for everyone involved. I’m an Old Guard by WT standard, I remember the B-17 chase over Berlin back in the day. Half the german team HAD to spawn in Me410 B6/R3 and beeline the enemy bombers or else the B-17 would instantly finish the match. It was boring, tedious, absolutely infuriating and forced one side to play one specific aircraft in an entire BR bracket to have a chance to win.
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Because of the nature of the stock grind and the status quo, some PVE elements are bound to be combined with PVP no matter the mode.
The goal would be to make PVE meaningful. Others have mentioned this but War Thunder certainly does need to work on their AI for meaningful PVE content.
Some form of EC is probably the best solution to all of this and would allow a ton of the more modern jets to actually play their roles out properly.
Unfortunately all of War Thunder is designed around the grind and this grinding nature drastically hurts game play. Many people just play to feed an addiction so any mode that nerfs the grind, even in a small way, will be met with a lot of hate.
I really hope we get an EC mode soon for the upper tiers.
Big maps (so people can avoid PvP), no markers (so people can avoid PvP), AI/objectives carrying more weight, additional PvE objectives… yes, that’s exactly what this suggestion is. Just like every other EC-like concept that periodically floats around.
Air RB has also been my main mode for most of my many years in WT, only coming in second to Naval RB recently. I normally ignore petty and irrelevant statshaming, but misinformation is not acceptable.
I do like the idea of helicopters being usable in Air modes, I may actually play helis if they were usable there.
…And this still comes down to the fact that ARB is a PvP mode, not PvE. I play the game for PvP, and that should not be interrupted or decided by PvE players. Give them a separate gamemode.
lol, what? SM.92, AD-4, Do335, Me410, and AM-1 are all viable attackers in the A2A role, just to name a few. Not to mention bombers like the SB2C and B7A2.
As for the rest of the “food” attackers, that is a good thing, as they arent supposed to work in PvP A2A combat.
And the way we win in WT? Air superiority. It is the objective.
Not sure about that, nearly everything here is for shafting fighters and making PvE the main focus.
Doesnt have to be the main purpose for it to be good at it.
It isnt stupid. The team with players still alive has now established air superiority!
WT isnt DCS, cant be and never will be.
This you? ARB main mode over many years? Sure.
Making other types of aircraft usable is somehow making ARB into PvE? Can’t tell if you are stupid or trolling.
Never have I said I want markers removed.
This is what you want ARB to be, not what it is. If it were plain PvP there would be no bomb targets, no tickets and no AI of any kind.
How do you not realize that air superiority is still going to help towards winning because strike/bombers get to their objective?
Shafting fighters? By reducing furballs and making more modern weaponry usable? Most people who played the ARH test last dev server said they liked it, not because of ARHs but because player counts were reduced.
PvE is NOT the main focus in our suggestion. While it is the objective that ends the game, it cannot be done without fighters. And if no one in the match wants to bomb great, you just got yourself 45 minutes or whatever of pure PvP.
How do you not see that a large portion of the planes has no place in a gamemode like this?
Wouldn’t be such a bad thing.
I won’t be replying to you two any longer. If you do not see the problems I don’t think anyone can help you.
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Attackers and bombers are perfectly usable in Air RB. “Usable” does not inherently mean “decides the match on their own”.
While I do have more time in fighters, I rather enjoy flying bombers, it’s very relaxing.
It’s literally one of the subsections of the opening post.
Simplifying something to an absurd degree is not, in fact, a counterargument.
We’re going in circles. I already explained why objectives exist in PvP settings (to nudge players towards encountering other players). Being a PvP setting does not mean it’s supposed to be objectiveless TDM, it simply means that the objectives serve the purpose of facilitating PvP encounters.
If you’re playing a bomber, your role isn’t “bomb targets”, it’s “bomb targets while trying to not get killed by enemy players”. The former is just a PvE farming game, the latter is proper PvP, as WT is intended to be.
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The former is just a PvE farming game, the latter is proper PvP, as WT is intended to be.
Ok cool. The problem is that air RB being pure pvp is really stale. And giving these other planes a role is the most obvious way to address this.
If you’ve stopped enjoying a game or gamemode, play something else. Subjective preferences do not qualify as a valid reason to redesign a game.
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But its not just my preference for there to be a shakeup. Most of the player base wants a shakeup. And frankly, how does giving bombers and attackers a role beyond being food hurt the game.
Ah yes, the “I speak for everyone” card…
Why, especially when there’s already a lengthy thread with plenty of answers, would you expect to get a meaningful answer for a loaded, bad-faith question?
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Ah yes, the “I speak for everyone” card…
Im not claiming to speak for everyone. I’m simply reporting what i see and hear from a lot of players. Its called observation
Why, especially when there’s already a lengthy thread with plenty of answers, would you expect to get a meaningful answer for a loaded, bad-faith question?
Becuase the burden for explaining why air RB should not change to give bombers a role falls on YOU. Beyond farming. Becuase guess what? That already happens. And if we give bombers a role, fighters have a reason to focus on them, and the farming problem resolves itself
By forcing them to rely on the attackers to clear AI SAM and such, as was suggested earlier.
This is the most blatant lie i have ever seen.
Usable does not mean major influence on game outcome! And YES, this entire thread has a pretty strong focus on PvE!
Is this not why other gamemodes exist?
In no way is the current focus PvE. It should never be a game deciding factor. Stuff like bombing is not impactful on the game outcome, because that is what PvP is supposed to do, decide the game.
I see the problems, as i play this gamemode almost daily at this point. And they would be:
Inconsistent, inadequate spotting (which for some reason you want nerfed or even removed outright)
Team sizes, 16 vs 16 is too many, not just for toptier, but all other jet BRs as well. I like 16 vs 16 props though.
Major flaws in BR system and balancing. Deciding BR based on the players performance is pretty terrible, turns out.
Which results in… undertiered aircraft that bully everything in entire BR ranges (10.0 all aspect carriers, F-104A) and overtiered aircraft like the CL-13 Mk.4 being higher than a similar aircraft for no reason whatsoever, and aircraft like the A6M and Re.2005 fighting enemies way out of their capabilities.
I cant tell if you are admitting defeat or just strengthening your brick wall.
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And yet since Air RB EC has not been implemented, we must instead convert the existing mode into something able to fit nonfighters in a healthy manner.
The SM.92 should be just classed as a fighter. The Skyraiders and Maulers get 1-2 good turns before being bled dry of energy and then sneezed on to be killed. The Me-410A-1 is the only decent one - the others are all bricks with the extra armaments. And the Helldiver/Ryusei are only good because of their airspawns, which they shouldn’t even have in the first place.
And I’m not saying Air superiority shouldn’t be an objective.
What I am saying is that it shouldn’t be the only objective. Currently, due to the ability of each of the three objectives to win independently of one another, air superiority is functionally the only objective. That is what makes attackers and bombers only ever possible to be 1) useless dead weight 2) abusable to rush games dead before PvP or 3) Ersatz Fighters usually through airspawn abuse.
My proposals wouldn’t stop you from having your fun dogfighting, FYI - they would however mean that more than just dogfighting is needed to finish a match. If you specifically don’t want to bother doing that, you would be free to land on the nearest runway and leave the round.
Especially in high ranks, most fighters increasingly are multirole in nature. Shouldn’t that be embraced, not looked down upon?
Helldivers, Dauntlesses, Ryuseis, and related planes are only good at such jobs due to airspawns they shouldn’t even have in the first place. Naval “Bombers” are really the seaborne equivalent of Attackers.
If we want to make nonfighters useful, air superiority alone cannot remain the sole objective that matters. Making nonfighters useful does not take away from you, either. If anything, it would expand the utility of the fighters you fly, by giving all those currently irrelevant ordinance loads now a seriously viable purpose.
There are many things WT should take from DCS. Starting with Universal Dot Scaling.
And yet for many planes to work properly, this must be experimented with seriously. There was an RB EC test years ago with no enemy markers, and friendly ones out to only 900m. I personally loved it - it was more fun than any time I have ever player War Thunder.
It’s the common assumption that making more than just PvP matter automatically means its solely PvE.
^^This.
^^ Also This.
In what I proposed before, PvP would still account for half the tickets in nearly every match. Air to Air PvP is totally fine - where it’s not is when it alone doing its job prevents nonfighters from doing theirs.
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