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.