Only concern I have is Bombing being a priority objective. Especially with Air spawns, a single squad of planes like the B-29 or Tu-4 could spawn and very quickly obliterate the objectives, leading to a quick game over with very few if any people actually managing to get kills or destroy other targets.
And it isn’t like currently Ground Pounding doesn’t affect the game- it very much does. The average ground target subtracts 100 tickets from the enemy team, the same as a kill of a player vehicle- and even now, solid ground pounding from vehicles like the Wyvern or the A2D make games quick and not fun to play.
So unless you remove airspawn, and make rewards better for people destroying ground pounding planes, I hardly see that working. The rest of this however isn’t bad, although I also personally don’t mind WT as it is now.
Edit: also, you would need to give every nation groundpounders of decently similar capabilities - if you put the US up against Germany or Great Britain or Japan or anybody pretty much who isn’t Russia, they are 100% winning that fight because of how much ordnance they carry and how fast/capable they are. The AD-4/2, or the AM-1, or the A2D, etc. etc. etc. all are better than any of their contemporaries save maybe the Wyvern, as an examples. So that would be another thing to have to consider.
The fact that you compare GRB and ARB directly indicated that you didn’t know the mechanics. At long ranges that’s super normal for air battle, objects are simply not rendered. And even within render distance, things are affected by crew skill. For GRB these are not a big issue as most battles are within 10km range.
So, the way you spoke only showed that you haven’t played ARB much and probably never played air sim, and you were just assuming and guessing.
Too many people using things like eyesight to justify the bumper bowling of markers in RB is dumb, I agree. But it must factually be said that War Thunder has too few game modes to be making drastic changes to the existing ones. Any of these changes MUST be implemented in an additional game mode, which means additional server capacity, which means additional cost without a direct way to offset that cost.
This has got to be one of the worst changes I have seen presented in the years Ive played for, the removal of markers for other players will lead towards a rat meta where you will have even less warning for the IRCCM no smoke missiles. Survival at top tier is dictated by your ability to detect and react to threats, 0 detection = 0 reaction = 0 fun.
You can currently get a feeling of this if you play high tier ground RB and die to an AIM9M, a mode where you may see 3 or so planes at a time. With this change you would be extending this to 16v16.
You already know the frustration you feel when you have a harrier or J7E drop a missile on you from 3KM above you but extend it into every single game with not just invisible missiles from players that you have no marker from but add active radar homing missiles on top of it.
personally I think there should be a larger range where you are able to see opponents so that you can be in a better position to react towards them.
I dont get why they dont just make arcade 16v16 only, thats the whole point of the mode, arcade gameplay. Yet for some reason Gaijin goes to quite the extent to make sure their vehicles are accurately and realistically represented, but the combat they find themselves in is the direct opposite of realism.
Realistically a small group of planes 2, 4, or 8, would face off in BVR and joust with radar missiles until they merged, in war thunder that never happens because anything that carries r27er’s completely rules the high alt, due to the fact that they are several leagues better than any other radar missile in the game (why hasnt the phoenix been buffed?) and so everyone hugs the deck, meets in the middle of the map and the game plays out the exact same every time.
Challenger tanks and ATGMs are a perfect example for ground, they are designed to fight at long range but that only happens in war thunder 5% of the time, and so these vehicles perform poorly. This is why the ATGM nerf absolutely baffled me, try playing something like the striker or swingfire now xD. Its honestly a joke, and completely broken.
Yes, that’s… the whole idea. War Thunder is a big sandbox to play around with realistically-modelled vehicles in game/sports/etc-like matchups (two teams evenly matched, TDM or simple objectives, a defined area, etc).
This has always been what it’s supposed to be. War Thunder is not about specific conflicts/doctrine/tactics/etc, nor should it be.
“War Thunder is not about specific conflicts/doctrine/tactics/etc, nor should it be.”
It is about a specific doctrine though, close quarters CoD gameplay and only that.
Alright, now imagine Call of Duty but your guns do full damage to AI bots but half damage to players.
The game implements vehicles that rely on specific doctrine and tactics but then makes the use of those impossible. That’s what has everyone bothered. I WANT to have a fun time bombing bases, I actually think it can be interesting. I WANT to attack ground and sea targets, but I can’t actually do it because the game is made to make the life of a Bomber or Strike Aircraft difficult.
On the Russian dev stream yesterday BVV_d said they are thinking about making a new mode (mission??) where those AI radar and SAM units from the trailer will be used.
About a week after the major update drops I’ll make a few new polls regarding team sizes, ARHs, AI units and whatever else comes to mind. Let’s wait and see how they are on the live server.
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
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 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.
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 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.
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.