Ive been trying to write a text about how Gajijn would benefit from investing some time into air SB. But my thoughts are too scrambled so everything ive written so far is just garbage. I could need some help with input and phrasing. This is only about air SB.
We all know that air SB isnt living up to its potential of what it could be and that its in dire need for some love and attention from the devs. Having nothing better to do ive thought a lot about what could motivate Gajijn to invest time into air SB. Money talks right? So the main point is that by leaving air SB in its current state Gajijn are underutilizing their assets. I think they could draw a significantly larger crowd to air SB than what they have today and it wouldnt take much work at all. They already have made and payed for like 95% of what they need to create a experience that would get a lot of attention. Right now i dont think theres a lot of people downloading WT just for the air SB and it seems like people have been leaving WT for other flight sims. Furthermore, WT is a likely place to discover your intrest in flight simulators (air RB players). Turning air SB from what it is today into something that would peak intrest in the flight sim world would not be a huge task. Like i said, they already have everything they need but its just packaged poorly.
Im not saying that WT should directly compete with other 1:1 flight simultors like DCS, quite the contrary actually. WT air SB has its strong suits that could be emphasised in marketing. Excellent accessibility in controls and hardware requirements. The whole sim-but-not-quite formula is appealing for a lot of people, this condensed sim experience focusing on action and immersion without all the boring 1:1 flight sim stuff. And of course the whole MMO part.
So what would it take to achieve this? Well i have my ideas but theyre mainly focused around a revive of sim to gain attention. What that means could be many things. Fixing bugs and general polish is a start but you will also need to have something new. Making the sim part of WT its own space inside the game would help with image of commitment from Gajijn. The UI for sim right now looks looks like a 90´s website (no wonder people dont play it). But having some sort of new content would probably be a must. New mission types would be a win. Being able to play player made maps and missions would be marvelous.
Step 1: Fix your shit
Step 2: Fix the balance (or at least the most broken aspects)
Step 3: Rework this useful actions thing. It forces players to do things, they normally would not do.
Step 4: Add new missions:
-destroy bridge,
-support your ground troops after air capture so they win the battle,
-give surveillance planes a surveillance function instead of just being a target
-destroy radar stations, that show their team all planes around them on the map.
-destroy cargo planes (slow but flying in a straight line over the map, so only one chance to intercept)
-use your own creativity from here…
Step 5: make some fancy news and commercials for “Ultimate SIM Update” or some other marketing BS like that.
Step 6: pay some sim youtubers to make a good official SIM tutorial and advertise it in-game in RB.
Step 6: Profit! 😎
Just kidding.
But I think many RB players would try it, but are not sure how to get right into SB. And players that left WT and “progressed” to IL-2 or DCS will at least take a look on the update.
But before anything else, the quality must be there.
Absolutely. Gaijin is sitting on a winning lottery ticket here.
We are literally one big rework/overhaul away from making a worthwhile flight simulator that would capture a big audience.
If they just showed some love to the game mode and made it more engaging with the player by making player actions have more substance to the outcome of the match, this would be huge not only for the players but also for content creators.
(Plenty of ways to do that. Improving on convoys, addition of AWACS, giving surveillance planes a purpose, improving player interaction with each other, like being able to join squads mid-game with VC, reworking airfield bombing, datalinks between aircraft, etc.)
People like to compare it to DCS and IL2, which are great games and currently wipes the floor with WT Air SB. But WT already have a massive advantage to those two games - WT is available to console, allowing a much larger market who currently have no (Fighter) flight simulator games available to them access to one. And I think it’s a good thing it’s not a 1:1 simulator where you need to read the damn flight manual to each plane, that’s a reason WT already outnumber the DCS player count 100 to 1.
This is too vague from a developer viewpoint. You need to be a bit more specific on what needs to be fixed since there are numerous systems and mechanics they have to check.
Again, this is vague. What type of balance you are implying here? Which BR bracket?
This part I highlighted is already a mechanic in EC. The side that wins with capturing the air zone will automatically start a ground assault in that sector for their team. For your team to win the ground battle. You need to wipe at least 50% or more of the defending ground units. While the defending side needs to do the same with the assault force to prevent a loss of the battle.
Exactly. They just don’t care. WHy are AI bot’s from the Opposite team yours and vice versa? It’s idiotic to have Soviet planes on US side on the Vietnam map. As well as all others, Why are AD- defence fighters flying into the mountainside or staying on the ground for the entire match? Why are they so bad that they really don’t even matter, etc etc. The list of easy pickings is long, so long.
At least they added decent weather. that’s actually great. And spotting is better than before, not all is shit, there’s also piss. That’s my three cents
I’ve been into this too long. I simply don’t have the stamina anymore to do anything about it. Just getting effed again and again. Even tho the last changes since the big steam review bombing have actually been great, but it took too much and should have been added years ago. Years. Perhaps there’s hope fot he future.
I’m aware, but that doesn’t help them if we fail to provide the details. It’s no different from playing a new game mode and telling developers, “It sucks!”. How do you expect anyone to make changes based on that feedback?
If you lack any details, it makes their job much harder and more likely. It will be placed in a backlog and forgotten due to development schedules, or the task ticket listed a closed due to lack of information to reproduce the problem.
The bugs were named and discussed often enough. (wrong and not working AI planes, AAA, open canopy, huge blue arrows on the map, transparent planes, etc. etc).
I will not make a complete bug list here. Thats the developers job. They know the details.
Balance is a difficult thing, I know. And there will never be a 100% perfect setup.
But some planes BRs are obviously wrong. The chinese F-86F-40 for example. Why is it at 8.3? Typo?
It has Sidewinders btw… Even the US who build the damn thing don´t have it before 9.0 or 9.3.
On the other hand you have planes that have so high BRs that you never see them in a match.
To create a list with all the things that are currently bad in EC Sim is indeed too time-consuming. Therefore I write only what I wish for EC Sim. (This is just my opinion, of course I don’t speak for everyone).
So I wish the following EC Sim improvements:
Return to the old reward system. Remove Usefull Action forever.
Improved possibilities to create user created battles. So that we don’t have to sit in the lobby for hours until the battle finally starts. One player per team should be enough to start the battle.
Re-introduction of the AI placeholder planes (Hans, Pete, Frank, Tony, Horst…) in user created battles.
Well programmed and well functioning AI units. Challenging but no suicide, no AI laser cannons aming.
Increase in the number of official rooms
Improvement of the nation battle setups. One of the points that is most important to me!
Official rooms with given defaults:
WW2
Allies vs. Axis on WW2 maps with WW2 planes.
Cold War
Democratic States (NATO) vs. Dictatorships (Rus and China).
On larger Cold War maps with jet aircraft.
User created setups with the possibility to create setups again by yourself.
Adapt Tech trees to Sim. (Tawian since 1949 to USA. DDR to Russia…)
Placeholder AI to match the setups.
And more things. But these would be already important improvements
I’m personally not a fan of having AI flying around unless they are a part of a clear objective/purpose, like bombers or surveillance planes (Both of which need to be greatly improved on). Nothing worse than getting a frag in a video game and it turns out it wasn’t an actual player you were fighting, ruins the immersion.
I think if they just give sim some love and a good rework we won’t be having this issue with the lack of players.
Sure, but I think it’s more important to focus on the larger picture so we get this big rework in, which will solve the issue in question - instead of settling for a bad compromise which will hurt the game mode in the long run if it still exists.
I really don’t see an issue with getting progression from AI kills. Whether it’s AI or a player, progression is progression. What ruins the immersion for me, is wasting my time and not having any targets to destroy.
The problem here is, that a lot of newer players don’t have the context of the old forums. There we have already discussed and pointed out everything that’s wrong in AirSim… and it has been thoroughly ignored.
All those good changes that came out of the Steam Review disaster are at best collateral improvements because the ones who revolted was the RB community that makes up 90% of the playerbase.
We have asked Gaijin time and time again to improve it giving detailed feedback and nothing has ever come of it.
When they introduced “Useful Actions” (2021), everyone told them it was a very bad idea. Even when it was in Beta they were told as much. After that I saw 90% of my wingmen leave WT for other Sims like IL2 BOS or DCS (which I refuse to do bc I’m stubborn af).
They’ve been told repeatedly what a gold mine SB is, and they keep piling on dirt on it instead of extracting it from the ground (sry for the metaphor).
It’s because of this that many of us Veterans are tired of repeating everything and it’s quite difficult for me personally nowadays to write anything about this w/o calling them names.
So yeah… that’s my 2 cents. I’m not saying we should stop trying, but please be understanding of the people that don’t want to give detailed feedback anymore.
It is important to understand that even small changes can have a big impact on a game mode.
For example, when the SP was removed, it was obviously a small change. In fact, this change turned the whole mode upside down. there are many other examples.
I personally didn‘t dislike the removal of SP. It was kind of frustrating to be shot down in a higher tier plane and having to fly something else for 30min.
But the change from repair costs to spawn cost was at the very least stupid. As in whoever came up with that is an idiot.
It’s only an example that small changes can have a big impact - positive or negative.
I didn’t put timer and SP in my wish list above - because I knew everyone would jump on them straight away.
SP was actually an important and proven element of EC for many years.
The solution in my opinion would have been to reduce Timer to 10 or 15 min. or to reduce SP from max 450 to 200.
The complete removal of timer or SP led to the fact that at 3.7-4.7 all immediately fly only 4.7. Also the rotation has shifted the problem to 2 days each. Unfortunately, after 2 years we got used to it and forgot that SP was better.
But I didn’t want to have a discussion about SP but rather express my wishes.
I think having AI flying around (Not counting obvious objective-based ones like surveillance planes) ruins the immersion of the game-mode, no-one wants to fight some AI fighter over a real player, it’s a bad and lazy compromise to an issue (low player count/retention)which is only a problem in the first place because of these various problems sim has, problems we’re suggesting fixes to in this post, the larger picture. Some of these problems sim has that I’m referring to is based on enduring confrontations as a whole (inadequate and non-engaging mission objectives) - but also based on the player side - stuff like bad default controls setups, low rewards (useful actions) and so on.
Sim is suffering, but that doesn’t mean we should put bots in place of real players.
As for SP, I’m personally not a fan of anything that forces you to wait on a damn timer to play the game, or even limit what plane you get to fly. Hell no. And spawn costs have been greatly reduced since the economy update.
I actually quite like the BR rotation as it is. The only thing that gets a bit annoying is how 11.3 planes in particular only gets 2 days out of 8 when it’s not facing 12.3, but this will likely get solved when 12.7 and 13.0 get’s introduced. (I’m guessing you’re familiar with the BR rotation table).
