I have a question that if aaa can`t protect people who landed in the af, why not just remove them?
we already have the system that the game will end if one side has no one in the sky.
being camped in the af is not fun at all, or just add an exit for those who don’t want to go back to this game again.
the top tier`s aa cant even kill a 600kph plane asap, why they are here.
There is.
If you safely land, repair (or havnt been damaged), J-ing out avoids repair costs. I cannot recall if you get a death on your service record though.
Iirc it doesn’t count as a death, but I could be wrong
It doesn’t but seriously, K/D is a useless stat. I’d rather have 3 KPB guy with 4,5:1 KD than 8K/D guy with 2 KPB.
indeed, K/B is much more useful for determining someone’s game impact
A few words regarding stats:
KpB is useless - if you look at the all time leader board you see mainly second account guys exploiting low tier aircraft like the BB-1 (#1 KpB 5.65). The value is appreciated because gaijin decided to display it and use it as tool to encourage competition.
K/D is useless too - simply because you can steer the value by not spawning in unfavorable conditions or by leaving the match by j out. The fact that you need basic math to determine it (as it is not shown as a value - and just on player, not vehicle level) prevents most players to calculate it and any quality assessment solely based on it is useless - similar to point #1.
In addition both values can be influenced by playing in a squad or just by flying op / severely undertiered aircraft.
Technically seen KpB often correlates with a >80 % WR - but at the end of the day killing the last enemy or winning by tickets decide a match. Air RB looks like a TDM mode, but at least at prop BRs ticket wins are also a way to win.
The values itself have lost any relevance in the last 3-4 years due to the massive increase of untrained rookies / tankers at any BR in Air RB.
Conclusion:
Basically statistics can be seen how you want them to see whilst applying individual views regarding their importance. Every shooter shows stats to encourage competition and/or to support in-game sales.
Reduced to being a shooter the value K/D is, was and will be the sole relevant factor of every shooter game. As gaijin steers the game with BRs, Nation mixes and certain functionalities within the MM and tries to tell the fairy tale of being a team based game, other values are presented in the leader board.
From a holistic pov game impact in Air RB can be measured only by counting sole survivor awards as this eliminates steam roll effects. It simply doesn’t matter if you have killed 3 or 4 enemies when you play 8 vs 2 after the first merge / furball.
Imho the only realistic quality assessment for any (fighter) pilot would be a counter of playing and winning outnumbered, so turning a match (or just by winning by tickets) whilst playing 1 vs 4 or 2 vs 8, anything else is just an individual preference.
Back to topic:
This thread exists mainly due to the deadly airfield aaa at prop BRs - simply because a loud minority complains about a specific game mechanic which prevents them from getting even more free kills.
Somehow understandable / comprehensible but as written earlier:
If gaijin would care, they would have changed af aaa years ago. There are now thousands of posts dealing with it…
They reacted (indirectly) twice since i play wt:
Btw - i found this old post in which wt has promoted the using of af aaa as defensive weapon:
Really way to much to read here at the moment. But just want to say that Gajian does promote use of AAA at airfield for defense and killing enemies on the other team. Here is video of theirs telling you to do just that as a heavy fighter/interceptor. Time starts at 1:52 where they tell you to use this tactic. So I know there are some who think its against the rules to do this and that its a reportable offense. Just wanted to show it is promoted by warthunder as a legal valid tactic.
Not in a game where you can run the clock or AF camp or climb to space.
I have played a few games in B18 and that thing can be unkillable in right hands.
In a game where you can’t avoid engaging, K/D id important, unless you are a sniper, then K/D of 10 to 1 is irrelevant if your average teammate scores 4 times as many in the same timeframe, but dies 8 times more often.
The thing is, K/D and WR can be boosted by squadding and passive gameplay.
KPB is KPB. Yes, squadding helps here too, but to a way lesser extent.
Of course it’s worth to check the most played aircraft, don’t get me wrong. But KPB is a way better indicator than K/D.
K/D is super important in 1 v 1 or in games where frequent engagement is unavoidable, like Counter Strike.
But WT is nothing like that.
In Rising Storm 2, Red Orchestra 1/2 and other team shooters with a bit lower pace and larger play area, your score is more important. If you have K/D of 2 and 30 kills, you have made the enemy team noticeably weaker than a a guy who has K/D of 10 and 10 kills, because as a result of actions of guy 1, enemy is down 15 tickets out of f.e. 200 compared to your team, the other guy creates only 9 ticket advantage, but also each time enemy dies, he’s out of battle for around 40s, which means he can’t defend or attack the cap.
And you can easily rack up high K/D just by camping in a relatively safe spot, while your team is getting overwhelmed because they are down 1 guy who is not capping/suppressing the enemy.
WT dev team doesn’t really play their own game part 2137, hence they can’t see the problems with their own gameplay design (which is probably why we have such horrible ground attacking/bomber gameplay).
It depends on your game and the game mode in general.
So even as some of your points make sense (from a general perspective), we talk about Air RB, a single spawn mode. Shooters with a “one-life” mode are usually not popular if they have a functioning SBMM as getting kills becomes harder if you only meet equally skilled enemies.
As long as there is no “real” SBMM active in wt you can kill as many enemies you want (or you are able to kill). This means also that even if you kill 4 enemies it says nothing about the quality of your kills or the skill of your opponents. That’s why KpB is nothing more than a useless number if you die, even if you contributed a lot to the Numbers Game called TDM.
Any arguments related to a team of random strangers (if not squadded) in wt are Imho not relevant - at the end of the day they are just competitors for the same targets in order to get score / points / rewards. We both met griefers in wt.
Stats are just indicators, nothing more. I saw your last comment in the B7A2 thread :-)
Regarding teams:
I remember a match in SWBF 2015 when i was in a 20 vs 20 lobby (Walker Assault) as a sniper - ending up on rank #1 with 8:0 by killing enemy Tie fighters (with ion shots) strafing our respawn locations, whilst the poor soul on the other team needed 92 or 96 kills and about 4 or 6 deaths to get the first place :-)
And the game mode was designed like Ground RB - no real cover (= spawn killing), air supremacy wins (limited counter measures and killing fighters from the ground required extreme patience and skill) and trying to play the objective was a recipe for getting killed.
To kill you have to take the risk.
To not die, you have to avoid the risks.
Achieving high K/D in warthunder for dummies:
Jump in P-47
Side climb
Never accept any fight below 7500.
Will you score a ton of kills?
No.
Will you die? Almost never.
Will you score high WR?
Nope.
You can do the same with a lot of planes. F.e. B18 is perfect for high K/D gameplay. Or B7A2 Homare in space attacking stalling enemies.
I always look at stats to judge if somebody is good teammate. I see a guy who kills a lot, I know I can count on his aim and aggression and there’s good chance we’ll steamroll the enemy.
I see high K/D, low KPB guy - OK, maybe he’ll be useful late game, maybe not.
Now, this will be a personal example, but a good one: once had you on my team, and you’re a guy who plays it safe. You flew B7A2 and stayed high. In the end you had like 1 kill, dove towards Yak-3 and died.
I was long dead by that point, after killing a few guys.
Yak-3 was initialy alone vs a few friedlies, but he was dragging them towards AF AAA and fighting there, like a true K/D acelord he was. He only flew out to fight your plane once everyone else was ded.
I don’t blame you for dying.
You took the risk, but too late.
If you didn’t, you’d end up with 1-2 kills and 0 deaths and we’d lose anyway.
But if you took the risk earlier, maybe you would have died, but more than likely, we would have won.
Meanwhile that Yak-3 guy was an absolute gaijin target demographic piece of floral, but he won and maintained high K/D, no skill involved.
I remember the match :-)
You can blame me for dying 5 times yesterday.
Gaijin implemented a “stealth” nerf on air brakes yesterday. At least the B7A2, B-18B and SM 92 are affected. Their air brakes are way less effective than before - f.e. you could perform a 90° dive from 9 km to ground level with a B-18B without being anywhere near to the danger of ripping - now you have to use flatter dive angles. Same with B7A2 - dropping behind somebody and parking there led to 3 times ripping due to overspeeding.
It took me 3 deaths to realize that i ripped not due to lags, ping or connection lost (which happens way too often). The other 2 because i forgot it in the heat of the battle / needed time to adopt to the new effectiveness - lmao.
As a Ta-152H user/abuser I’m so used to having quite the antithesis of dive brake (a plane that REFUSES TO SLOW DOWN), I didn’t even notice :P
I love when Gaijin implements pretty damn important changes to aircraft and kind of forgets to mention. Who doesn’t love to learn the hard way?
Anyway, I think Air RB as a whole really needs a refurbish. Not just AF AAA (would be nice if it actually tracked and was dodgeable), but most aspects.
F.e. wouldn’t it be nice if ground targets were actually fun to shoot at?
Imagine if even 250kg bomb resulted in a proper smoke cloud, and hitting a truck loaded with ammo was as spectacular as it should be.
etc. But that’s material for a different topic altogether.
I’d need to give it special focus to confirm beyond vague observations. However, I think real shot vs hitscan AAA already exists in prop tiers:
Air sim Air field carrier AAA fire. Flying solo at a carrier is gonna be a death sentence. Flying in formation vs a carrier can overwhelm its guns long enough to strafe the deck and drop some bombs on it. While quite laser accurate, it does seem like you only get damaged by actual shots rather than simple countdown and get hit mechanics.
I wonder as an experiment how it’d change if RB airfields were given boat/carrier AAA from sim
yeah
id be fine if prop aa gunfire was actually modeled like it is in top tier aa…but it’s not
You can’t dodge it, and it essentially acts as a DoT spell with 100% perfect tracking, which is kind of ridiculous that it’s still like this in 2024
Just add in wirblewinds and some 88mm flak trucks or something
I recommend reading the first few pages of the old version of this thread (link in first post / OP).
It boils down that gaijin tried various iterations of af aaa accuracy in the years before 2017. So sometimes af aaa was less accurate, sometimes more. I saw even reports of concentrated fire on a single aircraft - whilst nearby flying enemies were totally ignored.
I played with less deadly accurate af aaa before 2019. On flat maps like Sicily or Tunisia 2 determined P-47s were enough to wipe out all af aaa in 2 or 3 passes - the received damage was minor and most of them made it back to their own airfield.
Ofc this had side effects (own af aaa is marked on the map) as smart bomber pilots saw this and decided not to land and j out due to the missing af aaa cover whilst landing.
If you ever tried to land a Me 264, B-29 or He 177 you faced the Ta 152 H fate: They don’t lose speed. It took ages to reduce alt and speed and thanks to the partly extremely high repair cost your chances to survive increased with space climbing - even as the matches lasted 1 hour those days.
Here to mald at a game I lost tonight because the enemy P-39N could just use his superior speed to run to the airfield every single time he was caught in a bad position, including running for about half the match around the edge of the map to do so.
And while I kept him busy, my teammates who said they were going after ground targets either didn’t actually bother or couldn’t find any they could destroy (tanks, light pillboxes, etc). So despite us having absolute air superiority and a numerical advantage over the battlefield, we still lost. Pretty sad too since I hit several shots with the 37mm.
If he was spaceclimbing I wouldn’t have an objection to it, but running to the hitscan AoE death bubble anytime you’re inconvenienced still doesn’t belong in a gamemode that is 99% TDM.
Which is exactly why I think AA should only be active when someone has landed on the airfield. It gives vulnerable planes protection, while also not allowing abuse such as what you experienced.
I’d go a step further, AA only turns on if you are landed or have your landing gear fully deployed (and thus at a speed low enough for this to be the case, with all the performance penalties of it).
Imho this is a prime example that af aaa is used as rather cheap excuse for wrong decision making of random team mates.
Short version:
Your team attacked way too late the wrong targets - and the rookie with less than 1 day total game experience used af aaa exactly one time to his to his advantage: After 24 minutes - with a ticket lead of 600 vs 444 points.
You had the chance to kill him (just unlucky), but the side effect of playing a BR 2.3 aircraft (Ki-45 Ko) in order to bully rookies is that your team mates at this BR are inexperienced too.
So the root cause of your ticket defeat is not af aaa - it was wrong decision making - and the enemy team played the objective (destroying ground) way earlier than your team, whilst 3 of your team had done nothing (until 15-16 minutes) proved by a mission score between 51 and 76 points.
Long version:
Winning from your side of the map (Operation Uranus) by tickets is a milk run as the nearest ground units are 2 km away from your attacker spawn. I use this map very often to get the Thunderer reward as you are able to kill ~ 20 ground units without getting molested by enemies.
After watching the replay:
Gaijin Entertainment - Single Sign On
…it became obvious that not af aaa was the root cause for your defeat.
A few highlights:
After 10 minutes your team played 8 vs 3, 4 of your teammates had between 0 and 70 points - whilst the enemy killed 27 ai units and your team just 5. Tickets 1.244 vs 3.100.
Your team stopped the own ticked bleed (by killing enemy ai planes) way too late, your tickets bleed stopped with 444 own tickets.
At around 16 minutes the rookie in the P-39 came the first time into af aaa range - as he ran out of fuel, having 2 behind him. Playing 2 vs 6 but with 2.000 vs 444 tickets. He and the A-20 G landed and took off at 18:30. Your game was lost at this point as 3 guys within your team had between 51 and 76 mission score.
Your team decided to go for the A-20 G first instead of focusing on the climbing P-39 - subsequently 2 guys died whilst you had just bad luck as your shots at around 24 minutes just damaged him. He managed to escape into af aaa range after 24 minutes.
Your attempt to kill one cluster of the 3 x 6 late game truck spawn directly below you (which would have won you the match) came too late, you lost 3 vs 1 with 444 vs 600 tickets.
The inactivity of 3 guys within your team (51 - 76 mission score) for the first 15-16 minutes was the main reason for your defeat. Even if they would have just destroyed all 4 non ticket bearing flak trucks groups this would have been beneficiary as your remaining ai aircraft would have attacked ticket relevant targets.
Your conclusion that 99% of Air RB is TDM is imho somehow near the truth regarding the overall game mode, but at prop BRs this ratio is way lower; even admitting that most of these non TDM endings are based on basic map design flaws.
I lost or won countless matches whilst being in the middle of a dogfight on the usual maps (old ones: Tunisia, Poland - new ones: Mysterious valley, City, Spaceport, etc.) whilst 30-50% (on average) of the lobby is still alive and kicking…
He used it more as after he took off and started coming for me, he then turned back to the airfield. Then as I described above, as he was actively losing he did it again.
It’s a cool little plane. Unlike japan’s higher BR twin engine fighters this one can actually hold its own, and the tracerless 37mm makes for pretty fun moments. If I had kept more ammo for it I might have been able to kill him at the end, or it might just have missed since its tracerless and pretty low velocity.
I mean that’s kinda the point isn’t it? Many people earlier made the claim that you can get teammates to “just attack ground targets” while you keep watch on the last guy and prevent him from doing anything, yet even when I told them we had to do exactly that (and they replied positively) not much was done simply because this is a RANDOM MATCH where teamwork is a distant suggestion.
If even when teammates are fairly active in chat and (presumably) able to read and we lose, what then when you’re left alone or with unengaging teammates? The enemy can, again, abuse his hitscan AoE death bubble to play the game for him and never actually have to do the hard work himself.
