Nobody is looking fore excuses. I used a game mechanic (like plane choice, choosing mouse or joystick, etc.) which allowed me (together) with ticket advantage to win the match without any risk.
I have an old inactive account with 114 days as fighter, 73 days as bomber and 26 days as strike fighter - in 196 aircraft. Gaijin refused to transfer the stats and planes, so i started again from zero (ofc without all premium and event planes like AU-1 or BI) but i felt the need to avoid pure fighters even before.
Individual goals are personal things. Nobody cares about stats because they are only relevant for you - and if you see this as a pure shooter and play for competitive reasons. I fly props only because i also like WW 2 - but there is no need to justify individual preferences. But you might agree that kills became much easier than 4 years ago.
Imho i was not clear enough:
The main change is the massive deterioration of the average player skill.
A few years ago you needed skill to participate in Air RB, today it looks like all you need is a premium plane.
The majority of current matches are decided by quantity, not quality. There is a clear lack (often a total absence) of anything related to tactic or strategy.
But also the setup of Air RB changed a lot:
Axis vs Allies (still in place at certain brackets) was at the end boring like hell.
Flying GER or IT:
Either you searched the whole Norway map to find a B-29 at 10 km alt or you lost by tickets due to a P-47 being at the same alt. And you lost by tickets as AD-2s & AD-4s farmed pillboxes early game and you were unable to kill tanks & pillboxes with GER/IT hardware. And ofc you had often 6-8 Spits coming in very high and exact in this match you had just 1 or 2 109s and the rest 190s…
If you wanted a challenge you were forced to fly US planes.
Against JP with stuff like the P-51 D-30 - just to play 1 vs 8 after a few minutes and having 3 J2M2s behind you and 5 A6Ms below and behind you - for one hour.
And vs Germans you had a similar effect - there was always a 109 above you and it took ages to neutralize their initial climb advantage.
There were just a few air spawn planes on both teams. A fellow player posted somewhere else a replay showing his team with 8 air spawn fighters (4 x XP-50, 2 x P-61, 2 x these French VB interceptors) vs 2 enemy air spawn fighters (2 x Bf 110)…
There were no “no-WW2” nations like Israel or Sweden active, whilst the best Swedish props (PM-1 and B-18B) are actually post-war aircraft.
There were not so many c+p maps (regarding layout) like today - Norway was just amazing as soon as both teams had air spawn.
There were no hordes of PvE /PvP players in Wyverns ( i have seen 10 in a single match) either farming enemy PvE players or bombing all bases foreseen for actual bombers.
There were just a few Pacific maps and the “old” Berlin map with ai planes - either denying you sneak attacks or just cluttering the map. Today you are enforced to kill them after the first wave in order to avoid ticket defeats in close matches - like on Tunisia.
You could actually lose matches due to your airfield getting killed.
16 vs 16 just increased these effects, the majority of your matches are decided after 8-12 minutes: 8 vs 2 or 2 vs 8 - choose your poison.
Fully agree to the first part, the second view looks suited for speed grinders, but a new player trying to master the game should rather try to learn to stay alive. The majority of RP income requires to stay alive as long as possible.
Well, the people in premium planes are willing to fight for the most part. Over-enthusiasm can be fixed.
I find airfield AA to be unsportsmanlike because it’s a cheap way of keeping the enemy team from getting the kill despite the advantages that they worked for to get. There is no way to defeat a determined airfield camper with teamwork, no way to land a satisfying shot from 2km while being mowed down by a hitscan death field.
We’re in a team-based fighting game and AA allows you to deny the enemy’s teamwork and not fight.
I agree that the way the game is played has changed in the last 4 years, but that doesn’t change the fact that Airfield AA is objectionable.
No offense, but “sportsmanship” would require fights on equal terms, so fights vs equally skilled opponents using the same hardware whilst playing the game with the same goals - you find none of that in wt.
As written earlier - just an illusion. Imho a fellow player nailed it:
I think Airfield AAA needs to be there as a discouragement, but it needs to also be defeatable. Not too easy, not too hard. Find the right balance and you will please the greatest number of players.
The best discouragement is teamplay.
If all of.your team is damaged/no ammo and enemy is nearing the airfield, maybe, just maybe, mistakes have been made and the game should end.
OK, so why even continue the game if enemy has enough of an advantage to strafe the airfield with impunity?
Either way, it’s GG, time to start another match.
Or, you could sit in the AF bubble and spite the enemy by dragging the match out even if you’re losing. Alternatively if your team - being the potential gaggle of idiots they are - won ticket lead by PTFO because they have enough braincells to understand that there’s more than one way to win, then it’s on the enemy team - potential gaggle of idiots they may be - to either get their shit together and start to PTFO to close the gap, or refuse to and lose while you’re just chilling.
An enemy plane sitting on AF means they’re in no position to challenge you as you PTFO, especially if your gaggleshit team has numerical advantage. There’s no excuse for teams to lose by not PTFO’ing because refusing to do so is sheer stupidity.
Spite is a sour trait that endears the trait-holder to no one.
Here is the exact same scenario stated a different way. We have won the teamfight in the middle by a landslide, but now because one guy refuses to accept the match results we must all wait for him to engage us - if he doesn’t then there is nothing we can do. We cannot end the match on tickets because some maps are dominated by medium tanks that can’t be killed by most fighters. If there are eight of us on one side, and one of him, every 7 and a half minutes he wastes is an entire man-hour that the rest of us could be using to have fun.
It is TDM if there is no way to win on tickets in a reasonable time frame.
Not to mention that if it’s a closer situation like 1 vs 2, whoever runs to airfield can win the game easily if one guy goes RTB and 1 groundpounds - camper shows up with massive energy advantage and kills the groundpounder without contest. Then he can bait the last guy into airfield AA or defeat him with the energy he got because of base AA protection.
Copout argument because many fighters on all nations can carry bomb loads that can destroy a tank, provided you don’t miss. If you’re stock then you’re simply SoL. Can’t win them all.
Copout argument based on the duo making poor choices by not committing at least 1 plane to minding the enemy. Does happen though because lots of WT players are just tactically unaware. Again, can’t win them all.
Mfw someone expects my Merlin spitfire with either no bomb or one poxy 250lb to destroy entire convoys to reverse a ticket advantage a couple of attackers got in the first few minutes uncontested. Your argument is the copout here.
What kind of poor take is that, you wipe enemy team on Tunisia, but they have ticket advantage and last dude doing NASCAR larping on the AF … and you have to kill heavy tanks with your Spitfire. Can’t even RTB for bombs because tickets drain very fast on most maps and you don’t have time for a 6 minute round trip. You lost with outnumbering the enemy 10:1 and 6+ kills ONLY because he’s protected by the AA bubble of instant death.
AF AA can fuck right off in my humble opinion. Ticket drain should also be strictly player induced, not artificially imposed by crappy AI.
You know, there are also certain players putting a 90%+ winrate by abusing AA and AI, doing this solo. They bombs specific ground units that will win them the game, RTB, and fly around AF for a guaranteed win. Zero effort… just rush those units before enemy gets there due to airspawn, retreat, profit. They don’t even have to kill anyone of the enemy team to do this.
I was on the north team there, flying a MiG-17 for 25 minutes AFK, and even though we were literally not ground pounding, the north side tickets were bleeding much faster than the south one. And while my team AI was an A-4B, the south side AI is Yak-38M that is much faster, and it is impossible for some aircraft such as Ki-200/Me 163, Me 262 C-2b etc to even keep up with them.
I would say [Operation]City should get replaced to [Operation] Korea that was one of best map in Jet RB match but, that’s never happen because people love “dogfighing” in the city.
Yep. Operation City is one of the worst maps when it comes to AI ticket bleed. It’s funny how not even the AI is balanced (killing AI Yak-38s vs AI A-4s or Sabres). AI ticket bleed is one of the worst mechanics in Air RB currently and I can’t wait for it to either be revised or removed so real players have to drain tickets.
I disagree with removing the AI itself from a stock grind perspective, but since the current AI can reload without landing at the airfield for somehow so, this problem can be fixed by simply disabling their reloads.
Nah, I didn’t mean for AI to be removed. I meant getting rid of AI being able to drain tickets. I’ve also heard it referred it as paasive ticket bleed.
