His teammates got killed much earlier in game.
And “playing objective” is a funny thing.
You basically have to BET on somebody surviving and camping the AF for it to make any sense and on enemy team to have no attackers left.
In other words - “playing objective” is nothing more but a gamble. You don’t have enough information to make it a reasonable decision. Just like trying to stop the attackers - if you start from the AF, you have to NOT climb and hope enemy attackers will stay in the middle for a while.
A huge gamble.
And you don’t even know if the enemy has attackers till they make it to the middle. By this time you’ve been flying straight for like 2,5m without climbing (to get to the middle ASAP).
And imagine what happens if these attackers chose to climb or at least partially climb (at 380 IAS f.e.).
They arrive above you and kill you easily.
As a fighter, the only reasonable decision is to climb. Trying to stop enemy attackers is all fun and stuff, now imagine doing that in a plane with bad turn and so-so low alt performance, while superior turners arrive way above you a few dozen seconds later. Yeah, you’re dead.
Even in a great-turning fighter you can only do so much if the enemy has some working braincells.
Now, OK, 2 fighters go low early and stop 2 enemy attackers that luckily were there and didn’t run back to AF and failed to kill the fighters (I have excllent results when using attackers as fighters in WT, so it’s not anything surprising for AD-4 to win vs Bf 109 that decides to dive to the deck). It can and should be expected that our own fighter force loses the higher alt combat with 50% chance assuming our team has 0 attackers and same number of same quality bombers. If the fighters diving are actually top BR planes, the chance goes a lot worse. If our team has attackers of its own - then up high the fighter force is outnumbered and chances drop.
But lets assume no attackers on our side - now these 2 fighters basically either run to AF or count on enemy team to have no working braincells.
Fun, isn’t it?
And we’re still losing on tickets because enemy attackers can and WILL start ground pounding before you get to them.
If you want to count on your teammates to win the air combat, then “playing the objective” is nice idea. If you actually aim higher than sub-50% WR - then you simply can NOT play the “attacker hunter”.
And this game doesn’t allow to quickly check other players’ stats or to assign tasks so you can’t take the worst scrubs in lowest BR fighters and send them to stop attackers.
And even if you did - there’s like 70% chance they’ll crash and burn and fail at their task and then what? Enemy team camps the AF.
To sum it up - “playing objective” as a fighter is NOT reasonble and is strongly discouraged by the game design and will lead to losing a LOT more matches.
Rewarding “playing the objective” by the ability to camp the AF is simply rewarding BAD/anti-team/low skill choices because going for attackers usually means a lot of your teammates will die and you will lose more often, but in exchange - you’ll probably score around 0,9 kills per game, which is objectively horrible, but for average WT acelord - that’s an achievement worth the risk.