Change it so it only functions while a person is actively landed repairing then taking off again.
St lower BRs it is essentially a near un passable dome due to the way it modeled , at at higher brs its overwhelming with missiles and SPAAG.
Which you can sometimes get through, but if the person is actively circling it your boned.
I suggested something similar to this above:
Which I think is a little more fair than having to be on the ground.
So you want players flying around the AF waiting for the enemy and do straffing runs none stop once they landed. Bright idea
Reading the last posts was quite interesting - especially regarding the effects and necessities of this game mechanics.
Whilst everybody (including me) welcomed the removal of af aaa on the forward airfields in October 2023 it also looks like that everybody has his own interpretation of why this happened.
From my pov gaijin had three reasons to do this:
Whilst number 1 is clearly self-explanatory the number 2 makes sense if you think about it.
#2:
At higher BRs the forward airfield was (and is still) used by the myriads of Ju 288 pilots - it was protected and granted an air spawn after repairing / rearming - meaning they were able to score more points if they picked up additional speed and altitude.
At lower BR the af aaa on the forward af made the Wyverns nearly untouchable - the smarter guys used them to cover their retreat to the main airfield after their first bomb run - and depending on the map layout the “gap” between the protection bubbles of main and forward airfield was way too small considering their insane top speed at sea level.
So both cash cows for gaijin became way easier to kill without touching their BRs - almost nobody realized or commented this. As a follower of the “Anti-Wyvern-Movement” i was happy as my rather small firing window against them increased over night significantly.
#3:
The strategy to make skill less important in prop Air RB matches is acknowledged by almost every long-term player. That’s why we have 16 vs 16, insane clouds and fog directly above airfields on certain maps. Simply because it reduces the experience advantage of long term players vs rookies as the situational awareness is significantly reduced.
So by allowing rather cheap kills on the forward airfields gaijin created another possibility for rookies to score, quire easy to understand.
Regarding af aaa in general:
Besides the often addressed abuse i would like to draw your attention to the way more common scenario: Complaining about af aaa as distraction from own mistakes.
Example:
I came out of a match on Hokkaido (replay link) - medium clouds above enemy main af and partially center mao, heavy clouds rest of center map peaking above our main airfield resulting in extremely bad visibility there. I saw two complete turnarounds in this match.
My team completely outclimbed the enemy and decided to go low and die there. After around 8 minutes my team assembled to repair / rearm at the same time at our main airfield and flew one by one very low and totally oblivious in 1 vs 3s and got deleted.
2 vs 4 after ~10 minutes, game lost. My 109 F-4 team mate was a tanker and for me going low vs 4 faster enemies (3 of them sticked close together) is a dead sentence if they have 2 functioning brain cells and i have no clue where number 4 is.
My last teammate (killed a B-25, got damaged and repaired) was willing to fight but the ITP, the F4U-4 and a P-51 D camped him way too close. As soon as he was trying to engage - the enemy team engaged way too early - thereby allowing him to retreat.
As i refuse to fight in such conditions (when i have no clue where which enemy is) i parked at 8-9 km above this scenario and protected my mate with 2 subsequent 5 minute orders (09:41 and 15:14) - just to deny avenger or blind hunt.
The problem of my last mate were his very low crew skills, meaning that in the clouds above our airfield his enemy markers popped up way later than his own for the enemy - leaving him always at a disadvantage.
Their 4 kill ITP tried to ignore af aaa and got peppered and subsequently cleaned up by the 109 (12:51 - 13:09), the P-51 D (complaining in chat 10:57 “camping ass”) messed up his approach and the F4U-4 was too far away. 2 vs 3.
In the meantime enemy #3 in a Cannonstang joined the party. And then they lost - the rather decent (2 good kills in the previous match, i remembered his name) P-51 D pilot lost his nerves and dove into af aaa (died to af aaa 17:50)- whilst their best pilot (i remembered him from an epic fight months ago) died due to a rookie mistake: He ran out of fuel (20:06).
2 vs 1 vs their last guy - the 109 managed to perform and survive a totally braindead FCH head-on vs 4 x 20 mm (20:16) and i was near with a whopping 6 km altitude advantage. Severe damage & kill 21:10.
All they enemy team had to is to give the 109 room to breathe by extending from our main airfield towards center map. This would have solved their visibility issues in the cloud mess above our airfield and to cut him off from the main airfield.
He was definitively not a camper, he simply got pushed in this role by the enemy team with their way too early attacks - and it is logical that he retreats into the af aaa bubble if he has the chance to do so.
This is just another episode of the all-time #1 in this thread : Af aaa is the game equivalent to Thanos in “Infinity Wars”: Evil, “unkillable” and responsible for the deaths of half of the population in the universe.
This looks like a myth:
I honestly dont see that place. The game worked perfectly during the time when there was no airfield protection at all and no one was asking in the forums for it either. One day the devs came up with it and opened Pandoras Box.
People will still lurk in vincinity of those airfields once a team has the clear upper hand, waiting for a plane to take off while the plane will have not enough energy to be putting up a fight. Quite compareable to the situation we have now: When the last opponents are on the airfield they may use the AA screen to gain altitude but meanwhile the lurking opponents will just climb as well.
Their only strategy left is “diving back to the airfield in hope an opponent gets tunnel vision and will be shreeded by the AAA”. But that´s a toxic strategy the devs have worked out here as it makes no one happy. The guy using it feels dirty as he lets the AI do his job while - when it works - the enemy team feels betrayed of a victory… plus it has the ability to waste everyones time meanwhile.
I would just give people who take the long way to the rear airfield the additional option to J-Out and pick an airspawn at a random altitude and position - bombers included. This wont stop people from lurking at 5000 altitude either but at least it will give some a momentum of surprise and the ability to instantly start manoevering, even at a disadvantage.
This might be true or just selective perception. In any way nothing has effectively changed since then: It´s a suicide run to attack an enemy whos either on his airfield or diving for it and not worth the try.
To read the old posts mainly leaves the impression to me that this mechanic has been regarded as a problem from the very first days and that its still an actual topic till this day.
I havent heard of any Youtuber or Forum poster through all those years past recommend attacking the airfield as a viable strategy after a change of AAA effectiveness. Which I would interpret that it has been virtually untouched.
The fact that this mechanic is mentioned for various years does not imply that these subjective opinions would have any relevance for gaijin.
You see the same effects regarding mechanics in Ground RB: CAS, ODL, WW2 vs Cold War tanks.
We had some years ago various HE bugs which made hitscan af aaa useless - and ofc there were the vids and posts of the usual suspects celebrating and exploiting this.
The term “viable strategy” requires to have a strategy in the first place, so whilst most of the participants in this thread are highly experienced - the majority of players in your team are fans of the point and click approach.
So if i clearly remember getting strafed in 2019 on certain maps - we still have bugs/features on some maps like Poland and both Smolensk maps (1941 & 1943) which allows strafing runs on specific airfields.