Yeah… no. The skill comes from flying sub-par planes and trying to make it to a bomb target while being harassed and chased by fighters. Sometimes you go unmolested and can “skillessly” bomb the base, but often times you get stuck in actual engagements where you are in fact playing the harder plane rather than the guy in the fighter having an easy time shooting you down.
I love this as an idea.
The only reason this would fit it “correctly” is because of how perverse it has gotten in the past few years. The mode used to actually support bombers as a playstyle and it was fun to play against and as in my opinion. I do miss that.
I’d prefer making bases both 1. more numerous in number (say, 6-7 instead of 4 on maps) and be worth more tickets so that both teams actually have to consider defending them or attacking them to win.
You might want to do some research about this topic. Gaming is a highly profitable multi billion $ market - and ofc a lot of studies have analyzed the motivations of players just in order to maximize profits.
Imho you mix up mindsets with motivations and goals why and how to play a video game and your classifications are rather biased opinions. Nevertheless some things are actually true for wt. Check this overview and you find some of your points.
At the end of the day wt is a plain shooter game with a strong grinding component with all consequences.
Imho this request sounds reasonable from a player perspective - but it can’t be the goal of gaijin to accelerate the grind.
Why? Their main goal is to keep players trapped in the hamster wheel called grind as long as they can whilst keeping the player committed (attached / addicted) to play the game - in order to sell their premium stuff.
If they make the grind to easy they limit their business opportunities. Same when they make it too hard.
From a holistic pov the respawning bases nonsense (May 2020) was primarily the confession of gaijin that they are unable to balance bombers and base & airfield health. The appearance of F-4Es (March 2020) able to end matches within 2-3 minutes just due to their insane payload was imho the final motivation to go this path.
I do agree that the claim of the fellow player looks rather strange, but i saw this even at prop BRs, very rare, but it happened, even last week when i decided to escort a coordinated 3-men squad in Bv 238s.
But imho those wins were not as a result of base bombing being decisive - it was more or less a combination of multiple factors:
Low ticket maps - so 5.400 instead of 7.600 tickets.
Own strike aircraft killed the first 4 bases very quickly
Own team killed enemy ai planes very quickly
Own team had 3 or 4 high payload bombers alive
Enemy team was low, bombers very high
So i do agree that the claim just on a stand alone basis is rather unrealistic, but in order to be fair: It is/was possible.
Imho you mix here some things up:
The attempt to bomb a base worth 300 tickets in a non-fighter
The conceptual disadvantages of strike fighters vs fighters
I mean the main purpose of markers for enemy and friendly bases is to facilitate such engagements. So even as i do agree that you might need skill to survive such base bombing attempts, the skill requirement for bombing is rather low.
The main question is imho why would a skilled player put himself in such a situation (=“sub-par” plane attacking a known target with positional disadvantage) in the first place.
I liked your proposal In general as i see it similar.
But as written above: Gaijin proved that they are unable to balance base health and payloads properly and decided to make classic bomber game play (=killing bases and enemy airfield) useless regarding the outcome of matches.
But #2: The challenge of playing prop bombers was never to kill bases - it was to get to the enemy airfield and to kill it. They introduced then bombers with very high TNT payloads without adjusting base / airfield health points leading to very short matches.
So even after the reduction to 4 bomber slots it was almost impossible to intercept stuff like B-29s or Me 264s (BR 3.7 when introduced) on small maps without reverse climbing above your own airfield.
Gaijin reacted with insane repair cost (like ~75k SL for a B-29) and constant uptiering of those aircraft.
So flying a bomber these days (above ~ BR 4.7) is a rather unpleasant experience - there is actually no reason for experienced bomber pilots to fly anything above BR 4.3.
Escorting own (heavy) prop bombers these days is rather futile for 95% of those players as they play bombers just for the sake of grind and not due to their passion to fly those planes.
But whilst flying my B7A2 i do this quite often when i see that a skilled pilot is in the bomber - you can easily identify them just based on flight pattern, route and, ofc, stat cards. I have actually way more fun dragging enemy interceptors away from those guys than killing a clueless Yer 2 or an afk climbing fighter…
I’m aware that gaijin doesn’t want to accelerate the grind, I’m not saying they would fix the base problem, they created it themselves on purpose, but they could fix it if they wanted too.
Also I used the word mindset cause I didn’t really know what to call it, it’s not really a playstyle thing. I’ve played a lot of games for a lot of hours and done a lot of observing and I can confidently put say that everyone fits into one of those categories or bounces between them, but generally people fit snugly into one.
You get more players who only show up to grind. Ideally, you would want less of them.
So really, instead of increasing the high rewards of realistic even further, it might be better to increase the rewards in the actual modes of interest.
As you are not playing any mode but air, you likely have no idea, how much lower the other modes reward. I don’t think air could demand for more or would profit from changes.
People who play Arcade don’t do it for the grind benefits. They do it for the easier learning curve, multiple spawns, and quick action. RB rewards will not change that.