After the latest upgrade, I lose 90% of Battles. Doesn’t matter if your using top tier, BR 8 or BR6.3. This mode is unplayable.
2 Likes
What?
Yes that’s exactly right, after the Hornet’s Sting update 90% of the battles (assault ground arcade) can’t be won with a regular team. The chance of winning the first battle for a booster is close to zero. I mainly play top tier, don’t know how it is in lower tiers. Chances of winning improve a bit playing in a good APC or SPAA, and then one of the few maps that can be done even in a tank is Fulda.
2 Likes
It would appear ticket bleed from losses are either higher or there are less tickets overall, average matches end up with 10% of tickets left by wave 5 no matter effectiveness of holding back the waves.
The ai spawns got fixed so no more spawning inside of each other (sadly) but some maps appear to have the waves converge onto the base much faster than before with random exception of the ardennes ai sometimes stopping just before crossing the base border (helpfully preventing ticket bleed)
Another tweak has made the ai far more likely to target you behind cover and be able to predict fire as you peak out of said cover when previously the ai would target you only out of cover with a delay allowing shoot and scoot.
Many of the useful cover spots are now harder to hold because they are able to target any part of you that sticks out or through gaps. It feels as if the ai has been turned onto Hardcore from Normal.
3 Likes
I play almost exclusively Ground Assault Arcade (although probably less now) and there is definitely a huge difference in win/loss rates.
I have noticed two changes that happened in the last big update that stack up to upset the balance in Ground Assault Arcade games in the AI’s favor. They are:
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The AI has been tweaked to spread out and attack much more aggressively. The AI used to sit back and send small groups of tanks to push for the cap and you used to be able to stop an entire AI tank column by disabling the first tank or they would just get stuck on their own, confused by bomb craters. Now they all spread out and rush full speed. Unless you happen to have a seriously stacked team, the human players simply cannot kill them fast enough and get swarmed.
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The tanks no longer spawn on top of each other. This glitch used to allow experienced players to take out dozens of tanks with a single shell or bomb. In a good bombing run I could take out two whole columns in one pass. Now the air raids are far less effective.
Those changes are not inherently bad by themselves. They are an improvement. But the problem is that nothing was done to counteract the balance issue they cause.
On top of that, the fact that you can still often spawn into your instant, unavoidable and unfair death, sometimes multiple times in a row, is just a blatant violation of the basic rules of good game design and it surely ain’t helping with balancing the game mode.
I strongly doubt that Gaijin isn’t noticing this huge imbalance given they can see the stats. I’m hoping they’ll try to fix it. But that game mode is still so severely broken after so many years, I wouldn’t hold my breath.
4 Likes
It appears more difficult but I haven’t noticed a decline in win rates compared to before the update. The only times I seen to lose is when there are a bunch of really low tier vehicles in their playing together. I’m always in a heli 99% of the time.
Frankly I think assault arcade needs an overhaul across the board with mini-objectives to capture to gain buffs like a massively up-tiered vehicle for temp amount of time, (i.E. you’re in a WW2 vehicle, you capture a random point on the map, and you get control of a M1 Abrams for 1 minute.) etc.
And yeah, the bots on this mode, as someone accurately summarized, are effectively skynet terminators.
That is because right now a good heli in the team is the difference between win or loss. I also noticed the dramatic decline in wins whenever I jump into a tank, but when I use Apaches/AH-1Z/Ka/Mi-28 it is almost a certified win. The state of things is that if I load 16 hellfires and kill 12 tanks in a direction, by the time I finish reloading, the remaining tanks from that direction are almost capturing the base. That’s insane and never happened before. Now imagine this but being in a tank.
I have noticed a few more differences since the update since it happened too:
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Ever since the update, there is a lot of lag in the AI tanks. Where you see the AI tank on your client screen is not where the game server thinks it is. It is very noticeable now. What you see happen on your screen and what the hit analysis shows you actually happened are two completely different stories. This means your shot will often hit the tank somewhere different or miss altogether, making the difference between a kill shot and a non-penetration or between an ammo rack hit and an engine hit. This means in overall players will need more shots and time time to kill AI tanks, just as the tanks now swarm the cap faster.
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Another observation I’ve made: In Maginot Line there is a spot out in a depression on the East that I usually hang out at and where with a Leopard 1A5 and a lot of work I can usually hold back on my own the entire column of AI tanks that spawns in that direction. Ever since the update however, it takes 3 players to hold that same direction back. Any less players and they very quickly get swarmed and overrun. This is very telling on how the more aggressive AI affects balance. You need almost 3 times the number of players to stop the tanks now.
I tried BR 4.0-5.0, 6.7-8.0 and 8.3+ and it’s always the same story. More than 90% of the time players simply cannot kill the AI tanks fast enough to stop them from reaching the cap. They get swarmed and lose.
Please balance this mode again. I used to gain silver lions overall while playing that game mode. Now I’m steadily bleeding silver lions because the pitiful amount you get in a loss is often not even enough to cover the price of spawning in your tank once, no matter how many dozens of AI tanks you’ve killed in that game. I’m getting very close to quitting WT altogether unless they fix this. I mean there is no longer a point to play the only game mode I used to enjoy and even if I kept trying I’ll just eventually run out of SL to play it.
5 Likes
I tried it yesterday with a Bt-5 (I know, I know) and we did win - just. But… the mismatch between actual tank position and what you see on the screen is big. Most of the low level players were having great difficulty. I think that something needs to be done to make it a little easier at BR 1 - 3 for the newbies, or they will just leave the game behind
1 Like
Not nearly as bad as they used to be, and they used to be able to shoot you thru the buildings.
OP-
We won the last two times I played Siniaide. I like the changes aCtuaLly. They took away the point in the rocks, but they made a depression NE of the cap point that is protected from 3 of the 5 enemy paths and the village provides much better cover.
It’s not just in assault arcade. The sync problem is in every ground battle. Even at ranges of less than 0.5km, my shots fall behind. Long range shots of 1km are near impossible sometimes. Seems to have cropped in the last week or so. As usual one of gaijin’s classic update snafus
You are right Cap. Just played a 4.3 game on Attica - lots of misses/weird hits that were full on from my PoV, yet wildly out in the replay. This was on the EU servers. Don’t know what the others are like.