"Balanced Battles:" A New Game Mode Idea

Game Discussion General Discussion
1

Ever felt like your matches are unbalanced? I propose a more balanced game mode which can coexist with existing modes. Ideally, players should not die undeservedly, but bad balancing leads to scores of deaths that the player has no control over. Essentially this new mode would eliminate instances of players not being responsible for their deaths by factoring in skill and experience
Problem: unbalanced matches
1. unbalanced skill: squads of lvl 100s with more hours in game than in real life can face people that just installed like a day ago. Matches should not depend on how many of these bullies (let’s be honest, they specifically target the “weak” for their enjoyment) get put on your team. Someone who has 1k matches in a vehicle with most likely perform better than someone with 10 matches in the vehicle
2. unbalanced vehicles: Vehicles without modifications have a significant disadvantage that can make it near impossible to fight vehicles with modifications. Uptiers can also be literally impossible, you can face vehicles that are straight up better versions of yours. ex. M4A4 vs. Firefly.

Solution: “Balanced Battles:”
1. Skill can be balanced by only allowing players within a certain range of levels to participate. ex, If you are lvl 50, you could get “uptiered” in skill to face lvl 60s, or be “downtiered” to face lvl 40s, like the current br system.
2. Vehicles can be balanced by decreasing maximum uptier/ downtier. A maximum br difference of 0 is likely impossible, but with 0.3 or 0.4 br gaps then the vehicles are essentially the same. If your vehicle does not have all modifications researched, it will only face other unspaded vehicles. Or we could just get rid of the modification system entirely, it’s just making you pay for what you’ve already bought anyway. Experience in vehicles can be considered as well: ex. you can only face players with + or - 100 games in their vehicles as you, though idk how that would work with the people who have astronomical numbers of matches in 1 vehicle. Also AIR planes should get out of GROUND battles. Most ground vehicles have no real way of fighting air planes, therefore airplanes are unbalanced.

2

there is an issue with that,
just becasue you are a level 100 dosent mean that you are good at the mode

for example you have someone who grinded air and got to lvl 100 that way, but he basially has zero clue about ground battles

9 Likes
3

You fail to see the full picture. The only reason why the game is unbalanced is because Gaijin wants you to find a match in less than 5 seconds, which implies that the faster you die in a match the faster you will be available to jump into another one. Also the more vehicles that are cramped into a BR range of ±1 the more people will be sharing the same queue, which is why the battle rating system is completely unbalanced; a whole 1 BR uptier usually ends up in a bad experience since the difference in performance, armament and technology is way higher than it should be. This is of course by design to drive sales, but that is a different topic.

Any suggestion that increases queue times (different modes that split the playerbase) or makes it so that it takes more for people to die (balance) is not gonna cut it.

2 Likes
4

i was litery tiping that but you beat me on the time
also balancing by modification can be abused with (GE)

5

you have fallen victim to not seeing the whole picture

one thing i see all the time is the beleif that level 100 means something. It means nothing as its just an XP score aquisition, there is no skill indications from it at all.

Level based matchmaking wont do anything

this just creates a minmaxxing unspaded tank meta, best round+no thermals or mobility on something like a challenger to face maxxed out M60s

I have near to 1000 matches in the FV721 fox but barely over a K/D of 1 in the vehicle (mostly because it is not competitive at 8.0) or the mk2 centurion where im on 500+ but adittedly do a lot better than most at the BR because of 6.7 german skill issues, why should i be punished for liking a vehicle to the point that it will face objectivley superior vehicles at a higher occurance rate than natural?

Also makes smurf accounts a very valuable thing to abuse because you face noobs again

both yes and no

Add a ground only mode? yes 10000% and make GRB as we know it today into combined (ready for when infantry comes)

Nerf CAS significantly in combined mode either way. American, russian and german CAS options are damn OP

6

So your idea is basically a worse SBMM.

7

I don’t think that smurfing in a grinding game will ever be a problem.

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Why are people obsessed by matchamking people according to their levels?

Having lvl 100 means nothing. Ive seen people with lvl 100 have reaction times of half eaten banana that was left sitting in a kitchen for a month.

These people could have wallhacks installed and would still get surprised by enemy hiding behind an obstacle.

Not to mention levels do not diferrentiate between modes. Lvl 100 air player that never touched tanks will be as good as lvl 10 that just installed the game.

Not to mention this could simply be bypassed by smurfing.

You would need to match people according to some metric like SR1 that shows how they actually perform, regardless of their level.

Thats, quite frankly, terrible idea. Some vehicles dont need to be spaded in order to perform well.

For example in air battles, Rafale without any A2G weapons researched (but with all the FM upgrades and MICAs + chaff) would perform exactly the same as fully spaded Rafale in A2A combat.

Just no.

Overall this whole post sounds like kneejerk reaction to doing bad in games than some idea that had deeper thought behind it.

9

While I am in favour of SBMM, player level is not the way to do it.

It takes 14,482,500 RP to get to level 100.

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https://old-wiki.warthunder.com/Ranks

If you ONLY and ONLY fly 130% RP bonus planes in air sim and have no premium, getting to level 100 takes:

We know that you cannot earn more RP for going above 15 points:
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We observe that 15 minutes alive (maximum time span observable) we have:
1050 - 1978
1950 - 2001
2653 - 2001

We can safely conclude that RP gain plateus at around 1050 and ceases to increase regardless of performance - almost triple score and only 1.16% reward increase!

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(further evidence: HeliBoys Sim EC Sheet - Google Spreadsheets)

Above is 80% of maximum possible reward. Landing gives us an addition 20% for 2500 RP plus minus a few score.

2500 RP per 15 minutes (assuming always earning 1050 score or higher, always landing)…

((14482500 / 2500 * 15) / 60 )/ 24 = 60.34 days

Now, let’s use a premium account (or a plane with 260% RP bonus - say a jet)

((14482500 / 5000 * 15) / 60) / 24 = 30.17 days

Which of these players do you think is more experienced?

In 30.17 days, the non-premium player ONLY flying the bf109F4 (or A6M3. The two are a few percent within each other) will earn
(30.17 x 24 x 60) / 15) x 2500 = 7240800 RP, which consulting the table:

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level 65.

One player with 30 days of playtime is level 100.
The other with 30 days of equal gameplay and playtime is only level 64.

Air sim is used as an example because we have a fixed upper cap on RP earned making it very easy to calculate things.

If you aim for balanced fairness, forget player levels exist. They don’t say anything.

Instead, look at some kind of elo rating that’s defined per ranks played.

A crack pilot of WW2 dogfights has very little transferable skills to BVR jet combat and vice versa. Of course, we should acknowledge that neighbouring ranks do influence the nearby ones so initial ELO should be a function of the elo of the ranks above and below with each rank having an increasingly diminishing contribution so that by rank 6, rank 3’s impact has a vanishing influence and vice versa.

( as a fun exercise, I have 750h of total playtime and a playerlevel of 70.

If I spent all 750 hours playing air sim in just the bf109f4, I’d be…

((750 x 60) / 15)) x 2500 = 7 500 000 RP - level 66.

Suppose 300 hours of that 750 being in sim with rank 3.0-5.7 planes kinda explains the theoretical bf109 spammer without premium being so close to my own…

If Instead I did it with premium I’d be level 100 already. Would premium make me a better WW2 plane pilot?)

10

And, for a real life example, this is exactly me

11

I see that’s a skill-based matchmaking, which is certainly unrealistic to the current game. War Thunder isn’t involved in rankings and levels like a Fortnite you get higher classification based on your performance in a match. People could just purposely play bad just to match with ‘low skilled’ players to have a good time or smurf the hell out of this people,

Which could result in a great population of players in a specific area every few hours because at the end of the day, ranking, numbers except research points and silver lions doesn’t matter in War Thunder—There’s no penalty for playing bad except the rewards you get.