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.
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
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.
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:
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!
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:
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?)
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.
Good point, ideally levels would be based off of skill but the game doesn’t realize that. Perhaps in addition to vehicle br, skill can be balanced by stats in specific vehicles, k/d, games, win rates are already collected, why not put them to use. But this is probably too complicated for this game. Even a level based matching system would be better than what they call balanced now
I don’t think unbalanced matches benefit Gaijin. Sure, it might drive people into another match quicker, or on the other hand sane players will just stop playing the game once they realize the pain of uptiers. My new game mode idea would exist alongside regular battles, players can choose for themselves whether they want balanced or unbalanced matches, Gaijin can still keep players in regular battles if they can. Remember Gaijin serves us, not the other way around.
Level based matchmaking: Usually lvl 100 does mean something, though I agree it is an inaccurate reflection of skill. Ideally there would be some way of balancing skill based on a players k/d, win rate, games in a vehicle, data that they collect anyway, but that would probably be too complicated to effectively implement.
Modifications: Your point is just another reason to get rid of the modification system, it further widens the gap between skill and br, researching modifications is just paying for what you already bought. Modifications should come equiped, but be able to be unequipped to simulate historical accuracy or present a challenge. I think my proposed unmodified vehicles only facing other unmodified vehicles works better than the current system though.
Experience in vehicles: to be clear I didn’t mean more games in a vehicle would make it face higher br vehicles. Rather, you would face players with a similar amount of battles and therefore experience in vehicles of the same br.
CAS: I agree, I think balanced battles would be without CAS. It could be the the ground only mode.
Why not take the BR limiter from squadron battles and make it a new gamemode
if its 9.3, you can take 9.3 and below 9.0, but cant take 9.7
Could change everyweek
either it will be fixed Weekly BRs that it changed from 10.7 to 9.3 after a week
or have it go down by each br 12.0 → 11.7 → 11.3 etc
Good point, I do realize level is not a perfect reflection of skill, but it’s better than nothing. Ideally matches would also be balanced based on a player’ k/d, win rates, and games played in a specific vehicle, but that would probably be too complicated to implement. Paying doesn’t equal skill, and people who pay, usually for unbalanced vehicles, can have the advantage of their vehicle negated by facing more skilled players. But that wouldn’t be a problem if paying didn’t affect your level. Thanks for the detailed and well thought out response.
That would severely limit how many players can play. I want battles that are balanced at every br, at all times, instead of having to wait weeks for your br to come up.
Stats of which vehicles though?
Players have multiple vehicles in the pre-set, but maybe not all are useful on the map assigned via MM. And what if that players best stats are in a vehicle they won’t be using due to the map?
And things like K/D… are absolutely useless for rating players in team-based ground battles which are ALL a domination mode. Have seen players that barely contribute to win because all they care about is not being killed (possibly to pad their KD stat).
Who is more skilled? A player with 2 kills no deaths and a meh score of 600? Or a player with 1 kill, 3 assists and 3 deaths and 3 caps for a score of maybe 900? Does Gaijin een track things like Caps?
Have always thought that BR + crew level would be better matching system, but the crew level runs afoul of the vehicle stat problem I mention above.
You underestimate how masochist people can be. Any player that doesn’t pay for premium is sure to have a miserable experience, yet there’s thousands of people with negative SL that have to fly stock vehicles they don’t want to play because they are simply not good even when spaded, yet they do play them.
It is a fact that unbalance is premetidated in favor of queue times, there’s many modes they could add with much more value than what is proposed in this post, but they won’t do it because it would divide playerbase by a lot, making any possible BR decompression even harder to do.
