No no and no, the only thing that should happen is for the first 5 minutes all non strike fighters should have bombs locked. That gives strike fighters enough time to focus on their role while Fighters can eventually help bleed an enemy team of tickets in case all strike fighters or a majority have been knocked out. This allows for Strike fighters to do their job first but still aloow for multirole fighters to also participate after the first 5 min.
That is only the beginning of what is needed to heal Air RB. The linked suggestion is meant to allow the crowds who enjoy doing one particular objective, regardless of what it is, to now properly stack together instead of competing with one another for who matters most to match outcome.
If fighters obliterate the enemy team in 5 min, and the game auto-ends when all enemy players die, it really doesn’t matter how many targets nonfighters have, how big the map is, what the AI target composition is, etc. Changing any of those other aspects may make things a little less painful for nonfighters but at the end of the day the core problem is not fixed. The reverse situation is true if its an attacker zergrush sweeping down all the tickets fast (Tunisia for example is infamous for this) or the increasingly rare map where airfield destruction is still a win condition (a fully-loaded Ju-88A-4 with 1500kg firebombs and 1400kg standard bombs can one-shot the runway) make much of the fighter efforts effectively irrelevant.
Players “not doing their intended job” is a wholly different problem, IMHO. I feel like this can only be solved by a series of both positive AND negative incentives to coerce people to focus on their intended jobs. Snail is adamant that they don’t want to raise rewards globally, so to have any sort of reform with a shit’s chance in hell of being implemented, it must be a tradeoff and not a global buff. What I have come up with in the past is as follows:
- Ten times more rewards (RP, SL, score) for destroying targets within your chosen role for your plane.
- Ten times less rewards for destroying targets outside your chosen role for your plane.
- Many planes may have two or more roles, and they pick one role before they queue, getting its associated set of multipliers.
- Once a match has begun, if some players have died and available slots have opened up, a player can change their role to another available one on the runway, thereby changing their set of multipliers.
- The matchmaker would be altered to queue people based on their chosen role so that people using bombers or attackers no longer “take team slots that could’ve been filled by fighters” - 10 “fighter” slots and 6 “not a fighter” slots.
Available roles would be:
- Fighter: destroys enemy fighter and interceptor aircraft to secure air superiority
- Attacker: destroys enemy ground or naval targets with cannons, bombs, rockets, missiles, or all of the above.
- Bomber: hits strategic targets and airfields
- Interceptor: destroys enemy bombers and attackers to protect friendly assets on the ground/water.
Each gets 10 times current kill rewards for destroying things in their chosen job, and 10 times less for killing things outside their chosen job.
A P-47D could grab bombs and rockets if it so pleases, then it would be queued as an attacker, airspawn with the attackers, and get the set of reward multipliers as an attacker. The same plane could alternatively choose to be a fighter.
An Me-410B6/R3 could choose between either Interceptor or Attacker roles.
A B-25 could choose between Bomber or Attacker roles.
A B-17 would only be able to choose the Bomber role.
An Me-163 would be only an Interceptor.
An R2Y2 would be a Fighter or an Attacker.
So on and so forth.
In any scenario, you can still destroy off-role targets in a pinch if the need arises to not lose a match, but do not expect to be paid handsomely for stuff that ain’t your damn job. This helps curb situations of fighters with poor air-to-ground armaments cutting grass, bombers and attackers abusing airspawns to hunt other planes, bombers and attackers trying to be gunships, and so forth.
The only part I do not entirely know how to resolve are cases where planes are clearly air-superiority-fighters, but also get access to one decent-size bomb (for example, Bf-109s). Would even those cases be lumped with other Attackers despite being much less effective at that job than say an F6F-5 or P-47D? I genuinely do not know.
At the end of the day, all the premium jets doing base-bombing would probably be able to classify themselves as “Bombers” under such a system. On one hand this would be a substantial buff, both in rewards earned from bombing and also by airspawning like bombers currently do. On the other hand, they would get functionally nothing reward-wise for doing anything else until they land and swap jobs. But the best part is that with the above proposed matchmaker change, all the premium jets base-bombing would no longer take up fighter slots anymore. 10 fighters, 6 non-fighters.
I’ll agree with it if they make stock grind less painful. At the moment it’s way too painful without napalm bombing
Not happening because Gaijin loves handholding fighter players
Modern jets are multirole
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But I think that’s kinda the point. A lot of people play fighters single role and it’s not as a fighter.
Heck the number of times I’ve ended matches with the most kills on my team as a Tornado GR4 is just hilarious. And mostly because both teams were just base bombers focusing on bases not enemy aircraft
I don’t have an issue with some dumping a few bombs on the way to doing some A2A, but a lot dump and run, I wouldn’t be surprised if a few didn’t even bring A2A missiles to save on weight/drag