Players leaving and players not engaging with the game’s mechanics make battles, regardless if it’s air or ground, boring. I leave naval out because I don’t play it as I find the gameplay frankly boring and therefor can’t identify it’s problems.
In air battles you see players latching on to a single enemy even though they have 3 more enemies around them. Yes they get a kill, but are killed themselves in return. Players don’t engage with their planes perfomance, instead they usually rely on “hold S until someone dies”. Same with top or higher tier aircraft. Notching, despite it being relatively easy, is used by few players. People take bombs on their Mig-21 and fly to base, bomb and then headbutt a sparrow. Countless examples.
Ground RB suffers from teams being left with less than a third of their players after 4 minutes. People hold W, see an enemy, click and hope that they get the kill and repeat that until they die and then leave.
Games don’t feel like battles any more. I propose that we introduce a reward multiplier based on how long players have stayed in the battle when compared to the total battle length.
For example, if you stay 10 minutes in a 10 minute game (until a team score reached zero), you get the full bonus reward. This could be for example 15% of what you already get as rewards.
If you would have stayed only 5 minutes, you’d only get 7,5% extra rewards.
This time should not be based on what the game curently considers activity.
This is because SPAA players are still taking part in battles, it is however quite hard to get a kill in certain vehicles and covering the skies is their job, so I’d like to not punish people by playing SPAA.
Instead it should take the time spent in any vehicle into account, with the respawn times between vehicles added onto the ingame time. If the player has not ended the battle in a vehicle, the last time in menu should be subtracted.
Overall, I hope that a mechanic like this makes people consider staying longer in matches, as all actions you did during the match become increasingly more valuable. The same can be applied to matches in air RB. The “bomb-headon-die-repeat” approach would still give rewards, but not gimping your plane with bombs, staying alive and learning the mechanics of the game would make it overall more rewarding.
It is in my opnion also hard to effectively abuse the machanic. Staying in spawn or circling the airfield to elongate the match would do little, as you aren’t getting any rewards. It would be more beneficial for players to quit the current battle and move on. I believe however that bringing lineups and staying active for longer (basically, engaging with the game) should actively be rewarded by the game.