Do you really think the current reward system in Sim is okay?
Capping rewards every 15 minutes with the “useful actions” system and then giving only a fraction of the reward if you do not land makes no sense. What is the reason for capping rewards to 15 minutes when players are already naturally limited by ammo and fuel? This system actively promotes bot like behavior and offers no real benefit other than making the grind worse or even impossible.
I play top tier Sim. Let us say I get three to four kills within a 15 minute interval. Then an enemy fires a missile at me. If I try to defend properly, depending on my altitude and the distance to the enemy aircraft and missile, there is a high chance I kill myself by ripping my wings or hitting a tree or hill while trying to multipath. The Rafale is a good example, with an extremely weak airframe combined with insane engine power. In that situation, I lose most of the reward I worked for. Ironically, if I just fly straight and let the missile kill me, I often get rewarded more.
I understand there was an issue in the past with people doing bomb and suicide runs to grind SL or RP. But instead of destroying enjoyment and progression for players who actually play Sim the way it is meant to be played, why not only cap bombing rewards? To counter people intentionally killing themselves to deny rewards, the reward could be given to the closest enemy player within a certain range, or within the effective range of their missile.
Sim has so much potential, yet it has been completely butchered in terms of rewards and gameplay and then left to rot.
I will include a screenshot of one of my matches. Out of six deaths, four were counted as suicides. Three were wing rips and one was a tree impact. All of them happened while trying to defend against or escape from missiles or enemy aircraft. For 52 minutes of playtime, 17 player kills and 4 bot kills, I received 10k RP and 79k SL. This was a free to play match, but even with premium the rewards are still miserable.
To spawn a Rafale with the loadout I use costs 15.1k SL. With six spawns, that is 90.6k SL. Since the match was a loss, I ended up with a net loss of around 12k SL even after a strong performance. The system simply refuses to reward skill and instead actively punishes mistakes.
So my question is simple. If and when are we going to get a proper Sim rework?
People will always look for a faster and easier way to do something; it’s just human nature. Punishing the whole community because of a few is not the right way to handle it. Some ways you could possibly counter it are: nerf specific vehicles that people abuse, nerf bombing, or outright punish people who exploit it. Nobody is abusing PvP in Sim because it is not as easy or efficient as bombing, so the solutions are pretty obvious.
Best part about Useful actions is that you only get 92% of promised reward.
Not 100%
A6M3 promises 730 SL/minute.
Understanding we only get 0.8x without landing, it reduces to 584 SL/minute.
That’s 8760 SL per 15 minutes.
Now look at these results:
At 1050, I got 7974
At 1812 I got 8063
At 1950 I got 8064
At 2653 I got… 8062
At 2653 score… I still only got 8062/8760x100= 92.032% of the reward
You’d think after getting about the same reward at 1050 (approximately 91-92%), I’d get the remaining 8% by getting over DOUBLE the score (2653 is 2.53x of 1050!). Nope. Not even a full percent.
You would be surprised how effective farming the farmers is in Sim. Heck, you earned almost 10k score done in less than hour, result impossible with basebombing or even suicide airfield strafing.
And payout is derived from earned score, though with useful actions you have hard cap and time limitations to that.
There aren’t that many “farmers” in top tier. Even so, what is actually wrong with having flat rewards? If the rewards are too high, just lower them. It really is that simple. Do not punish players for dying when they are trying to play the game properly. You have already implemented multipliers on bombs that give more or less percentage depending on the performance of the vehicle and its BR, so what is wrong with applying a similar system more broadly? This could also be extended to air to ground missiles (if it already isn’t), which are commonly used for farming as well.
That 10k RP reward you are referring to was my best Sim match ever, and it objectively is not easy to achieve. I can take an F-5C with a premium account into Air RB and get 10k RP from two to three kills in a 10 minute match, with SL rewards around 80 to 100k. Do you really think 10k RP for an exceptional 50 minute Sim game is good in comparison?
You also have not addressed the fact that I actually lost SL in this match. That alone should show how broken the system is.
With flat, properly balanced rewards, you would effectively achieve the same goal as the “useful actions” system, but without the downsides. At the moment, the system does not reward exceptional performance. I genuinely cannot think of another game or reward system that refuses to reward players for playing well.
Again, we had flat rewards in the past, it didn’t exactly worked out for the snail, ESPECIALLY as you have technically infinite number of players in any given match unlike ARB, so there is no “cap” on possible rewards. So where you draw the line for rewards? Keep in mind, house (snail) must win in the end, not players.
At the same time, UA system is easy to take advantage of when you aren’t reckless hot headed specimen, which is why Sim is somewhat populated by PvE players doing airborne version of Euro Truck Simulator and walking away with decently big RP/SL check to their name.
We had flat rewards in the past, but they never tried to balance them properly when the issue of farmers appeared. Instead, they completely scrapped the system and introduced hard caps on everything. I also do not understand your statement about having an infinite number of players in a match. Sim matches have a maximum lobby size, as far as I know.
Even in an extreme hypothetical scenario where you have a full lobby of “bots” that agree to fly straight and kill each other for the entire match, which will realistically never happen, you could still implement an overall RP and SL gain reduction based on the total player kill count of the whole lobby. This is just something I am throwing out while writing, but the point is that even if flat rewards are not the perfect solution, the current system clearly is not either. That means we need a third option.
“The house always has to win” is not a valid argument. No, it does not. Both players and Gaijin want balance. A game without grind is boring and people will stop playing it very quickly, just like killing bots in a PvP game gets boring fast. On the other hand, if the grind is too hard, the game stops being fun and becomes frustrating.
The reason the game is in its current state is because of mentalities like yours, where there is a refusal to find common ground or to try new systems. This applies not only to the economy, but also to new game modes or other major changes. Yes, the Useful Actions system is easy to exploit if you want to play like a bot and maximize grind efficiency, which is exactly what I said in my first post.
Do you honestly think a system like that is good for the game and should remain implemented? Are we playing a grind simulator, or are we trying to play a proper warfare game?
Amount of players respawns is effectively unlimited.
It is, Gaijin is for profit company.
So far players want imbalance in their favor - entire “I want realism/historical accuracy/balancing decisions but only when I’m benefitting from it” gang, while Gaijin wants their bank account balance in the green.
Which is major part of Gaijin business model, focused almost entirely on grind shortening aids.
Gaijin seems to be content with “good enough” approach for gameplay modes and prioritize what actually brings them money - new vehicles.
For “proper warfare game” you already had your fun demolishing lobby in Rafale. You can play Custom Battles at zero expenses and have all the fun there. And yet it is you who want to get paid for having fun. So, decide which you are, play4fun or play4progression? Because in Gaijin world you’re unlikely to have both.
2030 x 15 = 30450 What I got: 22412 + 5603 = 28015 28015/30450 = 92.00%!
I bought a plane promising 2030 SL/min if I do well in it. I got 3 kills, survived 15 minutes and landed. I’m stiffed 8% of my reward. Based on the zero, even getting 5 kills in 15 minutes (5x450=~2275 + assists/crits) won’t give me that 8% reward. 1050 score? 92%. 1567? 92%. 2653? You got it. 92%!
In a way, this is false advertising, is it not?
The one defensible form of microtransaction (pay for faster progress) literally does not work as advertised.
Respawns are unlimited, just like in Realistic Battles, where you can join a new match immediately after dying. You also get a bonus multiplier for winning in RB if that applies. In Sim, however, you have to wait 1 to 3 hours for the match to actually finish, and you pay for your spawn. So I really don’t understand your argument. If anything, the odds are that your spawn in Sim will last longer than your match in top tier Air RB.
Yes, of course profit will be first priority for them; it’s a business.
Yes, people will always want things to be easier for them. As I wrote above, it’s human nature. Any mature person understands this and will agree that balance is best for players.
Yes, I understand that if the grind is painful, it incentivizes people to buy premium time and vehicles. But if people don’t like something and want a change, and it doesn’t happen, what happens to a game when they start taking more extreme measures, like what happened in the past?
Yes, Gaijin won’t try to fix something that people don’t complain about. So why don’t people complain about something that is broken? Exactly because of mentalities like the one you are presenting now. You are arguing in this thread for the sake of arguing, instead of giving proper reasons why you think the system is good or better than something else, or proposing a new approach to the problem. Saying “Gaijin is greedy” and “people just want easy and free stuff” are not valid arguments.
The last sentence is the same story; no arguments, just “it is what it is, you can’t have what you want.” There is nothing wrong with not commenting on a thread if you don’t have anything of value to contribute. Constructive criticism is always welcome, but this is just a pointless argument.
And it comes from over a decade+ of observing Gaijin actions. This company has long pedigree of eventually fixing issues they deem as one. Gameplay loop, economy clearly aren’t deemed as such, otherwise they would have been addressed at some point. Unless “player feedback” really threatens their bottom line ie famous reviewbomb few years ago, don’t expect forum yapping to be more than social interaction with other yappers.
Most perfect example - CAS. If decade of yapping didn’t changed it in any meaningful way, nothing will. Worse than that, Gaijin doubled, tripled and quadrupled on it by adding helicopters and increasingly modern air to ground ordnance.
In other words, judge game for what it is, not what it could have been.
I am well aware of Gaijin’s moves and motives, and I’m also aware of the type of community this game has. The point of this post was not to point fingers or assign blame, but to open a discussion and explore a path toward resolving a broken system.
What I said in my previous comment, which you either didn’t understand or ignored, is that if people stopped focusing on “Gaijin/community is this or that” and actually started a proper discussion about the problems and potential solutions, those solutions would be pushed into the game, because no matter how big or greedy a company is, it has to come to agreement with its community that is united.
And you think how many times someone came up with exactly the same revolutionary idea of “proper discussion” as yours in the past, and how many times it led to Gaijin actually doing something? You’re not the first not the last Neo here. Lets be real.
Whole “playerbase is united” is extremely unlikely to happen for simple reason - only common ground is grind/progression. Tankies couldn’t care less about Air or Naval struggles, not only that, they would love to see Air progression to be slowed down to Ground pace, with wishful thinking they will be bombed just a little less in GRB. AAB players don’t care about ASB economy, nor those three Naval players can be bothered caring about Heli PvE or Ground Assault economy.
Will what-if economy rework be beneficial to the players? No, as Gaijin will want return of their dev time investment. They also have no incentive to make Sim more popular, those who are interested in it, already play it.
