The point is for those who keep using the air mission, there will be players that will want to move onto RB for that or will want to play planes. Air mission is an advertisement of planes in ground AB addressed to those who did not yet play planes at all. The fact that you can “test drive” a random plane at high tier without having plane tree spaded is an advertisement to play that part of the game.
Of course not everyone will actually get caught by this, but it doesn’t have to have high percentage of success. Keep in mind that only fraction of players actually spend most of the money in game. F2P/GaaS games have multiple strategies scattered around for bringing players into other activities in the game for retention and for monetising them. There are specific paths designed for a new player that are based on chances to guide him towards places where he can spend more time and have chance for him to spend money.
Also second thing here is that when you ask a player about his decisions made throughout the play time, he will often not be able to precisely tell you what he did and what decisions he did make. If a game developer is making a playtest session for an unreleased game or a new chunk of the game, they will capture the play session, and prepare questions about specific topics, but often the answers to the questions are either really vague or doesn’t make sense when confronted with what actually happened in this specific player play session. So there are A/B tests conducted to see if specific mechanic actually makes an effect on player’s choices, so a group of new players is split between playing with and without it and they are observed to check that.
So the question is, are there actually players that started in ground AB and then started playing aircraft, or are there players that started in ground AB and transitioned to ground RB to play their own aircraft with unlimited time there etc. And then figuring out the importance of this advertisement of planes.
So you not hearing a precise answer like “I came to Ground RB/Air AB because of Air Mission in Ground AB” is not a proof that the system is not designed to work like this and is not generating profit for developer this way through a fraction of overall playerbase.
By having a way to play higher tier than stock planes before grinding plane tech trees, you are introduced to the mechanics of higher tier planes and can try playing them this way.
Even if a percentage of people will do it right away because of that, it still works - advertisement in general has low percentage of people actually being caught and buying into it right away, but often it’s the fact that you remember the brand, you’re more likely to purchase it once you need a product like that and here it’s the same way.
So since you’ve been using planes in in air mission, you already know the controls and know some of higher tiered vehicles (this is the advertisement part) and when you get bored of tanks or there is something to be gained by playing not only tanks but other things, you have a choice of playing planes now and grinding them.
F2P/GaaS games strive to make it so that there is always a new activity you can jump to if you get bored with what you’ve been playing/doing so far, because it means you’re staying in them instead of closing the game and forgetting about it and potentially going to the competition. It’s always about retention and more routes to make sure player keeps staying in this game as long as possible.
Also what air mission does apart from the advertisement itself, it also reduces friction layer of being introduced to another set of controls. For some players to jump into a different game mode with a different set of controls after spending dozens of hours is already a friction point where they’d rather just keep playing the same thing. But if you can let them learn a bit while playing their primary mode, and in a way that they are not really penalised for using it improperly, like it is with “free” planes, it reduces the threshold player has to overcome when starting a different game mode, different type of activity in the game because he’s already partially familiar with it.
You can test drive higher ranked vehicles already in the form of premiums.
I don’t understand how a player will come to want or understand high tier gameplay from the 60 second kamikaze plunge that air arcade presents to you.
Equally to helicopters where you spawn with multiple surrounding you and have a little lock and spray then you’re on a rocket run.
Neither of these experiences reflect actual gameplay. At best your suggestion is that the air in Ground Arcade introduces players to a falsehood. This would further reinforce reasons as to why it should be removed.
Not only is it a pointless feature, it’s an actively negative feature by your understanding.
But that’s not a problem - just being partially acquainted with the planes just by controls, and the camera is enough. This not being a full 100% of the experience of playing aircraft for the whole match is even better in context of advertisement - because if you could have the full “product” without actually going for it and grinding the tree, then it wouldn’t be such a “demo” of it, but it would be a full product.
But that’s not an in-game mode advertisement such as the air mission in ground AB and planes in ground RB where the planes are the part of the game. If you want to keep playing, you need to get used to them either being there or start using them in your favor. It’s a different level of friction than starting a test drive of premium vehicle in a new mode. But both ways of advertising are there to cover all bases.
Funny how well it matches recent trends in F2P mobile advertisement :)
Where the advertisement is supposed to be a false advertisement to capture idiots/vulnerable people.
You keep looking at this from the point of view of the player assuming that devs have player’s best interest in their mind when developing a F2P/GaaS game - where it’s simply not true :D
Where the hell did you find that I said it’s purely negative one for the player? In my last 3 comments I was explaining the point of planes being in the game mode from the perspective of the developer.
How it is implemented in context of player’s point of view is a different story - it can be made that is a fun and balanced element of the mode and it can be made like it is now that it’s annoying as hell.
No, it doesn’t justify anything. As long as this doesn’t push players away from the whole game mode, the other retention/monetisation schemes matter. Again - simple people want simple answers - but the world doesn’t work like that.
All-in-all - we as the players are not the ones to decide whether something gets changed or removed from the game, and asking for cutting away a feature is more intrusive and risky than solving it over few iteration with small changes, and unless we actually have an upper hand by organising a game-wide strike over this specific thing, then you have to propose something the other side is willing to talk about. And time and time again gaijin stated that the game is supposed to be a combined arms game, and I assume that they have some reason behind such decision that is different than “we don’t want to invest time into changing it”.
Again - you are not the one that will decide whether something has a meaning/justification from the perspective of the developer. You can state your opinion, give your feedback, but when you are asking for a core principle of a game mode to be changed, this is something that may not be acceptable from the point of view of developer and effectively it’s not productive to ask for it instead of discuss smaller changes.
Because if you’re asking to change something that is a core principle of the game as stated by developer multiple times, then maybe you should stop playing the game if you don’t like it to that degree? As long as it’s not stopping you and most of others from playing the game, than it’s not so critical that it should matter to devs to change a core principle of one of the game modes.
From my perspective it’s a choice (for us - players) between gathering around 200 players here in the forums that would vote for improvements in how the planes work in ground AB versus at least a magnitude bigger amount of people, so like 2000 players to go on a strike stating they won’t play the game at all as long as the planes are still there in ground AB.
It’s simply more productive to talk about solutions that will be acceptable from the point of view of developers with support numbers that we can actually achieve instead of trying to push something that requires organising a big scale strike in the community that is barely existing because most of AB players are not really on the forums or reddit.
I think it could actually make more sense to discuss a hybrid AB/RB tank only mode similar to how world war worked, as a new mode, than try to cut away planes completely from an existing mode, because introducing a new mode doesn’t necessarily mean breaking the existing one, as long as most of the players won’t jump into the new mode at once.
I take screenshots of players using CAS against me for a while now. At this point, i have sorted out 651 such screenshots (from the others that are not made of such player stats.
I made a Java program, that gets the tank kill and death counts from each screenshot, and then averages them.
At this point, that 651 player has this stats combined:
Yes, they have an average K/D, that is barely over 0.5!
Whenever i get to 1000, i will collect stats from players that kill me using a tank, and we will then compare…
That tells a lot about the players that use this mechanic.
The sad trutsh is, that these players, instead of learning to play with tanks in tank mode, just choose to go the easy way and use an unfair mechanic.
It is a tool used by Gaijin to keep these players in the game by giving them an unfair advantage, so they don’t have to learn to play with tanks to get kills.
Air does add an element of almost unfairness, you effectively get another or several other vehicle(s) for free. It doesn’t matter if you die while in an aircraft as you magically return to your tank and wait for the next time you can blag a plane.
I would love to see the destruction of a plane result in the simultaneous destruction of that players ground vehicle, surviving and ending your flight with a kimikaze kill has a consequence. This isn’t an unreasonable idea ;)
Also there should be random ground to air support, just magic a few into existance is good enough. This should also push those keen on racking up cheap kills into flying rather than hovering a few kms out.
Literally just had two AA tracks killed as soon as they spawned and lost the magic invincibility by helis at 3 & 3.5 km, then I’d already killed another 3 with my first track.
“Players provide it, developers choose to take it or not.”
More often it seems that Players provide it , game developers ignore it. But that’s pretty common in any game, the times devs listen is when it’s going down the pan and their salary is at stake.
Planes in AB arent a problem, beyond planes with tiny tims and kinda the 7.0 bracket, but that can easily be fixed by lowering aircraft spawns. Ninety percent of the time you can just move away from the bomb, and if they targeted you while you were disabled then good on them lol
Destroying your ground vehicle as a penalty for crashing your plane - counter productive for the devs, this would make less people use the planes, especially when figuring out who’s at fault for crashing the plane is tricky. What makes sense is that you only score the kill and points if you survive in the plane, but still it’s penalising if you have interceptors on the back. It’s an unsolvable problem with current setup with limited time. If you had your own plane for unlimited time, then evading risks is part of the skill, with predetermined close distance spawn layouts it’s just random.
Also I tried suggesting that if you get killed by CAS, you don’t lose the vehicle you lost, but you have time penalty based on how much of the damage was not from the CAS, so if the CAS just finished you off, then you have to wait for a long time to reuse this vehicle, but mods were against it because it would open up the flood doors for different conditions of how death is counted… despite plane deaths not counting as a death…
Good point on the AI/NPC SPAAs on the ground - if you make it so that each team has it’s own AI SPAA on each side of the front that’s going to shoot down planes crossing specific line, then there’s no strafing from behind, which is really annoying because ground units don’t have full map so the direction marker is skewed at the edges.
no, they are a problem. Yes, tiny tims are explicitly bad, but the game “RNG” decides the outcome of the match this way often - if you have interceptors spawned too far away to chase you, then you can drop the bombs from high altitude. If the map has buildings/urban environment, those will make bomb whistle working only after the bomb passes height of the building so like a fraction of a second before it lands, and if you are at an alititude over like 1200 meters or something, the forced fuse is not there, so instant bomb explosion is still there. If you spawn in bomber and have interceptors right in front of you, you cannot do anything in a bomber that will loose significant portion of the speed if he turns away. And most of the time it’s like that if you’re doing some task that the bombing would help, and you’re unobstructed if you’ve finished your tasks - just making sure by average that people stay longer in the game.
Arcade Ground Bombers are too flimsy my tail/wings/etc. all go flying off in the first spray. Also it’s complete RNG where the fighters spawn so often time your friendly fighters are 1km behind so they have a 0% chance of catching up.
My games are being ruined to the point id rather do my own custom games.
Every bloody night game after game the noob air battle players log in to GFs just to fly and bomb with little or no idea what the hell to do sometimes with two vehicles they die then leave the game ,how is that allowed to happen ?.
Aircraft in GFs should be limited to 3 planes like the ground vehicles when they’re lost you lose both the tank you started with and the plane used,
None of this unlimited plane BS ,or if that’s the case give us unlimited tanks like in RB but an arcade version
I for one am sick and tired of playing this game night after night knowing the same types of players are going to be flying instead of helping the team ,
If that’s the case then war thunder will be losing players and the income they bring due to their stubborn realisation that the planes in GFs have now become the primary vehicle and the tank is just a tool to get one .
When will they finally nerf the plane spam to stop games being ruined ?.
Its bad enough having a BS match maker this is making the game worse
Plane spam is a complete non-issue to be honest. As long as you are semi-aware of the sky you are fine, and if they bother you, spawning fighters works 90 percent of the time- its a good way to pick up kills, too.
