Same but there are plenty of players who are fine with how the game is. So what can you do?
Either you play the game or you don’t.
I would like the game a lot more, if it’s mechanics were actually realistic.
But changing it would basically make a complete new game out of it, which the majority wouldn’t enjoy.
How would dying more slowly help them?
I hope you are trolling. :) Assuming you are not, instant death vs more survivability compares a cliff like learning curve with something that someone is more likely to benefit from. But, what do I know, I only have 30 years in education to base that perspective on.
I don’t expect a game to be realistic; well, not unless it has simulation in the title. I was speaking to the commercial side of having something that people may get a bit more invested in. I first played this one quite some time ago and I think it is fair to say that it suddenly became harder to progress when their damage model changed. It seems to me that the change to aircraft melting did make a completely different game. It also became more boring, for me at least. I know how to “bounce” as a fighter and bouncing with four 20mm cannon (for example) simply melts opponents. For me, that is far from the most fun way to play a game, which makes me wonder how many new players stick around to endure the much steeper learning curve that I remember from pre-damage model changes.
My plane here has two 7.7mm machineguns.
95% of the time, if the aircraft are relatively evenly matched and you have made a mistake that will cause you to be fired upon, it does not matter if the enemy has cannons or machineguns because they will be in a position like this - near stall speed, with an enemy solidly planted right behind them and at a higher energy state.
Even if my first gun run did not succeed (which it did), I could simply pitch up sharply to gain separation and come back for another pass. Once he got himself in this position there was no way out and that wouldn’t have changed if I had actually good firepower.
Beyond that, making guns worse has a much greater negative effect on bad players. Hence why many “cannon bus” aircraft are at quite high BRs, like the Fw 190 A-8 which was already a poor performer but also got moved up recently. The P-51 (20mm) is another plane that sits much higher than its airframe would otherwise be, because having four 20mm cannons allows even bad players to get a lucky or unlikely shot, and be rewarded with a kill.
But a skilled player will make even relatively lacking armaments work extremely well, see Ki-44-II Otsu/109 E-4/Ryan FR-1/P-51C, the likes. None of these are bad, all are some of the most dominating aircraft at their BRs. All have average or below average guns.
There isnt really much that can be done about that though and its not even really a canon only thing.
See it happen all the time in ground and naval. Heck, forget canons, I shred everytime I play the 3.0 premium Spitfire with 8x 303 MGs, just with maxed out crew and experience.
they could add some kind of ranked MM, but you would still end up with experience players on fresh accounts or those that could buy maxed out crews have a massive advantage.
Its the fundemental flaw with basically any PvP game, especially any “free to play” PvP games and I dont think there is much in the way of a solution.
But looping back to the thread… Yes canons are probably doing too much damage relatively speaking, but I dont think the issue lies with the canons, but rather the damage models, they are too simple, and that magnifies damage greatly (rather than having a hole punched in your wing, your entire wing instead falls off)
Fixing that would go a long way to helping normalise damage a bit, but a single 303 mg round to your pilots head is still going to one shot, so an experience pilot that can aim well will still have an enourmous advantage over an inexperienced one in terms of ease of kills.
Crew skills though, need an overhaul
Its the point of the entire buissness model, make it as frustrating as hell, so you spend money.
Grind taking too long? Buy premium time
TT vehicle not good enough? Buy a premium one
Want to skip a load of the tree? Buy a high tier premium that costs more than most new AAA games.
Crew skill screwing you over? accelerate training
Want a final extra edge over your enemy? Buy ace
vehicle sucks stock? spend GE on unlocking mods.
Except for the part where .303 can’t actually penetrate a pilots armor plate.
Armor plates and self-sealing fuel tanks made LMG obsolete, as you have to pump an ungodly amount of lead into a target to bring it down.
But in WT you can still saw planes apart by just shooting them enough times.
They can also instantly destroy an engine with just a couple of hits.
In reality you can land one hit in a radiator and then hit them 999 more times within five minutes with no effect, going down just from that single hit 5 minutes ago.
Even .50cals won’t easily defeat armor plates inside a plane because bullets just have a natural tendency to tumble after impacting something.
But that’s not modeled in WT.
Hence why you can easily kill pilots, even with LMG bullets, unless the plate is thicker than the 0° penetration of the bullet.
The pilot might need 10 hits after going through the armor but eventually you’re getting a kill.
Otherwise you might just saw the enemies tail off, also giving you a kill.
In WT it’s all about not getting hit, since neither IL-2 or P-47 is safe from bullets penetrating armor that they should have no business to defeat and wings and tails falling off from either kinetic or explosive rounds.
So having no pilot or fuel protection hardly matters, as planes are all made out of styrofoam.
Which also completely defeats the purpose of anti bomber guns and weapons.
A Zero wouldn’t end up at 5.7 when it wouldn’t one tap every plane from 400-600m after they overshot.
The MK 108 is a straight down grade over MG 151/20 in every possible scenario.
It’s hardly more effective in destroying bombers and strapping 6 MG 151/20 to a Fw 190 makes no sense when you can easily bring it down with just one.
There used to be an advantage in having more guns or more powerful guns but 20mm ShVAKs also make 23mm NS-23s completely redundant, when the whole reason for the larger caliber was that the small 20mm wasn’t good enough.
He could dive away and there wouldn’t be really anything you could do to him with 7.7mm MGs.
Which is the majority of players.
And it’s grounded in reality. As you want enough firepower so that when your average Joe gets into a firing position he is able to score a kill.
Like you said, firepower doesn’t matter that much when you have a superior plane and can put yourself in a position that makes it easy to land shots.
And of course its also easy for good players to abuse mistakes made by bad players.
With how guns perform now, a single 20mm is all you need to kill the entire enemy lobby.
I mean 11 air kills, including IL-2s, with 170 rounds of 20mm ammo, has to be a joke.
The FW-190 A-8, which is worse than the FW-190 F-8 in basically every performance metric save for having 2 more MG.151s in the wings was moved up to 5.3 in the last patch as well. Both planes also have air-spawns and the Fw-190 F-8 air spawn is more useful than the A-8 air spawn.
What was the highest number of kills claimed by Han-Joachim Marseille in a single day in World War II? Isn’t it something like 17? While flying a Bf.109 equipped with the MG/FF? And he didn’t have mouse aim as far as I know.
I don’t think I am seeing anyone getting 11 air kills in a lobby with only 170rds of ammo unless you are counting bots.
Here are some times that it has been done with a Bf.109.
Note that he is using gun pods and it’s a later Bf.109 that has 200 rounds in the central gun.
This was the only Bf.109 in the list that I could find with an 11 kill record by the way and games like this are extremely atypical and are representative of 1/1000.
Hans-Joachim Marseille flew three sorties and shot down a total of 17 enemy aircraft (two Hurricane and two Spitfire fighters between 0826 and 0839 hours while escorting Stuka dive bombers to El Taqua in Libya, seven P-40 fighters between 1055 and 1103 hours near Alam Halfa, and five Hurricane fighters between 1747 and 1753 hours while escorting bombers toward El Imayid). His score at the end of the day stood at 121.
Not that it matters, since you can’t compare the real life scenarios to WTs third person flying with enemy markers where two equally sized teams engage each other.
What matters is HOW combat happens, because in reality pilots have much worse spacial awareness and can’t fire from every angle of attack, since they can’t see the enemy at all times.
A 20mm Mineshell, and even regular explosive shells, in WT, will one shot a Spitfires wing or tail and you can shoot targets from much longer range.
If you get close to an unaware target and aim center of mass, any 20mm cannon is going to spill the end of a fighter, simply because 20mm AP rounds are going to take out pilot or engine and HEFI shells are very likely to set fuel tanks on fire.
But in WT you can just spray from long range and simply hitting wings or tails is enough to score a kill.
Other than the fact that MG 151/20 have at best 60-66% Mineshells, why take a 30mm MK 108 when the 20mm already one shots other fighters with higher velocity shells and more ammo to boot?
From my pov Marseille is a real bad example - he was famous for attacking large formations alone (especially defensive circles) and (after his transfer to Africa) for incredible marksmanship with defection shots.
So if the reports are true his shots landed almost always in the engine and ended at the pilot cabin - with 2-3 cannon rounds per kills on some occasions (reported by ground crew).
Even as there are hell of outstanding pilots active in wt the current damage output requires way less precision as depending on angle and shell a single hit disassembles a wing of a fighter.
So whilst i agree with your overall statement i see this more like a result of playing a video game which is just loosely connected to irl.
Have a god one!
I agree with your perspective, but (based on my experience of the early ranked aircraft) not everyone is as good as you at that rank and that gives people some time to learn. I cannot shake my many hours of playing tabletop aircraft games from 1916 to 1986 where aircraft simply do not just fall out of the sky - but, again, I am left wondering how many new players stick around to be repeatedly instant killed.
There is a lot of truth in that, but I cannot escape my sample of game programmer degree students who simply move on to another game, not to mention my two sons. I seem to remember that it used to a lot more fun prior to the change to the damage model. But, people have their own preferences.
Because most aircraft players are actually tanks players, they grind CAS and merely see air battles as a chore, instant time to kill is beneficial to them since they want to simply get to X plane in the least amount of time possible.
I suppose current cannon damage also helps SPAA, no one want to empty half the ammo on 1 plane when already landing 1 shot is hard enough.
Even the best air sim pilot in the game is not readily duplicating Marseille s feats while having twice the amount of ammo. Reducing gun damage and not also increasing the severity of minor damage just creates a situation where “realistic” damage is just planes becoming bullet sponges because minor damage doesn’t do anything to planes outside of reductions in top speed and fact that game is set up with very close airfields.
I can keep up with an already damaged Corsair in the Suisei, and I had a speed advantage to begin with. He’s not going anywhere.
No, I said firepower matters LESS when you, the player, can put yourself in the right position to make the most of your available firepower, instead of using many cannons as a crutch because all you can get are poor shots and rely on ‘accuracy by volume’.
The average player rarely gets in a good shooting position, while someone more skilled can reliably place themselves 300m right behind the enemy plane and hit most of their shots - even just one cannon or a few HMGs are more than enough in such a situation.
This is regardless of which plane you’re in, but obviously greater flight performance will bring much more kill potential even if your armament gets worse. There is only so much you can do in a brick like the F4U-1C or most twin engines like a Mosquito.
If you have very good accuracy, positioning, awareness, gunnery… If you have the skill to do that 16 times over, I’d say you’ve earned it.
And at the same time, hitting that same Spitfire “non-critically” in-game results in no noticeable performance hit, whereas IRL a hit anywhere in its air system will instantly disable most devices, including the guns.
Idk why, that topic title just made me think of this :
sorry nothing else to add, i’ll see myself out
I’d also add he came under scrutiny for overclaiming.
