Aptly named, this has been one of the most unpleasant tasks I have ever completed. A miserable experience, it required well over a hundred battles. The chief problem is to kill 10 player ground units using a guided missile, which involves overcoming multiple points of failure.
The first, and probably the worst, is that most Ground Arcade maps spawn planes rather than helicopters, meaning a good 80% of battles are pointless for this task. And here I think I’m being generous. Nevertheless, you are forced to play through them, hoping to get a helicopter map next time. This alone multiplies the number of battles required by five.
The second point of failure, although perhaps less severe, is playing well enough to earn an AGM-equipped helicopter. This is generally not difficult, but exhaustion and bad luck can result in a poor score—or worse, earning the helicopter only to be killed before you can even take off. Sometimes War Thunder simply refuses to provide a helicopter despite a decent score.
The third point of failure arises once you have the helicopter: avoiding annihilation by a barrage of SAM missiles before you can launch your AGMs. This is often luck-based—sometimes the enemy is SAM-light, and at other times, anything that flies dies.
The fourth point of failure involves handling technical or logistical issues. The most annoying of these is the interface refusing to lock onto a target. Other issues include other interface or control failures, or the helicopter being equipped with unfamiliar weapon systems—i.e., Shturms, Mavericks, or whatever—with no prior warning as to what helicopter you’ll get. Even trivial things, such as friendlies destroying targets your missiles were already en route to, can disrupt your progress. Sometimes, enemy tanks manage to evade the missile entirely (fair in itself), or the missile simply fails to damage the target.
When you multiply the requirement of 10 kills by these points of failure, it becomes clear why it took such an unbearably long time to complete this painfully unfun task.
I did become better at Ground Arcade and managed to upgrade my vehicles in the process, but that’s a hollow victory—thanks, but no thanks, Gaijin. I do like Ground Arcade but this was agony.
Note that I am unable to play Ground Realistic as I simply cannot see enemy vehicles without the highlighting feature in Ground Arcade to spot targets, and staring at the screen for extended periods causes me eye strain.
