If you have ever seen close footage. When a person multipaths most of the time, visually the missile hits them. It just does no damage. It’s almost as if being at a certain altitude makes them immune to radar guided.
It doesnt matter how high you are. It really depends on the terrain. Take sinia for instance there are some flat portions but most of them have rocks/ditches/dips. So If I shoot down at a target the ground doesn’t have to cooperate with the bandit. Next for forested maps like rocky canyon, tree height isn’t ground height. So new players will try to hug the trees and they’re actually 200ft off the ground.
We could discuss the flaws of GSB or GRB all night long. But first and back to what the winrates say, what do last month’s data says, the data which has been repeating itself for at least the past two months now?
Come on, it’s not hard to say that Russia even with every alleged bit of “suffering”, has been sitting on a pretty good spot for a major, if not the most rounded winrates across top tier.
The problem with 13.3 is simple. The underdogs dont have ARH missiles. This on both sides, the players in the low bracket mig29smt, su34 have had to fight at the bottom of 14.3. They are typically better than most f16ADF pilots. The argument that the hornet is suffering can also be used to say the su27/j11 suffers.
I don’t get this argument at all. It seems like people want to say I’m getting beat so fuck them, then when i have the beating stick, stop complaining/skill issue. The Br rotations just setup seal clubbing days. The most popular and dumb answer is just wait for your seal club day.
That in my opinion is what is wrong with sim jet tier. I personally would like a locked br bracket from 12.3 to 13.0. The br would contain mainly semi active aircraft with some arh slingers like the f4ice, kfirc10, and harrier ii, the F16ADG varients should’ve stayed at 12.7 with sparrows, the su27/j11A goes down to 13.0. There done.
Air RB maps have more terrain than Air SB maps. It is far easier to maintain multipath altitude of 30m when the majority of the map is water like Denmark. Also there are no markers in SB so flying very high in MiG-29 means the radar and rwr are your primary source of situational awareness and they are not very good on the MiG-29.
The Rafale and Typhoon have qualitative advantages over the Su-30SM2 that are simply not true for something like the MiG-29 compared to it’s current peers. The AESA Eurofighter overall has the best situational awareness of any plane in Air Sim due to the radar field of view and the HMD that marks all radar contacts and all friendly fighters.
Prior to the addition of the Su-30SM, the average win rate for the USA side of the matchmaker was greater than 70% and had effectively been that way at least since the F-16C was added and the CL values for the MiG-29 were changed. My personal win rate in the F-16C was 87% and that also includes a small number of games since the Su-30SM was added. During the exact same time period, my win rate in the Su-27SM was around 20 - 25%.
To put things further into perspective; here are my results for the Su-30SM2 vs Eurofighter AESA.
The difference in my likelihood of winning the game between both of these planes is a 2% difference. I have actually played the Eurofighter slightly more than the Su-30SM2 and most of these games are during the period where the RWR bug would cause it to randomly decide to not register ARH missiles.
Then you have not been paying even the slightest bit of attention to any part of our community. The current win rate situation at top tier is such that the worst Eurofighter w/ the RWR bug has a 40% win rate. To make a direct comparison, the German Eurofighter experienced an average win rate of 34% in February of 2025 and this was drastic improvement for the “Red” side at the time; especially when you consider that prior to the introduction of Eurofighter, all radars had a bug where they scanned top and bottom bars twice. This was especially detrimental to the Su-27SM with its fixed search size and slow radar.
If you want a perspective of exactly how imbalanced things used to be you can go look at Aeroturtle’s statcard. A guy with a full VR / HOTAS setup, content partner benefits, etc was able to muster a blistering 0% win rate in the Su-27SM; you can actually see that his current win rate in it is only 9.1% and that win happened AFTER the addition of the Eurofighter. And that isn’t really an outlier either. And I use him as an example because he has largely stopped playing sim in the last year and a half.
If you actually paid any attention to sim communities, especially those that are centered around top tier, you will see that there has been plenty of discourse regarding Blue vs Red balance at top tier. In fact I have repeatedly leveled the criticism that most of todays self-identified “Red” mains are just yesterdays “Blue” mains that jumped ship as soon as the meta shifted and that other former Blue mains simply rotated to lower / more favorable BRs.
You can also refer to forum posts I have made in response to the meme about “Red” players being better at the game. This was largely true amongst players that had stuck out playing the Su-27SM at a time when it was considered top tier but is not true today.
That’s not a counter point: even if the BR’s are different, it’s still the same tech those aircraft use: visually aimed bullet weapons.
The difference between 12.7 and higher is SARH against ARH, which has fundamentally different implications for how those aircraft fight. You don’t have that fundamental difference in prop BR’s.
Those props from 4.0-5.3 also come from the same years of operation. Between a F-15A and a Su-30MK2 lies over a quarter century…
No problem? The problem itself is that there’s a rotation that everyone knows from the start will penalize a specific BR range, and you don’t even deny it. I’m speechless.
Every BR (except the lowest and 14.3) is top BR at least once in every full rotation cycle (2 days out of 8), so how is anyone ever penalized?
Admitteldy, some aircraft and BR’s are more forgiving if you fly in a higher bracket, others suffer if you fly them in a higher bracket than yours. But you have the choice.
And as I explained in response to your original post: You don’t have to fly a 12.7 against any aircraft higher than 12.7!
The great thing about Sim EC is that YOU can chose against that BR’s you fly, contrary to AB & RB where the game’s matchmaking decides what opponents it throws at you!
What kind of ‘choice’ is it to stop playing 12.7 just because you don’t have ARH missiles and want to avoid the 13.3 uptier? Where I come from, that’s called a forced choice, unless you actually enjoy losing due to a massive power gap.
To get a single kill, I have to work three times harder because they can just ‘fire and forget’ while I’m stuck maintaining a lock and taking missiles to the face. This isn’t a choice; it’s terrible game design. There should be a hard wall between aircraft with that kind of technology except for the F-14, since you can just notch or cold-turn away from AIM-54s and they’ll lose you. So, let’s stop making excuses like ‘it’s your choice,’ because it isn’t. It’s an inevitability. That’s the right word, the inevitability of knowing that if you fly 12.3/12.7 against 13.3s, you’re just an easy kill for someone else’s event grind.
No, you don’t get it I shouldn’t be forced to stop using it just because of some stupid rotation. The solution isn’t to stop using it; it’s to get rid of a rotation that’s brainless and punishing.
You’re allowed to fly it on 2 days in a week, possibly less depending on how it lines up with your RL schedules.
Does that sound fair?
It’s why I dislike 5.7 BR aircraft - they’re fun… but they’re only really playable 2 days out of the week because then Ju-288s ruin finding fun lobbies from 6.0 days onwards. This also contributes to why I went for 109 F-4 over my F4U-4 despite loving the corsair. 109 F-4 can be played from 3.0 to 5.7. F4U-4 is playable 4.3 to 5.7 (and you can gamble if ju 288 spam is especially bad or if there’s actual fun to be had for 6.0 and 6.3… or just fly the 109 F-4.)
Result: 109 F-4 is 71 games - much of which were fun. F4U-4 is 37 games - some of which were me learning why you don’t fly on 6.0/6.3 days.
What’s taken as “great thing” is what sours the F4U-4 for me… applied to most jets (starting from korean war even. Fun times flying F86A5 into ariete spam!).
And down at prop BRs we have: “I feel like playing a 109-F4 . Let’s check lobbies that include 4.0 and also up to 5.7 and are appropriately sized and are not mixed. Ooh, that lobby has only been open for 30-45 minutes and there’s 6 vs 6 (or more) promised! Let’s join.”
(then leave if it’s thunderclouds or split lobby, but that’s another topic).
Do you not yearn to experience the same using jets?
Sure. But still: Does anyone actually have a (potentially working) solution for that apparent dilemma of only being ablte to be top dog 2 days out of 8?
It’s very easy to say something is bad and should be changed - as long as no solution has to be presented…
(Yes. Decompression, of course, but that is also not as simple as many think…).
I really encourage people to make the best out of it, and enjoy the possibility of chosing BR and maps, even if it means there are some caveats - especially considering the alternative as those are handled in the other game modes are way worse.
