I don’t like the new damage models from the last update. All these “severe damage”, “finished off” etc. are confusing. You frequently get these apparently meaningful messages, expect to get at least an assist but in the end nothing. Also, all these new things mean that it is harder to get a straight “critical hit”, and it is therefore harder to complete tasks requiring critical hits.
The other problem is that wings have become incredibly brittle. They fall off just from sneezing.
Supposedly this from cannon being better, well fine, but wings constantly coming off is annoying and disconcerting. Wings could survive cannon, though, frequently planes came back with gaping holes to the airbase. I remember an account from a German pilot who said his Bf 109 had a hole in the wing big enough to put a desk in it.
Furthermore, for some reason planes that are for all effects dead, because they lost an entire wing (or both!) continue to be in the game and refuse to die. The player might keep on trying to do something because the plane isn’t “dead”, but it is hopelessly out of control.
I have also noticed that hits fail to register. I’m sure I have hit the other plane, I even see flames coming out of it from my hits, but I don’t get credited for these hits.
There is no need really for making major changes to the game in every update, just fix the bugs. They usually just break something that was working fine.
This is desync between you, the server, and your enemy. So annoying and ends up creating those exploded out of nowhere or those tracers were 50 yards away from me kinds of deaths. I wouldnlive this to be fixed most of all because you can’t shoot at a plane when you don’t know its true location.
to create redundant threads if an official devblog feed already exists.
Although i share some of your thoughts and can confirm some observations - from an efficiency pov it makes more sense that you add your feedback to the devblog threat - Forum mods stated in the past that devs read this blog and receive summaries of provided feedback.
Regarding your issues with planes without wings (leading to opportunities for kill steals or waste of ammo)- you might read this thread:
If you hit a plane but the pilot can still control it, it’s severely damaged. When it’s “finished off” it means the pilot can no longer control the plane.
It’s a great change that makes “kill stealing” less likely as both people who hit the target are credited with the kill, just with a little less SL (assuming you didn’t finish it off yourself). It also is great technical information that lets you know “hey this guy could still shoot me” which is extremely important in Ground especially.
Just read the above linked post regarding kill steals to see that you are technically seen wrong as severe damage in the new world was almost guaranteed a clean kill in the old world.
In other words you lose 20% of your rewards if somebody else finishes your severe damage.
This is technically seen also wrong if you consider my first reply above (severe damage was a clean kill before) and the fact that you need for a clean kill now a pilot snipe or you have to shoot the tail off. Seeing that air modes have way high combat altitudes it gives friendlies way more opportunities to kill steal than before.
Based on what i have read the phenomenon “i was killed by a dead plane” in Ground modes led to massive complaints and was the root cause for this new mechanic which offers actually just disadvantages for players - except the fact that some tankers now keep firing on approaching planes untill they are actually dead.
The only other actual advantage is that “stolen” kills based on severe damage count now for tasks.
Oh no! Finish them off yourself then. I have survived many times being “severely damaged”. You haven’t actually killed anyone yet until they die. Finish them off to get the full reward or wait until they die, if someone finishes them, it wasn’t you doing that.
It is good to encourage someone to finish severely damaged planes.
It looks like that some damage classified as severe damage is a joke. I managed to get auto-kicked (as tickets ran out) by a severe damage which i haven’t even noticed. Described here:
A bug. Nothing to argue against it. What you wrote earlier doesn’t exactly matter - many of people who would have survived would also have been counted as dead. This system is better. No system is perfect and both systems will have some downsides, so we pick the better one.