Probably so people don’t get killed by “zombie” planes anymore that are considered dead by the game, but still handle just well enough to get a missile off, especially with HMD, or even shoot as someone passes by.
But the playerbase will always just complain about “there might be one situation every couple matches where I get slightly less grind points!!! unacceptable!!!”
I never got why a plane that’s able to still fly and fight was considered a kill when tanks only count as kills when they absolutely can’t do anything anymore. And in the age of HMD + R73s, even a flatspinning jet can still kill you if you drop your guard because the game tells you they’re dead, even though they still have full control of their weapon systems.
Who cares if they do? Someone already got their 80% award, you allowed the plane to get away so they get to go free, the game ending too fast before someone is able to make it back to the airfield shouldn’t be punished.
Possibly. My question is, what difference does it make for the player, if the plane that killed them has gray nameplate or red nameplate? The result is the same, you die in both cases, right?
If someone complained about the plane that killed him was “destroyed already”, they will now complain that the plane that killed them was “severely damaged”. E.g. a spinning plane can still use missiles or guns and get a lucky kill. It won’t change anything in this aspect.
My understanding of this “kill all severe damaged planes at the end of the battle” is because now previous kill conditions are considered only as a severe damage, these planes should be dead already. Severe damage is like a delayed death.
If the devs decided not to kill these players at the end of the battle, it would decrease number of kills in battles significantly. To compensate for this, they had to add mechanics like this. It’s like patching a problem they created with this new system.
Just check this:
Severe damage to a plane is considered to be: destruction of all engines (or destroying one engine if there is only one left), destruction of all elements of the control system (or the remaining controls left), which makes impossible to control the ailerons, elevators and rudders, separation of more than half of at least one wing, and destruction of all horizontal stabilizers (or the remainder of the horizontal stab).
It’s completely ridiculous such conditions will be now considered only as severe damage, and not an instant kill! So these planes have to be killed at the end of the battle to credit players who caused this damage, these planes are pretty much already dead (with the current system, they would be dead). You can’t really recover from these conditions.
With this new system, such planes will still be considered “alive”, so players will waste more time focusing on them, more ammo to shoot at them, and will gain less score/rewards if the teammate decide to finish them. I don’t see how that’s a good thing.
In all honesty I don’t care about the new mechanic. Won’t change much but the 6v6 and around matchmaker is the best thing that has happened to airRB in the last 2 years. For the love of god gaijin keep that
It does seem like it’s more designed to get people familiar or comfortable with less rewards. This was my biggest concern with this mechanic.
I would only be comfortable with it if the individual who scored/caused the “severely damaged” gets 100% of the reward and this new 20% they’re adding goes to the finisher. In my eyes, that’s fair.
The person who did the most work to severely cripple an enemy team is getting their reward. And the individual who did not put in as much is basically gettting the “assist” payout. Sure, everyone’s experience is going to differ, but in my own, kill steals have almost always happened as the nearly destroyed aircraft is fireballing down to the ground because the game wouldn’t recognize them as destroyed.
Gaijin seems comfortable enough with making a kill worth 120%. Cool. But it should be 100% to the sever damager and 20% to the finisher. Not this 80/40 split.
The thing is, it’s not working as people think it is. Because most players can’t read. It’s all written in the description of this mechanics, but I guess that’s “too much text”.
Then most players will vote for this mechanics and when it will be added they will cry “why is it so hard to kill planes now?”.
The biggest problem is that this new system will change kill conditions. This will create even more “kill steal” opportunities for players.
For example, let’s consider the situation where more than half of the plane’s wing is destroyed.
With the current system, that’s a kill condition:
Spoiler
This guy died, because he lost his wing. His nameplate instantly turned gray and I was credited for a kill (100% score and rewards).
If my teammate in this situation attack this guy and cause another kill condition (kill the pilot, destroy his tail etc.), he will receive an assist (60% of the score and rewards).
That’s pretty much how the old (current) system works. This situation is clear. Sometimes you have a situation, where a kill condition is not met (e.g. he lost less than half of the wing, but started spinning and can’t recover). This is where “stealing a kill” can occur. I will explain what will happen with the new system in this situation later in this post.
Now if you consider the same situation with the new system, it’s not a kill condition anymore, it’s a severe damage condition:
Spoiler
So instead of this guy being already dead (like in the current system), he is considered severely damaged and I only receive severe damage credit (80% of the score and rewards).
But this guy is still alive, he still has red nameplate. Every teammate will see this guy alive and if they decide to finish him, they will get finish off action (40% of the score and rewards) and I will never get the remaining 20%. If I decide to waste more time/ammo to keep shooting at this guy (and at some point kill his pilot or torn off his tail), or he crash or J-out, only then I will receive the remaining 20% score and rewards.
The huge problem is, this new system will remove most current kill conditions, and there will only be 2 ways to instantly kill the enemy plane in the air:
To destroy a plane you’ll need to hit its pilot or inflict enough damage so that its tail is torn off.
If you use missiles at top rank, it shouldn’t change much, because exploding missile usually kills a pilot (if explode near the front) or destroy the tail (if explode near the back). But try to take a propeller with weaker guns and tear off the enemy’s tail. It’s really not that easy to do. It makes kills much harder, instead of kills you will see a lot of severe damage conditions and your targets can be finished by your teammates (especially if they have better guns than yours). So instead of a kill, you receive a severe damage kill. It will look the same on the scoreboard, but it won’t be counted in the summary screen after the battle (because someone else finished the target).
And somehow the devs wrote:
the severe damage mechanic simplifies the system for scoring an aircraft destruction and makes it more understandable and transparent
With dead targets still being alive, severely damaged planes flying around (do you think your teammates will know which ones are severely damaged and avoid them or just attack them like a normal targets?), more opportunities for other players to finish “your” targets, stats will look “very nice” e.g. 2+3, scoreboard showing different situation than after-battle screen, reduced shared score and rewards (120% instead of 160%), less possible assists in battles, more ammunition wasted on already dead enemies (would you continue shooting severely damaged planes or just leave them and hope no one will finish them?), and all severely damaged planes dying at the end of the battle.
I don’t understand why people are so happy about this. Especially this new system won’t change anything in the situation, where you destroy e.g. less than half of the enemy wing, and he will start spinning. Assuming your teammate killed that spinning plane, with the new system you will still receive an assist, just like with the current system. Just like it’s not considered a kill now, it still won’t be a severe damage condition:
Severe damage to a plane is considered to be: destruction of all engines (or destroying one engine if there is only one left), destruction of all elements of the control system (or the remaining controls left), which makes impossible to control the ailerons, elevators and rudders, separation of more than half of at least one wing, and destruction of all horizontal stabilizers (or the remainder of the horizontal stab).
I tested out the new mechanic and it seems like a good idea with some small problems.
There are marks needed that show players that an enemy aircraft is already heavily damaged. At the current state especially bombers tank a whole magazine if they are already heavy damaged and you just get the assist. I wasnt able to test air rb but i can imagine that many people will waste their air to air missiles and ammo on already death enemys because at longer distances it is not possible to distinguish between criticaly damaged and fully intact enemys.
So please ad markers for Air RB if they arent already there.
Preach it. I had such a hard time getting even the 10 crits mission done, scoring 0-2 per battle even when I had a dozen or so kills under my belt. Absolutely nuts that hits resulting in plane kill aren’t counted as critical.
“This mechanic [Aircraft Severe Damage] has turned out to be quite complex in a technical sense, requiring careful testing. Part of the necessary code for this testing will be included in the game in the Air Superiority major update, and will be used by us for testing and debugging. Although you shouldn’t notice any changes to the game, this code inclusion will bring this mechanic closer to being completed. We’re planning to introduce this mechanic between the 5th update of 2023 and the 1st update of 2024." (link)
In a way Crit Hits were the previous anti-kill stealing mechanic, in that even if you got kill-stole you normally got the Crit and Assist points from that kill, but if you instakilled them you got the Crit points and Kill points. It likely can’t survive the change to the new mechanic as it was: the difficulty would appear to be that that new mechanic is currently only half-implemented.
I’m not sure its been proven that less crit SCORE is actually being given… what seems fairly clear is that the crit that comes with a instakill itself is no longer being counted against crit TASKS.
It’s a nice theory, but the thing is, this new mechanics doesn’t change how the critical hits work. It’s like a new layer between a critical hit and a kill.
I’m not a native English speaker, so I will try to explain this on an example (hope it’s more clear this way):
The current system:
[Conditions A]: Hits
[Conditions B]: Critical hits (guarantee assists if the target will be killed by someone else or kills when the target crash or J-out) [Conditions C]: Instant kill (the target nameplate turns gray)
The new system won’t touch A and B, but it will split C into two separate parts (D and E):
[Conditions A]: Hits
[Conditions B]: Critical hits (guarantee assists if the target will be killed by someone else or kills when the target crash or J-out) [Conditions D]: Severe damage [Conditions E]: Instant kill
We already know conditions D and E, they are written in the description of this new mechanics. With the old system all these conditions were considered an Instant kill [Conditions C].
I think the biggest mistake players make here is the assumption this system was introduced to solve kill stealing problem, while it’s not the aim of this new system. If anything, it will make the problem bigger, as players with severe damage won’t be considered as killed anymore (and can be finished by other players). So this new system will actually give other players more opportunities to reduce your kill score/rewards (by finishing “your” target).
They introduced this system for a completely different reason. And that reason is many players were complaining that they are being killed by “destroyed planes”. With this new system, the planes will be “severely damaged” instead. So their nameplate will still be red (and not gray like currently).
Basically, this new system is designed for players who refuse to accept that the plane with a gray nameplate can still be dangerous. So the devs will keep the nameplate red and make the plane much harder to be destroyed.
The logic behind this is simple. With this new system, you will have only 2 conditions that will kill the plane instantly: killing the pilot or tearing off the tail. In these conditions player can’t aim with the plane anymore (dead pilot is obvious, with the tail teared off you no longer have control over the plane).
This doesn’t mean this solution will stop “destroyed planes” to kill players. Just players won’t see them as destroyed yet, as their death will be delayed. This solution doesn’t really solve anything. It’s just in players minds that for some reason a plane with gray nameplate killing someone is “a huge problem”. Instead of killing planes easier (what many players wanted) the devs decided to make it harder to kill planes. The effect will be the same, you just won’t be able to complain about “dead plane just killed me, it’s unreal”, you will die from a “severely damaged” plane instead. And I’m sure players will still complain, they will just complain that: “a plane without a wing just killed me, this is wrong!”.
As of now, the death of an aircraft is counted under one of the following conditions: the pilot was knocked out; the aircraft crashed into an object and was completely destroyed; the aircraft had its tail torn off; the aircraft received damage that causes it to be counted as dead but it can still conduct further combat.
Relating to the last part, currently when an enemy aircraft gets destroyed (“Target destroyed”), they can sometimes still fly, shoot, land to repair and have no automatic bail out. The aim of this was to allow you to score a frag and at the same time prevent another player from finishing off the heavily damaged enemy aircraft and steal the frag.
We’d rather not count the aircraft as destroyed based on “guesses”, but instead would like to leave you the opportunity to attempt to control a “severely” damaged aircraft until it’s either completely destroyed or returns to the airfield to repair.
However, with different game modes, aircraft control options, player experiences, and the number of aircraft in the game, there hasn’t been a single system that could reliably and accurately determine this state.
Due to this, we’re proposing to remove this condition from the game mechanics and instead replace it with the “Severe damage” mechanic. How will this work?If an aircraft is damaged to the extent where it would have been counted as being destroyed previously, despite still being able to fly, shoot and land to repair, this new mechanic will count it as severely damaged. No destruction or death will be credited until the severely damaged aircraft is further finished off.
I have no idea why so many players see this new system as “finally solving kill stealing issue”. This new system is basically the opposite of what the players wanted. It will create more kill stealing problems. And the devs even admit this in the previous article (read the spoiler above). But of course the players always know better, right?
Like I said, I’m pretty sure most players will vote for this new system, and then they will start crying all over the forum, when they realise how many problems this new system created in battles. I’m like 99% sure this will happen, because for some reason most players have a huge problem with understanding what they read and what they vote for.
It would even be hilarious to see all this mess, if not the fact I really like Air battles, and I’m sure with this new system and new kill rules the game will be much less enjoyable and much more annoying.
I can already imagine some players trying to finish the target, wasting all their ammo, but couldn’t tear the tail off (so couldn’t finish the target). Do you think that would be an enjoyable experience? We’re still talking about a plane that would have been dead a long time ago if we had never changed the system (and significantly reduced the number of kill conditions). It’s funny and sad vision at the same time.
Yes but the failure condition we’re talking about is a kill, specifically an instakill, and whether they have to change whether you also get a critical hit score component for that. Clearly they’ve changed something in the logic in the live game so that, at least in the case of tasks, you don’t, currently. That could be an error in implementation or it could be deliberate, we don’t know.
In the case of an instakill, you don’t need the crit to flag for a possible future assist: the target is dead already.
All we know right now is crit tasks in air modes in the live game are significantly harder, because you’re not getting any credit for the crits that used to be part of the kill rewards you got in the case of instakills. Since this happened at the same time as the severe damage changes on the dev-server side, and they said they were making changes to the live server concurrently “that shouldn’t affect us”, it’s very plausible those changes had an unforeseen impact on task completion.
I have no idea why so many players see this new system as “finally solving kill stealing issue”. This new system is basically the opposite of what the players wanted.
It’s because people don’t understand these systems as these systems are not explained anywhere, Gaijin intentionally keeps things vague so they can push things like this.
They literally did the exact same thing with spotting, hype it up in a post, talk about how it’s improved and people will think it’s improved since they don’t know how it worked.
People thought they the ‘Not by intelligence’ was an added bonus to give you a reward where you previously did not get one, when instead it was removing your reward and giving you a worse on in return.
This severe damage thing is the exact same, people think that instead of an assist they are getting severe damage as an upgrade, but instead it’s a downgrade from a kill.
