It was essentially a free top tier vehicle, and one that was extreme META at the time of release. It would be like giving a leopard 2a8 as an event vehicle.
Event vehicles are best as mid tier odd vehicles like the sturmtiger and TOG, they are very good but arent a golden ticket to top tier without working your way up and learning how to play that high up
For the winter event, I think it would be like last so you must do 40,000 points per stage for every type of vehicule so 120,000 per stage to have every vehicules.
Last event it was 40,000 modified score per star, you needed 8 stars over 20 days to get one of the three top tier vehicle to own, 10 stars to sell. The one low-tier vehicle you picked up along the way at 4 stars. I would read what you link more closely next time. (link)
So one available stat I think you’re missing is the event popularity.
Market value prices are not a reliable indicator of much but number of sales are. If you look at each vehicle by their top sales day:
The naval events were an order of magnitude less played than the others. Basically 90% of the player base for these events ignored them, it seems. Update on the air and ground events stayed strong. I don’t think the cut-and-paste nature of those naval vehicles was a factor: if anything it was just smart considering how little people paid attention to them anyway.
You should also think of this in terms of vehicles this year vs what we had last year. Eremin’s Yak or the AVRE, or both, could have been single-vehicle event vehicles, like the TOG and Sturmtiger before; plus you’re replacing the April, summer and fall events, which in previous years had 4 vehicles each (down from 6 for the summer event recently). So really you’re talking replacing 12-14 possible vehicles with 9-11. As people said at the time, basically the three low tier event vehicles from the previous event system would get taken away by this change, and that’s more or less what did happen.
Realistically if you’re an experienced player playing to keep, this system is probably about the same. I would have likely got 9-11 vehicles on last year’s system, depending on AVRE and Yak being single -vehicle events or not, as well. But if in part you’re playing to sell, this was harder. This undoubtedly reduced the degree to which casual players could earn GJN over the previous system. I’m pretty sure those were the reasons behind this (less vehicle output and cutting down on players’ GJN earnings) and so it seems it was successful.
It did however remove the April, summer and fall player bumps from the year, which could have something to do with why WT has basically the same size player base leaving 2024 as it did coming in as well. But if the reduced expenditure with the new system helped keep the lights on (designing those crafting events was non-zero in terms of effort as well), I’m sure it’ll be seen as a success.
If you put the prices of the highest-selling day on to cancel out time-on-market effects, you see which were the two real winners (because price will be inversely correlated with how much people were fine missing out on a given vehicle). Two big things it turned out everyone wanted, everything else wasn’t even close.
While I found I can’t be bothered to play chasing events or battlepass anymore,
the score based nature of events as they presently exist makes them infinitely better than battlepass tasks.
I can spend 2-3 hours flying in air sim, engaging in every fight I can take and come out never completing even my easy battlepass task because of raw randomness - “Get assists”, “Kill strike planes”, “Kill bombers” and so forth. Seriously, there’s multiple matches where I don’t see a single strike plane, and then when the BR brackets roll over… U.S is flying all A26s, except now I need to shoot bombers and yeah, it’s out of my control. Assists are a self-explanatory problem with air TTK and severe damage mechanics.
However score-based events do make me rather frustrated from the event-grinders. Past few weeks thanks to the latest event, air sim was full of “PvE Pls” bomber spam that go rabid in all-chat if you dare intercept and shoot them. It also generally led to very annoying lobbies like people flying Denmark/Sinai/Afganisthan with 3.0-6.0 propeller aircraft knowing that in a 4vs4 or similar empty lobby, chances anyone finds them and intercepts them will be low… and if they get intercepted, they all ditch and make a new lobby. And as an added bonus, there’s people who hemorrhage Silver Lions on repair costs (or ignore them because premium) who take off, fly straight at a runway or base, drop bombs and J out/crash to repeat - this makes intercepting them impossible, this makes for awfully boring lobbies and it also hinders the gameplay of legitimate bomber and strike craft as suiciding practically doubles the amount of bases and targets you can take out.
And on the flipside it still kind of forces specific gameplay like tasks do. 1 kill is 450 points. At prop tier even in 12v12 lobbies, I don’t think I’ve seen anyone - even names I recognize as CCs or otherwise pretty amazing fliers - manage more than 10-15 kills in a 2 hour long game plus change from A.I targets and air superiority points.
I havn’t really taken a lot of screenshots of the scoreboard, but here is one I did take:
AC Kopbe was pretty much dominating our lobby and even had a wingman (barbe noire) that kept him safe from reversals.
Amazing gameplay, got 5370 score.
Now, look at the top scorers with 8K+ score: Bombers, strike craft.
For curiousity, I joined a denmark lobby that’s been open for 2 hours:
15 kills with someone on enemy team having exactly 15 deaths kiiind of stinks to me given it’s event period and the fact that it has precedent that some people “fix” matches to farm pvp kills. Still, 2 hours, 15 kills and 6600 score - in likely a “fixed” match to boot. At 2.3, it’s still less than half needed for the event
Meanwhile… look at the top scorer in this other random lobby:
Playing legitimately and playing well at prop tiers likely earns you ~4-6K score for a 90-120 minute effort. Being a worse pilot will make you average 2-3K score instead (yours truly). Optimal RP/SL gameplay means you want to average ~600 score/15 minutes for risk/effort/reward balance (thus, 2 hours would give 8*600
Even focusing on bombing and ground-striking, you’ll linger at around 8000 score if left alone to do you thing. While the PBM is nowhere the fastest thing that exists, flying legitimately in that thing has me fly out, bomb a base for 450 score, maybe 2 bases or kill a fighter trying to shoot me or carpet bomb the battleground. Let’s say I get 800 score per fly-out. At 350 km/h from take-off, climb and drop on a 64x64 map from say, B2 to G2 (~48 km), it takes around 8 minutes to get 800 score, then 8 minutes to RTB, land and another 8 (16 minutes) to score again (so we spent 24 minutes getting 1600 score). If you suicide instead, you’re getting 800 score every 8 minutes assuming respawns and same target opportunity.
A faster bomber capable of hitting 500 km/h (it takes time to take off, climb and reach that, so this is very optimal) takes ~6 minutes instead to reach, ~6 minutes to RTB, ~6 minutes to bomb again.
ALL THIS IS TO SAY
The way even scoring works kind of creates some VERY BAD and VERY PERVERSE incentives for players that does not sufficiently reward legitimate gameplay while HEAVILY ENCOURAGES and PRIZES illegitimate, anti-fun lobby-ruining “PvE only” suicide-bombing, fixing matches and spawnkilling.
Checking the profiles of such top scoring suicide-bombing individuals is also very revealing: These people mostly play ground or air RB, never ever play air sim except during events. They often have zero hours in anything except for their bombers that have died an absurd number of times for the time they played.
The way events currently work very negatively affect the enjoyability of air sim EC for their duration.
I’ve no idea how to fix them. Something should be done about the perverse incentives WITHOUT punishing legitimate players (both fighter and strike/bomber players). It should also realize the differences in pacing for various ranks - missile thunder can shoot a missile from 50 km away, mass-bomb entire ground battle objectives and fly at supersonic speeds from runway to bomb field while with props you have a far slower paced battle where you spend at least a good 4-6 minutes before engaging the enemy unless they’re…
Oh.
And airfield spawnkilling. The combination of new runways breaking AAA in air sim and “must get score ASAP” event incentives had led to me multiple times taking off into the enemy players sitting on top of my runway. Which leads to teammates quitting. Which leads to unwinnable odds. Which leads to the lobby dying. Inversely, your teammate does it instead and you have nobody to fight as the enemy team rightfully up and leaves.
You forgot to mention that “guy” name _844378900 haha
Of course, new events require you to pay in the vehicle environment ( plane = air battles, tank = ground etc )
Going back to old days, tasks. Good tasks, 6 vehicles, grinding 2 vehicles in same mode. Players with 3+ rank vehicles can only complete it in 3+ rank vehicles ( to avoid clubbing ).
Of course gaijin probably lose money with doable tasks since ppl won’t GE score task, so probably never re-implemented
First, I have to say I do not play Air Sim, I am not good enough and the frustration levels prohibit me from trying very much. Nothing against the mode at all, I am glad it is there for those that can enjoy it.
And looking at the leaderboards you posted(I have played over 60,000 matches in WT, so I can read a scoreboard . . .lol) it is not to hard to see the things you mention as “problems”. All of which point to some of the flaws these “scoring” events pose to the player base. Basically making playing your normal game during an event almost a waste of time. People, by nature, will seek any & all advantages, but especially playing competitive games.
I play AB in tanks & planes and RB for naval( the differences between RB & AB in naval are slight, especially compared to planes & tanks). I do not play high tier, staying to what I most enjoy, mid tier . . . 4.3 - 5.3 BR in AB planes(my most played mode by far) and 4.7 - 6.3 BR in tanks. For naval I do actually play the high end mostly now, I just enjoy the bigger ships most of the time.
That being said, it takes me far longer to do a scoring event in planes and tanks(I am not as good of a tanker as I used to be) and it is mainly for two reasons: the flawed penalizer system and the way game play changes, drastically most of the time, during an event.
What you have shown is an excellent example of how game play changes, with those seeking easy advantages to lessen the grind/work that an event takes. And even without playing all the modes and more BR ranges I think it is safe to say, this happens at all levels.
Gaijin watches the numbers and is pretty quick to hammer down on anything that shows players to be moving too quickly in many cases, but then turns around sets up that exact thing with the penalizer(multiplier) system, granting undue bonuses to certain modes and BRs, while penalizing others.
If you do not play RB and/or Sim, you are penalized. If you do not play BR’s in tier’s V or higher . . . again, you are penalized. This might make some sense if there were grossly exaggerated scoring going on in the bottom half of the tiers, I do not see this, not at all. All I see with this penalizer system is that a “class” separation is being developed and even promoted by the current system. Yes, I understand Gaijin using the end game as the “carrot on the stick” for many players(mostly the newer ones) and that’s ok to a degree . . bidness.
Sorry for being verbose, but just blurting out disgruntledness without some explanation seems like ranting . . . .lol
Ground pounding(as you mentioned a few times) has always been a fair way to rack up decent scoring playing air battles, for all the modes I think. In Air AB there are a lot of different style players, mostly the pew pew pew kind, just chasing tail, going after air kills. But you also have “stat padders” of various sorts. There are the K/D ratio guys(usually of the spawn camper variety) and then the winrate types, who just go in to get a win, no matter how that is done. One of their tactics you can see regularly(usually at lower tiers I think now) is the “power squad” that go in and wipe out as many ground targets as they can as fast as they can, making the ticket bleed speed up rapidly and ending games very fast. This also occurs when individual players do the same thing, mainly during these scoring events. And Gaijin reacts . . .
What they have done in Air AB, coming with the Update(just in time for this air event) is to move the spawns so far back, now no one can get a decent score at all on roughly 90% of all the Ground Strike maps.
Example: Sinai Ground Strike . . used to be just an average ground strike map, spawns just over 15kms apart, ground targets spread out evenly over a fairly wide berth on the map, bases just behind them . . a fair and balanced map, no excessive scoring usually because of the spread. So what did they do? The spawns are now in excess of 30kms. If you spawn 3 times you end up spending 70 - 80% of the entire game flying from spawn just to get close enough to shoot at anything red . . scoring has literally been cut in half and the game does not last any longer than before. These spawns are literally for planes at 8.0 BR and higher . . . no BR below that should ever even see this map configuration.
They have done this a couple times in the past, and I had assumed it was to combat spawn camping, but now. . . . pretty plain to see it is simply a scoring nerf that affects every single player.
It’s just sad to see that fully, well over half of the player base, gets penalized for their efforts and has map changes(and other game play changes as well) thrust upon them all to hinder your scoring . . . with “scoring” events.
I can do a naval event playing my RB 6.3 - 7.0 BR ships in roughly 10 - 12 games, maybe a little more, around 3 - 4 hours tops(that’s goofing off some too . . .lol).
To achieve the same playing planes or tanks in AB at 1 - 2 BRs/tiers lower . . 3x - 5x and sometimes even 10x more games/time. The disparity is real . . .
A more “fair” & proper “multiplier” system would look like this:
tiers I & II - 90% ONLY with an event vehicle, tiers III & IV - 100%, tiers V & VI - 105%, tiers VII & VIII - 110%, no additional bonus for mode played, all modes the same in that regard. Something simple that does not put undue burden on those that choose to or have to play mid tier or below.
