EC Air RB with Historical Matchmaking

Game Discussion Realistic Battle
1

Air RB is quite often frustrating to play and difficult to enjoy. Each match we’re thrown nearly directly into a massive furball that’s basically just area deathmatch, with bombers and attackers having very little flexibility to do their thing, and even fighters and interceptors being highly restricted in how they can play.

This is made even worse around the 9.7 - 10.3 range where you have first-gen 1950’s jets without countermeasures facing off against AIM-9G’s, R.550 Magic’s, R-60M’s, and AIM-9L’s.

A good (but not perfect) solution - or at least alternative - to this already exists within the game and could be made into a quite enjoyable game mode with very little effort: EC mode for Air RB, especially if enhanced with historical matchmaking based on equipped missile tech (ie, a Mirage IIIC with AIM-9B’s would compete in a different “era” than a Mirage IIIC with R.550’s).

“Balance” is something that can never be accomplished with “Battle Ratings”, nor do I believe that “balance” between aircraft should even be a goal in an EC-style game: The flavor and fun of so many planes is utterly lost when taken out of their historical context. Flying out, for example, a German Alpha Jet in a late Cold War lobby, providing light CAS when there’s MiG-21bis’s, MiG-23’s, and MiG-29’s on the prowl should be a terrifying experience. That should and could be the fun of flying something like that. Similarly, flying a MiG-21bis should be a challenge when you’re going up against F-15’s and F-16’s.

If further “balance” is needed here, that can be achieved with things like spawn costs or reward multipliers. There are many ways the increased risk of flying out a non-“meta” but historically accurate plane can be rewarded in-game without simply allowing those jets to seal club planes decades older than them.

An ideal EC RB map for this sort of gameplay would have multiple airfields close to the front lines and multiple ones farther back, allowing the player a choice. Having them be separate lobbies (like Sim EC) would make them be entirely opt-in and not force anyone into the game mode if they’re not interested in it.

Also (and this applies to Sim EC as well), EC lobbies should be able to start with even just one player in them. Sometimes you can sit around for 20 minutes or longer waiting for an 8.3 EC lobby to get enough people to launch, and honestly that doesn’t need to be. I understand that the counter-argument to this is “Well, then people would just play by themselves”, but honestly… so what? It doesn’t hurt other players if someone people have fun in a way different to them. If it’s such a concern, it would be trivial to make it so that all such lobbies can be joined by potential opponents, but making someone be unable to play the game unless three strangers also show up is honestly just silly.

I’ve spend a fair bit of cash on this game over the years, and while there are new planes and things I’m interested in purchasing, quite honestly the gameplay isn’t there to enjoy them, so I’ve been holding off. Give me a fun gamemode, and I’d be happy to keep spending.

3 Likes
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RB EC yes, historical MM no.

There isn’t a way that you can make it balanced and fun. Changing rewards does nothing, since players would just keep spawning in the better planes.

But how would it translate into good gameplay? The Alpha jet doesn’t even have RWR to know something is nearby, let alone whenan Aim-120 is about to hit it. Becoming food to a better plane can’t be made good.

3 Likes
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There are many, many players who would find historical matchmaking far more fun, myself included. Just look at the number of players requesting, or the popularity of historical sims.

In terms of the game mode I’m proposing, “balance” is something that should be pursued between opposing sides in the battle, not between all aircraft on the battlefield. You need to consider the battle as a whole: For each “underpowered” A-10 flying in skies with MiG-29’s and Su-27’s, there are Su-25’s flying in skies with F-16’s and F-15’s. The A-10 - a CAS specialist - doesn’t need to be “balanced” against fighters of it’s era. It’s inherently balanced against other CAS specialists of it’s era.

This is a positive to gameplay. Imagine, for instance, if the “capture points” in EC overlapped with the generated ground battles, and to capture the air point, you had to be at, say 2km or higher, ideally with larger maps and larger capture points / ground battles: You can then create an environment where fighter players are incentivized and rewarded to provide fighter-cover for CAS players. With a map that properly balances map size with engagement range and provides a wide enough selection of ground targets, CAS players will have the option to ground-attack at a point they know they have fighter cover at, or to seek out possibly “safer” ground targets farther away from the action.

The Alpha Key doesn’t have RWR to know if something is nearby, and that’s fine because the Alpha Jet, in real life, didn’t have an RWR to know if something was nearby, and so that should be part of the experience of flying an Alpha Jet. That’s ok. People will still fly them sometimes. I’d be one of them. They might fly them only in safer environments, or when they want the risk and challenge (or the meme), or have other planes in that lineup if things get too hot. All of that is ok and good, because it widens gameplay. It makes it more interesting, and makes the choices of what you fly out more interesting. It makes it a more interesting environment to fly in, too.

It’s easy to imagine a scenario where aircraft like the Alpha Jet, in an EC RB historical match, are free to spawn and don’t cost your team tickets when they die. Similarly, the top-end aircraft of an era could cost increased tickets on death. Just a random off-the-top-of-my-head example. There are so many gameplay ways to achieve “balance” that do not involve the literally impossible task of trying to balance individual vehicles against each other.

The idea that players will always spawn in the “best” plane is simply not true. Some players are like that, sure, but not nearly all. How many times do you see props in jet battles, or an M22 in a high-tier ground match? Plenty of players spawn in what’s fun. And I - and many others - find it fun to play in a historically appropriate environment, how “good” the vehicle is is irrelevant.

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It’s important to remember that not all players care about high scores, stats, leaderboards, or even “winning”. A lot people play games just to have fun. A lot of players of this game play it just to have fun.

And to a lot of people who play this game - and who would play this game if it supported this sort of play - the best way to have fun in an Alpha Jet is to fly it nap-of-the-earth and always paranoidly looking around you, trying to complete a desperate strike in a late Cold War battlefield. That’s what the story of the Alpha Jet was supposed to be, right? People want to experience that, and this game could be an awesome environment for that sort of play.

The Alpha Jet’s “story” is just one random example too: Every plane, helicopter, tank, ship - every vehicle in this game - has a “story” if it’s own: How it fought, or was meant to fight in battle. Historical matchmaking lets players play with each vehicles story, be it a paranoid desperate flight in an AlphaJet, the dominating swagger of an F-15 or Su-27, the long slow flight of a B-17 punctuated with moments of terror when intercepted, the defiance of a Char 2-bis facing a swarm of Panzers, the hopelessness of a Panzer IV J facing own hordes of T-34-85’s and IS-2…

Historical battles don’t need to be forced on everyone, if they don’t want it. But this game is uniquely positioned to let players play so many of those stories. They should give us the option to. It could literally just be a checkbox when creating the lobby: “Check for historical matchmaking”, and it would make so many people happy and draw in new players.

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Imagine an option for Historical Matchmaking, where imbalance was embraced as part of how the maps for a given historical match was designed.

For example, a 1945 WW2 map set in Europe: The German team wouldn’t be expected to “win” and they wouldn’t have objectives to that end. They would “win” by holding off the other team from winning for as long as possible. You could easily design an EC map with PvE events around that sort of scenario, and give out SL and RP accordingly. You don’t really need “balance” between vehicles, in something like that.

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Correction, many players think they want historical matchmaking.

This is a terrible analogy as I don’t see prop players often and most of the time they are teamkilled because fail-squads are actively despised. M22 players at least have the chance to be useful as they can cap rush and if they are lucky can take out enemy IFVs.

This alone I can agree with, but at the end of the day it would just be another abandoned gamemode with how many vehicles would straight up dominate the matches.

4 Likes
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Terrible idea because all that means is that the Alpha Jet will be a free kill, and thus nobody that knows any better is gonna play it.

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Man, I understand your perspective here, and you’re not wrong that there’s lots of players with similar perspectives and approaches to games. But that’s not the only way to play games. There are also lots of gamers who enjoy historical games - have played and enjoyed many “unbalanced” historical games throughout their lives - and enjoying playing for the experience of playing a given vehicle or role: The sim market. That’s where this game has it roots, even, in Il-2 from back in the day. A lot of simmers play this game, even in RB and AB, because even in those modes, this game can be a fun sim-lite sometimes.

A well-designed historical mode would be a huge draw for sim-fans, and for players who have the approach you seem to - have the best plane, get a high score, win the match - you can join that lobby if you wanna come farm all the noobs in our non-meta stuff. Literally just means you’re a another fighter-pilot, from the sim-perspective. ;)

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Why is that terrible? Gaijin has no obligation to make sure the Alpha Jet is flown often. Why do you think it actually matters if those plays choose different planes instead? There’s plenty of aircraft in this game that are not often flown. Do you have perfectly equal flying time across every aircraft in-game? Would it even make sense for you to want to? lol

10

To many players who would be attracted to that kind of game mode, it wouldn’t matter that those vehicles dominate matches - those vehicles would be expected to dominate matches, because those are the dominant vehicles, and that’s… literally part of the appeal of the game, dude. :)

All you have to do is balance map size vs lobby population & aircraft performance, and design the matches so that they are decided by PvE objective, not PvP. PvP can ensure air-dominance, and that could decide which PvE objective gets completed, but you have it be PvE (“the ground battle”, in an Air-EC scenario) that actually wins the points that decide the battle.

There are a lot of players who would enjoy that.

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Ah, so your proposal is to INCREASE the number of aircraft that nobody plays. Brilliant.

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I think historical MM in terms of Axis vs Allies or NATO vs Warsaw Pact would be fine, no?

Sim lobbies seem to mostly follow this trend with some wildcards.

Current rooms/matchups:

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Just because people like you wouldn’t play them, doesn’t mean nobody would, and it’s not a bad thing that there are aircraft that aren’t often played, lol. That’s simply an artifact of statistics.

Do you want to want to play every single vehicle in this game equally as often as each other? Literally who would? No one.

Each player in this game has hundreds of possible vehicles, and there will always be some that are played less. That’s just how numbers and humans work bro. :) It’s not a problem if some vehicles are played less often, or by a different sort of player. It wouldn’t make that game mode any less fun to the many, many, many people who would enjoy it, and play, and give Gaijin more money.

14

Yeah! That would be so much fun!

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With a curated vehicle selection, it could work. Putting an Alpha jet in the same match as any top tier aircraft would not work, because no one would play the worse aircraft.

1 Like
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Almost any tank can kill almost any other tank that’s a higher BR than it is. An M18 can easily kill any MBT if played right, but good luck damaging an F-14 in your Bf-109. Planes rarely stand a chance against planes that are 3.0 BR higher, while tanks often can.

1 Like
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So your position is that it’s a good idea if you don’t have the option to fly the Alpha Jet, but if you did have the option to fly it, then no one would (making it the exact same game as would be played if you didn’t have the option to fly it, that you just said would be good) and that would therefore make it bad?

lol

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My point is, is that anything outside the best would be considered DOA. A proposal like this would just be the best planes on one side vs the best on the other side. At that point, it would just be RB EC but slightly worse.

19

My dude, at this point you’re just arguing to “be right”. All your point is, functionally, is that EC RB with Historical Matchmaking would have air-superiority fighters, and you would want to play the air superiority fighter.

Yeah man, we know. That’s ok. That wouldn’t affect anyone who would enjoy historical matchmaking, with an EC mode to support it.

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Sometimes I’m glad gaijin doesn’t actually read the forum, because they might read this and go “yes, MORE vehicles need to be basically unplayable!”.

I want to have a reason to bring out any vehicle in the game, instead of knowing that X other vehicle is better than it in every way and sits at the same BR, and thus there is literally no reason to play whatever plane or tank I was looking at.