EC Air RB with Historical Matchmaking

Game Discussion Realistic Battle
24

Sure but RB isn’t a sim.

Sure War Thunder SB is underrated as a flight sim. It’s also quick to get in and out so it is the best for people with busy lives, which is why it is so popular.

But you should have stopped the sentence there because:

This is utter BS. If simmers play RB or AB it is to play an action shooter, not a sim. They don’t play these modes as simmers but as casual gamers. The only reason for them.to play RB as a flight sim is as a challenge…

So no there is no sim-lite experience in those two modes. Arguably WT SB is the simlite experience. But AB and RB… Lol no.

Only if it where done in SB. Think of it, why would anyone interested in an authentic experience go: “facing the right historical opponents is more important than having any experience of flight in my flight sim”… Tgose people don’t exists, those guys go to SB and wouldn’t play it in AB or RB. And those people already had a historical roleplay campaign, mixed EC, historical events all the time in custom battles advertised on facebook and the forum. I partook in quite a lot of these games, having been a regular on the historical roleplaying games. The draw for sim fans is already there, where it belongs in SB.

Why don’t you simply play more sim? It seems to solve most of your problems.
EC? Check
Semi historical nation setups? Check (you can setup your room as you like).

What’s your issue?

25

Also for faster RP/SL gain!

Wish sim EC was easier to stay in positive for. Useful actions can make a 3 kill 5 death game with multiple caps lose you SL.

26

No. Not only would that be a colossal waste of money, that’d have <100 players playing.
The game mode would be more dead than coastal naval.

No, there isn’t. It’s a loud minority of German fans that want to use their OP vehicles to stomp inferior aircraft.

Realism and balance > historical LARPing.
The vast majority of the War Thunder playerbase HATE the imbalance you demand.

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27

And I’m saying that it would last maybe a month before its a dead mode and people only play the best 2 or 3 vehicles allowed.

Take this historical context to its limits - you’d have A6M5s (5.0) fighting F6F-5s (3.3); 109 F4s (4.0) fighting Yak-7Bs (2.7) and Yak-1Bs (3.0); and the late Ki-45s (2.7) against the F7F (6.3).

28

All these responses saying that sim fans who play RB because it’s accessible don’t exist are pretty comical. :)

Every air RB match I go into and type out that wish we had this sort of game mode always has at least one or two people agreeing with me, and that’s a sample size that’s not limited to the people in the lobby - it’s limited to the half-dozen-ish who read and respond to chat. Across all the matches going on, that’s a lot of players.

29

Wanting RB EC is an incredibly popular opinion, but wanting historical MM is much less common. I would love it if Gaijin just copied sim, but with RB controls and stuff.

30

makes it a suggestions and i’ll vote yes.

31

That’s fair. I was more thinking along the lines why simmers voluntary. Some have to play it out of necessity due to the bad sim economy.

32

Noone said that. What we said was that these players aren’t playing it AS A SIM OR SIM-LITE, not that they aren’t playing it at all.

I do play a lot of arcade for fun but not as a sim.

I highlighted the important bit so you have no grounds to get it wrong again.

33

I play it as a sim-lite. I know of others who do as well. You’re simply wrong, lol.

34

Yeah, it should also have no markers, as sim does. I forgot to mention that.

35

If RB EC was added, I’d want everything above 11.3 to not have any enemy markers, and everything below to have close range enemy markers (around 2-3km). Not having enemy markers at prop BRs would be a bit annoying.

Friendly markers should always be on, imo (or on within a certain distance). If they aren’t, it will severely harm the popularity of the mode. I don’t trust teammates enough to communicate positions and stuff.

36

That makes sense for the non-historical matchmaker you want, but a historical one would be better without markers, like sim. Needing visual ID (or IFF) adds an interesting element that’s lacking otherwise.

37

The thing is, all this stuff could be options when making an RB-EC lobby. They already let you choose which factions can be on each side, it’s just a matter of expanding on that, and it’s a fairly straightforward thing to do, especially for the flexibility it would offer players.

When making a theoretical RB-EC lobby, we should have:

  • A checkbox for markers or no markers
  • The ability to set which aircraft a faction is allowed to bring
  • The ability to set which weapons an aircraft is allowed to bring

And people should be able to see all of this before deciding to join that lobby.

You could make your ideal RB-EC matches, I could make mine, and others could make their own too. All Gaijin has to do is give us some basic tools to enable it. :)

38

Technically this is already possible with custom battles. I am afraid that with such customizability, Gaijin will likely not let you get full rewards from it.

39

While I don’t really like the complete radicalism of historical RB there should definitely be some context when fighting in certain planes. Sabres and mig 15s with no missiles should not be going up against supersonics and planes with missiles. Mig 21s and F5s should not be going up against F16s but there should definitely be an equipment level of matchmaking in terms of historical accuracy. F14s with ARH missiles should not be up against 11.0-11.3 planes that have only IR missiles and the A4N Ayit should not be up against other 8.3s-9.3s that don’t have flares and missiles that can remotely compete with them. A start would be to completely take out or separate all the attack aircraft with their overpowered missiles and lackluster flight performance in some way or create 2 versions of 8.0-9.7. One with no missiles and historically accurate tech relating to their time of their main deployment and one with missiles and flares but is completely separate from the previous generation of jets.

Here’s a rough more specific version:
BR 1: 8.0-10.3 – Mig 15s, Mig 17s, F86s, F9Fs, Mig 19s, F100s, Mig 21s, Hunters (no flares), Javelin, Lightning, Kis, Me 163s, Q5 (no countermeasures), Sagitario, F8Fs, Vatours, J29F, A32A, Mysteres, Super mysteries, Alpha jet

BR 2: 8.0-10.3: A4s, A10s, Su25s, F8U (should be 10.3 or 7), Harriers, F104s, Yak 38, Jaguars, Hunter F.58, T2s, F1s, Q5s, F8E(FN), Mirage 5, Super etendard, Mirage IIIs, J35D, Ayit, A5s

Planes that can go into both BR 1 and BR 2: (there are definitely more that can go in between both BR 1 and BR2 but this is just a rough concept)
Sa’ar, G91s, Q5s, T2, Buccanneer, Javelin, Schimtar, Super mysteries, F3H, Vatours, etc.

I know I’m missing a lot of planes in all 3 areas but you can get the idea from separating planes into different BR categories while staying in the same BR range. It would just make things more balanced and more fun if its done right, It took me literally 5 minutes to just decide this but if they put a whole team into working on balancing this it could be figured out in no time and make the game 10x more enjoyable while making more people invested into lower tier jets compared to what it is now.

40

Just to be clear, I am a sim-fan. I have a the whole HOTAS and head-tracking set up (tried VR, prefer this). I play sim in War Thunder. I play other sims.

None of that means that I only play sims, or think sims that aren’t hardcore can’t be fun, or anything like that. I enjoy sims.

I also like the pretty and cinematic visuals that you get in RB (looks even better without markers, and I don’t mind visually ID’ing or using IFF, because as a sim-fan, that’s more fun for me anyway). I like the ease-of-use of the control system. To me, most of the “fun” of using my HOTAS isn’t because it’s “more realistic” - even if you a have a HOTAS specifically modeled after a single aircraft and only fly that one aircraft with the stick and throttle in the exact correct positions relative to your hand, it’s not adding that much more “realism” - I like my HOTAS because when you’re first-person flying a plane in a game with a good flight model, a HOTAS and rudder pedals seems to be the best way to control a plane.

Gaijin did a pretty decent job of keyboard-and-mousing planes in a third person view, physics-wise. It’s not perfect or anything, but it’s not terrible, considering the scope of everything else they’re doing in this game. As a sim-fan, it’s totally possible to enjoy flying in RB mode, for sim-fan reasons. I enjoy playing RB like it’s a sim. I’ll try to do whatever my plane is equipped to do - intercept, fly CAP, do a bomb-run or CAS - and I’ll try do be able to land as my priority, not score points or get kills. Sometimes I’m top of the board with several PvP kills, sometimes I’m up there with PvE, sometimes both. Sometimes I get no points or just a few. Often I end up baiting other players for my team, because I mostly fly to stay alive as a priority.

In that context, with that mindset, I would love historical EC RB. If they let us make our own EC RB lobbies, and gave us tools to customize our own battles - and still made it “count” towards progress because however we play, we’re still customers and we’re still paying money and so there’s no reason to punish us - I could do that, people could do all their own tiers that they think are fun, people could easily make their own leagues and stuff - imagine the number of pure-Bf109 lobbies.

I think the main reason Gaijin is scared to implement something like this, is that it would be so popular that they’re afraid of what it would mean for the existing random-battles queue times. I don’t really see a way around that unless “random battle” just put you in a traditional Gaijin-style EC RB lobby.

That would end up frustrating the players who like the rush of a quick 16v16 battle-until-everyone-is-a-flaming-pile-of-debris, though: I do genuinely believe the queues for that style of gameplay would be significantly longer if the playerbase has customizable EC alternatives. I imagine that, for Gaijin, it’s simply a matter of what’s more profitable. I know I, at least, would spend more if I could have lobbies as I’ve described. As it is, I have little reason to spend money on the new planes they’re releasing. They planes are cool, but what am I going to do with them that’s fun?

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41

I’m all for Air RB EC. I was able to play it a couple times on the rare moments in the past when Gaijin tried it before.

I am ambivalent towards Historical Matchmaking in Air RB. On the one hand, I understand why many are against it, but on the other hand, unlike Ground in Air I think the disparity in Historical Matchmaking wouldn’t be nearly as bad and would be quite manageable. The margins between air tech and capabilities within defined eras is not nearly as wide as it was with tanks. For instance putting a bunch of early P-51s and Spitfires against 109s and 190s, or F-86s against MiG-15s is nowhere near the issue of, say, a bunch of Panzer IIIs against IS-1s and 2s.

However, I do not think we will ever have an Air RB EC as a regular, consistent mode because it would make grinding the trees “too easy.”

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42

Who and how?

Because any sim aspect is ruined by the instructor

43

let me get this straight, you just want to keep smashing your head against the proverbial fox3, 2 and 1 wall with your alpha jet just to satisfy some “era/year” based “historic” match making? big no my dude. You think it’s going to be fun and “tell a story”. It’ll just be frustrating and yet another way to gimp progress.

I am all for EC maps with nationality/allegiance based team instead of arcade+ (surely not because I want to club people with my F-14s), but hard nope to “historic” match making. I don’t want Me-262s fighting early Yak3s and M4A2s vs King Tigers (as much as the German crowd wants this)

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