I dont know anymore.
I beleive several French mains genuinely consider the Rafale bad and the only reason it does well is because they are just better players.
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Definitely seems like it
You could argue that the bug report had inaccuracies or some faults with it, and I don’t disagree with the 2nd tech mod pointing them out, however the 2nd tech mod was wrong for closing the report. The issue still remained that the missile could not maneuver at a certain range, what the cause of the issue is should have been determined by the developers. The bare minimum requirement of demonstrating that an issue exists was proven. I could put up a report today with that singular primary source, although I’m working with another primary source that shows MICA is supposed to have a range of 100km. Let’s not ignore that the MICA is underperforming in time-to-target which is more important than range anyway.
There does exist some problems with technical moderators being extremely critical of my reports, and even overriding each other in my reports, or in some cases shutting down my report stating I used a “restricted source” despite the source being freely available for the public in the US naval library. It is quite problematic for reports that the developers would approve of and implement, to be shut down by certain technical moderators when it meets the standards of developers.
Would this be accounting for playerbase of the tech tree given that the same vehicles in France that’s also available in the US tech tree have better stats?
The sentiment I’m getting from this post is, MICA doesnt ever need a buff even after AIM-120D is added and maybe only fixed once AIM-260 is introduced. Never would have thought that we would get this far.
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it was the 4th most played 14.3/14.0 jet in september, more games than the american F18 and only 12% less than the german Typhoon. You can drop the “french players are just better” stuff, the Rafale is mainstram at this point
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Either we’re using statistics or we aren’t. If we’re going to be comparing vehicle statistics, it’s only important that we look at the statistics as the complete picture in a whole including looking at other factors rather than looking at one dimension of it.
When someone says we should base decisions for the Rafale based on statistics comparing it to other tech trees, and I respond that we should also look at the playerbases behind the Rafale and other tech trees, the response isn’t to dismiss potential factors that explains the Rafale’s performance. The popularity of the vehicle doesn’t dismiss the possibility that the people playing the vehicle are those who grinded the Rafale after already having newbie experience in the F-15E/Su-30SM and etc.
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The same would apply to quite literally every single vehicle in the game especially other minor nation ones. So what on earth are you yapping about?
The Rafale performs insanely well, its quite popular how much evidence do you guys need until you accept that its just a tad overtuned and its not just french pilot brilliance
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You admit the point but somehow missed it at the same time. Yes, minor nation vehicles that become popular does not dismiss the possibility that the vehicles are performing just fine (not arguing that this is the case here for Rafale). If you knew this then why are you pointing out the popularity of the Rafale if it is irrelevant?
Now you may be going off-topic here. MythicPi stated that buffs to the Rafale should be put on hold until the Rafale is performing worse than vehicles at the same battle-rating.
The question to MythicPi is simple, should we wait until the Rafale becomes worse than its peers such as major nation vehicles despite the major nations playerbase being worse? Or should it account for the playerbase by looking at the same vehicles available in the French tech tree versus whats available in the US tech tree?
Because its not? Every influx of a lot of players brings down the average performance, that didnt really happen for the Rafale. Either, because its good enough to be used effectively by average players or because everyone swapping to it is an experienced above average player. Which would beg the question why experienced players would swap to it.
yes because that is kinda what you should do with buffs in a game.
No? Because extrapolating data from playerbase performance from completely different vehicles and then trying to work it into balancing the Rafale sounds inconvenient at best.
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And if we cannot dismiss the possibility of experienced above average players switching to it (which is the most likely probable explanation since new players are not grinding France as their first nation compared to major ones), then it isn’t worth mentioning the popularity of the vehicle.
It isn’t inconvenient, its very much possible, easy to do, and can be understood. Refusing to look at readily available information that explains some of the performance factors without good reason doesn’t indicate a good-faith attempt at understanding what’s actually going on.
You dont know that. The Rafale and EF might have brought in a ton of new players.
Which, again, would beg the question why experienced players are switching
I was trying to be nice. Its stupid, complex and wont bring satisfying results since you cant just look at the Leopard 2A4 and the 2A4 NL, see a 20% better french performance and be like “well France players are just 20% better with every vehicle” and justify the overperformance of a completely different vehicle class with that
Frankly, I don’t think its possible. There’s to many variables to control for. You’d need, of the top of my head:
- An identical Aircraft available in multiple tech trees, not every F-16 is comparable after all.
- Those would have to have the or very similar same matchmaker and face the same opponents
- As was already established, some nations face the Rafale way more than others, making this very difficult. The Rafale is quite an outlier after all
- They’d have to be played enough to get a large enough sample size (Shoudn’t be a problem tbh)
- We’d have to account for non-spaded aircraft as well. I could very well imagine that eg. the F-16s in the French tech are only played until spaded, and not much afterwards (You’d presumably have the Rafale as well, after all)
- Network stability is also a potential issue, tho I think that should normalize itself with the sample size
All in all, I don’t think that data can be sampled unless you create a F-16 vs F-16 playlist with fixed nations per team or smth like that. The really big issue is the Matchmaker. You’d need two identical planes, one in the french tree and one somewhere else, that are always matched together. If one has to face the Rafale 30% of the time that would already compromise the data
No
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Looking at steam only, there seems to have been a spike, but nothing permanent.
Guys, they forgot to nerf fr*nce once again. Look at their heli tree, now a better version of german UHT is almost a whole br lower xdd
Never attribute to maliciousness what can easily explained by incompetence.
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And those are valid question and points to ask/discuss, still doesn’t prove that the popularity of the vehicle is inherently because it’s good, but could be because of other reasons such as experienced players having already exhausted and completed all the major nation trees deciding to grind out either the Rafale which is in one tree only and the EFT which is spread out over 3 trees leading to. If half of the experienced players choose the Rafale, and the other half choose the EFT which is spread out over 3 trees, the Rafale stands to gain the most popularity individually.
Luckily it’s not ONLY the Leopard 2s and there’s multiple other vehicles that have identical counterparts found in other trees. These can be vehicles found in the ground, heli, and air trees, and even at lower ranks/BR. Just because it might be a bit more difficult to figure things out this way doesn’t excuse making conclusions off of surface level analysis of only comparing a minor nation vehicle to a major nation vehicle.
I mean it’s pretty much a meme, I’m interested how long it would take them to fix that, wanna bet?
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Luckily there are multiple identical aircraft in France that’s found in other trees.
There are identical aircraft found in Rafale also in other tech trees where those specific vehicles don’t face the Rafale since they’re at lower battle-ratings.
But wouldn’t this lend to my argument since if the French F-16 is only played until spaded (when the vehicle is performing at its worse), compared with other nations where players continue playing even when it is spaded, and it is found that French F-16s are performing better compared to identical counterparts, then that only adds to the side arguing Rafale has a better playerbase that accounts for some of its statistical performance.
I suspect that people simply do not wish to do an hour of extra work to examine identical vehicles found in the French tech tree and others, because then they may arrive to a conclusion different to the one they argued on forums.
By the way, it is very possible that even when accounting for the playerbase, the Rafale still outperforms other nations, but just maybe not to the extent that some people have been alleging.*
And theres your issue. Lower battle rating = different player base. If we want to be able to account for player skill when comparing the rafale to other aircraft at it’s battle rating, the Aircraft we choose to use as a base have to be at the Rafales battle rating.
Yes, but we wouldn’t be able to normalize the difference based on that data, because we’re no longer comparing identical planes
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It already takes multiple hours to properly examine simple datasets, something as complex as this would take days (and you’d have to assemble the raw data first)
Sure Maybe Dassault made a new internal rule that every employee needs to play the Rafale in war thunder but often the most likely explanation is also the right one. And it is literally objectively better in almost every way compared to its peers.
Its still incredibly insane to use data from completely different vehicles in completely different matchmakers for balancing purposes. If another tree had a Rafale with similar playrate you could use that but using different vehicles for it is dumb.