Turns out that’s also not as easy as I thought. You can’t filter players by vehicles they own on statshark, and I’ve not found any API that doesn’t deny my requests yet.
If someone wants to manually filter through potentially thousands of profiles to get a decent sample size be my guest, but I’m not doing that
I think you are under a misconception that bigger maps will help the long-range 120 slingers.
It will not.
What’s going to happen if we hypothetically get bigger maps is the larpers are going to sling their long range 120s. Those 120s will do fuckall because your “range” advantage is useless because missiles are trivial to defeat, the rafales will easily close distance and your choices are to either die to the rafale, or run to the map border, give up all map control, and die anyway while also wasting everyone else’s time. Bigger maps will change nothing unless something major changes with how easy missiles are to notch or bleed of energy.
A buff to all missile seekers (but especially to AIM-120) would do much more to increase the viability of other aircraft that fight the Rafale. Long range shots requiring proper defending and respecting the NEZ will actually let people use their range advantage. There will still probably be furballs where the MICA wrecks people, but they should be more difficult to jump into when long range missiles are actually dangerous.
Bigger maps do have some advantages, particularly in EC gamemodes, since you end up with lower player densities over the map.
Also gives strike aircraft players space to path more creatively towards their objectives, forces players up to higher alts to account for increased fuel requirements and gives aircrafts more space to actually work with in air combat,
Like you said though, radar missiles are just much too easy to defeat in-game, so bigger maps wont actually have any impact on balancing the Rafale.
TLDR: increased map sizes would havr a positive impact on the gameplay loop at top tier, but wouldnt help with thr Rafale balance issue.
following that logic of being higher in altitude means:
it will basically gives the missile a Greater No-Escape Zone, and quite better tracking - as there is no Multi-pathing in altitude -
both of those will greatly benefits longer range missiles like AIM-120C or R-77-1, since both of them are designed for such use, but also because the MICA-EM is hard-capped at 50km (range from which you can possibly never enter, thanks to greater maps)
and even if ennemy Rafale goes down to defeat AIM-120C, it will impact their ability to reach you from lower altitude, reducing the MICA-EM energy, and make it harder to be used against you (while favorizing high energy AIM-120C falling from 11km+ altitude)
so overall, a greater maps, will favorize AIM-120C (not as much as many thinks it will, but you could acknowledge that it will be better for such missile carriers)
the only problem that remains, is the “i want fast combat” players
I’ll second this with additional interesting phenomenon, here’s my service record with the two planes:
Rafale:
103 games played - 70.9% wins, 5.2KD, 2.42KB
UK Typhoon:
191 games played - 71.9% wins, 3.69KD, 2.03KB
Note that my winrate is actually slightly higher in the Typhoon despite performing significantly worse. Which nation does the UK get overwhelmingly paired with? France with Rafales.
Bigger maps only have advantages if people are willing to play them and play them at scale. Otherwise they are just a sinkhole that attracts PVE-Only players and they normally leave the game as soon as someone is actually able to successfully intercept them.
Radar missiles are also in an odd spot where the only people that really think they are too easy to defeat are people that have taken a significant amount of time to learn how to defeat them.
This is Saturday night in sim. There is only one large map that has any terrain to speak of and it’s the least populated. The majority of players prefer Denmark and prefer to spend most of the game relying on multipathing even though it is inconsistent at best; especially when missiles arrive from high to low.
And 90% of the players that lead the charge for 60m multipathing have quit the game or they do not play top tier anymore. This is not limited to yourself by the way. Aeroturtle does not play top tier anymore, and if he does, it will be on Tunisia and spending the whole time in multipath. Sky_King7 doesn’t play anything that isn’t mid-Vietnam tier and plays whatever plane is broken for the day. Pretty much none of the other guys who used to complain about “red team quitters” touch the game either.
Currently in-game there are only a handful of sim players that can notch multiple missiles without the use of chaff. If we assumed that radar missile buff results in reduced notch gates for ARH missiles, and we assume that chaff would only open notch gate to the current non-chaff notch gate…then you just end of even more heavily incentivizing relying on multipath for most players. If you get rid of multipath then you even more heavily incentivize spawn-camping gameplay loop.
This is all to say that there is not really an easy solution to current EC gameplay loop.
Disregarding the fact that there is not enough available information to really take something away from the shoot-down we are not in the 80s anymore.
These modern missiles have brutal reliability depending on various aspects of course.
How prepared the Rafale in question was to be shot at is probably it’s own discussion and againthere is very little information availabke on that.
The idea that something is more or less unbeatable as if one had the card with the highest horse power in Top Trumps is the issue.
In war every piece of equipment or weaponry in service tends to be shot at.l and lost.
Marketing is another matter.
Sure but there’s a known aspect and that known aspect is a range of 200km, where any aerial missile has a Pk of basically zero.
Claimed or estimated range.
Depending on the situation one expects to find themselves in compared to the one one might actually find themselves in the no escape zone might be more than large enough.
With the latest IR missiles fighters would supposedly shoot each other down. As long as both can verify and lock the target and are in range of course.
Depending on the predicted capabilities of the other by each nation the reason any plane got shot down might as well be analytical.
Very little is known publicly about the incident and no one can conclude which part of which “chain” held under pressure or broke. This goes for both sides of course.
The whole topic is rather larger than talk about missile ranges or fighters.
Just as was the case for the F-15 classic 104 : 0 or the Bf 109 vs Spitfire debate.
have taken a significant amount of time to learn how to defeat them?
All I spent was 30 minutes reading Wikipedia and then playing a couple of games.
There’s nothing difficult written in it, and it doesn’t require any complex or delicate operations, so what exactly is taking so long?
There are certain people who want the missiles to have better seekers yet if u send them a missile their way they flop around in the air unable to accomplish the simplest notch.
Also they sit on other platforms and yap about the game more than actually playing the game and advocating for more hardened mechanics that result in worsen gameplay for the avg player who is trying to enjoy the game whilst learning its mechanics and become good at it.
Sadly many of these types of player exist and have usually called out for many changes whilst when such larper changes have come around, they simply disappear into the abyss because they couldnt handle it.
R-37M:
I don’t understand the people saying “french pilots are just better”.
The game in its current state favors close engagements.
Here is a comparison of HOBS performance of the:
MICA-EM (in orange), AIM-9M (in green), AIM-120-C-5 (in red), AIM-120B (in blue)
Launch Parameters:
Start Speed: 1200 km/h | Target Speed: -1200 km/h
Launch Altitude: 3000 m | Launch Angle: 0 Deg
Initial Target Distance: 1200 m | Target Altitude: 4000 m
No one likes to see their favourite vehicles getting nerfed so people often create a narrative that excuses broken stuff. Happens all the time in every tech tree. At least here there is a bit of truth to it since Minor nation players are usually better on average
Yep, kinematically speaking, France have their next gen IR missile as there is very little difference between Mica em and mica IR in that regard, so the closest equivalent in WVR would be missiles like ASRAAM, IRIS-T, etc etc which have been denied “due to performance” but why they refuse to action bug reports for everyone else’s missiles, especially such widely used missiles like Aim-9M and AIM-120 is beyond me
more accurate example:
Well, now euro mains can’t complain about the rafale getting 8 MICA and HMD. At least those are in service in the French Air Force on the F4. There’s still no definite answer for the eurofighter having AESA in active service aside that some test platforms have carried it for testing (basically what was used to get the Rafale it’s « unrealistic » equipments)
AESA Eurofighter is about a year late
It could be as soon or as late as possible, I can still expect that people will still complain either way :/
