I think both systems on paper as described seem fine.
The only aircraft vehicle class I have issues with in regards to surviving are helicopters. There’s examples people make and we see in game of Helicopters that fly normal when their tail is cut off. The tail is usually a balancer to prevent the Helicopter from spinning wildly. One major change you should make is you immediately lose control of the helicopter when it’s tail is cut off.
As far as night battles the problem is the BR spread. Obviously Thermal sights are far superior to traditional Night Vision. By limiting it to 10.0 many of these traditional NVD only vehicles will have that modification be worthless. Maybe set it so night battles only apply for you when all vehicles in your line up have a NVD/Thermal sight equipped/researched on the vehicle. That or remove the NVD from vehicles that wont see night battles anymore.
I think that the “severe damage” mechanic will be a great addition to the game because it was very annoying to get your kill stolen but I think it’s even better than you might think because you actually get more reward for the sever damage than the guy that finished him off
No need to count meaningless kills after match ended. Kills after game ended are useless for the outcome and all hell of players crash on purpose or pancake for final blow reward.
Although i am with you in general (noob gets a kill) the fine print of this suggestion says "a severe damaged plane "which will be counted as “killed as of today” will be replaced with 2 potential kills in the future.
My first impression was “nice, might be suited to end kill stealing”, but after repeated reading of this:
I changed my mind, because as long as gaijin does not outline when exactly severely damaged planes in the future or planes counted as of today as “dead”, but still somehow controllable can be actually repaired their proposal make no sense.
As outlined by others it would take away a secure kill (as of today) in exchange for a potential kill for potentially 2 guys in case the victim is unable to repair.
And i do agree with some comments that it is extremely disappointing to bring a crippled plane back to base with MEC, rudder, flaps and some luck and the game refuses a repair since a while.
And this gets even more disappointing/annoying if you then score a kill in the next match at altitude and you see the same guy 10 minutes later like nothing happened - Wyverns are prone to get such “come backs”.
In other words this explanation:
…does not cover the “irreparable” condition precisely enough and has the major flaw of
the aircraft received damage that causes it to be counted as dead but it can still conduct further combat.
Every twin boom pilot is counted as dead if a single HMG shell sheers of the horizontal stabilizer (one piece like P-38, P-61, SM 91) besides it is possible to bring such a plane home with airspeed and flaps…
This is an extremely valid point - the crash mechanic is broken since years.
Besides your example (no kill) i see often headons in which one of them scored not a single hit and gets rewarded with a kill after the collision - despite the other scored hits and gets no kill.
In addition you see from time to time teamkills when friendlies crash on purpose or due to plain stupidity in another friendly. The bug report section is loaded with such cases as usually the ramming victim gets blamed as teamkiller besides he has done nothing wrong.
Valid point, currently you get an assist if you are lucky. But at least in Air RB some special premium bot bombers are bombing bases and fly deliberately into the airfield aaa in order to get shot down - in order to get as quick as they can into the next match.
Whilst experienced players are able to identify such bot bombers quite easy, go for bombers last as they are no thread and know how to kill a bot B-25/A-20/ Ju 288 a hell of noobs are actually tailchasing them until the bitter end and get shot down by their aced ai gunners.
So rewarding these guys with a kill despite the planes would have been killed anyway by airfield aaa would actually reward them for such braindead actions…
After reading this suggestion mulitple times times it looks like you try to solve a problem that is rather rare: A plane currently counted as a kill is able to make it back to his airfield.
It would make sense if you could quantify this issue - so are we talking about 10% of all current kills or 0,1%.
Seeing the huge number of feedback - a lot of players (me included) were confused by this proposal as it looked like you might roll out this new function for all of the kills - which is not the case.
Imho this suggestion of kill allocation is not really suited to bring any substantial improvement to air combat due to the very rare frequency this happens.
If you really want to improve the Air Modes there are much more important issues like 16 vs 16, weather or matchmaking/BR setting.
But in case you want to focus on kill / destruction mechanics read this:
A lot of guys see Air modes just as an another version of a FPS and sacrifice anything to be on top of the scoreboard and various rankings. This is fine because there are some correlations between high kills per battle ratios an win rates and from a holistic pov this competition is good for your business (selling new top tier premium planes), but it has also some downsides like stealing kills.
From my pov you can’t avoid kill stealing due to the competition amongst players, but you can reward players which actually play more efficient much better.
A few examples:
Just introduce a reward for the most kills and assists combined in match. Just like in soccer the guy giving the assist has done more than often most of the hard part by outplaying the defensive and the final goal was rather easy for the other guy.
Add assists to your ranking system. Currently i see just kills; with another column assists and a column “total” you show some respect to the efforts for the guy bringing another guy from 8 km down to tree top level with some crits and a teammate flashes in with warp 3 to kill the critted guy in front of his nose.
Reinstall the proximity score. Baiting was a viable tactic in aerial warfare before AAMs increased the combat ranges, so rewarding a guy baiting another should be considered like some time ago.
Rework your destruction model at least that it is able to identify irrecoverable flat spins. The same guys “helping you out” in point Number 2 are happy to finish your victim (that you forced into flat spinning several kilometers down) just a few seconds before they hit the ground. And even if you are not getting this “unwanted help” - sometimes just a tiny hit is enough to create such flat spins or irrecoverable dives leading to overspeeding, but more than often you don’t get a kill - game says the enemy is just crashed.
Rework your “sole surviver” reward. This reward should at least in theory reward the “decisive” kill in a match in a pure 1 vs 1. From a technical perspective it doesn’t matter if both teams had each 3 players with 5 kills as the last kill is the decisive kill. Unfortunately in most of the cases you won’t get this reward late game if the enemy player simply refuses to leave his burning or “death diving” plane. The auto ticket drop late game is so fast, that you have barely the time to turn around.
Basically the points should reward smart or team oriented game play with very low efforts from your side much more than today - without demotivating players which determine the total number of kills as sole truth…
If you would like to rethink your score/kill allocation in general - the earlier proposed assignment of a “health score” for a plane and the subsequent allocation of the kill to the player who has created the most damage looks like a very good idea.
I would also love to have night battles in air rb.
Or at least evening ones. I always loved the look of tracers and stuff flying around in the darkness.
This sounds like a good idea. I really like the changes to the aircraft destruction mechanic. At the moment it can be very deceptive, a “dead” aircraft is often not actually dead and can still kill players. This mechanic seems much better, it’ll be much more clear when an aircraft is still dangerous and hopefully will provide more opportunities to escape and repair or continue fighting without being forced to bail out.
As for night battles, I like the idea of having them be selectable, but I have concerns with this implementation. Limiting them to 10.0 and above battles is very limiting, and will make it so there’s really no point to NVDs on ground vehicles of lower BRs. Even before night battles were disabled, there were a lot of Tier IV and some Tier III vehicles that had them but couldn’t make use of them because they would never encounter night battles. Also, will there be enough players with night battles switched on for them to ever occur?
Gaijin, you have to give a percentage here. How much of the final reward is the individual who “severely damaged” going to received? 99%? 90%? 80% 51%? You absolutely cannot use the term “slightly less”.
Why can’t the system just be; severely damaged - 100% of the reward. Finished off - 25 to 50% of the full reward. Both get a frag. Realistically, the lower the finish off reward is, the less likely the kill is “stolen”. If I see a plane spiraling to the ground, be it because it had a wing shot off or is currently a fireball, I am not going to waste a missile or the ammo on it knowing I will only get a fraction of the reward payout. The goal is make the payout of a stolen kill as little as possible. Severely damaged is basically the “kill”.
What requires skills? What is more challenging? What is more essential to achieve victory?
A) Damaging an aircraft with 100% of its abilities?
B) Finishing an already crit/disabled aircraft?
Finishing a crit aircraft doesnt require so much effort and it contributes very little to the final result in terms of fight advantage. I think gaijin should reward this kind of behavior accordingly : a “thank you” would do, or same as when you help a team mate to repair in ground RB for example.
Crit damaging a plane requires skills, efforts and risk taking in most cases. It means disabling the aircraft of its full combat abilities which gives an advantage to the team in terms of number of planes able to fight in the sky.
Just an example for devs how bugged the current system is:
Watch this replay and see that i attacked a B-25 after 3:00 minutes. I set him on fire, damaged his left wingtip resulting in a crash at 3:59 minutes.
The battlelog says “player credited for kill: Uncle J Wick” - the scoreboard says 200 points and no kill.
Ofc i had a 150% SL booster activated, so i lost a kill worth 13.371 SLs, my deserved 1st place and i was not rewarded with the “Terror of the Sky” reward.
Why? My teammate ended with 3 kills and a score of 2.334 points, i ended with 2.014 points and credited with 2 kills (a P-51 and a 109) on the second place.
So if you consider the missing reward plus SL bonus, the win bonus and the missing SLs for the B-25 kill we talk about ~ 20.000 SLs i did not receive just because your kill allocation mechanic is bugged…
No offense, but i think you should fix the already existing bugs before you try to add something new.
Another example of severe flaws in game mechanics:
In this replay you see that i got the first strike reward and killled also their last fighter and 15 ground units. Nobody crashed, nobody scored any air or ground kills except me, all is written in the battlelog. Game ended with ticket win.
Ofc the game refused to reward me with the “Mission decider” reward.
This happens frequently - i simply stopped asking gaijin support for a refund 6 months ago. 3 times in 2 weeks - i was forced to create a bug report 6 months ago - never heard about it.
The problem is not the missing SLs - the problem are the missing rewards for daily & special tasks. I am quite sure that a hell of players were affected by this at a certain time, but imho just a few are actually aware of it.
So again, i really appreciate your efforts to make the game better, but from my pov it would be great if you can fix already known issues first. Thx!
My primary feedback is that you’re very obviously stalling and dragging your feet for as long as possible on the actually important RP boosts and top tier multi tree discounts boost. And everyone is completely aware of it and not being fooled one bit.
My secondary feedback is that it is pretty ridiculous to ENCOURAGE kill stealing (which this does) purely for the sake of top level tryhards who want to cartoonishly try and limp back home without a tail. It’s encouraging only bad, silly behavior all around, and has no redeeming facets to it.
More kill stealing and incentivized kill stealing, VERY bad. And bad for normal, bread and butter players, too.
More absurd survival when no real plane crew would ever even attempt it, bad.
Necessitates tediously overkilling every plane that should already be dead, slowing gameplay way down while people chase a should-be-dead-plane around being bored to death, bad.
For what? Nothing really redeeming in exchange. And that’s if it wasn’t bugged, which apprently it is based on the above.
This clearly massively increases kill stealing, it doesn’t reduce it.
You used to just get a kill in this situation, straight up, all you. Now you only get like 75% of a kill or something, while another player gets 25% of what you USED to get 100% of.
That directly adds an incentive for people to steal your kills that didn’t exist before, and thus purely increases the amount of kill stealing. It does nothing to decrease it, and a lot to increase it.
Make them a different optional mode type so you can sit by yourself in queue for 10 minutes and play with the same 20 people who also minmaxed their graphic settings to be able to see in the dark
The main problem of wt is that gaijin follows the market and tries to satisfy their most important customer group which is imho a very young audience with access to credit cards. Those player are looking for instant action and therefore even Air RB became a plain shooter like Arcade +.
In their own words they describe playerkills as “ultimate goal” so it is logical that they support everything which enforces competition within teams - the more pure kill focused players participate, the better, as matches get shorter and queue times get extremely low.
The major downside of this focus on kills (for my mode Air RB) is obvious as seen in the last few days - a mix of greed to get kills #3, 4 of 5 and reckless game play in order to get kills in the first place are altering the outcome of matches even more than before (Prem spam, 16 vs 16, …).
That actually useful actions like kill assists or baiting for others are not even considered in this bonus or are completely ignored like baiting (proximity score deleted years ago) is more that disappointing.
I mean at prop tiers a hell of matches get decided by a few guys playing point and click vs PvE - even if they die without a player kill they put so much ticket pressure on the red team that the blue team can benefit and win by tickets.
If was able to get 4 kills because i could 3 times benefit from distraction of the enemy caused by a teammate, it is simply unfair for the guy playing the bait or just distracting to be excluded from a bonus. Even if i would have killed these 3 guys without distraction it simply makes my life easier.
And as stated earlier - even if high kill numbers in Air RB are mostly a sign of quality - it is no problem for an even rather inexperienced player to get 5 kills - all he has to do is to find 5 less experienced players.
If than an experienced player is able to win 1 vs 3 with just 2 kills in total in the same match (including killing the 5 kill enemy from earlier) it seems that skill doesn’t matter…so rename skill bonus to “kill bonus” and implement a “kill doesn’t matter reward” - just be fair…
I had similar thoughts a while ago and further recommendations for a more professional kill allocation:
I think if you are going to enable this, then you need to make it so when a plane is “black” it cannot fire their weapons or their maneuverability is greatly impacted. I have been killed twice today by planes that were completely black, on fire, no engine and they flew normally with functioning weapons. In one case they were able to accelerate while climbing.
Either a plane is dead or it isn’t. If they’ve burnt up they shouldn’t be able to fly around like nothing happened. There are no real life cases I am aware of where a burnt up plane was able to continue fighting. Either the pilot bailed out or was dead.