I have long felt that IF snail ever pivoted and gave a TO mode at some unknown future point in time, that they would bring the “doom artillery” from the Battle Royale mode to be used as an anti-camping function instead. Thus you’d still be popped by “something you can’t counter” be it from a plane or from a gun, because the alternative is upending every single map in the game to remove camping spots that planes currently help suppress. And knowing the devs, those same map changes would also get applied to the combined arms mode too.
No one asks for that and no ones need it really, advanced gamemode test proved it.
What exactly causes the huge discrepancy then between test drive observations like this and actual gameplay? I remember seeing a lot of people on various “fail to lock helicopter” Reddit rant posts saying cold weather maps reduce IR missile functionality somewhat, but shouldn’t a colder background make IR missiles more effective due to greater contrast of the aircraft vs the background, akin to finding a light source in a pitch-black room?
Nowadays? you can expect to lock a heli from ~1.5km away with a Ozelot FIM-92K, it used to be around ~2.7-3.4km depending if they had HISS enabled or not, if they turn around you can expect about ~2.1km at best against a hind with HISS modification on
Porting over a short summary of some of the many points in favor of removing free SPAA from the other thread:
- Overabundance of SPAA takes away from the ground aspect of the mode (ground combat).
- Cheap SPAA spam weakens teams by reducing the number of tanks spawned. This accelerates the snowball effect that causes matches to end with camping fests.
- The huge gap in SP costs between SPAA and CAS causes the latter to be outnumbered greatly. Free SPAAs are therefore not only unnecessary, but actually is bad for balance.
- Free SPAA is unfair to those who spent countless hours working for the SPAA. The fact that they are stock is not an excuse, since most stock SPAA are scarcely less effective than the spaded version.
- (from this thread) Free SPAA exacerbates the premium vehicle problem, and doesn’t fix the one death leave epidemic.
In addition, here are just a few of the arguments in favor of CAS in general.
- It takes much time and SP to spawn CAS, so it rarely goes unopposed, and is often too late to do anything in the match. (Increased number of SPAAs only makes this worse)
- People who only play tanks, ignoring aircraft or SPAA, have a conflict of interest. They are predisposed to hate CAS due to their self-interest, causing anti-CAS bias. Anti-CAS players are much more likely than pro-CAS players to lack knowledge about the actual capabilities or weaknesses of CAS, due to many never having played aircraft.
- Most CAS aircraft at relevant tiers are much weaker than top performers. Community anti-CAS sentiment originates mostly from a few overpowered aircraft, fueling illogical hatred towards all CAS.
- Unlike CAS, top-tier SPAA generally don’t vary as widely in their effectiveness. Every nation has a fire-and-forget SPAA, but many lack CAS with effective munitions (such as Kh-38 or LMUR) altogether. Blanket nerfs to CAS, made common by community pressure, further harms balance.
- CAS is an integral part of Ground Battles and improves matches in multiple ways. CAS makes ground gameplay more dynamic, balanced, and fun.
Its exploit which could let you lock on hydra and launch missile. Missile runs after hydra but when hydra chills, stinger loses lock and switches into search mode. At that point stinger is close enough to lock on any heli and destroy it. Idk if its needed now but back then it was really handy thing to disable pesky heli camping at 4-5 km range, distance which was too big to catch any heli with ir seekers
Interesting, how much lock range are IR missiles supposed to have vs helicopters in the real world, all-aspect?
This “exploit” feels much the same as locking onto a drone with a Spike, flare-less jets using HVARs as makeshift flares, and other similar stuff.
Devs could change things for better over time I guess. Their spike nerf (now cant lock scout uavs) proves they do it without telling players about that.
oh that was because people learned quickly you could launch your scout drone, fly it towards the enemies, sick a spike after it 1.5ish km away and fly over an enemy vehicle so the spike changes its lock to the tank, there was no counter to this
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Tbh spikes with their garbage dmg (vs tanks) were excellent as scout drone killers. And cv90 mk4 was somewhat useful even without tracking.
CAS is badly and wrongfully implemented as an expensive killstreak powerup ripped out of CoD.
TO players do bring up some legitimate gripes, even if their end goal is even more half-baked than the CAS they’re trying to escape.
Indeed, and once you move outside of top tier (which seemingly always has something broken almost on purpose to ensure it sells well), there aren’t all that many standout CAS platforms seemingly without weaknesses (even the Yak-9K/9UT)
Blanket nerfing of CAS not only further harms balance in Ground RB, but it also punishes the Air RB mode that the TO guys tell pro-CAS people to go play instead. This is the source of my grudge against them - I was punished for the actions of totally different people in totally different game modes.
CAS is currently only barely being utilized as a half-baked killstreak revenge powerup to dig people out. Most of its real objectives are completely missing, thereby forcing it to solely go do anti-tank work which most CAS was not actually built to do.
SPAAG over-abundance only “takes away” due to the utterly bewildering observation of people seemingly raging at any SPAAG successfully killing tanks the same or even more than CAS killing the same tanks causes. Thus much like the CAS, the SPAAGs’ ability to defend themselves has been progressively neutered.
I personally think trying to contain SPAAGs from killing tanks is a very wrong way to go about things, and that should be reversed immediately. Current gameplay basically screams at them “you need to move to be effective, but to move means you will run into enemy tanks, thus you need to kill enemy tanks to secure your position and be where the CAS is going,” yet then turns around and punishes SPAAG when they can reliably kill tanks?
The cost disparity is something I find silly as well. I’m all for raising SPAAG spawn costs IF they are made substantially more potent at both anti-air and self-defense anti-tank ability.
Free SPAAG are frankly a good thing. They drag the stubborn horse to water, and offer it the choice to drink or die of thirst. But they and the backup tanks should be spaded with modest level crews.
Free SPAAG only fail to fix the ODL problems because they are completely helpless vs most tanks, even through their side armors. As do the free backup MBTs due to being bone-stock.
if it was going on auto yes or you have proxy, ive dodged pantsir missiles and IRST by just doing loops, not that hard to throw off a spike coming at you either
Tbf if not spaa spam I couldnt get frags in my harrier. HE mavericks giving 4/4 on russian (and sometimes nato) tanks drives me mad. I just go with 10 jdams and get some frags from guys who tend to stand still at spawn and scroll yt shorts
Natural selection, I swear…
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Yes I used to wait till they enable auto mode for that reason
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at mid BRs it’s primary cannon SPAA which, if you are even semi competent in a cas you are getting past it
toptier really benefitted from more SPAAs since you got players who can do this every 40-50 second in toptier and all you can do is throw your missiles away to not get cruise missile’d in spawn or on the caps
Gaijin is also aware but they aren’t really interested in changing that.
Keep in mind, this is a very simple fix.
Yeah, removing kill camera should be one of the easiest things you can do to combat various problems.
These might forcefully come with balance changes, so I don’t think it’d solve problems in the long run.
Getting CAS’d in general makes people angry, AAs not working as they should is just icing on the cake.
It really does as you simply remove one of the biggest issues altogether.
Removing the cancer will make you feel better.
What’s wrong with camping spots if your tank can get countered in those by other tanks ?
Some vehicles are design to be camp-y.
This is a major source of complaints against CAS, I feel - without borderline inhuman levels of practice and some luck, most non-radar AA struggle to do their intended job.
Thus, I have long proposed giving all non-radar AA a shorter-range version of the arcade lead marker to help compensate. 0-1km for a stock crew, 0-1.5km for an aced crew.
In all possible aspects, the game needs to gear-shift from “nerf so-called ‘overpowered’ weapon” to “buff a counter and expect players to use that” as its go-to balancing change, only using weapon nerfs as an absolute last resort after every other possible option (buffing counters, changing SP costs, raising BRs, etc) has been tried and has failed.
Cases of blatantly ridiculous and uncounterable stuff should be still neutered, however, such as top tier Russian helicopters being immune to all SAMs right now thanks to LDIRCM.
Or just add TO mode and revoke all nerfs
This one is funny because ka52 isnt immune to new sams but mi28nm is. Even tho they both use Vitebsk