Basically, if SPAAG go from being target practice vs most tanks to being actually competent in flank shots, in addition to giving the non-radar ones a short-range lead indicator to make swatting planes in them about as easy as it is to use CAS currently, I could see all SPAAGs go up to Medium Tank SP costs. Light tanks also should with all the direct and indirect buffs they’ve gotten over the years, but that’s a different discussion.
Are they really? We already have many tanks and TDs pressed into roles they were not built to do, so I find singling out SPAAGs for tankbusting to be kinda ridiculous, especially when WT’s current gameplay is basically screaming at them to do exactly that if they want to be truly effective.
The game has tried neutering SPAAG tankbusting ability for years, and it has achieved exactly NOTHING. People still are not using SPAAG in the “correct” manners, and clearly never will. What we know does work is giving them some form of aim assist, because the moment Radar SPAAG become available those same players who uselessly spray & pray from too far away in WW2 tiers suddenly become fairly competent at swatting down CAS. Likewise, those Radar SPAAG become doubly more potent due to how 35mm Oerlikon APHE behaves enabling them to melt most tank sides at short to medium ranges, exactly like WT gameplay screams at SPAAG to do from the very beginning.
Give people the tools to work and actually fit the gameplay as it currently is, and most of them will in fact stop complaining.
If it is through the side or rear plating, what exactly is the issue? If a group of five people did not pay attention to either side and got deleted from back to front, that’s their own damn fault.
I fully understand if its some BS like cupola shots (purely a fault of APHE), microscopic armor holes (not making every tank use a fully volumetric armor model), server overload leading to rounds teleporting through plates (self-explanatory), rounds bouncing off of more than 3 plates and suddenly forgetting to perform armor penetration calculations leading to nonsense penetrations (odd game limitation I have no explanation for), or barrel damage (a bad mechanic in general). Neutering SPAAG to not address any of these is quite literally throwing a rug over a vomit stain.
And yet, in order to protect those same medium and heavy tanks from air attack, they need to advance alongside or just behind them, especially in pre-radar tiers. But average players have proven time and again they simply won’t unless the SPAAG can shred tank sides effectively to defend themselves and even in a limited fashion go on the offensive when the match demands.
Tying a vehicle class’s hands behind its back and then wondering why people either don’t use it or fail to use it correctly is quite…interesting…logic, to say the least.
It’s really not, at least not before long-range guided weapons arrive on the scene. Planes or helicopters with unguided ordinance get close enough that you will in most cases hear them unless they do some cheeky throttling back in a dive or the game’s sound bugs out. Bombs are well-neutered enough that successfully killing a moving non-overpressurable target is rather difficult, even with fairly big ones. Likewise for unguided rockets that actually shoot straight.
Meanwhile in flanking with a tank, you may not hear them until they’re already on top of you, if you don’t just get blown up in one hit without hearing a damn thing. Sometimes WT’s wonderfully stupid anti-cheat decides not to render someone who has a kill shot line of sight on you even when you are paying attention.
Modern tech is unfair, but you have to remember it is literally designed to be. The only counter to a plane with that kind of range is having your own fighters up and having sufficient distance between the enemy airfield and tank map that intercepts prior to ordinance launch are both possible and practical. SAMs are more a last resort weapon if air superiority fails that current WT gameplay presses into a primary role by idiotically relegating aircraft to CoD killstreak revenge powerup status. THAT is far more “CoD nonsense” than (re)buffing SPAAG into semi-competent tank-killers could ever be.
And like I said, what do you do if the technology in question is literally designed to be inherently unfair, because unfair fights end wars the quickest? The tech itself is designed to be as uncounterable as possible, and then different game mechanics restrict access to the things that could counter it (fighters with just air to air ordinance are currently locked behind SP walls “because its Ground Battles.”)
Idk when you and folk of your mindset will just give up the ghost already. If seemingly popular mode ideas like RB EC keep getting consistently shot down by the devs, why do you think TO, a mode which has been explicitly denied more times than any other game mode, stands any reasonable chance of ever seeing the light of day?
You may call my CAS reforms “little better than fanfiction,” but they’re assembled from stuff the game already has and embraces fully in different game modes. Much of the needless frustration can be addressed by simply deleting the kill camera, forcing runway spawns on all planes, moving helicopter spawn locations onto the plane runways, and deleting the separated helipads. Rebuffing SPAAG can happen in stages, but copying over Arcade’s lead markers and reducing the maximum range it renders really would be a literal copy-paste. New anti-tank rounds can come later, much as I want them now. Likewise with diversified objectives for both CAS and tanks to perform (which would also help address sardine can tank maps and spawn camping issues tankers complain about).
In theory yes it would. What reasons can you come up with as to why they haven’t, if it is supposedly so “easy”?
See, I actually agree CAS’s current implementation as a killstreak revenge powerup is complete and utter horseshit. And yet, with maps currently being campy sardine cans, something is sadly needed to dislodge people.
I have accepted that people will always complain about something, and instead of endlessly chasing who is complaining about what, the only way to “end” such stuff in any meaningful way is:
Make. Their. Complaining. Their. Own. Damn. Fault.
That is why my CAS reforms developed the way they did - give people the tools they need and/or unburden existing tools so they consistently and easily WORK, and expect the complainers to go use them. If they choose not to, it’s no longer a game problem anymore.
The only time a CAS nerf is justified is if every available tool has been sensibly rebuffed, no available alternatives can be added to fix the problem, and the functionality of the weapon/its platform so blatantly overperforms that no counter would make a difference. An example is Russian Helicopter LDIRCM being a bubble of denial for all SAMs currently - nothing will fix that except making LDIRCM work correctly, which would be a laser aimed by the player toward incoming missiles that can only be aimed at so many missiles at once.