The Finnish KV-1 is litterly same br as the Russian one that has flat out worse armor
This is even industry standard so i have no idea why Gaijin does not so filtering.
Balance changes in LoL, Dota2 always happen following bug tournaments that peosuce a lot of high skill data. There is a rare change here and there to fix things stomping pubs too hard but that is the exception not the rule.
AOE2:DE also kind of follows the same philosophy but i think they use an elo cutoff rather than pro scene.
Ion protogen also proposed a more “balanced” approach over just 5%:
Consider a player’s usual performance with similar vehicles in a br bracket and if the vehicle stands out in performance for a lot of players, investigate why that might be. Someone doing bad across the board doing badly isnt as telling as someone doing well struggling to make a thing work (or someone struggling suddenly getting very good games)
3 Likes
I don’t think we’re anywhere near the flow zone.
2 Likes
It needs to be semi based on how players perform and the people who don’t play it because of how bad it is.
Germanic Finland (KV-1E) or the KV-1E (1942 Swe)
So let’s say you take stats of the player that has a defensive playstyle in Ground mode. This player will do very well with vehicles that have good guns, but not necessarily good armor. But at the same time, vehicles with good armor and worse guns played defensively won’t work very well. That’s not because they are weaker, but these vehicles have different strengths that this specific player will never use with their playstyle.
So how can you balance two completely different vehicles that require different playstyles based on this specific player performance?
To give you a different example. It’s very easy to play turnfighters, basically everyone can do this. If you start balancing vehicles the way you described above, if you think turnfighters currently have too high BRs, you don’t know yet what high BRs mean. With the mentioned system all turnfighters will keep moving up in BRs constantly. Why? Because most players don’t know how to play Boom & Zoomers. It’s not a matter of BR, if you compare them to turnfighters they will always be much worse, because they are simply not played correctly by an average player.
The problem with this approach is that you forget that some vehicles are easier and some are harder to play and master. And obviously there will always be some players who will master every single vehicle in the game. But this doesn’t mean it’s equally easy to reach that level with every vehicle and for every player, because everyone has their playstyle.
I think a good example of the weird vehicle is the 15cm sIG 33 B Sfl. It is currently a 1.0 BR vehicle with HE shell that has 8.6 kg of explosive mass. This vehicle is not easy to use, but it can be very powerful even at higher BRs. If you would like to set the BR of this vehicle based on top 5% players performance in this vehicle, it could easily go to 4.0 or maybe even 5.0 BR. But does this vehicle deserve such BR? In my opinion it doesn’t, because the vehicle has many problems. Maybe it should be higher than the current 1.0 BR, but putting this vehicle too high will kill it for everyone but players who know how to master such vehicle. For every other player it will be simply unplayable. That’s the main problem of this idea.
At the same time, vehicles that are easy to master will have easier BRs and will become overpowered. Why? Because you can’t go beyond some specific performance level. And if it’s easy to reach that level then the average player will be very close to that top 5% players level. This is the opposite situation to vehicles that are hard to master.
So with this kind of balancing you will basically kill many hard to master vehicles. The situation will be far from balanced, because it’s the average player you want to have fun in the game. You don’t want only 5% of players that can master specific vehicle to have fun in it, while other 95% of players only suffer in the same vehicle.
That’s the whole problem with balancing. There is no one great method that will address all the issues and will make the game fun for everyone.
In my opinion, the current system is far from perfect, but it’s a good base. I wouldn’t go too far with tweaking it. First, I would exclude the worst players performances in vehicles. I can’t say the exact solution, because I don’t see global stats. But we have scripts in the game, we have players who take low BR vehicles at high BR “for fun” and so on. Such players shouldn’t be included in BR calculations. And it works both ways. Especially at lower BRs there is a problem of players who play thousands of battles in one specific vehicle. Such players are massively overperforming the vehicle. I remember some time ago I saw a player who had like 5000 kills and 50 death. It was one of the German planes at low BR, I think He 112 A-0. This guy never played anything else, he just researched this plane and played it constantly. Such players also should be excluded from vehicle balancing. So I would basically rule out extreme performances. I have no idea is that a good method or not. It’s just something that I would personally like to try. It still wouldn’t be perfect of course, but I believe such change would be an improvement to the current system.
Than take the 5% of from the lower end of the last 8% of the players to cover extremely skilled pilots.
In general:
I appreciate (as usual) your view on certain topics. From my pov you indirectly supported my claim that BRs adjusted to cover the performance of the best players (we might have deviating options regarding which range/percentile) looks like the better option for average pilots.
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Example #1: You mentioned turn vs BnZ fighters. We have already way too high BRs of A6Ms compared to US BnZ fighters. The current BR set up tries to minimize (or even eliminate) the necessary effort to find the right tactics for inexperienced pilots in BnZ aircraft by widening the plane performance gap.
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Example #2: You mentioned players flying nothing else than a specific plane scoring outstanding results with them - and you argue that they mastered it. Imho this is just 50% of the story. A main pillar of their success are enemies using the wrong tactics or strategies against them. I met recently a guy with 12k kills and just 600 deaths in 20 mm P-51.
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Example #3: Your point of a 1.0 tank able to play at 3.0 or 4.0 if used by a pro is exactly the point we are talking about: Not all vehicles can be played without investing time - but the BR setup creates the illusion that time or willingness to learn are not necessary. And if a vehicle is that hard to master it should reward the players who invested those efforts.
All in all it looks like you assume that the average player would be actually interested to master the vehicle he is playing. Imho this does not reflect my daily experiences as for most players their vehicle is just a tool to progress as they are trapped in the hamster wheel called grind.
I have serious doubts that the experienced players asking for BR changes have altruistic intentions and do care about fun of average players. From my pov they simply address that gaijin’s claim (realistic fighting chance vs full uptiered enemies) is not true.
Have a good one!
A blatant example of “Statistics > Capability” being used to decide BR placement is the AMX-13 (FL11).
It’s a blatantly worse M24 Chaffee that is at BR 4.3, 2 placements higher than the superior M24’s BR of 3.7.
The M24 is more agile and has an actual reverse gear, a gun stabilizer, a faster reload, a roof mounted .50 cal, and 2 more crew members; yet the FL11 is placed higher in BR simply due to France’s players being more experienced and thus performing incredibly well with a clearly worse vehicle.
3 Likes
I’m just saying that in my opinion taking an “average player” performance is not a bad idea. The problem is that currently the devs also take stats of extreme performances. I would simply rule such performances out. But I do understand that’s the whole problem, how to determine what is extreme performance? You can’t only look at the K:D, because not every vehicle is good in K:D (look at e.g. heavy bombers).
I still don’t think that taking 5% of players performances to balance vehicle for 100% of players is a good idea. But I do agree with you that especially bad performances should be excluded from the calculations.
Let’s say someones average performance in the vehicle is 0.1 kill per death. This is just an example, I know this example won’t work for every vehicle. This kind of players only creates imbalance in the stats of the vehicle. It’s not a problem when we have just one player like that, but usually (look at major nations) many new players have similar stats, because they are learning the game. I don’t want such players to affect balancing, but at the same time they can’t be ruled out based on the specific %, because this number will change. You can’t just rule out the worst 20% of players. It would have to be done separately for every vehicle, because in some less used tech-trees some of these 20% of players could actually have decent results and in other situation e.g. 30% of players will play the vehicle incorrectly (so 20% won’t be enough to rule out).
It would have to be a more complicated formula that will rule out extremes. For example, if most players on the specific vehicle get 10k action SL per spawn, if there is a person that at average gets 1k action SL, this person is clearly underperforming the vehicle and shouldn’t be counted. The same goes for players that can get 20k action SL per spawn. Of course you can say to just take the average from 1k and 20k (that’s how the current system works), but the number of players on both ends is different for every vehicle, especially in different tech-trees. But I still think the average player performance is the key to balance the vehicle properly, so I don’t want such players to be excluded. After all, you want an average player to have fun in the vehicle. I don’t want this game to become a game only for professional gamers, and I’m sure that Gaijin thinks the same way.
Basically, in my opinion you can’t take performance only from players who knows how to play the vehicle very well. This will kill the fun for an average player. Every vehicle that is hard to use would be massively overBRed, and every vehicle that is easy to use will be underBRed from an average player perspective.
And of course an average player won’t suffer in the vehicle for weeks/months, even if they knew it’s possible to eventually learn to use this vehicle effectively. They will just complain on the forum about the lack of balance in the game and most vehicles in the game won’t even be used, because the skill level and effort required to play these vehicles well will be too high for an average player. They will never waste time to learn hard to master vehicles, because they have easy to master alternatives.
BTW: I hope you realize that not a single developer will read this topic. So we can talk about this whole day long, but it’s pretty much a waste of time anyway.
Another thing came to my mind.
Especially for planes. Given ARB RP gains, you’ll likely only spend 20-30 games in a single plane before moving on from it (I’ve long-unlocked the F2H banshee before I finished spading my F84B as my last memory. While it’s possible to learn its nooks and crannies in a few games (especially if you watch videos about it, obsessively research about it, look up BFM/ACM guides etc etc), and some planes got very transferrable skills between one another…
It still likely means the average player has not yet grown familiar with the plane in such a short time and has only used it as a stepping stone. By the 30th game - they likely did, but - they stopped flying it at that point and the first 10 or so games were spent spading it and then the next 10-20 learning its characteristics.
Now, multiple game modes kinda confound this thought since just looking at the P-51 cannonstang, I got 24 battles in ARB with it (average 10-15 minute games), and 22 battles in sim with it (average 90 minute games). However, I feel that this likely is going to be merely a rounding error given the sim population, and not sure AAB’s flight models can at all teach you how to use it in ARB. Still, I mention this for sake of completeness.
So - what about another filter:
Only consider a vehicle’s effectiveness starting ~60 games played. This means the player has long-since spaded the vehicle, has likely finished researching 1 vehicle with it already and has probably spent ~30 games flying it after actually learning how it flew.
This should still consider the average player, but rule out the learning phase where obviously the vehicle won’t perform well since you’re unfamiliar with its guns and what situations it will kill you or save you.
Imho your predictions regarding a potential outcome or impact on BRs can be seen also the other way around.
- So if an easy to use vehicle will be adjusted only by the performance of experienced players - their BRs will go up, not down as the rookie players won’t be able to drag the BR low - seal clubbing will be reduced.
- A hard to master vehicle is in every case nothing for rookies, so depending on the total amount of professional and casual players the BR might go down if too few “better” players are using them…
Regarding fun:
I see everything which supports results based on average views as highly critical. If i would have to chose a irl example, i’d take education. So by lowering the standards to be able to visit a university or getting a degree due to ideological reasons (like to support minorities or increasing educational statistics,etc.) studying and the degree itself became less valuable. That’s why you can hire fully educated lawyers working for a small salary for your collection management department.
Therefore any fun created by too low standards (“It’s the plane, not the pilot”) is technically seen just an illusion.
I still see a conflict between gaijin’s goals and player interests - a fair and well balanced game play based on reasonable BR settings (like requested by long-term players) contradicts gaijin’s efforts to earn money with mostly inexperienced players…
I am fully aware of this, but it is always nice to think outside the box and having a nice chat.
Btw: Even such a small thing like taking the median results / performance instead of the plain average would be a relief. If you look at certain statistics regarding economic key figures like net wealth or available income there are huge gaps between median and plain average values.
Interesting idea to cover the lower end of results - if you add not considering results of players with more than 500 or 1.000 battles in the same vehicle you would cover the high end too.
This is incorrect for a simple reason. You completely skipped the limited number of players in the battle and limited time of the battle. There is a performance level, you simply won’t be able to jump most of the time.
And I’m not talking here about extreme examples (that’s why imo they should be ruled out). Of course you can play in a squad, of course you can only spawn on maps you know you can abuse and not spawn on maps you can’t abuse, you can spawn only if you are in a downtier and not spawn in uptiers, and so on. But these are extreme examples of players who basically play for stats. Some players play this way, but it’s not an enjoyable way to play the game for an average player. And there is a question, do you even want to play the game this way? Do you really want the game to be balanced by such players performances? It’s fine if you do, but I personally don’t. That’s why imo extreme performances shouldn’t be counted for balancing.
Back to your point. If you have an easy to play vehicle that is not really overpowered, just easy to play and do well with, an average player performance in this vehicle will get e.g. 3-4 kills per spawn at average (as usual, this is just an example). But even very good players won’t be able to suddenly get 3 times more kills in the battle at average, because this vehicle is pretty easy to perform well, but there are limitations to what you can do in the battle. So the difference between an average player and top player is not that big. The current system is actually much better to balance such scenarios than the system you proposed (based only on 5% top performances in the vehicle).
When you look at hard to play vehicles, the difference between an average player and top player in this vehicle will be absolutely huge. And even both vehicles (easy to play and hard to play) can get the same average result for top players (let’s say the 5:1 K:D, it’s just an example), it doesn’t mean the skill (effort) required to get this K:D is exactly the same in both vehicles.
If you want a real example, let’s look at my ZT3A2 stats:
This is an ATGM vehicle at 8.3 BR! It’s a crazy BR for this vehicle, but I still have 36 deaths and 94 ground kills with it. Does it mean it’s overpowered and should be moved up in BR? No, it’s still a very hard to play vehicle. I was partially lucky, but I also knew how to play this vehicle, because I’m spading all ATGMs in last months. So I learned maps and positions already. I also know what to expect from such vehicles and what to pay attention to. But this vehicle imo is still far from balanced. There are some situations, where you can “abuse” missiles and kill enemies that can’t shoot you back, but you need a lot of things to “click” to be able to do this. And still, one small mistake, and you are dead, because this vehicle is no match for other vehicles at this BR. This doesn’t mean some players can’t perform well with it, but from an average player perspective, this vehicle is just bad and overBRed.
From your perspective. But from an average player perspective balanced BR for the vehicle is when such player can perform decently in any vehicle. If an average player can’t perform well in 80% of vehicles, because the skill level required to play them well is so huge and requires so much effort, the game will be far from balanced from their perspective.
Of course it’s good to exchange opinions and different point of views. But this won’t really affect anything. I’m 99.9% sure nothing will change with how the balancing in the game works. It looks like the devs are very happy with the current system, even if they are aware of some problems with it.
Absolutely agreed. They also need to do a massive decompression by increasing ground BR’s to 13.0 like aircraft.
Players are already affecting the ground battle matchmaker by adding those aircraft into their lineups.
From your pov. Long story short: I agree to disagree.
Imho they key word here is “performance level”. Seeing your subsequent wording as a whole it looks like that we talk about different things.
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My aim was to flatten the current BR gaps by eliminating average battle performance out of the equation - and you focus on enjoying the game from the perspective of average players. That’s we see the topic from different angles.
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If you analyze match results of Air RB matches you might have noticed that (in 16 vs 16 lobbies) max 30% of the players contribute to the match result, quite often just 1-3 players are able to decide a single spawn match. Another 30 - 50% get back to the hangar without any relevant impact. You see similar effects in other shooters, that’s how games without effective SBMMs work.
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For me performance is not just a matter of K/D or KpB - performance should cover also WRs or relative positioning in your team. So it is incredibly hard to weight these parameters and to come to the right conclusions.
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As an example: I used a BR 2.0 Ju 88 A-1 to build up crew XP in the German air tree. I played 144 battles and died just 2 times. I killed 14 poor guys on the enemy runway whilst killing their airfield and have a whopping 80% WR just by using experience. So is this aircraft undertiered or not?
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As another example: In Air RB some planes are objectively seen severely undertiered thx to a mix of being an US/USSR plane with a large player base (with many rookies) and/or being a premium plane. Whilst a decent pilot can close the technological / performance gap vs a rookie, it becomes almost a mission impossible to beat an experienced player flying a op plane.
Sad, but true.
Have a good one!
PS: I am not sure if the OP is aware of the fact that the MM (which nations fight with which nations against which nations and the skill distribution between the 2 teams) plays a way more decisive role that the BRs alone - steering the game as a whole with just 2 or 3 BR rounds a year sounds highly unlikely. Same with the impact of server selection, my last round with roughly 90 games on US server showed much better results than playing EU server…
Tbh I am in favor of a fully mixed MM for balancing reasons but I digress
1 Like
Another really good, quality and smart suggestion that we will vote in favour and Gajin will ignore it. Gotta love this game.
The system is flawed but there is not much of a way around it. No matter the system they use there will be issues and yes I do think there is a better way of adjusting BR’s I still don’t think it would work to keep the player base happy.
The huge issue is people complain no matter what. They do one thing it leads to complaining, they do another it leads to complaining. So nothing would make the playerbase truly happy.
How I think it should be done
If we forget about everyone being happy and the complaining the way I think it should be done is balancing off of stats of a top % of players and it still be a pretty decent % of players like maybe 20-30 but this should rule out any issues of non-skilled players affecting the stats of a vehicle and if they were to do every vehicle off this figure I think it would be more balanced than it is now. Still not perfect but better. I think it should be more based off K/D and Efficiency than anything because Winrate is effected by the team still which can be effected by hoards of bad players. This does lead to the issue of making it harder for non skilled players but if every vehicle is balanced this way the most vehicles should be equal to the vehicles around it and if the vehicle is just harder to master I think that kind of comes into the terms of “Skill Issue get over it” as the vehicle is “technically” balanced the person playing it just needs to figure it out which they will eventually. Now yes people will complain about this but its legit what the War Thunder playerbase does.
Also another thing I am just adding now is that transparency would be nice. When doing BR changes adding the statistics that led to the BR changes and comparing it to a similar vehicle at its old BR would be nice and possibly help out a bit.
Well all this balancing or doing BRs based on how much each vehicle does RP/players expiriance, leads to same vehicles in different nations being at diffrent BR… And thats fundamentally wrong.
But then again IMPO and what Ive seen until now I think saying anything is complete waste of time.
That would be great, but it will never happen, because it would only add fuel to the fire.
The efficiency (basically SL/RP gains from actions) is the way they balance vehicles, but there are no strict rules here. Sometimes they keep some specific vehicles at specific BRs, even if their efficiency is way higher than the average efficiency at the same BR, and vice versa. They have their own reasons for that, but this is something players will never agree to.
If you give players the stats, I can already see all the angry posts of players comparing 2 vehicles and complaining that one should go up because it gains 11k SL from actions at average, and the other one only 10k, so their efficiency is definitely not equal!
BTW: If someone wants to read more about the efficiency, it’s explained pretty well here:
I never got the F8F-1 since the American air tree rearrangement means I needa research another plane to get it, but I have the F8F-1B and even 1.7 higher it outperforms most planes.