So tired of dying to planes over and over again. Nothing like getting a good kill streak and having it violently ended when someone kamikazes their plane to deliver 8 2k lb bombs just for you. Dying to a plane is more personal, out of all the people on the map, they chose you to kill. Why are AIR planes in GROUND battles in the first place??? All they do is ruin ground battles, they contribute nothing. Air gets their own mode, why not ground?
Reasons to remove Air planes:
- Most tanks have no effective defense against planes. Let’s be honest, your 7.7 roof mg is not going to be taking down the Pe-8 at 3000ft. Tanks are just sitting ducks against any bomber with positive IQ, and open top vehicles are just seeing how long before a plane strafes you to death. And you have to pay sl or wait days just because some plane that doesn’t even belong in ground battles comes and kills you.
- Ineffective countermeasures: “JuSt spAWn AA:” most aa are useless. Why would anyone spawn an aa when they could spawn a tank. People want to play tanks, not the boredom and then survival horror game that is aa gameplay. Arcade advertises lead calculators, but half the time they don’t show up, and when they do, you can dump your whole mag into those circles and not score a single hit.
- Altered gameplay: If you have no AAs on your team, you will likely be destroyed. If you have too many AAs on your team, you will likely lose. If you have no planes or too many on your team, you will likely lose. Allocating the right amount of resources to air and anti air means often experienced players take over AA roles, when really they would more valuable in regular tanks. Or, someone gets a few kills, spawn a plane and wreck the enemy team, regardless of how skilled the enemy team is on the ground, which leads me to the next point:
- No skill gameplay: It takes next to no skill to use planes effectively against ground targets, whereas it takes much more skill to use your average tank effectively against planes. Matches become not about skill on the ground but who can get the most planes first.
- Discouragement of teamwork: often you will see a teammate in need of repairs, you drive over and help them, only for someone to plant a bomb right on top of you. Planes encourage you to not work with your team. They also distract you from being fully focused on the ground.
- If you want to play CAS, go play ground strike battles.
- In arcade specifically, once you start losing, it seems only the enemy team is allowed to spawn planes, which is counterintuitive since it adds even more power to the already winning team. A potential solution to this would be to only allow the losing team to spawn attack planes or bombers.
Potential counterarguments:
- Realism: It is realistic to have ground and air battles at the same time. But then is it really a fair match? War Thunder is, after all, a game. Perhaps planes could be kept in realistic since it emphasizes realism, but arcade emphasizes fun, and planes definitely do not bring fun to the average player. Sure, you get 1 happy player in the plane, but the 5 players he just killed are not having fun at all.
- Balances out skill: Some argue planes allow less experienced players to have an even field against more experienced players and remove them from advantageous sniping positions, etc. However more often than not in my experience the higher experience players are the one in the planes destroying the already helpless newer players. Or if the higher level player finally gets killed by a lower level one, they simply revenge bomb the poor lower level player.
- What to do with AA when no planes: AA should be kept in ground battles because some AA can be used for anti-tank purposes. An interesting idea would be to let you spawn AA in air battles, and see how the air players like that. Or perhaps an AA mode where a team of AAs fight against a team of planes, the planes could even be AI controlled. I don’t really care as long as the planes aren’t ruining my ground battles.
I can’t take much more of dying to planes. I can already predict the completely civil responses of people that will tell me “skIlL iSsUe”