Severe damage has nothing to do with “addressing kill stealing”. If anything, it allowed players to kill steal more than in the old system.
Even in the article I quoted a few posts above yours, the devs clearly wrote:
Currently (in the old system) when an enemy aircraft gets destroyed (“Target destroyed”), they can sometimes still fly, shoot, land to repair and have no automatic bail out. The aim of this was to allow you to score a frag and at the same time prevent another player from finishing off the heavily damaged enemy aircraft and steal the frag.
And they changed this old system to a new one, that allows to “steal frags”.
In the “Responding to the Severe Damage feedback & release time” topic, they also explained why they won’t add any marker to severely damaged planes in the new system (previously severely damaged planes had different nameplate color and that was misleading to some players):
We have also read feedback that severely damaged aircraft could have a marker added to signify this to other players. We’d rather not add this because a severely damaged aircraft could still be as dangerous as a regular aircraft. Adding a marker to signify this might be misleading in some cases and we’d like to keep it simple.
They also clearly stated that severe damage mechanics can “slightly” reduce your rewards (we know now it’s exactly 20%, not counting missing critical hits):
In addition to this, if you severely damage an enemy aircraft but did not destroy them (because they flew away for example), you will not receive a destruction but instead a new reward called “Severe damage”. The amount for this reward is slightly less than the reward for a destruction.
Also, their basic summary of this mechanics:
Briefly, the severe damage mechanic simplifies the system for scoring an aircraft destruction and makes it more understandable and transparent: as long as an aircraft can theoretically continue to fight, it’ll not be considered as destroyed.
Do you see anything here about addressing “kill stealing”? They actually wrote that this mechanic was designed to keep planes alive longer. It’s just players who misunderstood the mechanics. It was never designed to fix kill stealing, what most players think (probably because most players actually didn’t read official articles about the mechanics).



