Win-win if you have a gunpod
I always assumed it was the popularity of games like Ace Combat Zero which glorify headon engagements (especially in its final boss fight) as a major culprit.
These days though, I headon when I know my plane is hopelessly outmatched and/or I simply don’t care to actually try.
R2Y2 life…
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Some of us speak Klingon rather well.
I think mouse aim can also be blamed.
Without mouse aim, “head-ons” are just passing each other because in my experience 95% of the time, people don’t want to risk crashing into the other aircraft for what’s likely going to be a miss anyway.
In sim, I’m constantly doing head-ons without either of us shooting the other. Not being able to ID the aircraft from up front also discourages shooting.
See enemy plane, try to climb over it then nose down to try and mask energy advantage, zip past then turn either towards them, away from them or dive to gain separation if it looked like a zero or spitfire.
If I did the same approach in ARB, I’d get shot to pieces.
Now, nearly all tutorials for “How to dogfight?” are made assuming flight stick and rudder, not mouse aim. Requiem’s BFM playlist, various DCS tutorials, IL2 tutorials. Only Defyn and similar WT ARB people emphasize the difference.
So as a devil’s advocate: Assume someone is familiar with realistic dogfight principles and aircraft duels. Now they get put into Warthunder where you can point the mouse at a guy 800 meters out and score a hit.
Result = Lethal Headons rather than this:
That's a P-47 and a Bf109 flying head-on to each other. Both players are considered highly competent and skilled.
Not only mouse aim, but I’d daresay the bright red “idiotmode red markers” are an even bigger culprit. Because with those, you can ID planes well outside their potential engagement ranges until the advent of long-range guided munitions. If you can even ID the general plane class, you can adjust how you approach.
In my experiences with dogfights over Ground RB maps, people don’t always open fire from quite as far out, because they don’t always know what they’re shooting at. Likewise during the one 2018 weekend Markerless RB Air EC event featuring 5.0-6.3 planes in years past which had Sim-style near-absence of markers.
While I do agree that mouse aim certainly does enable Headon Thunder, I also plainly see that Air RB will flat-out never even consider removing it, as the easy controls are what helped this game grow to what it is today. Unlike every other flight sim, you don’t need a full (potentially expensive) setup.
Mouse controls and 3rd person camera are simply too basal to the game’s popularity to be open to change much. At best I can see modifying instructor behavior to make planes stall out and spin, but then recover automatically, to stop the “helicopter upward defying physics” stunts.