Look at SB stats, not RB. And I said "competent", not "amazing." I'm pretty sure this more than proves the definition of "Competent" - that being: Possession of casual familiarity with general aviation & combat maneuvering concepts and familiarity with handling characteristics of chosen vehicles. Given that I can fly all my aircraft linked without stalling and use combat maneuvering concepts to gain dominant positions even from the defensive, I think "competent" is a fair label to use. I cannot win against anyone (with reasonable assymetry) - I'm not great. But I have a fighting chance even in assymetric and chaotic fights - despite not having headtracking/VR.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KuEmmY4v9jA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5EnZW1aBjk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uf23CiNK4Z0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VlicxsVIgz4
Do I make a lot of mistakes? Certainly. That’s why I play to try and minimize those mistakes and increase consistency. That’s why I also record these - to see what I did wrong and lived only due to good fortune.
You might also wish to look at “Session” stats and notice what vehicles contributed to what kind of stats.
You might find there’s a lot of stock planes (filter to single 3 day sessions at a time, notice the plane in question has only had 1-3 battles in it):
The game mode is called REALISITC game mode.
The purpose of REALISTIC is to provide players with a more-accessible means of experiencing SIMULATOR battles by providing visual aids, third person view and simplified control schemes (this more so for aircraft rather than tanks). Realistic battles isn’t “Arcade, but no markers and slower vehicles.” It’s “Simulator, but easy to get into and start doing things without learning the unique handling of each individual vehicle and playable anytime, anywhere with any control method equally well.”
The reason I ditched Air realistic outside of stockgrinding is because various new demographics since 2015 have turned it into Arcade+ rather than Simulator- (25 minute battles, every objective in middle of the map and changes to ticket mechanics, damage models (I distinctly recall wingrips being far more prevalent)).
I can’t do that for GSB because of this stupid mechanic - trust me, I tried to use my conqueror to play sim yesterday, it didn’t even let me:
The physics are the same as simulator mode, limited only in air by the “Instructor” preventing you from doing reckless things that might actually give you an edge but have a high chance of killing you (Cobra button for all jets essentially, pull far more AoA in spitfires and Bf109s).
Instructor for tanks manifests in firing from the cannon, removing the need to learn different tanks’ layouts and be able to aim equally well for all of them.
With proper, actual mission design both ARB and GRB could provide simcade experiences where entry is an easy in-and-out without needing fancy set-up or vehicle-specific practice to reach baseline competence.
Arcade exists for… arcade style missions, situations and pacing.
The trick is in mission design.
Simulation battles represent a prolonged, 3 hour long conquest of a region with multiple goals and tasks to be achieved in pursuit of victory. It rarely goes to 3 hours in an active lobby when goals and tasks are completed, and it’s completely valid to criticize the sandbox as having rather terrible implementation and lots of bugs. However, respawns make perfect sense in this context. Especially once you consider that you can tag in and tag out whenever which neccessitates the respawns being a thing (the negative consequences of the lobby system are a whole another story).
Whereas, air RB is just one singular task being contested for 25 minutes where the battle environment does not evolve and change (as miniscule as it is, in SB new objectives do come up that - assuming you’re not playing for the grind and don’t mind being penalized for swapping planes - justify the ability to land and respawn with a new plane). Notably, Air RB did use to have battle environments that changed and evolved and created a neccessity and need for ground-strike teams (and thus, teamwork and coordination to keep your bombguys safe so they can help you capture that island to make landing & rearming easier and so forth) - occasionally pacific maps show up which demonstrate this - but it’s been mostly removed in pursuit of arcadification and appeal to the lowest common denominator.
As an added bonus, it’s probably accessibility. In RB, you’re not going to randomly crash as a total newbie and have no idea what happened. A total newbie in sim (who has no idea about principles of aviation and propellers) will probably need a respawn or two just to take off if they havn’t made use of community resources (which hopefully they’ll be advised to check out by players in the lobby rather than farmed for easy kills)
Also notably, ground RB is sharing a similar fate - arcadification and appeal to the shooter crowd by creating funnel maps that favour twitch reflexes and bat mutations over everything else. Also including changes to traction modelling and vehicle collission. I distinctly recall GRB beta having crew be injured or even dying if you crashed into someone at any significant speed… while nowadays you can crash into a solid concrete building and maybe damage your tracks. Oh, and friendly fire.