I don’t know how we can go “Actually SPAA is super good and even overpowered against CAS.” to “Well I don’t actually know if SPAA is good against CAS but it probably is.” without coming off as a little disjointed.
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Yes, it can be, but Gaijin won’t listen, is the thing which is the point of what I said, which ultimately renders most discourse irrelevant. We can talk between ourselves all we want, but ultimately it wont have any weight on Gaijin’s direction for the game. Not when discourse comes from here where they ultimately have full control over it. Anything truly “loud” can be really easily suppressed. Every time change has come from the community, is when it has been so loud that they can’t ignore it.
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And unfortunately what’s loudest is often also the dumbest. Easier to see a stupid sound byte go viral than any well-thought-out proposal.
That’s because any actual basklash towards Gaijin has largely been in the spur of the moment, rather than planned. Call to action has also failed to reach the different sides of the international community (Russian and Chinese sides for example.)
Essentially, lot of people know this game has issues, but they don’t have a proper way to speak up – or voice themselves in such a manner that they get shut down in the channels that are available for such discourse (the forum) by either mods or other forum members who specifically target that sort of overtly negative and often unfounded discourse.
We can honestly see this with how many of the ideas of the “War Thunder Player Union” felt out of touch, and very badly formatted and written. Orating one’s points/opinion into a cohesive package is hard, which is why we end up with so many purely emotional rage threads here that usually get shut down. Then, the actually intelligent discourse, is ignored. Because it’s easy to do that.
This thread: “Last Stand of Air Realistic Battles” is a good example of that. By most standards, I feel that thread should have a response to it by some staff member. And I don’t think it’s odd to expect them to react to it considering how it really has gained traction in almost less than a week. Then again, maybe they’re drafting a response – this is a corporation after all. Time will tell what Gaijin will ultimately do.
Another issue I feel is that people, will always argue with each other. This is something I can attest to, especially in this thread. “CAS haters vs CAS lovers” those two labels alone have been thrown around this thread so much that it feels silly. The fact is, it seems most people don’t want to accept the fact that the root of all problems is Gaijin. I don’t really know why. I guess it’s easier to argue with each other than actually trying to propose solutions to a problem. Internet mirrors reality…
Ultimately, it is what it is. I want change myself, but I don’t have the time to dedicate myself to creating the necessary prerequisites for a proper community backlash that would probably force Gaijin to change their attitude permanently. What are those prerequisites? It really does just boil down to community unity, especially in the context of CCs. I feel there has to be some leg work done to communicate that message across the different national communities, and any support from CCs would help a lot in that regard.
Either way, in my eyes it would really all boil down to a proper exposé of Gaijin and all of their misdeeds, and a proper analysis of War Thunder’s predatory gameplay loop/failings as a video game. This should be in a single combined package, and a video works best for that, in my eyes, best done as a series with prearranged release timelines to create a sense of pressure.
All of these things just make the point of entry so steep, that it practically filters 99% of the community out of the equation in being able to do something like that. Current CCs themselves seem reluctant to speak out these days, maybe because of their partnership with Gaijin? Idk. A lot do complain in their videos, but it’s just usually rants mixed into the video proper.
TLDR: the community needs a voice for itself that is well spoken, wide reaching and most of all unwavering against Gaijin. When we get their attention, is the moment to push even harder.
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Part of this is pure, simple, animalistic human nature. We as a species are not as much “better” than animals as we might like to think we are. Laziness being the default biological response to a slow-burning problem (“it’s not at my doorstep right now…”) is baked into the evolution of all animals, really all living things more broadly. You don’t use precious energy and time until you have to.
Thus yelling is easy and takes very little effort. Actually solving systemic wrongs is hard. Very hard.
By trying to appeal to “everyone,” snail has egged on several groups of people the rest of players would look at and say “yeah, he’s totally lost it.” The game still has not admitted it cannot actually please everybody, and refuses to commit to a particular vision, instead trying to go halfsies with every extreme faction. Which leaves everyone unhappy. This is why when one player gives a well-thought-out idea, it gets screamed down by people who sometimes only disagree with one single sentence in it.
As one of the major commenters in that very thread, I have maintained pretty consistent opinions for damn near a decade at this point - that fighter mains have been slowly strangulating the life out of the game mode, and because they are saying “shut up and take my money, gib F-22!”, Gaijin, being a corporation, is all too happy to oblige. Then you get the paradoxical situation where often the exact same people will simultaneously say:
“this mode sucks and needs and update!”
but then turn around and scream:
“we can’t DARE let BOT FARMER SCUM and SPACEBAR WARRIOR TRASH have as much value as MUH SKILL in DOGFIGHTS!”
when anyone dares to propose giving the ignored potential of attackers, bombers, and specialist anti-bomber/attacker interceptors their long-overdue time to shine. Even though, as anyone who even briefly studies the history of warfare from Interwar to Modern will see, fighter aircraft were always acting as either an enabler for bombers or attackers to do their jobs OR preventing the enemy side from doing the same. A fight over airspace is meaningless because planes have to land eventually, unless it is backed up on the ground or sea underneath with something hard and permanent.
Some people, however, never seemed to get the message. Instead, such folk (you can guess who they are in that thread) will raise absolute hell any time bombers or attackers are even remotely able to win rounds in a reasonable amount of time, until said “offending” plane is neutered to worthless status like all the others of those classes. That portion of the community in Air RB unfortunately has become a problem due to Gaijin’s negligence with the objective setup of the mode and solely listening to whomever pays the most.
Thus it is no longer just Gaijin that is the issue here. The community is not innocent.
It’s a nasty truth that few wish to admit. But in the context of Air Realistic Battles, fighter dogfight dick-measuring contests (which is NOT wrong in and of itself) are not what War Thunder was ever meant to be. If it were, why are bombers, attackers, and bomber-killer heavy fighters playable at all? They’d function just as well as AI-only set pieces if fighter combat were all War Thunder Air RB was truly meant to be.
If you have read that linked thread you quoted, you should know exactly the sort of people I’m referring to. If you were on the old forum, it’s the “xBromanx” types of the community. I will never forget seeing in one of many argumentative discussions with the man when he said the following:
"If for any reason I have to abort a fun dogfight I am having to go save or kill some fucking bot farmer or spacebar warrior, or lose the match, that is the day I uninstall War Thunder."
There is no reasoning nor compromising with that. Any attempts to do so only harm everyone else’s experience in the game, because what people like that want is only fighters to matter simply because they (currently) require more “skill” to use than attackers or bombers (even though their complaints about bombers and attackers actively prevent either from ever getting any more skillful gameplay). It’s like trying to reason with a religious extremist on something they consider existential to their faith, complete with all the hypocrisy found in world religions, if I must be frank. You can refer to people like this as “the fighter mafia,” for lack of a better term.
Yet, I do not hate these people. I simply disagree with them, and our respective visions for the game are mutually incompatible. Hate is the world’s most useless emotion, because even regret can teach you something sometimes.
Now, do even these people have some legitimate grievances that MUST under no uncertain terms be answered? Yes.
Much of their complaining to neuter nonfighters over the years was a result of half-baked objective structure enabling bombers and attackers to wipe matches in sub-5 min, meaning fighters never got a chance to have their fun. Not wanting these sorts of behaviors to become commonplace again IS a fair argument and criticism of ideas to make bombers and attackers more important. That half-baked objective structure was and very much still is Gaijin’s fault for creating, but the community’s fault for normalizing and screaming down any meaningful attempts to overhaul it.
Despite this legitimate part of their arguments, the ripple effects of such folks’ problematic behavior extend far beyond Air Realistic Battles. The utter purposelessness of ground attack aircraft, bombers, and sometimes-hefty ordinance loadouts on fighters has massively exacerbated the ongoing CAS debate in Ground Realistic Battles, which continues to get worse with every piece of longer-ranged modern tech Gaijin then adds. Bombers which do not perform well in Ground RB go infest Simulator Enduring Confrontation. Some bombers try their hand in Naval RB. And specialized bomber-killers…yeah those barely get used at all.
IMHO, people whose actions cause this kind of damage to the entire game in every game mode do not deserve a seat at the table anymore. They clearly only care about one thing - fighter dogfight dick-measuring contests - and view every other type of plane or gameplay as “beneath them.”
The ripple effects in Ground RB specifically bring me to the next point of your post:
War Thunder is at its heart meant to be a “Full Combined Arms” sort of game, or at least it was clearly intended to be such from the start with things like the Victory is Ours trailer. But, by trying to please “everybody,” they enable the existence of crowds within their community who selfishly only care about a single vehicle class, and then scream about any interference from a vehicle class they do not like, whatever the reason.
Much like the “fighter mafia” in Air Realistic Battles, the “tank bushido” crowd (for lack of a better moniker) absolutely detest the mere idea of battlefields being more than two dimensions. They want effectively “tank chess,” so to speak. This is not actually a bad thing, but it’s not what War Thunder is about, either. Again, another fundamentally incompatible viewpoint with literally everyone else who plays Ground RB.
Gaijin implementing CAS in a half-baked messy fashion adds legitimacy to many of this crowd’s complaints. SPAAG being near-useless unless pilots play into their hands below radar tiers. A snowball-prone Spawn Point System which treats CAS as killstreak powerups ripped out of Call of Duty or Battlefield. The complete and total lack of every other real objective for all those CAS and bombing platforms to kill besides direct antitank duty, which very few planes were purpose-built to do. Not forcing every user to be automatically Combined Arms in their lineup in every match, in a combined arms game, despite now doing that very thing in Naval for years.
Due to the faulty implementation of CAS from the start (Gaijin’s initial screwup), this served to enable endless whining about CAS from tank mains getting bombed/rocketed/missile’d/strafed. And Gaijin, being a corporation but more importantly still human at the end of the day, took the lowest-effort “solution” and kept nerfing CAS weaponry many times over for years. Until it feels like a year or two ago they hit some kind of floor and decided to stop, because just like how “fighter mafia” types and “tank bushido” types say “shut up and take my money!” for their respective shinies, so do Desert Storm fanboys wanting their A-10 power fantasies, and you can’t have that if CAS weapons keep getting nerfed. Hence it looks like they pivoted hard in the direction of empowering CAS, then saw much more recently they overcorrected, then overcorrected again with the new super-SAMs, then overcorrected yet again with borderline-invincible helicopter DIRCM systems. By trying to make “everyone” happy, nobody is.
In summary, some opinions in the community are incompatible with all the others, and any attempt at compromising with such opinions harms the gameplay of everyone else. Both the diehard “tank bushido” types AND the “Desert Storm fanboys” are in the wrong here, have overstayed their welcome, and much like needs to happen for the “fighter mafia,” need removal from the discourse. They can of course still play the game - but it should not cater to such types any longer, or it’ll keep stagnating with the same boring decade-old gameplay.
People cannot even clearly see the structural issues that ARE Gaijin’s fault due to the antics of these sorts of extremist camps. And the broader community never will until these camps are shut down and shut up. Ultimately yes, their existence is Gaijin’s fault, but due to Gaijin’s negligence, it is now no longer just their fault.
I’d say it’s more due to the fact that most commenters here (myself included) do not have the coding skill nor developer tools to create demonstration missions and actually test our ideas. Thus, we’re all unfortunately talk with no substance. If I knew how to make test missions with my ideas for Air RB, I would have years ago. Same with my proposed CAS reforms for Ground RB.
Now if user-friendly tools were devised to enable people without any coding skill at all to make functional demo WT missions, I would jump at the chance to copy-paste an existing Air RB map that already has well-separated groups of ground units (Operation Iskra is a good candidate, as would be Air Battle Hurtgen, Second Battle or France 1944), turn off automatic match-ending ticket bleeds, adjust the ticket numbers assigned to each unit in the battle, and return match time to 1h to give people the time for something more than another meaningless dogfight. Every objective would be worth no more than 50% of the ticket bar, ensuring no single objective is capable of smothering any others, intentionally in direct defiance of the fighter mafia types who got us in this mess.
I frankly suspect that this will not happen until the day War Thunder runs out of steam and closes its official servers, then being rebooted on private servers fully under control of the truly dedicated parts of the playerbase. I would gladly join one of the splinter communities popping up from that seeking to use the quality assets of War Thunder to create effectively a better ArmA or better GHPC.
Meanwhile, the “fighter mafia,” “tank bushido,” “Desert Storm fanboy,” and other similarly extreme sects can go found their own private server versions of War Thunder dedicated to their respective power fantasies if they so wish. But I will have no need to ever join their communities. I disagree with them, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have a right to exist nor don’t have a right to have fun. They do deserve to have their fun - I just don’t want to mingle with them because my definition of fun is incompatible with theirs, simple as that.
My TL:DR - Gaijin’s poor decisions may be the root cause, but the community isn’t innocent at this point.
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30 games on Sky Sabre, and it’s total dogshit, 10 times worse than ADATS. Radar is buggy garbage, and constantly loses targets. It can’t shoot down recon drones, it can’t shoot down planes, and it’s just impossible to shoot down helis (and they have infinite FnF missiles, very balanced).
Skill matters huh
Spend a lot of time to get a plate of shit, thanks snail (also applies to top tier battles in general)
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Hi all,
It seems the original post leans towards Top Tier SPAA, here’s my take on that matter:
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70SP is way too cheap, leaving SPAA as the only option left to poor players, often leading losing teams to field 4+ SPAAs, completely negating Air Units until Top Tier
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Since most SPAA players camp their spawn, they don’t contribute to winning the game (on the contrary of what the OP seems to believe: no amount of education will fix this kind of stupidity)
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In most cases, the skill required to operate SPAAs is vastly lower than the skill required to fly Air Units, which is a clear imbalance. Yes, SPAAs are a hard counter to Air units, but it shouldn’t favor poor players in SPAAs against good players in Air Units with that magnitude. This is even more obvious with radar guided SPAA, and tracer-less SPAAs, as example (good luck killing / evading / countering a Gepard or a Strela with your Etendard IV !)
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The Spawn Point cost difference between SPAA (70 SP) and CAS Units (~400-900 SP) is a clear imbalance and punishes flying players way too harshly (yes, you can get CAS for cheaper, but don’t be a toad !!!)
Making SPAA so cheap and so easy to use is a VERY, VERY, bad way to balance CAS - and shouldn’t be the last resort to losing players / losing teams.
Now, competent Air Players will find ways to counter SPAAs, but the reality is “competent” is rare in War Thunder - if you’re one of them, good for you!
Balancing SPAA / CAS is not a matter of changing only one side, but changing both. So, I posted a suggestion on the forum - once it is approved, I will post the link here.
See you on the Battlefield!
WM
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Biggest word dump i think i’ve ever seen, but overall yeah, gaijin is far too susceptible for pandering to those who pay the most in any given scenario
Just spawn a tank bro.
And what should big, often helpless trucks do ?
Maybe cap or rush the flanks ?
I mean it goes both ways.
Good luck doing the same to helicopters while using a Gepard or Strela.
So how much SP do you want AAs to cost ?
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All SAMs and radar autocannon SPAA should be at least 100sp, same as light tanks. Honestly, 150sp would be perfect for a lot of them.
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150 SP to spawn something that isn’t guaranteed to have targets to shoot at is a lot.
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So we either have to move SAMs higher, which will make them more balanced and by proxy give more targets to shoot at, or we let SAMs stay overpowered and make em cost alot to spawn.
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Whole ground should be moved up to 13.0 ideally.
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Honestly I’d say 14.0 by now.
Realistically tho, stingers should be facing 10.3 planes like the A-7D.
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Typical toad comment.
Did you read the original post ? At least they should relocate.
Better: they could spawn in a useful vehicle and do some thing to win the game.
Finally a good question - I answered it in a Suggestion post in two parts that work together. Here’s a copy / paste:
Suggested Air Space balance improvements:
1. Limit Air Units Presence in Ground RB
Merging Planes / Helicopters Spawn Point pools (similarly to how Light and Medium Tanks Spawn Pools are merged) would limit multiple air spawns in Ground RB without removing the option entirely. It would also force players to actively decide whether they want to fly a plane or a helicopter for CAS as flying both would be much more expensive and unlikely to be available to them. I understand the FnF CAS spam is a frustration to many players, and this would synergize very well with the new Loadout Spawn Point system.
2. Remove SPAA as last viable option for losing players
Similarly, merging the SPAA Spawn Point pool with TDs and Heavy Tanks and increasing SPAA Spawn Point cost to a minimum of 100 would force players to chose their options wisely. SPAAs are currently so cheap to spawn (70SP) that they are the last resort to losing players / losing teams, often leading to 4+ SPAAs camping their spawn, not contributing to winning the game, and completely denying Air Space to even competent Pilots, since most SPAAs are very easy to use efficiently.
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So instead of spawning SPAA, people would just leave the match.
So losing team instead of having to deal with enemy tanks now will have to deal with the air too meaning their game would be even harder to win.
Such nice words to just say that You would like to have easier wins/games.
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It won’t work as its not about SPAA but CAS. Players spawn SPAA as result of CAS spam. Reduce CAS spam and players wont spawn SPAA that much any more. To reduce CAS spam, CAS SP needs to be extremely high.
This was tested as one event and it worked exactly as I said there. There were very few planes because SP was extremely high and very few SPAA because it wasn’t needed. Tank battles were very immersive even though it was a city map.
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Other is to i troduce some semblence of a skill floor to using planes in order of viability of being implemented…
- No scouting and hit markers while in air - you need to now rely on your team using smoke shells and map/squad markers to identify where enemy vehicles are or visual feedback (muzzle flashes) to do so without their aid.
- No map markers while in air. You must use pilotage to find and identify the A point rather than be given a big waay target marker that exists out of universe.
- Restrict planes to cockpit view to significantly reduce situational awareness and force planes to maneuver in certain ways to look under them
- Turn the existing wind mechanic back on to force long distance bombs to require compensation when dropped.
Part of me also wants instructor gone from grb but thatd contradict the rb game mode’s main definition even if it would significantly cut down on aircraft accuracy by forcing people to use simified, realistic or full real controls. Currently planes have absurd ahistorical accuracy thanks to the combo of mouse aim and third person camera.
That is not to say absolutely cracked ground pounders are unable to replicate precise dive bombing outcomes - even i am able to be somewhat precise with frb controls and i am a fighter main - but irl even big boats in the pacific and large hangars, buildings in europe proved very difficult targets to the average pilot much less a comparatively tiny tank and that is before we consider jinking to evade aaa fire.
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