Bruh, you have 0 reading comprehension. The point of dividing the deaths was because WT tracks plane kill and tank kills separately, but not deaths.
Bruh, you have 0 reading comprehension. The point of dividing the deaths was because WT tracks plane kill and tank kills separately, but not deaths.
And you have even less comprehension that me.
You go on some “The fact blah blah really say something” when it absolutely does not. doubling the kill of everyone doesn’t magically make you look average.
Something even better imo. You are pretenting to be better in spaa that tanks right?
And yet, you have a positive Kill/Game in multiple tanks, as high as 2.62 for the KV-7. Meanwhile your best kill/game in spaa is 0.63 in the M42.
Strange for something that can perfectly counter CAS, is untouchable by planes, and is in a target right environment without much competition from other players. And sure, plane are not always in the sky, and sometimes crash into the ground. But as much as 10 plane can spawn in, and according to yourself, you are on the frontline following your teammates, so you should at least kill 1 aircraft a game, if not more? Also, SPAA tend to be the vehicles in your stat with the worse winrate.
So as usual, we come back to this:
SPAA are not a counter to CAS.
Because:
- CAS plane are untouchable by SPAA unless they are distracted
- CAS plane cost is cheap enough to not care much about losing the airframe.
- SPAA can never prevent CAS from killing friendly tanks, making it de facto useless in the scheme of GRB.
In a rock paper scissor game, CAS is like that annoying friend that goes, “Gun, the gun shoot and pierce the paper, break the scissor and break the rock”.
It’s by definition unbalanced, as it can freely destroy everything with SPAA being nothing more than minor inconvenience. Oh, and it gets a free no kill bubble. Imagine if tanks had some AA antitank protecting the spawn.
And I’m still waiting for you to address my arguments, instead of indulging in complacency about you being bad. And actually state what you are arguing for.
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Looking at air, escorting bombers with fighters is all about pro-activity.
You’ll lose bombers being passive and just flying above the formation and simply reacting. @Pangolin_fan is advocating for the equivalent here.
To protect a bomber formation, you need to be pro-active and clear the path before the bombers before fighters can even think about engagement. This was true in real life (fighter groups acting independently were more successful in escorts than those who sat with the bombers) and in Warthunder, Il2:Great Battles (experience from flying escort/CAP in SB EC and keeping front-lines clear for friendly bombers/attackers).
It’s strange that reactivity after the damage was already done is considered acceptable, if not outright optimal for GRB. Is it not?
Also this cannot be understated. Looking at World war 2 instructional videos like for how to travel with Shermans, one can notice that the main use of the rooftop anti-air .50 cals for the shermans wasn’t so much the killing of enemy CAS. Its job was to fill the air with a lot of tracers in a wide area to discourage attackers from easy approaches and make them miss their bombs because people preferred staying alive.
Even looking at naval anti-air, we can observe how for operation Ten-Go the main thing achieved by anti-air was making the american aircraft stay at distance until they realized the limitations of the defensive artillery and overwhelming it.
US had:
- 11 aircraft carriers
- 6 battleships
- 11 cruisers
- 30+ destroyers
- 386 aircraft
Japan had:
US losses:
- 10-13 aircraft destroyed
- 52 aircraft damaged
You’d think 8 destroyers and company would make an impenetrable anti-air screen based on claims from this forum about SPAA effectiveness.
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Unlike you, I don’t need to double the kills on my SPAA to make em look good.
Why are we even arguing with Pangolin_Fan at this point? Everybody that visits the forum frequently knows he’s a troll. Most of his opinions, statements and what not are incorrect and dishonest and mostly in bad faith anyway. He screams OP about vehicles he never played, makes false statements about things he’s done, etc. This dude is just baiting at this point.
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Delayed reply, but you’ve raised a very fair point. It’s just that I (and many others I feel) constrain themselves to thinking within the system that already exists. Largely because it feels that Gaijin doesn’t want to change the system in place for something new.
Of course, when you really sit down and think this game has so many issues that you could probably make an entire series of video essays on the subject, ranging from balance, to game modes, to player incentives that Gaijin gives within gameplay itself and so much more.
Arguably, I’ve come to realize that the biggest flaw of this thread was the fact that I made it like this to begin with. It concedes defeat to the fact that the system in place cannot be changed, and that the issue ultimately lies with the player (even if I don’t communicate that directly, I feel people have gotten that impression over time) – which it doesn’t because it’s ultimately Gaijin’s responsibility to educate the player. Which I actually highlight in the original OP.
Ultimately, I’ve personally concluded that the forum really isn’t a proper way to influence change nor discussion because of how much of a limited slice of the War Thunder audience/player base it represents.
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Yet the solution isn’t new at all nor novel to the game - it already exists in Simulator mode.
Yeah, but it shows how far some players will go trying to understand and solve the problems, it’s like I’m earning a second doctorate from playing War Thunder.
But it can be changed, and quite easily. Nearly all of the aspects of a comprehensive CAS overhaul already exist in the game, scattered amongst different game modes.
Well yeah, most people play the game and don’t care that much either way.
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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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This post was flagged by the community and is temporarily hidden.
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:
-
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
-
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)
-
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 !)
-
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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