I have never seen a game that reward individual actions more than team effort like this game

Many games, online pvp especially, really incentivizes team effort and reward winning much more than they punish losing where the reward for winning is just so much than just getting good stat that ultimately the best performers who act selfishly gets absolutely trashed in post-game chat to the point of being flamed to hell and back.

Until this game.

This is the only game where individual performance has better reward metric than playing well in a team that wins whilst having subpar performance yet sets up a lot of friendly victories, where moments like setting up energy trap, faking headons, wasting away opponent flare, removing altitude/speed/either advantage and other team-benefitting actions is done in the benefit of the team and self.

Game doesn’t help by removing proximity score some years ago, practically making your effort to intentionally getting 3rd partied a fools errand instead of genuine set up effort that is rewarded with scores.

Is dev just allergic to good gameplay loop and healthy community or are dev just too much of an eastern european to even think of the world as something more than winter, cig, and vodka? world is more than that and surely making war thunder money opens your eye to the beauty and pleasantries of the world.

I was thinking of making pseudo-suggestion by bringing up features like adding “useful action” to air RB that centers around a player ability to set up third party, making a dynamic scoring where it returns proximity score and gives mini assist bonus for being near an enemy when they’re downed by missile or guns (rewarding kill set-ups) but this game hates it’s player. I know what Im trying to do here is a Sisyphean task that goes Icarian in seconds where it just fell on deaf ears and fails in a “crash down to earth at mach 1” fashion, but can this game at least be more friendly and open to the idea of making the game victory-oriented than personal stat-oriented?

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Because reward between winning or losing has barely difference because the players were complaining that losing gave low reward compared to winning which is a true logic.

Considering the winning and losing rewards multiplier, of, if I’m not wrong 1.4x and 1.2x respectively is more than obvious that personal performance is more important that team performance.

Forum sends incomplete post, added thoughts taht I want to convey in full.

Most of your rewards comes from time spent in match, individual actions help keep your activity up in the match and give extra rewards.

Alas, offering rewards for teamplay is not going to feel good for casual, solo players.

For it to feel good, we need to look at a game that only cares about team victory/loss - Dota 2/League of Legends.

Beyond the obvious, what differentiates LoL/Dota2 from Warthunder?

  1. Role queue.
  2. Skill based matchmaking
  3. Behaviour score

These interface in quite ingenious ways and on their own would not function.

SBMM without role queue punishes solo play due to unpredictability of teammates - everyone who is somewhat into gaming has to have heard of “Mid or Feed” sometime, somewhere.
Mid or Feed was a consequence of SBMM without role queue. People would queue up and fight over a particular role and hold intentionally throwing the game as a bargaining chip.
Either you play along, or lose MMR.

Role queue filtered this behaviour significantly, but it was not perfect. Sure, “Mid or feed” disappeared, or at least became less prevalent but we still had people being unfaithful in their obligations. Classic example is someone queueing as a Pos 4/Pos5 for the typically faster queue and playing like a Pos 2/Pos 3.

Behaviour score takes care of that. Even if you can maintain a good win rate, and thus positive climb in MMR, being reported for failure to uphold your contract diminishes your behaviour score which means you get matched with players who, like you, violate their agreements, promises and contracts. Suddenly, unfaithful supports become YOUR problem.

Warthunder lacks all of this.

Your teammates can be crack pilots and absolute noobs, there’s nothing that ensures the enemy team will give you a fair fight, roll over or stomp you.

Your teammates do their own thing, and have no obligation to cooperate. You didn’t even agree on what to cooperate about!

It just does not work.

One can also somewhat observe a unspoken behaviour score having positive impact - SB community is small. You recognize people from the forums in your matches easily. You recognize your CCs. Your random discord people in the LFG servers. You recognize regulars.
Acting like a jerk towards your teammates has a consequence, and that consequence lingers as ill reputation. I notice impromptu teamwork manifest between regulars even without previous LFG and there’s a few folk whose names I recognize and will loiter near to help each other out and chat during downtime.

It barely works because you see the same people over and over again.
It barely works just like JKA/Doom/UT/Movie battles 2 and other old timey lobby-based games of early-late 2000s worked before automatic matchmaking became a thing as a consequence of live-service games.

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Do you never 3rd party a dogfight or something? Its suck to be the 3rd partied in the grand scheme of thing because ultimately you get nothing despite you twisting and turning and risking missile yourself and gets nothing because someone get a good rear aspect shot at the guy you’re fighting. it’s inherently shitty to subject someone to this.

Even then that is only one aspect of the game that I think need to be changed. Because this is only one aspect of reworking this game from rewarding personal play to rewarding winning.

Addition like reducing kill reward and increasing winning reward will create the motivation to win by itself when people realized winning is more important than just killing 4 dudes. at this point motivation to win is little and motivation to be self-serving is bigger. the game could do better by just… promote teamplay.

Otherwise this game better off be an FFA deathmatch game than red vs blue plane shooter.

I ended up editing my post and expanding on it, adding my observations of ASB having usually more impromptu teamwork than ARB due to smaller community and persistence of reputation/familiarity.

Basically, SBMM/Role queue/Behaviour score act to replace/imitate the old intimacy of being a regular in a lobby you joined every friday while playing movie battles 2 (I was a =[GIN]= regular!) or whatever old lobby-based game you used to play.

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also ended up editing my response because at the end of the day what I want to convey is still part of a longer discussion.

On your edit, I do believe that on pure technicalities - what you seek are already true.

If you consult Report on how scores, SL, and RP rewards are calculated
you will see that for research points, kills are worth pitifully little RP.

Now, short and quick matches - the difference reduces or almost vanishes. In the fighter jet bombing thread, I’d come to the frustrating discovery and was forced to concede that for players with a premium account, flying premium planes (and thus - the +100% from skillbonus becomes much less impactful) - suicide bombing a base becomes superior to actually playing to survive and consequently win.

However, over the course of longer matches (more prevalent at prop tiers) and especially without premium time & premium vehicle, the following pair of formulae comes to dominate all other sources of RP:

   Win: Play time x activity x coefficient x RP multiplier x  skill bonus x 2 
   Defeat : Play time x activity x coefficient x RP multiplier x skill bonus x 1.34

Let us examine a 100% RP modifier plane in Air RB for simplicity’s sake. 4 kills corresponds to 100% RP bonus and 1 kill in itself is worth 114 RP. We’ll also assume 100% activity. Bit of a spherical cow, but ease of discussion and napkin maths justify spherical cows.

With a bit of maths, we can find a match duration where playing to win becomes superior to playing for a kill.

In a 10 minute (600 playtime, 1.22 coefficient, 1.0 rp multiplier, 2.0 skill bonus) match with 100% skill bonus, victory is worth 966 RP over losing.

That’s pretty significant!

The problem is the skill bonus. Let’s remove the 2.0 skill bonus and reduce it to 1.0 (player got 1 kill).
483.12 RP more for winning over losing. Still significant but… 1.35 vs 1.0 RP multiplier in comparison (ergo - value of 1 more kill) …

If we have 1 kill, play a 10 minute game and we give up victory for 1 more kill (114 RP and bump skill bonus from 1.0 to 1.35), we get -25.812 RP over playing to win. 25 RP less for getting guaranteed income (1 kill) over gambling for victory.

Without lingering, it’s obvious that until a player achieves 4 kills it becomes favourable to play for kills over victory (assuming doing so does not carry significant risk of dying). However, this does diminish proportionally.

There’s quite the room for discussion on how more kills also increase activity (although activity seems to plateu at 90% pretty early), and to find the optimal decision at various match length break points.

On intuition,

  • Longer matches make playing for victory increasingly more valuable
  • The better your existing score, the more you’re favoured to play to win over kills
  • The fewer kills you have until 4, the more you’re favoured to play for kills even at cost of winning.
  • In excess of 4 kills, your optimal play first is to drag the match out as long as possible. A 15 minute long lost match at 80% activity is a loss of 300 RP compared to a victorious 90% 10 minute match, and a gain of 878.4 if you win, and a gain of 13.176 if you maintain 90% activity but lose. Extending to 20 vs 10 minutes, we get - we get 503.616 gain for loss and 80% activity, gain of 111.264 for loss and 70% activity. Obviously, winning and maintaining activity will give us greater rewards - but it’s pretty clear how survival is less of a gamble.
    Winning, if achievable without dying earlier, becomes second priority.
  • If you have premium & a premium plane, “Reward for winning/Participation” becomes insignificant at very short match durations compared especially to bombing rewards.

If you can find a way to encourage players with less than 4 kills to play to win without punishing them for random, unpredictable and ephemereal teammates - then it could work.

so what we have to kill is activity time as score in order to make the game playable and enjoyable in the first place.

This is going to require us to gift some people with can of sarin.