Recently started playing sim battles using a hotas, to get away from the crazy pace of Realistic battles. The mode totally needs rework and thankfully many suggestions have been made from players, though what spoils it the most for me is IFF marking friendlies as foes and vice-versa. Example: friendly MiG-29G marked as foe while flying in the Russian MiG-29, friendly italian F-16 marked as foe while yet again flying a MiG-29. I am aware of the ‘sim element’ present here, and that different nation aircraft by default identify each other as foe, but considering the fact that IFF is a frequency-based system (and thus can be tweaked, correct me if I am mistaken) could we not be allowed to mark friendly aircraft of different nations as friendlies as well? I stopped counting how many games I was kicked out off for teamkilling someone in BVR engagements, as it is impossible to identify someone visually in that case. Don’t tell me to abort BVR and go up close to identify first; BVR is a common situation in air to air engagements and it totally deserves its place in the game but for it to work, the IFF must be reworked ASAP. Still not sure if that only applies to the MiG-29, please feel free to share your thoughts with me people.
Last I checked what you describe doesn’t exist.
IFF only cares if they’re on your team.
We can test this of course in case there’s a bug report to be made.
Update: IFF works in my test.
Did you check MIGs as well? Pretty sure something is wrong, ideally I should not even be able to lock on a friendly.
I used an F-16AJ & a Soviet Mig-29 & radar searched against a friendly American F-16ADF/C.
I play sim very frequently, including some mig29. I can’t remember IFF malfunctioning.
However, there are some things to think about, situations where you might accidentally engage a friendly when you think it was an enemy, here are a few of those situations:
- Missiles, are always marked as “foe”, even a missile fired from a friendly, it’s not likely but maybe you accidentally tried engaging a missile that a friendly shot, and confused the two?
- Every time you “Lock” somebody, what you’re actually doing is having your radar try to lock whichever target you have selected on your radar screen, it kind of locks in the same way an IR missile would, it will search in a very small “circle” (like the seeker head of a missile) on the last known location/ping of that target you have selected, so if the enemy your trying to lock is very close to a friendly, like in a dogfight, it’s not uncommon that you might accidentally lock onto the friendly instead, despite you having selected the enemy. You have to take this into consideration, especially if your radar has a slow frequency (how long time it takes your radar to scan the same area twice) since that increases the time a friendly might fly into that search circle.
- Some planes only have IFF on certain modes, for example the mig23’s have IFF on their search radars, but their “MTI” mode on their radar, does not have IFF.
Until I learned these 3 things, I team killed pretty regularly as well, now it pretty much never happens.
I’ve encountered this as have others. Flying F-16’s, F-14’s, Mig-23’s. I see it happen at least once a day and it’s entirely random. Might play 2 or 3 matches and all is well then get slapped with a hefty fine because IFF showed hostile.
I will back this claim. It does happen from time to time, and isn’t exactly specific to which Jet I’m flying at the time beyond that they have an IFF function on the radar.
The lack of tutorials at high tier really doesn’t help matters either as many of the MiG-23, F-4S people have no idea how to use the radar in the first place.
I assume you mean A/AFR on the HUD after locking on, correct?
It seems a lot of people playing sim in War Thunder aren’t aware that it’s a thing, and multiple times I was told that “everything is working correctly” but only one person so far actually understood what I was referring to and told me that this feature is simply not implemented and it will always show A, indicating an enemy, no matter who you lock onto.
Thank you to everyone leaving their feedback. Do you think the issue is worthy of a bug report? If so I am gonna send one when I get the chance to, around these days.
If you are able to get a capture of a clear Radar showing enemy and it being a friendly on a jet with IFF in that radar mode. It’d likely be a worthwhile attempt. I vaguely remember them saying that they tried to fix the issue a while back (which it was admittedly worse some months back)
This has happened and when i got close enough to see I found 2 planes but only getting one return on the radar and sometimes it’s the friendly and sometimes it’s not.
Even if you lock the correct target the missile can still change it’s mind when the targets are so close.
I feel like Friendly kills at top tier should be free for everyone (no repair costs for the victim and no punishment for offender; as long as it was a BVR shot).
If that was the case, people wouldn’t even try to identify targets anymore. Team kills are frustrating, but I like that some critical thinking is required in Sim.
To score a BVR kill, you need a radar lock, and that lock does not happen on a friendly at all if IFF functions as it should. So, locking a friendly bot/player in BVR and proceeding to shoot them down, means that IFF did not function as it should have from the start of engagement. Critical thinking can be a thing in a dogfight where most likely IR missiles will be used, but then again I do use radar scanning while entering a dogfight to know if I should engage or continue as I was, in case I see a friendly pop up.
Thanks to all the comments here in this post, we might as well get something good out of this in the end. Always good to converse with people on common issues.
I found this thread from obvious reasons… Yes, I have the same issue: when flying MiG 29 SMT in sim battles all F-16, F-15 (basically western aircraft) are considered as foe, even MiG 29G. It’s annoying and makes radar borderline useless as you can’t tell if you are shooting at teammate
Mig-23 MTİ has İFF since September. Recent addition
Here as someone without a ton of SL, who has recently paid 200k SL because of the IFF issue. I absolutely don’t think TKa should be free. That’s retarde and will get heavily abused. IFF just needs to be fixed for the radar modes that it’s designed to function in per radar set.
I found this thread today, i have to post again.
Before yesterday, either bug or a temporary problem, IFF was way off.
We had a large group of people who were flying F15, F16 and M2000. We had several teamkills as M2000 and F16 was seeing the F15 Baz as foe on the radar. Unfortunately I had two during the match and got expelled. Several F15 Baz were shot down during this AirSB.
Generally, I rather double check and die before shooting down a friendly. This time it was really weird. I was very clearly seeing the Baz as foe, repeatedly during the match and I was not alone.
The real solution is to just disable team killing altogether, just as they do for ground. There really is no need for it.
I’m mostly play AirRB where team killing is guaranteed. Whether on purpose (idiots gunning each other, firing missiles or ramming team mates at game start or because someone hit a bomb target before they did) or by accident at high BR where heat seekers often go astray due to flares or the target dying before the missile arrives.
Disabling friendly aircraft/weapon damage is an easy fix that would solve a lot of problems and much frustration with this game.
I agree for RB, but in SB being ground or air, teamkilling is active