Unfortunately I don’t agree with your #1 and #4 suggestion and I’ll explain why.
At first when I started playing War Thunder I was also against the idea of having aircraft in my tank battles because they were, well “Over Powered” and all I wanted was some tank on tank action without having someone dropping a bomb on me when for example I had won a very good forwarded position and being punished by someone who just flew above me and dropped a bomb didn’t seem fair.
However, as I played more and more and got better at the game, I thought to myself that I too would like to perhaps have a plane in my lineup and drop some bombs on the enemy team because if anything it was a good way to secure wins and be useful to my team in a way that a tank couldn’t assist.
Your #1 suggestion leaves a lot of grey areas that need further answering.
First of all, you are removing players freedom of having the ability to use their spawn tickets to spawn in their planes by locking it to 3 per team as you’ve mentioned which leads to the following problems:
1- There’s going to be a lot of light tanks rushing into CAP points and then suiciding to spawn their CAS (trying to make sure they’re able to spawn their plane). Whether they’re useful to the team or not is subjective. If they end up dying that means they’re probably out of tickets and you are left with one less player in your team.
If they don’t end up dying and go back to the airfield and just repair and refill, no one else is able to spawn their plane.
2- By having aircraft locked/limited per team a lot of players might just idle in the menu waiting for a friendly aircraft to go down, so they can attempt to respawn a plane of their own, which itself only makes the game experience worse for everyone else involved as less players are spawning in/battling.
3- You didn’t mention helicopters at all which means even if players can’t spawn in a plane because its “restricted” we might get a big influx of helicopters instead unless you plan on restricting those too?
4- Some nations will be penalized more than others with this being added. Nations such as the US for example have a lot of good CAS aircraft that everyone just loves having and adding them to their lineups.
I agree, the Strela, the 2S6 and the Pantsir are really good compared to most other SPAA’s at their battle ratings, and I mean just look at Israel for example… they got a Chaparral all the way from 9.7 to 12.0 (assuming they use it) and still Israel top tier players are some of the best I’ve seen performing in top tier battles because they make it work in other ways.
And truth be told, only every now and then will I ever run into a really good CAS player, most players just fly over the battlefield which makes them an easy target for any SPAA, russian or not at the higher battle ratings.
As for #4, the ranked system I believe adding a skill matchmaking will be the end of this game as we enjoy it…
Players would just be way more sweaty and the game wouldn’t be as fun in a ranked environment.
If anything If you want a “ranked experience” just look for a squadron that is interested in doing squadron battles and you will find out why those battles can be boring. Maybe you’ll enjoy them, I’ve enjoyed a bit of squadron but its not something that I would like to be doing everyday in War Thunder. There are times I play the game to relax, while listening to music and stuff, and there are times I try to play a bit more “serious”.
I do agree that something needs to be done about one death leavers, I am guilty of this “crime” every once in a while (not often) because of different reasons, either full uptiers, or I tried a very agressive play but someone else beat me to it and the map is too big to get back into action, etc.