Cool beans.
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No, you can read this - or test it by yourself:
https://forum.warthunder.com/t/severe-damage-did-nothing-to-fix-kill-stealing/84776/36
Reading is a difficult skill nowadays. Most people just ignore messages longer than one or two sentences.
If you destroyed more than half of the enemy wing:
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In the old system you got a full kill credit with 100% score and rewards. If someone else decided to finish this plane, he would receive an assist (that counts for tasks and challenges) with additional 67% of the kill score, but no kill credit.
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In the new system you get severe damage with 80% of the score and rewards and partial kill credit (that is visible on the scoreboard, post-battle screen and counts for tasks, challenges and camo progress). If someone else decide to finish this plane, he gets 40% of the kill score and rewards with full kill credit (that also counts for service records).
If you care about your service records and the remaining 20% of the score and rewards, in the new system you have to waste more time and ammo to finish the target (that would already be dead in the old system). If you won’t do that, then you can lose service record kill and 20% of score and rewards, if someone else decide to finish this target.
But there are only two ways to finish the target in the new system, tearing off the tail and sniping the pilot. Any other damage won’t finish the plane. So you can literally waste all your ammo and that guy can still be alive!
I personally don’t shoot at severely damaged planes, in my opinion it’s just a waste of time and ammo (even if I can lose that remaining 20%, I don’t really care that much about service records).
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Wouldnt his name get “black” if he was destroyed and as such, any further hits would not count?
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I thought finishing off the kill was 20%? In all the finished kills I’ve gotten it seemed extremely low.
In the old system, severe damage was called a destruction. When you destroyed a plane, its nameplate turned grey, you received 100% of the kill score, full kill credit and that plane was “locked” for you, but not for other players.
So for example, when you saw a destroyed plane (that is now called severely damaged and keeps the red nameplate instead of grey), you could still attack it and get an assist:
Spoiler
That was the old system. Two players could get 167% kill score from one target. But only the first player (that caused severe damage) got a kill credit.
Sorry, I’m not a native English speaker. I think I should have wrote “someone else” in that quote. Because if you first severely damage a plane and then finish it yourself, then yes, you get 100% (80+20) and full kill credit. In the old system you would just get 100% and a kill credit sooner (and you wouldn’t have to worry about that plane with the grey nameplate anymore).
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This guy got so mad about service record feels sus. You’re killstealing to pad your stat arent you?
As long as it counts for tasks, that is fine. I dont care for stat padding or anything service record related.
I simply answer with a quote:
You also lose 20% of the score and 20% of rewards, if someone else finish your target.
About tasks and challenges. You have to remember that kill credit only counts for kill related tasks and challenges.
In the old system the person who destroyed (severely damaged) the enemy got a kill, the person who finished it got an assist.
In the new system the person who severely damaged the enemy gets a kill, and the person who finishes that enemy also gets a kill.
Which means this new system makes it easier to complete all kill related tasks. But it makes it harder to complete all assist related tasks.
I don’t know about other players, but for me it was always the hardest to get assists. When I had to get assists I always attacked planes with grey nameplates in the old system, because that was one of the easiest way to get assists. Nowadays I just skip all assist related tasks and hope the devs won’t add assist related challenges, because getting a sure assist in the new system is a nightmare.
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All i know is that i can now catch planes on fire and not have to worry about it being an assist. I have also not noticed any zombie planes which is nice.
Sure, i am probably losing some score to some things that used to be kills. However, i am now getting more score from things that used to be assists.
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I am worried about people stealing my kill, ok?
I usually fly Soviet props so I don’t have adequate ammo to finish severe damage aircraft, as long as I still want to score 4 kills in one single flight
now this sucks. How the fxxk do I severe damage someone but not get the kill counted in my service record? Fxxk gaijin
yeah. simply to waste all my ammo to kill the pilot or tear the tail off. I would be so glad to confirm the kill, even though I have only 240 rounds in my Yak-3U.
U R talking BS. Do you really play ARB prop fighters?
Fire doesn’t guarantee you severe damage in the new system. They actually didn’t change how fire works in both systems.
In one of my old battles (old system), I hit the engine of the enemy and caused a fire (that instantly “destroyed” the enemy plane):
Spoiler
That fire “destroyed” the plane, but you can still see that plane is overall “fine” (I mean the pilot is alive, he can still steer and destroy me):
Spoiler
In the new system this “destruction” would be turned into “severe damage” and that guy would still have red nameplate.
But not every fire works this way. Sometimes fires don’t cause any real damage, so they aren’t counted as severe damage or destruction. Fires are pretty much random.
And this is exactly why they changed systems. In the above example, that guy who is already “destroyed”, can still fly and even kill other players. Most players just refused to accept that planes with grey nameplates can still be dangerous. So the devs changed the system to keep the red nameplate for longer (so players can’t complain that “dead” plane killed them).
For me it would make more sense to just change grey nameplate to e.g. orange nameplate, to indicate this plane is still dangerous. But I guess it wouldn’t change much, as people would still complain that the plane with orange nameplate just killed them.
From this perspective, the new system fixed the “problem” of dead planes, that aren’t really dead yet.
EDIT: I completely forgot about Ground Realistic. I don’t play there, but from what I understand, planes in this game mode don’t have nameplates at all. It surely was confusing to see “Aircraft destroyed” message (most players probably stopped firing after this message), but sometimes that aircraft wasn’t fully destroyed yet. Ground Realistic is probably the main reason why the devs introduced the new system and kept planes alive for longer.
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fair. But now when i make an engine fire, I feel like i can freely engage other aircraft without having to worry about only getting an assist from half my team swarming a clearly dead aircraft. They still swarm it but now i get more score.
They could have the nameplate removed from dead planes and have the grey be the severely damaged ones.
It started from helis. They would get hit in the engine or something to cause a “death” but they still had a good 10ish seconds before they would spin out of control. Players would get the “kill” then ignore the heli which then proceeded to kill a tank or 2 before actually dying.
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This is a bit more complex situation, and your feeling is correct. But that’s not because of the fire itself, but because of the engine damage.
When the devs presented the severe damage system for the first time in late 2023, on our forum players mostly didn’t understand how the system will work (which is probably because of English-speaking content creators, who didn’t understand the new system, but still made videos about it), so almost everyone here was very happy about the new system (apart from a few people, who actually read the article).
But the situation was completely different on the Russian forum. People there actually understood the new system and complained about it quite a lot. Mostly because they realised you will need more ammo and time to finish a plane that would already be “dead” before.
Because of this, the devs moved direct engine damage from previous critical hit condition to severe damage condition. I don’t want to get into details too much about this, because everything is already explained in the severe damage official topic on this forum (it was linked a few times in this topic already).
So to calm players a bit, the devs moved direct engine damage to severe damage mechanics. It’s in fact possible that previous assist from direct engine damage in the new system will give you severe damage instead, so you can call it an upgrade.
This hugely depends how you play the game though. If you do many head-ons and use mostly AP bullets in your belt, this can help you to get more severe damage than before.
I actually analyzed one of my old battles to figure out if I would gain or lose with this system, and the results are pretty interesting:
I would potentially lose much more in this new system. But this whole change doesn’t sound that bad yet (especially most severe damage turns into destruction not long later anyway).
The main problem is, the devs are always weird, and at the same time they removed critical hits from severe damage system. They never mentioned this anywhere, we still don’t have any official info about this situation.
In the old system the critical hit was attached to the destruction. So for example, if you destroyed most of the enemy wing, you received a critical hit (for wing destruction) and a plane destruction. In most situations the number of critical hits in the battle was equal (or very similar) to number of kills + assists.
Critical hit is worth 33% of the kill score. So in the old system destroying the wing was worth 133% (100% + 33%) of the kill score.
In the new system all these additional critical hits are gone. So destruction (100%) was turned into severe damage (80%), and additional critical hit (33%) was removed completely. Finishing the target also don’t give you that additional critical hit. In the new system every severe damage or direct kill makes you lose that 33%. This is the real reason why the global score was reduced quite significantly in the new system. That’s the main thing I don’t like about the new system. I would love to see these critical hits back, but I doubt they will return.
BTW: In Ground modes, direct ground kills still have critical hits attached to them. So we have this weird situation now, where two modes work differently in this aspect. Maybe the devs will remove critical hits from direct kills in Ground mode too in the future, I don’t know. I don’t like it, I don’t think removing additional score and rewards from players was a good move. Especially they did this silently and most players didn’t even notice that change.
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I wasn’t aware of the reduced rewards due to the severely damaged system. It’s different but somewhat reminiscent of the situation in CS: Source where complaints about high ping led to developers artificially reducing the displayed ping without actual server-side improvements.
With the severe damage system, some players might experience a sense of gratification as it gives the impression of receiving kill updates that might not have been obtained otherwise. Personally, I’ve felt this false gratification too. However, your insights in this reply feel like you’ve just given me a sort of wake-up red-pill to the flaws of the current system and reduced potential reward distribution.
Hopefully, the devs continue to improve upon the system and find a way to scale the reward distribution more appropriately to the exponential increase of total RP required to reach top tier.
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again: “sever damage” means “kill” before the rework. Every time you see “severe damage”, it means the system is awarding you 80% of the score instead of 100% as before.
People can still steal your critical damaged plane (and you need to pay even more attention because if they do a severe damage after your critical damage and then you kill your own target, you only get 20% of the score instead of the 50% of the assist) just like before and on top of that they can also steal 20% of the score “after the kill”.
So, no: you’re not getting any more score than before. You’re just loosing some of it in EVERY situation. AT MOST, you can get the same score as before. They just added the possibility to steal 20% of the score on some kills.
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Nope. An engine fire used to be a crit, not a kill. Putting an enemy into a flat spin was a crit, not a kill.