I realize that this is not during peak gameplay hours, but anecdotally I have noticed a pretty substantial decline in the sim top tier population. The new planes also seem to have not helped.
I remember over a year ago when USA + NATO were dominating sim that people were claiming that USA / NATO out-numbering RU side of the matchmaker had nothing to do with the planes being substantially better. So what changed? Where did all the USA players go? Why didn’t all of the guys who said the Typhoon needed Captor-E to be playable in sim go?
I can find 5 different games at 12.7 where blue side outnumbers the red side. However I would be forced to play a MiG-29 with R-60s into planes with Aim-9M and vastly superior flight models. Why is this tier now more popular than top tier?
At the current state top tiers are unplayable. not rewarding, not fun, just frustration. I can’t believe I am going to say that, but rb is more fun and more rewarding too.
This mode doesn’t see an improvement since years. Fun fact, this community gave tons of good ideas to improve gameplay and balance, if only Gaijin would listen…
Sad truth is they earn more from other modes
While I am not a fan of the iron dome meta, it is representative of some of the higher end capabilities of the more modern missiles that people want to see added to the game soon; ii.e Iris-T, ASRAAM etc. As well as the addition of over the shoulder launch capabilities /targeting via shared data link or RWR.
Which is just to say that new feature creep is only going to solidify or amplify the current state of the game.
What improvements would you like to see at top tier?
Usually I see everyone claim to want bigger maps, more realism, more features like Link-16.
There seems to be a huge gulf between what people claim they want and what they actually do in game. Look at the widespread contempt the community had for multipathing circa 2 years ago and how the 60m reduction would discourage it. What actually happened for the most part is that people just started multipathing lower and picking maps that are predominantly flat.
Denmark is by far the most popular sim map. It’s a large map where most of the player action takes place in the right quadrant that is smaller than Tunisia.
Aces of Thunder doesn’t have anything resembling top tier planes. There were more populated 3.0-6.0 prop matches last night than top tier games.
Also from general reading of consensus opinion it appears this new game is a very watered down and arcade style of sim with Air RB style death matches, simplified flight models, and limited numbers of planes.
First of all for YEARS community asked for historical matchup instead of BR based. They made a couple of test on Stalingrad, it was a huge success, never seen lobbies so full again, and it ended just there.
Just think that during the first 3 years in EC you could not unlock any kind of achievement, title, skin, the only thing we had was a small booster in rp (gone time ago). When skill bonus was added, we had it in EC too, and then… removed. Sim always suffered an unfair and unbalanced rewards system, despite being the most difficult mode and there we got fooled again: in EC you always had to pay before spawning, at the beginning we had to pay half of the repair cost. Oh look, they nerfed that too, they added instead the mandatory landing to earn full reward, and we still have it with the useful action system that at top tier is quite inadeguate, to be kind. I grinded most of my tress in air rb, way more rewarding in both SL and RP.
Apart from br adjustment at top tier what other change, upgrade did they do to this mode in the last years??
pretty sure its been dead :( think they killed it a long time ago with the capped 15min rewards… at least in air Sim,n but ground I think its dead because of the missile spam at the start of the match
I think it’d be better to wait until the current tank event is over before calling top tier sim dead. Many players (myself included) are devoting our time to doing and event which now requires 45k pts (yikes), and has thus left us with very little time and energy to play other modes
Do you think historical matchups in top tier sim would be a good idea? To put every NATO or NATO adjacent plane on one side and RU + similar on the other? How do you picture this working at tiers that are just below top tier where the vast majority of players are in NATO planes? How does MiG-29A w/ R-60s match up against F2A, Gripen, etc?
