Last stand of Air Realistic Battles

[Real_K_Soze]

@Spil1tia-psn

Okay so if they aren’t irredeemably skillless how would you make bomber gameplay more skill based? Please explain how mousing over a target and waiting can possibly be made skillful I would love to hear it

Skill in a bomber is hard to measure - it depends mainly on the played bomber type and the pilot experience.

Whilst skill playing a fighter boils down to killing the right targets at the right point in time skillful gameplay of bombers depends on a combination of soft factors and his ability to interact with enemy fighters.

• Bombing a base was never a problem in the past. In the old world with destructible airfields skill was always a matter of making it through the fighter screen often multiple times with decreasing survival chances and make it back to the airfield.

• In the current environment skill as a bomber pilot is reduced to a smart relative and absolute positioning vs the enemy team and the manual gunner skills / quality of defensive weapons - but only if he is piloting a high performance (relative for its BR) bomber like the Ju 88 A-1, B-18B or the G8N1.

• Seeing each match at prop BRs 4 bombers flying straight to a base and pressing spacebar has nothing to do with skill. If i watch replays i see that around 80-90% of these pilots get killed whilst they are in bombardier view.

• If a today a bomber pilot is able to drag 1-3 interceptors out of the center, kill one of them and damage 1 or 2 others (forcing them to repair) he is way more valuable than the guys performing suicide / Ploesti bombing runs or the average fighter pilot who sees trading in a FCH as viable strategy.

Classic bomber gameplay died years ago - Why?

1. Gaijin has done almost everything they can to weaken bombers - countless open and hidden nerfs, Increasing bomber BRs and decreasing fighter BRs or adding ridiculous artificial spread of defensive fire (Q3/4 2022).

2. The way too low contrails and the increase of lobbies to 16 vs 16 fits into this strategy, same a nerfs regarding base multipliers.

Therefore there is zero incentive even for experienced pilots to play any kind of bomber above BR 3.0 as the invested time is usually not worth the outcome.

[Spil1tia-psn]

@Real_K_Soze

In the current environment skill as a bomber pilot is reduced to a smart relative and absolute positioning vs the enemy team and the manual gunner skills

in every environment, no matter what way you slice it the only skilled elements of bomber gameplay are positioning (which for bombers is just fly to where ever the red team isnt) and aiming the turrets. positioning and aim are required for every other class and are far more involved than with bombers.

@Real_K_Soze

skill was always a matter of making it through the fighter screen

this isnt really skill based, more hoping that you roll good damage rng or that for whatever reason noone decides to go for you.

@Real_K_Soze

If a today a bomber pilot is able to drag 1-3 interceptors out of the center, kill one of them and damage 1 or 2 others (forcing them to repair) he is way more valuable than the guys performing suicide / Ploesti bombing runs or the average fighter pilot who sees trading in a FCH as viable strategy.

key word here being “if” and baiting really dosent require skill.

@Real_K_Soze

Therefore there is zero incentive even for experienced pilots to play any kind of bomber above BR 3.0 as the invested time is usually not worth the outcome.

the actual reason is because bombers have zero depth when played in their intended role, beyond avoiding other players and aim there is nothing to learn.

[Ripbozo]

@ChorizoBlanco

They shouldn’t be as OP as Tu 4 on release but not too far from it either.

“not too far from it”…?

were you around when that thing was unleashed? It completely destroyed prop games, bombers should never, ever approach that level of cheese again.

personally I would simply remove them from the game period, they’re just placeholder vehicles at this point.

@Spil1tia-psn

the actual reason is because bombers have zero depth when played in their intended role, beyond avoiding other players and aim there is nothing to learn.

Never drop this truth nuke on the WT subreddit, they wouldn’t know how to handle it.

[slayer181]

dont forget they need to bring back taking off in br1 till 1.7. they took away some realism in that by spawning us like in arcade, in the air. its cool if whe had the choise. but whe have’nt now

[ChorizoBlanco]

What I mean is that ignoring bombers completely should have a very high risk of losing the game by tickets/loss of airfield, but the gap between bombers and fighters should not be as big as it was whe Tu4 came out - yes I was around.
I would never agree to removing them from the game, this is not call of duty and most people want more objectives, not less.

For people that want mindless killing fun you have arcade.

[Real_K_Soze]

@Spil1tia-psn

positioning and aim are required for every other class and are far more involved than with bombers.

This is nonsense and you are way too experienced to write such things. The positioning for a bomber is way more important as he can’t disengage at will due to slower rip and top speeds - there is a huge difference between locked into a fight and having the ability to run away if something went wrong.

@Spil1tia-psn

there is nothing to learn.

You are free to express your opinion, but from my pov you are not really qualified to assess anything regarding skilled bomber gameplay as you lack the necessary first-hand experience.

Have a good one!

[MotorolaCRO]

@Real_K_Soze

• Air RB is not limited by poor map design, stale game play or poor overall design - Air RB is shaped by the quality and expectations of the overwhelming majority of their paying customers.

ARB is definitely limited by all of those, but Gaijin doesn’t want to change anything because they’re happy with their earnings. From their business standpoint it might look that ARB is fine, but gameplay wise it really isn’t. That’s the key difference between my and your standpoint.

@Real_K_Soze

• I tried my best to show you and the OP that currently just long-term players would benefit from most of the proposed changes. The rookie player just follows the incentives by gaijin which are easy to identify - just look at SL & RP gains for extremely simple tasks like base bombing with a premium aircraft.

You’re stuck in your mindset that most new players are some dumb apes that can’t do more than simplest of tasks. Rookie players are just playing the cards they’ve been dealt, so they are stuck with very limited options to begin with.

SL/RP gains from bombing is solely Gaijin’s fault for being unable or unwilling to give us a proper reason to spawn something other than a fighter in ARB.

@Real_K_Soze

You might agree or not, but as soon as the game gets more complex and the needs of these rookies are not considered, gaijin might think about a few cosmetic changes, but they won’t risk to lose or reduce the income stream these players create for gaijin. So any request for a change should contain also a proposal how the needs of those players can be covered.

I think if they want everything on a silver platter that “advice” should be paid for, as you’re basically doing their job at that point.

Gaijin is very lazy to change anything, they’re in their groove just spamming out vehicles for people to buy. The real fall of the game will start the moment they stop having new shiny things to add, that is if the fundamentals of the game aren’t changed by then.

@Real_K_Soze

Importing additional problems to Air RB with this multiple spawn based on multiple deaths is just creating more issues.

You might import problems but you might also solve issues that are already present in the mode.

@Real_K_Soze

Objectives: Your points regarding objectives simply miss the point that in almost all shooters mission objectives are just there to support player interactions. That’s why those objectives (and air markers) are marked on the map / in your view.

Players will find other players without any objectives, which is easily seen in the current ARB and all out furballs between fighters.

Impactful objectives among other things definitely add to the game being more engaging to play, but as all things like that it introduces balancing issues that must be solved in advance, which is something Gaijin doesn’t want or know how to do, so we’re here stuck with an archaic, braindead mode made a decade ago.

Don’t blame it on new players being dumb apes, blame it on Gaijin and their inability to actually do something else that isn’t releasing premium copypaste slop.

[Real_K_Soze]

Just 3 quotes as a reply:

@Real_K_Soze

Imho this exchange is stuck in an infinite loop - as our understanding of the game mode, game design and player behaviour / motivations is totally different.

@Real_K_Soze

As a final message in this matter

@Real_K_Soze

In any case: Have a good one!

[Spil1tia-psn]

lmao

[kjlmurphy]

Liniyka I who I was going to suggest, he has good takes on the current state of air rb

[Dead_Sky]

@Smin1080p_WT, dear Smin, please kindly provide us with an update in regard to the issues we have summarised in this thread. We appreciate anything, even a small update, thank you!

[Ripbozo]

@MotorolaCRO

they’re in their groove just spamming out vehicles for people to buy.

You mean contracting independent vendors to model and texture vehicles for them, right? I frankly doubt Gaijin even has an in house art team, their whole vibe and demeanor on stream seems like it’s mostly a bunch of coders now.

[MotorolaCRO]

@Ripbozo

You mean contracting independent vendors to model and texture vehicles for them, right?

Who makes those models mean nothing as they are spending money to create those either way. Their focus to spend money on dishing out premium after premium shows their intent.

[Ckasaron]

@Real_K_Soze

As soon as multi-role fighters with massive payloads come into play the classic strike aircraft or bomber has no role left - they were designed to kill hard to kill stuff like tanks or tactical/strategic targets behind enemy lines outside the range of multi-role fighters.

In my comments about the plight of attackers and bombers, I frankly lump in any fighter daring to bring non-A2A-ordinance under the umbrella of “attacker.” Same with the single-engine naval bombers and light bombers which abuse their airspawns to hunt planes - they’re also “attackers,” just meant to sink ships.

Anything not a meta fighter is functionally irrelevant due to the objectives being zero-sum. I see matches auto-ending via TDM, auto-ending via airfield destruction (still a thing in reserve BR maps), and solely ending via CAS-derived ticket bleed as equally wrong. Such a setup discourages any thought of teamwork between plane classes, despite many of them being designed with that very teamwork in mind.

Unless the objectives change, there is no point to doing anything else. This house’s foundation was poured wrong and needs to be rebuilt.

@Spil1tia-psn

Okay so if they aren’t irredeemably skillless how would you make bomber gameplay more skill based? Please explain how mousing over a target and waiting can possibly be made skillful I would love to hear it

No point brainstorming about it until the zero-sum objective setup is dealt with first. To even begin thinking about what to do with bombers, they need to be important and required to win games first.

I do not think the oldschool airbase-destruction objective is good game design, either. It still exists in low tier maps for Air RB, and its just as stupid now as it was then, if not moreso thanks to German incendiary bombs.

But going out on a limb, assuming the objective structure is properly overhauled so no single objective is capable of auto-ending rounds on its own, probably I could imagine adding targets for bombers which have practical impact on the match flow.

The way Gaijin decided to implement Realistic mode in regards to the control scheme, adding things that a fighter jock might consider “skill” are not practical. Things like ranging turret guns, calibrating your bombsight, controlling one gunner position only from first-person and swapping between them as needed, etc - all that is much more at home in Simulator mode.

Bombers will never be “skillful” in the definition of a fighter dick-measuring contest. War Thunder was not built to be just a PvP dogfight dick-measuring contest - if it were, then attackers and bombers would not be player-controllable all. If they were meant to just guide match flow where dogfights happen, they could do that just as well if they were AI-controlled only.

@Spil1tia-psn

You say that you can just land and leave as a fighter player but there is nothing stopping someone from just not spawning or camping the airfield until the endgame and going and shooting all of your attackers after you leave and winning the game

The battle activity system is supposed to punish people who do that with greatly reduced rewards.

And if someone does that sort of cheeky strategy and manages to pull a victory out of the jaws of apparent defeat, that would be funny. It would be your choice to land and leave, with all appropriate consequences. If you left a player alive who could potentially do that, that’s on you.

Now airfield AAA should be severely neutered so people can’t hide on runways, IMHO. Which means that unless they climb to orbit in something un-catchable up high like a P-47, you would always be able to do something about such a potential player.

@ChorizoBlanco

What I mean is that ignoring bombers completely should have a very high risk of losing the game by tickets/loss of airfield, but the gap between bombers and fighters should not be as big as it was whe Tu4 came out - yes I was around.

What I think is that debates on which plane type should be “most important” are infantile dick-measuring contests no matter the exact circumstances.

Hence why I propose only allowing each objective to bleed 50% of the ticket bar. Only when each objective literally CAN’T win games on its own can the addition of better objectives for attackers and bombers actually take place with a real chance of success.

[mm10000]

Originally added at 6.3, then raised to 8.3 before being lowered to 8.0, the Tu-4 is unplayable a perfect example of how Gaijin ignores community outcry. It truly shows how Gaijin has thrown bombers under the bus.

[mm10000]

7.3 is fair

[Ripbozo]

It would still be useless.

Anyway the more pressing issue right now is that ww2 guns, ARE STILL BROKEN GAIJIN, WAKE UP. As it stands most props are simply unplayable because their guns deal no damage, and .50 cals are the only guns worth using, this state of affaires is bad.

[HoluhovskyCZ]

you actually showed an example of gaijin listening to the community, Tu-4 was uber super giga busted at 6.3 and got moved up after people complained

[mm10000]

Yeah i know it was busted but it shouldn’t be at 8.0 bro, It faces Missiles and don’t tell me to shut down the engines that doesn’t even work it’s unplayble keep in mind it faces 9.0 jets and anything above 8.0 fights missiles, 7.3 is fair not 8.0 and 7.3 is allot for it already maybe it they gave it finally the Targeting computer

[HoluhovskyCZ]

7.7 is pushing it