Game after game I am seeing our team of mostly lieutenants or slightly higher wiped out in minutes by an opposing team with at least 2 and upto 4 Marshals with 150k kills. BR 3.3 Swedish in my case - I cannot figure out why Gaijin matchmake like this. Maybe there should be a filter to exclude these top end players from coming in and shooting fish in a barrel at these low levels - other than massaging egos - why do this? And why a team of 2-4 against junior players?
it’s called sealclubbing, and has been a thing since this game’s inception
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It’s a KDR booster so they can get into squadrons/competitives.
It’s effective, but cruel; I don’t seal club unless I’m helping a friend or someone new to the game grind lower BR’s (like the time I got 4860 mission score from a single low BR Russian match)
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Being level 100 does not mean someone is good.
All it means is they spent a long time grinding and unlocking vehicles.
And it’s 1:1 RP to XP, meaning - flying a high tier premium aircraft will give you faster level 100 than grinding out the tech tree properly in terms of time played.
Likewise, flying ARB over AAB has the same effect.
Finally, ground and Air and naval share the same account level. Someone can have all ground vehicles unlocked but has zero flight experience.
Same is true in air: Might’ve unlocked all of Nation A, but never flew nation B.
And even just has an aced crew in slot A, but untrained in slot B. Which does bring up the only objective advantage a veteran player can have: An aced crew has busted advantage over a new crew slot (I get constant g-loc flying planes at far gentler turns than the person I’m chasing, causing them to escape or reverse while I’m blacked out. We pulled the same Gs, but they got a better crew so they were unaffected).
Finally:
Outside of biplanes, I cannot consider playing rank 3 vehicles (where BR 3.0 starts roughly) to be sealclubbing. Why?
Because that’s where all the cool & iconic planes are: 3.0-5.7 has all the cool bf109s, all the cool corsairs, all the cool zeros and spitfires.
Would you deny someone the ability to fly their favorite aircraft just because they played the game longer than you?
Same is true for ground - although iconic tanks are more around 4-6.7 rather than lower, but still.
Also inverse is true.
Lobby I’m in:
Guess this guy’s score?
Spoiler
They’re level 21 despite playing for nearly 6 days straight. Why? Because they only fly low-RP reward game modes and aircraft.
I’m level 50 with 6 days in tanks, 6 days in planes (RB), 4 days in planes (SB) (total 16 days)
I checked some lvl 100 in my squadron. 13 days in planes (RB), 6 days in tanks (RB), 1 day in planes (SB). Total days: 20.
They have 4 days more played than me and are level 100. I have 11 days played more than that level 21 and I’m level 50.
Can you see how “level 100” is a rather meaningless metric due to how it’s calculated?
Also, I made a calculation once:
You can get to rank SEVEN (VII/7) Swedish 11.3 aircraft (was 11.7 when I did the calculation) at only level 35 - barely above captain - if you only play air sweden. Assuming 2000 RP per match, 20 minute matches all the way… this roughly comes out to 18 days’ playtime (2.6 million divided by 2000 gives us how many battles, which we multiply by 20 to get time spent in minutes, which we divide by 60 for hours and 24 to get days). You could probably speed this up even more buying a rank 7 premium, strap bombs onto it with a premium account and just bomb a base each match for ~1000+RP for 5 minutes of action
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this is just sealclubbing, trust me this is better than having SBMM
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Just three points to make :
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Warthunder has no SBMM, and likely (& hopefully) never will. New players will face veteran players. Just is what it is. You can get away with SBMM systems in a game like CoD, where there are millions of players online at any given moment playing a small clutch of modes, but in Warthunder, with relatively small playerbase - fragmented across 9+ different game modes - across what… 39(?) different battle ratings within those modes. It just doesn’t work. Queue times would be too long.
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Veteran players can play whatever they want. This game used to be almost entirely WW2. A lot of old players joined the game at that point because they were interested in such vehicles, so it’s no surprise they choose to continue playing what they enjoy. High / Top tier gameplay is subjectively awful and does not interest everyone. Not everyone playing lower rank stuff is automatically a seal clubber.
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This game has been out for twelve years. Try not to pay much attention to rank. Even an awful player who started back then could be level 100 by now, simply by gathering enough RP from taking damage whilst dying and accidentally wandering into caps enough times lol.
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So is it seal clubbing if I’m playing with my lvl 100 friends at low BR because we want to play silly matildas and wirraways :(
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Correct, this is the main reason why i, as an very long time player, come back to playing low tier.
Other reasons why high level players play low tier are:
Starting a new nation? How are you supposed to do it otherwise?
And also: playing low tier event vehicles to grind events. Currently i am going to town in low tier battles with the ka-chi (which is nearly undefeatable for opponents with solid shot only, since there is seven crew inside) because there is a task in the battlepass that requires specifically that.
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Thanks for your reply. But that is just it - they are destroying the opposing team who are lucky to get a kill or two and most get none!!! I agree with your point that level is not directly associated with high skill and I am a case in point!!! However - I have been looking closely at this and these are people with 100K+ kills - and the proof is they quickly destroy the inexperienced team.
It is certainly true they can play whatever they want - however - if you are that good (and my point is these are most often top end players - why is it matching 2 to 4 of these against a complete team of novices? And on a regular basis? I do not buy the argument about starting a new nation - because I have been checking this out and they all seem to have a large amount of vehicles and of those a fair number of upgraded.
I see your point about events - however - my point is about the ridiculous matchmaking of 2-4 very good players and the results they get when matched against a complete team of low rank players who only get a few kills.
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Thing is, same thing occurs at every BR range.
At 10.3 ± 1.0 in my F8U-2, I find matches end based on which side has more premium players who turn their air superiority fighters into ground-strike vehicles. This turns them useless AND easy targets for the other team to get easy and fast kills & wins
At 6.0 ±1, same thing occurs with ground vehicles. One side can be far more competent than the other thanks to rushing to get that big iconic WW2 legendary wonder-weapon.
We can look at all the complaints about clickbait abrams for top tier ground.
Only solutions there are that don’t restrict what you can play (we’re eventually going to reach the point where people consider BR 5.0 “low tier seal clubbing” at the rate they add vehicles…) is skill based matchmaking.
I personally don’t buy the queue/playercount argument. AOE2 had and has SBMM and it has far fewer players. Sure it’s 1v1 or small 4v4 lobbies but we’re also talking 24K players versus warthunder’s 80-120K. Now, WT does also have more game modes but I still doubt the “queue” argument. Especially given how match length in AOE2 ranges from 20-60 minutes depending on match up, ELO and strats used.
Another solution is “lobbies” and we can see how much that gets abused in air sim by zombers and match fixers and people shopping for easy games.
Low br’s are fun. It’s unfair to ask people to abandon tanks they love using when they hit a certain level.
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Read the responses - being Lvl 100 is NOTHING TO DO WITH BEING GOOD - I should know - I’m one!! 😋
You can get to lvl 100 in any of the 3 modes without having any experience in the other 2 at all - or you can just play badly for 5 years and get there.
Your whole premise that level 100 = good player is nonsense.
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I never said that. My premise is that 2-4 Marshals each with 150k kills plus are being put up against teams consisting of relatively inexperienced players and they are wiping the floor with them.
Well, it may be fun. But it also spoils games for newcomers for one or 2 players satisfaction.
At the end of the day what is ‘fun’ - if you are good enough to regularly go seal clubbing and the matchmaking allows 2-4 really good players to absolutely wipe the floor. Is the fun stroking your ego - because it is like shooting fish in a barrel.
I am 62 years old - seen it all - played games for 3 decades. Maybe I no longer understand the fun in seal bashing. But I would argue that what is happening is not random connection based matchmaking - if it was then it would be extremely rare unless these small groups of really highly skilled Marshals were squads or Gaijin has some other criteria.
My personal view is you need something in place and it is not about matching the skills of the whole team - a simple filter maybe. For those who say I have the right to play whatever I want to - at the expense of whole teams who are not having fun (and I guess neither are the majority of the winners). Then tough - no you don’t would be my personal choice.
I have discussed this a few times with these seal clubbing players and the common response is the players need to ‘get good’ - no sympathy - the world is not fair. I do what I want. f-off.
I am not arguing for full SBM - I know the pitfalls - but I would favour a simple filter that says if the CBM turns up a team of low rated players against a team with 2-3 top end players - filter them out and keep looking for connection candidates.
It’s a tale old as time
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This is personal negative bias, I’ve recently had a number of friend show interest in War Thunder so naturally I’m helping them work up through the tech trees (I’ve been playing for 9+ years)
Both teams will have seal clubbers, so its generally more fair and balanced than you think. The one sided battles are a consrquence of one team having ‘more’ experienced seal clubbers and they get run-away victories.
As for team score, the BR is irrelevant. If one team fails to get a foothold score-wise its easy for 50% of the team to have 2-3 deaths each with no kills, and the remaining team members with 2-3 kills and 1 guy at the top with 9 kills complaing/bragging in ‘all-chat’ about how this is the third shit team in a row he’s had tp put up with.
Don’t get too caught up with the idea of seal clubbing ruining low tier battles. Even if they removed high lvl players, it only takes a small difference in skill to have a massive impact at low tiers.
Exactly. I’m still learning as a level 100 player.
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The thing is again it’s not based on BRs.
You’ll have completely inexperienced “how do lead my guns/how do I change what shells I got loaded” people playing at 10+ BR ranges.
If anything, most of my “seal clubbing” as it were happens at 10.3 - people buy mig-21 (r-13) for grinding at like level 1-5 (BR 9.7), load it up with napalm and go fly straight completely unaware and oblivious straight into missiles. This is very regular (at least during sales) to the point I see it as a decent and reliable source of easy SL (as long as they’re on the enemy team).
Reading forum threads, ground is similar with abrams clickbaits.
And we’re gonna get premium tigers it looks like so WW2 brackets are going to experience similar joys.
Some could even say in some aspects that the skillset at lower brackets can have a higher floor than lower ones (I struggle flying a bunch of rank 2 planes in air sim for instance because you cannot trim them and they have horrible visibility and terrible sights, meanwhile rank 5 planes basically fly themselves for you and got ranging radar gyro gunsights) so tying “BR = skill” is a futile and mistaken endeavour.
My last match, I kept running into this level 25 whose stats for the last month look like this:
versus mine:
I fought with a 5.0 vehicle against their 5.7 and we traded 1 to 1 in 2 duels I found a lot of fun.
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Yes you did - it’s right there in the quote from you in my post.