New ARCADE aiming

Machinery of War Discussion Navy
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27

I don’t disagree. Just trying to look at it from the company’s perspective.

They have two very similar modes, splitting the audience and increasing queue time. Many feel with the faster reaction times required and more complex air and torpedo games, AB is actually the higher-skill mode over RB, the reverse of the rest of WT. And compared to the other modes, naval overall remains terribly unpopular, just purely in terms of player numbers.

So, how to fix. Well, if they want to get things back in order, RB needs to become the harder mode again, even as the two modes need to differentiate from each other more. But they can’t make RB itself harder, it’s struggling to keep players now. So they have to make AB easier, hope the people who played AB for the skill switch over, and then they pick up a new audience of low skill players who just like the shooting and explosions.

I suspect they’ll lose more of those long-time AB players than they think they will though, RB is still a slower mode requiring less situational awareness and having less variety of play than they’re used to and those players will tire of the new AB quickly. A likely outcome is, somewhat like ground and air now, we see an AB low-tier/RB high-tier split. Some people still play AB air and ground at high tier, no question, not saying otherwise… but in both those modes, as people play more of the game they tend to switch their primary mode to RB at some point. So if this change sticks, I’d be willing to bet the same thing happens as in the other mode, where AB has a strong gradient of low-tier over high-tier players, and RB the reverse.

5 Likes
28

You only have to hit one section on coastals for instance. If you hit the bow, for instance and turn it black, you just have to keep shooting it, and it will count as damage to the entire vessel. It’s a terrible mechanic,

3 Likes
29

Agree with you, naval AB now is same as RB, but have unlimited torpedo reloading, faster speed and bomber aiming assistance, other than that they totally are the same as RB.

30

dude, play more RB and u will know what I say.

31

Way back when they launched naval, the devs said they likely could never make this work as a mode with ships bigger than destroyers, or modern missile vessels. I suspect a lot of the current AB audience, well, more than they’d like anyway, will decide they’re right and move on to other naval games.

I recognize it’s wicked hard to find a way to make it work in a real-time game, but the simple fact is most of the core of battlewagon naval combat in this era isn’t maneuver, it’s the complexities of long range precision fire while on the move. That is the actual meat in the bun here. By abstracting all that out, all you’re left with is a Naval Damage Control Simulator in AB, and not a very good one. AB players will tire quickly of the precision ammo-racking this will produce, I suspect.

2 Likes
32

I don’t know why so many people repeat this so often.

In Naval Arcade:

  • almost instant FCS (lead calculation)
  • visiblity rules are completely different
  • it’s easier to select enemy ships, mainly thanks to nameplates
  • maneuverability and speed are improved
  • you don’t have to manually correct the shooting distance all the time
  • unlimited torpedoes
  • unlimited missiles (at least before the devs changed it, now some vessels are limited)
  • unlimited depth charges (they could be useful when submarines will be added to the game)
  • faster turret rotation speed
  • faster breach repair speed
  • Arcade rules for planes (different flight model, unlimited ammo)

And probably many other things I forgot to mention. Saying these two game modes are “very similar” is definitely not correct.

Using the same logic, you could say Air Arcade and Air Realistic are “very similar” and Ground Arcade and Ground Realistic are also “very similar”. In fact, there are much fewer differences between Ground modes, especially after the devs removed unlimited rockets/missiles from Ground Arcade battles (now both game modes use exactly the same ammo box mechanics).

It’s also interesting that Naval Arcade was always the most popular Naval game mode (I know Naval Realistic players refuse to accept this). Maybe in devs heads the aiming change in Naval Arcade will force some Arcade players to move to Realistic. But this is a very risky move, especially these game modes are so different. I will probably just stop playing Naval game mode completely, I’m 99% sure I won’t move to Naval Realistic. If Naval Realistic is so unpopular, maybe this game mode should be changed instead? Because there is clearly a problem. Making the Arcade game mode significantly worse just to force their players to choose the lesser evil and switch to Realistic seems like an idiotic plan.

Like I said before, I don’t see how such change could attract new players to the game mode. In Ground Arcade and Air Arcade, you still have to do the correction yourself. Yes, you have some helpers (e.g. in Air Arcade you have lead indicator), but guns don’t adjust automatically there, you still have to move your mouse left/right/up/down to aim before you fire (just like in the current Naval Arcade).

The new aiming in Naval Arcade is unintuitive, even new players will struggle to understand what is going on. Every player who played Ground Arcade or in fact any other similar game knows that you have to lead to hit moving target. Even if you play FPS game you have to do this. So, are they trying to attract 5-year-old players who have never played a game before? Because after this change the whole Naval Arcade shooting system will be literally holding the left mouse button (you don’t even have to look at the screen, just hold that button) until the enemy dies.

6 Likes
33

Just wait for the feature to make its way to RB, then ask those who are saying just to play RB, how they like it…

2 Likes
34

I both play AB and RB, this change will make AB aiming system like WOWS, more new blood is good for everyone, so I welcome this change.

1 Like
35

Yes, in top tear battleship match, except shacrnhost, the game now is who can first explosion enemy mag.

1 Like
36

This is not true. Have you ever played WoW? In WoW you still need to make a correction based on enemy movement.

For example, you can check this guide:

Spoiler

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XiMlubUlrGA

At 3:46, you can see that this guy still need to aim in front of the enemy ship to hit it, because the ship is moving to the left:

Spoiler

Before the shells will land there, the enemy ship will move to this area.

With the new aiming for Naval Arcade in War Thunder, you will always have to aim at the ship, and this correction will be done automatically. So you basically don’t have to aim at all, you just press left mouse button, everything else will be done for you. I personally don’t know any game with such aiming system.

3 Likes
37

Dude, the new aiming system only help on calculate the heading angle, but u still need to judge the approaching distance. And u should play more larger ship not just in moffett, in larger ship battle, u enemy will not just go in the same direction with u.

38

Poul, we’ve agreed to disagree on this before. What I said was, compared to ground and air, naval AB and RB are the most similar. I don’t have to adjust my playstyle at all really jumping between them once I account for the speed factor. Same lineup, same map, same number of lives, same spawnpoints. Air and Ground AB and RB attract very different audiences by comparison and have very different experiences as a result. I can’t stand air RB because I dislike single-life TDM. If they took away Air AB I’d go to sim. Likewise ground AB and RB, because I like planes I have specced out and spaded myself not something given to me randomly as a kill streak reward. If they took away ground RB as it is today I’d probably just stop playing ground. More importantly for this discussion, because I’d never queue for the other mode, my queueing for one doesn’t affect anyone’s matches per hour.

Naval, most people I play with are at least prepared to jump back and forth depending on what’s the easier daily bonus to get. If they could queue for both AB and RB at the same time to bring the queue time down, a lot of them would. It does have a splitting effect on the audience if the modes are that similar, as I’m not able to queue for both, queue times on both sides for everybody are longer, and the combined playerbase is already too small with under 6-minute queue times to be sustainable without Gaijin bots as we’ve seen.

And AB does, generally, offer the better match. It was harder to be botted during the botscript wave and so for a long time AB was the mode you played for fun, and RB was the mode you played to grind because the presence of both Gaijin and third-party bots meant you were often the only human there, and you were basically in a PvE mode (less true due to recent waves of account bans).

All that as an aside, as I do agree with your general point, as I also think players are generally too path dependent to change and a lot of AB players could just “nope out” here. Of course, I like the naval aiming challenge, and I’ve gotten quite good at it so I recognize I have a bias here. But I have to remember the “new AB” is not for me or you, or anyone else who plays the current mode. They’re trying to make AB into a mode that attracts people entirely unlike us as far as what we value in a naval game. I’m also skeptical those people exist, for the same reasons as you. It takes the game even farther away from anything recognizably naval.

“IRL naval” was almost never about “where on the ship you hit something”, it was about hitting the ship AT ALL. Because the new game will become about precise pixel aiming to kill key systems, it diverges from that reality even farther. And because players who stay on and do the mode a lot will know exactly what their opposition is in and exactly how to one-shot it and with these rule changes be reliably able to do so, I don’t think it will become a very friendly mode for new players… the exact opposite in fact. Or a mode that really anyone who enjoys high BR combat will stay with for long, same as air and ground AB bleeds them away today.

I believe they did have to do something different for the game here, involving differentiation of the two modes and further simplification of AB. The modes steadfastly refuse to grow an audience, naval premiums sell very poorly now compared to the other modes, that’s undeniable, it can’t be worth the effort they’re having to invest into the mode to keep it going at present. I don’t think what we’re seeing on dev server as their move in this regard will work as they expect, that’s all. I’m saying it’s understandable but ill-advised.

3 Likes
40

Not true, it does both for you and adjusting your range is basically removed as a feature. It’s mindless.

2 Likes
41

I’m actually all for it. If this system will be simple enough that even warships players could enjoy it - naval gamemode might have more than 7 people playing it again. Things gotta change and that’s a fact. The whole coastal fleet tree is just so damn boring that it’s not even funny. Warthunder’s naval is already much better than their contenders. Adjustments is all you need.

1 Like
42

I feel the adjustments we need is design.

We should make Navy EC more readily available. That’s the only fun navy mode, but you can only do it on weekends and that’s gonna be hard to arrange and hard to justify over other activities you can only do on the weekend.

Navy EC makes it actually feel like a ship based game.

AB/RB feels like a “spawn in and click the enemy from spawn” because that’s your only option on most maps as there’s direct LoS spawn to spawn and you’re way too slow (and the crowd makes maneuvering a pain). Ton of weird islands and such would get in the way and doesn’t feel too realistic for larger ships.

EC solves that for me.

1 Like
43

Dude, I have and I don’t enjoy it.

45

If the argument is we need a better tutorial, I agree. If the argument is there should be zero learning curve so new players can just drool on their keyboard and watch explosions, I disagree.

I didn’t play this mode for 12 years to have it dumbed down so anyone with a pulse could play.

5 Likes
46

Two of the most consistent and frequent complaints when the overall playerbase is asked what they’d like to see for Naval that may make them play it (and/or prevents them from playing it as it is) are it being “boring” / too slow / TTK is far too long, and the aiming system is unintuitive, clunky, awful to use (which it is and always has been).

While I don’t think this exact system going to RB would be good, we do absolutely need a significant overhaul to how aiming/ranging is handled.

 

Suggestions like “more EC” and “better tutorials” are wildly off the mark, in terms of what’s actually needed for the long term health and growth of the mode.

2 Likes
47

That takes about 1 second…

1 Like
48

Please point to these complaints. I haven’t seen them anywhere.

Making it more boring isn’t the answer. With the combination of the new aiming system which completely removes any skill and makes it nearly impossible to dodge shots and the new damage system which means you can just point at 1 or 2 pixels on the ship and fall asleep on the mouse button, that’s not going to bring any new players with the exception of bots or people who are looking for braindead leveling to sell accounts.

5 Likes