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.