This is just me guessing but a common complaint about the PL-12 was its abysmal BVR performance.
Sure, most people looked at it pre-changes as a missile with “meh” BVR performance and “well it’s not a MICA/R-77 but it’ll do” WVR performance.
I’m guessing Gaijin wanted to address the lacking BVR performance and they maybe tried to balance out its WVR performance too, same as the changes they did not that long ago with the Derby.
I haven’t played China in a while so I can’t really say from personal experience how bad it is but judging from what I’ve seen from others I think it was a swing and a miss 😬
In fact, testing indicates that the changes to the PID and the center of gravity have reduced the usable G-load (it fails to execute high G-load even when commanded). Furthermore, it only pulls 18–20G at low altitudes, yet achieves 25G at a slightly longer distance (around 5km) and higher altitude, which somewhat contradicts my understanding of missiles.
This primarily affects the missile’s strike capability at the end of the motor burn phase, the beginning of the glide phase, and at both small and large off-boresight angles. In every sense, it is now more similar to the Derby before its rework or the original PL-5B （This passage uses machine translation, and I don’t understand English very well. Thank you.）
