We’ve been made aware of many of your requests for smaller teams in Air Realistic Battles as 16v16 teams are sometimes overwhelming in terms of the number of missiles at once.
With the release of the upcoming major update, we’ll be adding an option to the Air Realistic Battles game selection window where you’ll be able to turn on smaller team sizes.
This mechanic works in the same way as turning on the option for night battles: if there’s enough players in the queue with this option enabled, you’ll have a chance of getting into an air battle with smaller team sizes.
When this option is enabled, you’ll have the chance of getting into a battle with smaller team sizes (min - max: 6 - 12) instead of a regular battle (min - max: 6 - 16). Further adjustments in the future are possible depending on how sessions go.
This will only be for aircraft with a Battle Rating of 10.0 or higher, where high-end air-to-air missiles are far more prevalent.
Thank you for your feedback on this and we hope that this option for smaller teams will make your experience in Air Realistic Battles more enjoyable. Be sure to enable this option with the release of the major update!
Great stuff but please make this mandatory instead of optional for the higher BR brackets (10+) or alternatively inverse it so you toggle the option to get into 6-16 size matches and the norm is 6-12
I think players should have a lot more customisation options over their own matchmaker, Gaijin can collect data on what people do or don’t have as settings and respond to those preferences.
Additionally, conduct polls about BR decompression.
Ask people if they prefer longer waits but decompressed BR, or they prefer shorter wait time but compressed BR.
This is excellent news!! And, to make it even better, you didn’t made a permanent default change, but rather made it a toggleable option. That way, both kinds of players can enjoy Air RB the way they personally prefer, and anyone can try out the other options at any time as well. Thank you, very cool!
EDIT: I thought this was a hard toggle where you would only queue up for the option you selected. I believe that’s how it should be, rather than an option where “you have some chances of joining a smaller match if you toggle the option for it”!
I hope you consider changing this. 16v16 is literally unbearable to many of us!
EDIT 2: in hindsight, maybe this shouldn’t even be a toggleable option hahah.
EDIT 3: yeah, I got overhyped initially, but this is not good a good solution to 16v16. If anything, smaller matches should be the default and 16v16 should be the toggleable option.
Well thats the lamest possible way of doing this.
Just shrink the team sizes for top tier.
There’s no strategy, there’s no watching your back, its just chaos and it gets worse the more top tier increases and everything carries more and more missiles.
Yes but the issue is if not enough people use this option (like night battles) it will be extremely rare for those who do enjoy the different game mode.
Well, technically this implementation is slightly biased on the side of normal size match.
Opting into small matches is an option you have to toggle, but it doesn’t guarantee a small match, it just means you have the possibility to enter one.
Not opting in however is 100% effective, in that case you will play normal size matches exclusively.
I worry that this will become a “night battle” situation, where you rarely get the type of match you opted into because too few of other players did.
Well this sucks. 16v16 is just bad all around, please give us an option to avoid it at lower BRs.
I was looking forward to it, but now I don’t care because it doesn’t affect the planes I play the most.
Edit: This mechanic just sucks all around. Not very many people will enable it, making non 16v16 matches very rare. This is the worst implementation of it there could be. Just remove 16v16 for all BRs.
This is long overdue, thanks for working on it! 12 players might still be too much for top tier ARB though, but we will have to see how it goes.
It would be nice if the requirements for “Hero of the Syk” could be adjusted downward a bit alongside this. It is almost impossible to get in small ARB lobbies.
If there’s not enough players, then the majority of players don’t want it or don’t care. Therefore making it a permanent change for everyone would only mean doing something against the community’s will…
Remember: majority > minority…
An option to upscale the minimum player count for lower tiers could be nice. 6v6 can be kind of slow or imbalanced if more than half of your team are bombers fighting all props. An increase of the minimum to 10 would be preferable if that was an option.
