Many players may have a hard time doing the painful stock grinding because they will often face other types of players such as fully modified premiums or spaded vehicles using Golden Eagles giving stock and free to play players a hard time to progress their vehicles. Some could argue that I may be lacking skills to survive in aircraft battles, it may be true but I believe that I cannot be the only one who is experiencing such events so I wanted to share my idea right here.
For now I want to take aircrafts for example, from Rank VI and so on ( or certain Rank V aircrafts ) there are tons of of aircrafts with similar specifications but different loadouts ( Say JAS 39 A and JAS 39 C or multiple Phantoms and MiG-21/23s ). It may be possible to “change” their Battle Ratings according to their certain “modifications” which the game already allowed the players to install/uninstall them at any time. For comparison such as between Air Superiority ( F-15A, F-15J, Su-27, J-11, JAS 39A etc ] and Seek & Destroy update [ F-15C, F-15J(M), Su-27SM, J-11A, JAS 39C F-4F KWS etc ] showed that these aircrafts are not that different from each other in terms of specifications but their loadouts are another story like the brand new Fox 3 missiles which dramatically enhanced the BVR gameplay.
Stock aircrafts or those without them at that Battle Rating ( Let say F-15C at 13.0 with AIM-9L/M and AIM-7M ] should be lowered to 12.3 [ Same as F-15A ] until they installed AIM-120A to their loadouts, similar to increasing spawn costs in realistic ground battle mode or separating Battle Rating for aircrafts in Air and Ground RB. For F-15A with stock AIM-9M can perhaps be lowered to 12.0 until the player installed AIM-7M, same can be done in many aircrafts but not all. Strong aircrafts for its BR like F-104A/C for example can remain unchanged because it has only AIM-9B as its missile, for 9.3 ( at the time of writing ] having AIM-9B does not affect the overall gameplay since many aircrafts with lower BR also have AIM-9Bs as well. Another example is that doing this may help stock grinding older planes with modernized avionics such as F-4F KWS or Tornado F.3 Late with underwhelmed performances compared to other top tier vehicles easier as well as the possibility to give them better weapons such as F-4EJ Kai that could obtain AAM-3 with increasing its BR as a trade-off, adding old but modernized planes with cutting-edge weapons in the future could be more convenient too.
For increasing BR by weapons, it could look like these:
Countermeasure Chaff [ Should be default on Rank VII+]
Countermeasure Pods [ +0.3 ]
High Performance IR AAM (+0.3)
IRCCM-AAM (+0.3)
Semi-Active Radar Homing (+0.3)
Active Radar Homing (+0.7)
Having both Semi-Active and Countermeasure Pods or other combos will always be equal to +0.3 BR except ARH missiles which will always be +0.7 with any combo.
Of course that doing this could affect certain planes with already suitable BR or lower BR vehicles in a bad way such as aircrafts in Rank VII or lower but I believe if this system finds a way to be implemented in the game at certain ranks or in a certain way, it may help many vehicles find more balanced positions both spaded and stock across the more flexible Battle Ratings.