Removeal of the ability to decrease own engine sound

Dude you’re the one crying about a few publicly available sliders being “unfair”.
Being such a drama queen over a miniscule difference while trying to portray himself as “just for fun player” is hilarious. It’s obvious you want to be as competitive as possible, but are unwilling to change few settings to achieve that. Tough luck.

I’ve been playing a few grinding games and never felt like I’m putting out effort. Process of grinding to achieve something is fun to a lot of people.

Don’t worry, you can write a few posts until your low-mid tier air tractor reaches the furball.

Thinking people won’t be competitive in a genre that’s literally made for competition is ludicrous.

Do you even read th forums and all the crying about slow progression, horrible stock grind and bad economy?
The grind is a means to an end.
It’s quite the opposite of fun for a lot of people.
Just like stat padding oftentimes sacrifices fun for a restrictive, disciplined, focused gameplay that is oftentimes boring and tedious.

Oh my sweet child, you simply have never played such a game, and you’re also part of the problem with your sweaty exploiter attitude.
People were a lot less about “competition” in the early 2000’s multiplayer games and fooling around with WW2 guns was “fun enough”, some guys were bad, some were damn good, everybody roleplayed from time to time. I even mentioned the Red Orchestra. Also the Darkest Hour mod. Good old times with actual decent people enjoying the game as is, instead of ruining the experience for everyone just to get a few more kills.

Which is what?

Personally I find each stage of achieved grind to give a little sense of satisfaction, and I have little interest getting to “the end” of top level equipment that I will likely never play.

“Opposite of fun for a lot of people” does not exclude it being fun for other people.

Of course. There are people enjoying getting their family jewels crushed. Such is life. Getting another job, that you have to pay Gaijin for, is surely “fun” for some people.
Probably slightly more fun that sitting alone at home staring at the walls, so fun enough.
But generally, you can play “for stats”, “to grind better” or “just for fun”, and the levels of enjoyment and sources of it vastly differ. You won’t find me complaining about grind and economy. You’ll find me complaining about bad game design.

Never said grinding is fun to all people, which is true for literally everything.

To each their own ?
WT is a grind-y game and certainly isn’t for everyone, especially people that dislike the grind.

Please don’t try to be as competitive as possible in a PvP game, otherwise I’ll go ballistic accusing people of cheating/exploiting/unfairness over a few sliders in the settings.

You are quite a snowflake, aren’t you ?

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sorry but just turn it down… It hurts my ears to have it all the way up, and, in some rare cases, could worsen ear conditions, such as tinnitus. -1

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I refer you to post 153

My laptop was ~5y old and I needed it to run on ULQ. Straight up. One of the best things about WT is the fact that it can run on basically anything - even without a graphics card. It wasnt a matter of 140 or 100 fps, it was a matter of getting either 30fps or like 15.

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Your laptop literally has no graphics card. It had integrated GPU, which is basically good for watching movies and playing C&C Tiberian Sun.
My office computer would also have trouble running WT for the very same reason.
But why should anyone try to run a game on a computer that’s completely unsuitable for gaming? You tell me. 150$ PC from 2014 can run WT in medium settings, although with some fun effects disabled, in full HD.

I use this option (lowering my engine sound) for the same reason as everybody do.

But I wouldn’t care if this setting is removed IF the purpose is to make the game more realistic.
And it would be the same for everyone.
You would just need to adapt yourself a little bit if you are to much used to spot with sound only.

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Because we don’t want to/cant buy another computer for gaming? Most of us just want to casually play after work/school/whatever, and the fact that it can run on anything makes it extremely accessible. Its not even that uncommon among games of this type - I could run WoT or WoWS on it.

WT being able to run on so little is an extremely valuable asset, and people do not realize how valuable it is.

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Because not everyone can spare the money due to more pressing needs, so hardware is outdated. Or you might not want your laptop to start actively melting while still getting decent FPS. People make do as they need.

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The reduction of your own engine sound gives you an active advantage over other players that don’t know about such type of possibility.

Do we remove manual engine controls, sight distance controls and binoculars too? I was playing with a friend who had being playing war thunder on and off for years and never knew he could zoom in. There is a vast array of features most players will never learn to use or bother to experiment with, I don’t see why players not being aware of the volume controls being a reason to remove them.

having them keeping their position as soon as they hear an engine from afar and starting the waiting game behind the next corner.

This change would positivly impact the gameplay by not encouraging camping and would reward active gameplay from managing your noise emmission and lastly would let all the players play on equal terms.

Being able to hear enemy vehicle engine sounds helps detect enemies that are camping behind the corner. This makes camping harder than it would be otherwise.

a passive buff to vehicles that use a rather quiet engine for example wheeled vehicles or most light tanks

With the exception of maybe the Japanese Type 93, all of the ground vehicles in have engines with massive displacement. The lightest vehicles are still trucks after all with truck motors and truck exhausts, you can hear the drone of their engines from hundreds of metres away. Tank engines are a step up again in displacement and their engines are even louder.

Somethine as simple as a Panzer III has a 12.0L engine. The Tiger has a 23L engine, the only unrealistic thing about war thunder’s sound is that it’s not deafening.

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Those are (immersive in MEC, in-universe otherwise) features though.

Like, MEC is easier than true MEC but it helps enhance immersion and is an “in-universe” activity - you as a pilot are interacting with your aircraft at a finer control level that makes in-universe logical sense “Radiators close when I WEP. Can I not force them open for drag and avoid overheating?”. I will concede it needs better introduction and maybe a tutorial, but it’s there, it’s in universe and logical within modelling limitations - if you understand how piston aircraft operate, you can approximate the settings with most planes and get good results. Info may need using cockpit view to look at your dials to determine optimum settings, but there’s an entire mode about flying in cockpit anyhow.

Sight distance controls is also in-universe, maybe not every tank may have had them as fine as we can control them (I can imagine weird interward stuff not being supposed to have fixed ranging, idk). You’re ordering your gunner to zero your guns to a given distance - logic is already presented by “Gun convergence + Vertical Targetting” for aircraft, tanks can just vary it mid-battle due to configuration.

Binoculars has issues of periscope necks that allow for absurdly higher views than you’d expect a vehicle to have, and the commander is weirdly immortal and invulnerable while doing it. However, anyone who has seen WW2 documentaries of tanks driving in formation has seen a commander looking out from the hatch and constantly scanning the horizon. Thus, that’s another in-universe interaction that makes logical sense, and the game constantly tells you “use your binoculars, they’re free.”

What in-universe justification is there for different Own-other people engine volume? There is none.

The in-universe option for achieving the goals of different volumes manifests in the logical action of turning off your very loud, deafening death machine’s engines to hide your presence to set up an ambush and to improve your situational awareness. It also comes at a hefty cost - reaction speed if you get caught and loss of electric traverse if done for too long.

Do you see how the equivalence you try to set up holds no basis as every example you gave is an in-universe interaction, there already exists a in-universe interaction for stealth & awareness. Fiddling with your sound options is an Out-of-Universe interaction.

If we were playing a TTRPG, you’d call it powergaming+metagaming - using out of game/out of character information to “win” that your character has had no access to.

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Those are (immersive in MEC, in-universe otherwise) features though.

My point still stands, whether immersive, ‘in-universe’ or diagetic. The point that OP is making is that some people know more about the ‘video game’ interface controls than others and they are proposing to remove the option for ‘fairness’.

Do you see how the equivalence you try to set up holds no basis as every example you gave is an in-universe interaction, there already exists a in-universe interaction for stealth & awareness. Fiddling with your sound options is an Out-of-Universe interaction.

Suspension of disbelief, immersion and ‘in-universe’ vs out of universe are highly subjective and don’t follow much of a consistent logic from person to person. For example, a combat veteran would have very different ideas of realism compared to an enthusiast. Regardless of how you feel, we’re playing a video game using keyboards, controllers and joysticks looking through monitors or VR headsets. So, I don’t see any merit in you trying to argue engine volume control in the menu vs keybindings in the game. We’re not playing a realistic game, if you want to roleplay and pretend that this is a table top RPG and you’re actually a tank commander, fine. However, these aren’t arguments for or against options in a video game. We can switch between the bodies of the gunner and commander in the tank depending on which perspective is most advantageous, a tank that has lost 2-3 crew members can still function with a Gunner hotseating between the laoder position, and gunner seat whilst also acquiring targets. I’m tired of appeals to realism when the simple fact of the matter that nothing in this game is realistic, the engagements, the operation of vehicles, the method in which we interact with the world. It’s all a nice illusion to make you feel like ‘you’re really there’ the truth of the matter is that the realism of playing game is a step up from watching a war movie.

*Edit - I would like to clarify, I don’t think that War Thunder has failed in any way to make an interesting and immersive game out of vehicle combat. I think some people are entertaining serious delusions when it comes to the idea of ‘realism’ and what counts as immersive, and what breaks their suspension of disbelief.

*Edit 2# @RunaDacino I would happily discuss the merits of features that either contributed or detracted from a sense of immersion if there was any kind of scale, or metric that people agreed upon. Lets say an author from wizards of the coast or pathfinder wrote a guide to world building that extended to digital gaming like war thunder that laid out a metric for immersion and world building. Lets say it rated design choices on a scale of userfriendliness vs immersion, for example minimalist or no Hud when gaming is largely regarded as immersive however it makes it difficult for players to get the necessary feedback from the game to respond appropriately, generally there’s a trade off. So long as we’re talking about your personal feelings as to what does and doesn’t constitute realism and immersion, I’m not going to bother entertaining the conversation.

*Edit 3# @RunaDacino, I do appreciate the time you take to reply whether we agree or disagree. Given the limitations of the game engine I feel that personally, we get more out of being able to manipulate the volume controls for enemy tank detection than we lose in immersion from it being an out-of-universe game function. The fact that tanks can remain undetected at ranges up to 500m is nuts. There are 2 major highways that run through my town, If I’m anywhere in a 10km radius of the centre of town I can hear trucks. When I’m playing the game with noise cancelling headphones I mistake the drone of trucks for enemy vehicles sometimes. There’s also issues with the sound mixing, part of the reason that the detection works so well is that at a certain range enemy vehicles’ sounds ‘pop’ into existence which tells players that there’s a new vehicle in range. Additionally, friendly vehicle engines sounds are already significantly louder than enemy vehicles, technically speaking min-maxing the engine volume, only works when you’re isolated from allied vehicles so it’s not as if the developers haven’t included methods to balance the implementation.

The Wiesels all have car engines too, they’re one of the very few vehicles that really should be much quieter than they are right now.

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Fair I forgot about them

And tabletop is played with pen and paper or digital replacements (including MUDs in this). None tolerate the usage of out-of-universe tools and information outside of theorycrafting and those absolutely necessary for execution of the concept, perhaps to enhance it.

I do not think this is highly subjective at all, HRP vs LRP differentiates itself by these subjects quite cleanly within SS13 after all.

It is marketed as such. It was toned down unfortunately, but one must not forget the differentiation of arcade, historical and full-realistic being the proper titles (and now we have arcade, realistic and sim. You’d think based on wordings, a greater emphasis is placed on in-universe consistency, not less.)

In fact, notice me explicitly using in-universe rather than realistic. While I enjoy using the shorthand of “realism” to discuss character behaviour and quality in realms of spaceships, dragons and suspiciously earth-animal like aliens, people do the same thing you are doing and thus I’m skipping the short-hand and use “in-universe consistency.”

There is no in-universe consistency, no matter how you spin it, that your engine is more quiet due to an out-of-game action than your opponent’s and teammates. Such a thing is suitable for arcade perhaps, but not realistic and especially not sim.

It, much to my disdain, functions even in air sim. Fortunately, even with your engines completely turned down and cockpit opened, all you can hear is plane ASMR (deafening wind).

Plane ASMR flying close to another plane in test-flight.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smcqaqkupV0

Imagine if you could turn down the wind noise, I don’t think anyone would ever support such an idea.

In fact, it used to be your canopy being open did NOT deafen you like this and thus, this thread was born:

It actually got through as you can hear in the glorious plane asmr demonstration ™.

Ground battles could definitely use improvements, especially in mission design and controls and views could at very least be brought to the level of Red orchestra 2 for sim mode (and it should have its matchmaking fixed so that I can actually play my firefly there when I’m actually in the mood…)

However, can you - giving concessions for the numbers involved due to server load and rendering limitations - genuinely claim that in Enduring Confrontation, a wing of british bombers and american escort fighters taking off, climbing to altitude in Britain and flying in formation across the British channel to perform bombing runs on the northern coast of france to be intercepted by european axis (italian, german) aircraft is not an authentic approximation of missions preceeding and surrounding the Normandy invasion? The pilot’s skill, plane quality, fuel access, training levels are obviously ahistorical for this period of the war and the bombers have frustratingly CIWS-level stabilized gunners even while on fire and plummeting to their deaths but the fighter to fighter engagement? It’s easily on par with late 2000s civillian flight sims with simplified engine management. It’s absolutely outperformed by more modern titles, but hey- warthunder is a late 2000s accessible/entry-level air combat sim (il-2 wings of prey) turned into an MMO.

I wish time and time again we could have experiences like I described above for ground battles. Ground EC; world war mode, playable sim (why is my firefly never available when I feel like it…)

Thus, I think it’s very much worth arguing to improve Warthunder’s in-universe consistency. Actions, engagements, victories and losses should be the merit of in-universe logic and actions rather than those you cannot even justify even on level of accessibility features like markers in RB/AB or third person view or instructor. These out of universe features exist for everyone equally without a way to gain an unintended advantage from them. You can choose to play without them BUT! There’s game modes that make such settings standard so that’s a fair solution.

And as an aside -

I have issues with sensory and information processing and executive function. These coalesce to give me, on paper, quality hearing but in reality a fairly useless set of ears that do not know how to filter important from unimportant leading to situations where a person next to me is talking on the second floor of a building, I’m staring and straining at them and I do not hear a single word of what they said because of cars whipping past down the street. High school was fun. So especially for me, the ability to remove background noise and elevate important ones through sound mixing IS a pretty big improvement. However, here’s the thing: It’s even more of an improvement for someone whose brain can actually identify important noise and filter it into the forefront so in the end, I don’t feel it evens any playing fields. Plus, it makes sound-based spotting kind of a necessity. And for noise sensitivity, there’s always playing at low master volume or universally turning engine noise down. I know I use everything at 20-30% master volume on my computer.

Regarding your edits,

Sound mixing itself I can definitely see as needing an improvement. It’s been noted aircraft are pretty quiet in-game after all, when in real life (had the (mis)fortune of living in a part of europe that has helicopters/millitary jets flying over the past few years) you can hear those guys from easily dozens of kilometers away if you don’t have something louder to drown it out.

I also agree about spotting/rendering issues. You can see me rant fairly often in other threads linking a demonstration about its maximum absurdity (not my reddit post, but it’s very telling - guy is looking at a plane and it pops in and out of existence for no in-universe or real life justification - https://www.reddit.com/r/WarthunderSim/comments/1gvbc0y/now_i_understand_exactly_why_i_sometimes_lose/ ). Much to my chagrin, it does not come up often in tanks IME since the maps I roll are just… seversk, seversk, cargo port, seversk rather than ones where longer ranges might come up.

I think, in realistic and sim modes all vehicles should be treated equally for sound, altered only by their proximity and nature (incl state) and absolute game performance limitations (calculating sound propagation in a realistic way is very taxing in SS13 to the point we added a setting to turn off vent sounds as it made some people’s computers chug), so simple bubbles of on/off feel an acceptable compromise if done in a granular enough manner to not be so blatant as it currently is.

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You literally need a PC older than average WT gaijin target demographic to run it better than in ULQ. In other words, you need “graphics card” and that’s it. Thr only computer than can only run ULQ is office setup.
It’ll be 2025 in 2 weeks ans maybe we should stop acting like people who can’t afford a 100$ PC are paying customers. Such people are probably fighting for food with rats and wild cats, while avoiding cannibals in an irradiated desert.

Laptops exist, and still in the current year their performance is as lacking as ever.

If only it was that cool.

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