Responding to the Severe Damage feedback & release time

Official News, Development Blogs and Updates
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Yes, the battle summary screen will show you different kill count than a scoreboard.

Severe damage means I caused 2 severe damages to planes in this battle.

Air Targets Destroyed means I directly killed and finished 9 planes in this battle.

Let’s say if you severely damage a plane, and then finish him you receive +1 severe damage and +1 air target destroyed.

If you severely damage a plane, and then your teammate finish him, you receive +1 severe damage and +0 air targets destroyed. But on the scoreboard you will still receive +1 kill. So your number of kills on the scoreboard and on the battle summary screen will be different.

At least that’s how I understand this difference.

Like the devs wrote:

the severe damage mechanic simplifies the system for scoring an aircraft destruction and makes it more understandable and transparent

That’s sarcasm, if you didn’t get it.

That’s correct, because the new severe damage replaced previous kill conditions. So if you are severely damaged, you would already be dead in the old system.

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129

They have made it so stupidly over complicated for a game my accountant would love this sort of thing

Do i realy need to have pop ups in battle ssying severely damaged aircraft destroyed when im trying to dogfight. Like you said it was better before this complicated rubbish

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130

Dont worry. Your virtual instructor is struggling to get his head around it also lol

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I can Totally See this in a lesser degree being implemented in Realistic and Simulation battle but in Arcade it is nearly unplayable and completely negates some game mechanics not to mention the Enjoyment factor

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A short summary of a pure prop Air RB player of changes to crits, assists and severe damage mechanics:

  1. Crits became much rarer since the 15th of February, 2024. Based on my observations crits on fighters became extremely rare, crits on 2 or 4 engine bombers lead sometimes to nothing, sometimes to a " kill assist".
  2. Due to much rarer crits, my total number of assists decreased quite substantially - it looks for me that crits on bombers are the best way to get assists - in case you need them. Shooting on fighters result usually in instant kills - or just hits.
  3. Severe damage: Overcomplicated, but not suited to solve anything. But, i am happy to see that kill numbers are just “inflated” in result screen, but not in the overall statistics.

This means for me:

  1. I avoid / skip any daily or special tasks which include crits or assists. Even the short cut to get these tasks very fast (just crit enemy ai planes to collect crits and assists) is not working anymore - almost every hit on them is either an instant kill or just a hit. Even the special task “kill 20 bases” is done way faster than 30 crits right know.
  2. I see a reduced overall mission score - due to way less crits and assists - than before. A crit gained 175 points and an assist usually around 500 points. Severe damages (if finished by others) lead now to ~ 5-600 points.
  3. From the economy perspective: Less crits and assists means less SL/RP income. The 80% SL/RP reward for a severe damage (so in case he got finished) looks impressive and contributes to the skill bonus for RP but i do not really benefit from this, as it is way more likely to score instant kills.

So for me as “non-kill driven” & “non-score driven” player (i play just 4 fun) it looks not really like an improvement.

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133

Addition to my last post:

Gaijin - adjust your in-game orders - otherwise this looks like a scam.

Example?

If i play 1 vs 1 (as last players in both teams) and i am sure that i am able to kill the enemy, i usually activate an anti-air order. This grants me 3 times the SL than for a standard kill. It gets really interesting if you have additionally an SL booster activated.

Without any boosters: Instead of 5.348 SLs for a kill, i get 16.044 SLs.

With you new logic and calculation method i am screwed if i am unable to instant kill the last enemy.

In this match (replay link) i scored vs the last player (i was also the last in my team):

2 hits for 267 SL each
1 critical hit for 535 SL
1 severe damage for 4.278 SL
and
1 own target (rest of reward) for 1.070 SL (=the actual kill)

I activated an anti-air order (outcome of a 60.000 SL loot box), killed the last guy and received…3.210 SL (=3 x 1.070 SL) instead of the expected 16.044 SL as in the “pre-severe damage” implementation time.

Yes, you might argue why i shot both of his wings off instead of cutting the tail off or kill both pilots with one shot - just to meet to meet the instant kill requirements - but some guys fly without mouse aim…and have wing mounted guns, and are happy if they hit in the first place.

As imho this outcome can’t be designed on purpose, i kindly ask you to fix this asap, or at least forward it to the devs. Thx!

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134

It will significantly decrease “dead plane just killed me!” complains. This whole system was designed for that. In like 99% of situations players can’t complain anymore that someone with grey nameplate just killed them.

When you take a look at the previous screenshot I posted:

Spoiler

In the old system, I would be considered a “destroyed” plane already, and my nameplate would be grey. But I could still fly and shoot, so I would still be able to kill some players. In the new system I have red nameplate whole the time, so every enemy see I’m dangerous.

Like I said many times before, that’s a mentality “problem”. I always considered grey planes as “still dangerous”, but that’s me. Most players didn’t and this whole new severe damage system is designed for such players. This is exactly why the devs refuse to distinguish severely damaged planes now. I would prefer if they did, but we would be back to “dead plane just killed me!” scenario. Because most players would see different nameplate color (or additional symbol) and ignore that target, because “he is severely damaged, so not dangerous anymore!”.

Well, it should affect statistics of both players. I haven’t tested this myself, but according to one of the articles:

The overall reward when two players play a part in the destruction of an enemy is higher with the severe damage mechanic: 80% to the player that caused the severe damage, and 40% to the player who got the finishing off. As a result, both players will receive a kill in the statistics window for defeating the enemy, which is taken into account when unlocking camouflages and completing tasks.

If I understand this correctly, it will affect stats of both players. Basically the K:D of vehicles won’t be accurate anymore, because one death can result in 2 kills in statistics. This K:D is later used by Gaijin to balance vehicles, so it will also affect balancing in the long term. I suspect planes with better guns can move up in BR because of this change (such planes will have more “fake” finishing kills in their stats).

Yeah, that’s the problem. As long as shared kills are involved in battles, you will globally see less score than before. But the lack of critical hits is even more significant from the score perspective. I hope they will bring back old critical hits, but we don’t even know if that’s a bug or not, or at least I’m still not sure.
I understand the logic behind some other players saying that’s just the new system design, to not increase RP/SL gains globally. But the devs could reduce game mode rewards multipliers to even out RP/SL rewards. They don’t really have to reduce the score to achieve that.

There will be many more problems like this one. For example, we will soon have a challenge to get 2 kills in 15 seconds. In the old system that was easy. In the new system you will often receive 2 severe damages instead and there is no way to tell when these guys will actually die. In theory they could treat severe damage as a kill for awards (I saw this suggestion in the previous topic), but what to do with finishing then? And what if one player first severe damage and then finish his own target? There are a lot of problems with this new system and you can’t fix them easily.

For me personally, this new system fixed one “problem”, but added many other problems. And knowing Gaijin, it’s impossible now to revert this system and go back to the old one. So we will have to live with what we have now.
It also definitely doesn’t help that most players still think this new system is great, because they don’t even understand how it works. I see many comments on different Discord servers from players saying this new system is great, but “bugged”, and they still sometimes get “their” kills stolen. Right…

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135

Fix your damage model first - so planes without wings cant fly normally and shoot enemy down.
Lost a battle because game decided Hurricane without half of a wing is fine while my bomber without 1 engine was counted as dead.
Damage model is all ower the place in this game.

The only good thing about severe damage mechanic it is harder for teammates to kill steal.

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The overall reward when two players play a part in the destruction of an enemy is higher with the severe damage mechanic: 80% to the player that caused the severe damage, and 40% to the player who got the finishing off. As a result, both players will receive a kill in the statistics window for defeating the enemy, which is taken into account when unlocking camouflages and completing tasks.

I just tested this part, and it’s wrong. The funny thing is that I had a feeling it might be wrong even before this test.

The devs assumed (without checking) that what you see on the scoreboard matters, but that’s not the case.

What matters is the post-battle screen. I expected this, because it works the same way for assists. You can get e.g. 10 assists from scouting (Intelligence) on the scoreboard, but you won’t see these assists on the post-battle screen, and they won’t count for tasks and challenges. So I assumed kills should work the same way.

I’m sure the devs will fix this some day, but it won’t be an easy fix. They will have to create the “spaghetti code” and it will work differently for kills and assists. And then try to explain this difference to new players. Like I said, there will be many issues with this severe damage mechanics. It’s just terribly designed and not very well thought out.

To test this I found a task that required me to do kills (of course I’m always unlucky in this kind of situations and I had to waste a lot of SL and 85 GE to find the correct task):

Spoiler

Then I severely damaged an enemy plane in battle:

Spoiler

And waited for my teammate to finish him:

Spoiler

As expected, I received 1 kill on the scoreboard:

Spoiler

And 0 kills but 1 severe damage on the post-battle screen:

Spoiler

The problem is, this kill wasn’t added to my stats (in the service record), and it wasn’t counted towards the task progress! So this doesn’t work properly even though the official article says it should. They simply didn’t check this. They could do the same thing as I did above, right? How long it takes, 10-15 minutes? But who would waste their time, making sure the new system is working properly. It’s cheaper to just implement something without testing, then let players test it and eventually report bugs.

I can’t say I’m surprised, because I have seen this type of situation often in the past. I would be embarrassed to release such an update. I prefer to test everything multiple times before releasing it publicly.

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137

and to add a little sarcasm (or not…?): the bug report on this issue will at first be denied as “no bug”…

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This was for me extremely rare - happened for me just in 2 ways in Air RB:

  1. I killed a bomber (non-pilot snipe) and spraying gunners got a lucky shot.
  2. I killed an ai plane (same as above) and ai gunner got a lucky shot after.

All kinds of other “post morten” kills i saw just in replays of friends addicted to Ground RB which were bombed/missiled by “dead” planes because they stopped firing after the kill message - or in Jet RB (mainly Thunder Show) when a guy managed to release A2A missiles whilst going down.

I was not aware that this is a major problem - and needs therefore a solution with the described (and imho severe) side effects.

Imho the keyword is “statistics window for defeating the enemy”. So as shown in your following post the

is exactly what i mentioned - no inflated kill statistics on vehicle stats.

And this was my major concern some time ago. And i appreciate that cause there can’t be 2 kills in the overall statistics for 1 plane shot down…

They are already there - in addition to my “anti-air” order experience - i tested the order “be the best” - giving you guaranteed 15.000 SL if you got the highest score in max 5 minutes. I severely damaged the last enemy (just we 2 were still alive), activated the order and he crashed.

He got the 135 points for getting shot down - and i got 90 points when he finally crashed - in other words i made a donation of 15.000 SL and wasted an order…

Imho you follow here an illusion - if the stolen kills are not credited to your general game and vehicle stats (like right now) the new system is worse than the old world, because there a now severely damaged plane was counted as a kill - and now not.

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139

The Old System was Perfect especially for Arcade, However I will re-iterate for RB and SB this is probably very useful but since don’t play those with an Aircraft i can not say for certain. Now though have had Several Instances plane has no Damage Modules at all and A single Shot Mid Wing sends the plane into a Black Death Spin, Bombers Lose a single Engine and enter a nose dive, EFS have become nearly useless as, now as soon as an engine catches fire it instantly dies and or rips off the Wing.

Just My Opinion now but couldn’t we have had the new system messages without having to completely change how the planes reacted to damaged Modules

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This mechanic is fine , but for 4 kills just 1k rp is just a joke . This needs a buff in my personal opinion.

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Cause it (at least the changes to crits) are not.

A lot of times last night, I’d kill a plane in one pass, but it wasn’t an insta-kill, so I got the severe damage points and then the extra 20% kill points a half second later.

If they’d kept crits the way they were before, you could potentially get the severe award, then the crit award, and the death award, all in the same pass, but separated out, when you were doing something similar, which likely would have seemed extremely confusing. So yeah, crits on instakill were almost certainly removed deliberately, which is the biggest part of the score reduction here.

I actually don’t mind the new mechanic otherwise, I just wish that a score reduction hadn’t been part of it, without some kind of offset, for that to not increase the relative difficulty of air events (and the air contribution to ground and naval score as well).

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Like i said earlier its broken but you said its working as intended

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Oh, so you tried to say that kill-related tasks are not progressing as they should? Sorry, I didn’t understand your previous post then:

I thought you complained about seeing different kill results on the scoreboard and on the post-battle screen, because you never mentioned tasks in your message.

According to Gaijin, severe damage should be enough to progress your tasks, but this is not the case. So it’s indeed broken.

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144

What do you expect with 3 different results. To many cooks. I got planes flying around with mid section wig part all blacked out, all sorts of funny things going on

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So, overall, I like the mechanic so far in terms of certain cases where I likely would have gotten a kill but some jerk YOLO rushes up behind me take it, especially when trying to unlock some of the camo’s that have proved a bit harder in planes I just don’t do well in for some reason (Ki-45’s) or that are seriously in the wrong BR, at least in AB (F-84F, F-111, F-105). But it also needs some refining when it comes to wing damage. It’s one thing when my plane loses half a wing, especially the US ones, where it’s a pain, but yeah, I can still fly it back or even fight. When my plane has lost an entire wing in which there is no way to really control it - it should just be shot down and full credit awarded from the go. On the same note - I feel like the after battle stuff needs to be organized better, maybe don’t divide the rewards for your own kills with 20% in one section and the other 80% in another.

Also - slightly related, I feel like it’s since this was implemented if the A-10 even loses one of rear stabilizers or takes significant damage to it, it becomes unflyable and starts to nose dive where as pretty much any other plane I play can straight lose one and be fine, just not as great at turning. I mean I’m not an expert on the A-10, but especially in Arcade mode a Biplane I admit I ignored cause I thought something else was more of a threat managing to get a small burst that turned my right stabilizer black (still attached) before someone hit him with a sparrow doesn’t really seem like it should be fatal to an A-10. It also oddly always seems to be the right stabilizer.

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Feedback

If i try to connect this:

with this statement:

I’d like to inform you that it might be worth to think about an in-game message - informing the severely damaged player that he got severely damaged.

Why?

I just came out of Air RB match (replay) on the infamous City map in which i got kicked out of the match at 8:28 (ticket defeat thx to poor map design leading to very fast auto ticket bleed and enemy PvE players) due to a severe damage i haven’t even noticed.

What happened?

  • I critted a B-26 at 6:23. The player scored at 6:29 a hit on my horizontal stabilizer - making both stabilizers black.
  • But i didn’t even noticed that i got severely damaged - i had zero problem to kill him with my second approach at 7:05.
  • Seeing my tickets melting i tried to get rid off my 800kg bomb before the game ended.
  • Whilst dropping the match ended and i got declared as crashed, assigning the kill to the B-26.

So i got declared dead in a fully functional plane thx to a single hit by a gunner on my horizontal stabilizer.

No offense, but this can’t be right.

I have zero problems losing by tickets or getting shot down - but according to your own definition (“…and destruction of all horizontal stabilizers (or the remainder of the horizontal stab)…”) i was not severely damaged.

So in addition to my proposal of a new in-game message “You got severely damaged” i kindly ask you to review your parameters for severe damage or how they are implemented. It makes for me no sense if the stabilizer is black and i am unable to notice performance deterioration.

Furthermore:

  • What i am supposed to do to avoid being kicked with a working plane?
  • Check the scoreboard if the enemy i attacked earlier has after my attack a +1 on his kill list? And then?
  • Run to base to repair before the game is over in order to avoid a plane loss?
  • Or avoiding engagements in general if the timer or remaining tickets runs out soon and you are too far away from your base?

A short reply would be highly appreciated; thx in advance!

Edit:

In addition i’d like to add a kind of summary of the severe damage mechanic which i posted in another thread:

Highlights of the new mechanic and what some of you missed / ignored:

  • In parallel to the test phase gaijin changed their mechanics to get critical hits - they became much rarer than before the 15th of February
  • As a result tasks requiring crits became much harder to complete
  • Same as with kill assists as they require usually a crit
  • Current you score either an instant kill or you score a hit before you score a severe damage
  • In order to get a “clean & instant kill” - so without the chance for others for a kill steal - you need to kill the pilot or shoot the tail off.
  • You get 80% of the rewards of a clean kill for a severe damage. The fun fact is that the requirements for a severe damage are more or less identical to those for a clean kill (with 100% reward) in the old world.
  • In other words it get more complicated and a clean kill in the past can now be stolen.
  • Regarding kill steals: If you score a severe damage and somebody else finishes the plane, the mechanic counts your damage as a kill - but just in this match. In your overall plane statistics you won’t find this kill.
  • That is the reason why you see so many clubbers diving on planes without wings as they can score a kill relevant for their stats.
  • On the other hand we have (like in the OP) fully functional aircraft declared as severe damaged and written off after tickets or time ran out. This loss is counted in your stats and is imho a scam and just implemented to produce repair cost.
  • Other players like @_Poul tested gajin’s claim that those kills based on severe damage (so not finishing or a “real” kill) will count for tasks or camos. Currently this is not working.
  • On top of that the match score got lower, at least on average as you get less crits, less assists and less points for instant kills. So any score driven event gets slightly harder

The only thing what is positive is that the severe damage reward generates way more SL than a kill assist. But as outlined above this is imho not enough to compensate the negative effect - at the end of the day you lose score & SL/RP.

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147

so in consequence they should change the BP-tasks with crits to “get ## number of severe hits”