You are mixing many different situations in one post. The truth is, there is no perfect way to determine which plane is dead and which isn’t, because of hundred different ways you can damage different planes in War Thunder.
It’s easy to say they should improve the logic of considering planes dead, but honestly, how would you do this? Every plane model is different, and the same damage can have a different outcome depending from e.g. a speed of your plane. And I totally understand you can do something like if plane has 63% of left wing damaged and the speed is below 153 km/h then consider it dead and yeah it will work for one specific plane, but it won’t work for the other plane. How many such conditions the game would have to check? And the devs would first have to add such conditions.
Unless you use some advanced AI, that will learn from the outcome of specific situations, it’s simply impossible to implement such system. And even AI won’t make it 100% correct, because if someone appears to be flying straight and maybe be able to land, but then turns too sharply at some point, destabilize the plane and completely lose the control, that’s something even the best AI can’t predict in advance.
This is also why the old system had situations where “dead” planes were still alive from time to time. For me it wasn’t a problem, but apparently it was a huge problem for some other players. And the changes you see in the game with the severe damage mechanics improved this area.
I can’t deny the severe damage mechanics hugely reduced the number of situations, where “dead” planes are still dangerous, it’s a fact. The problem is, this mechanics created many more issues in different areas of the game. And many of these issues are not easy to fix, or even impossible to fix.
In my opinion, the game became worse after adding the severe damage mechanics. But it’s just my opinion, right? Look at the general opinion of players or content creators, they love the severe damage mechanics. Yeah, I know most of them don’t even understand this mechanics, but it doesn’t matter. Most players are happy, Gaijin is happy, everyone is happy, right?
I remember I watched one of the big YT content creators, and when he “explained” the severe damage mechanics and showed some content, he had a situation, where he cut less than half of the enemy wing, the enemy started spinning. Then his teammate came and killed that target. The content creator only got an assist and he said: “as you can see this mechanics still has bugs, but don’t worry, they will be fixed in the future!”. At this point I wanted to shout: “No, they won’t, because you simply misunderstood the mechanics!”. I even wrote a comment under his video, explaining this situation, but no one cared about my comment (I guess too much reading).
The thing is, we are discussing here things that most players don’t even want to understand. And you have to understand the system to propose solutions that make sense.
When I read something like: “let’s just give a full kill credit to a person who severely damaged the target, instead of the person that finished the target”, my first thought is how it’s going to work. Because the current system doesn’t distinguish between severely damaged and healthy planes. The current system is also hugely flawed as you know, and so many months after its implementation, we still don’t have any solutions to these flaws. It’s not even guaranteed that problems like the black horizontal stabilizers will ever be fixed. I know many bugs and problems that are in the game for years and no one does anything about them.
So let’s say they will move the full kill credit to the person who severely damaged an enemy right now. Imagine a situation, where you see an enemy below you that looks completely fine, you dive down to dogfight him, you lose a lot of energy, ammo and time and after a few minutes you finally manage to kill him, and you see you got 40% of the kill rewards plus not a full kill credit, because apparently this guy had black horizontal stabilizers before you attacked him and the full kill credit went to someone else. But you couldn’t know this before you attacked this target. Do you think that would be a fair situation?
That’s why I actually liked two nameplate colors to indicate the enemy state. In the old system you clearly saw severely damaged planes (they had grey nameplates). In the new system you just don’t know this. And this is creating more issues that can’t easily be solved. I totally understand why the devs decided to fully credit the person who actually kill the enemy, it makes more sense in the current system. But this doesn’t mean it’s a perfect solution. You could also e.g. fully credit both players, but then you break global kill/death stats of players. This is the problem caused by the new system and it doesn’t have the perfect solution. For me, they chose the lesser evil in this case.
I wrote this many times in the past, but in my opinion it would make more sense if the old system was slightly tweaked. Things like the grey nameplate should change color to e.g. orange nameplate. Things like “Target destroyed” could become “Target severely damaged”, it’s completely fine. But they should have just kept the kill credit like in the old system (severe damage = full kill credit with 100% rewards and the nameplate color change) and then we can discuss how the finisher status should work.
But of course Gaijin would never allow this to happen, because this would actually allow players to get more than before. In the old system, almost all players completely ignored planes with grey nameplates. But if the new system had more clearly visible severely damaged planes that can still give you decent rewards, more players would go for them anyway. I’m sure that’s what Gaijin actually feared, and that’s why they reduced the total rewards from such targets from 167% to 120%. This doesn’t mean I agree to this, in my opinion the old system was simply better, more clear and much more understandable with better potential rewards. It’s just players that didn’t use the old system to its full potential.
So I never supported the severe damage mechanics as a whole. I don’t see anything good about this mechanics, it complicated many situations, reduced the potential rewards and created a lot of problems. And all this just to improve the “dead planes killed me” situation? No, it wasn’t worth it. Ironically, the new issues added by this mechanics are much more severe.
