Well, I still think the player that caused severe damage at the first place should be credited for a kill, not the one who finished it.
tbh It doesn’t feel really different from the pre-severe damage gameplay.
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Although i agree with a hell of your posts - imho you simply describe the usual way of gaijin - introducing new (and flawed) game mechanics without fixing already existing problems.
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The “written off” mechanic as part of the severe damage mechanic simply tries to fix the flaw of a the delayed kill detection / allocation without dealing with the core problem of the devs:
They are unable to follow a clear path: Either they offer a fictional and fantasy game play (and underlying mechanics) or they offer something related to realism.
An example:
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If i play 1 vs 1 vs the last enemy in a severe ticket disadvantage and i meet my personal Kryptonite (a Pe-8 at very high alt) i might manage to kill him (and win the match) but if he kills my engine in this process i will be “written off” despite i have enough altitude to glide back to my airfield.
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So killing my plane in this case is just a wet dream of gaijin (and fictional) whilst they try to offer realism (= B kill) without considering the fact that i would make it back to base.
Therefore it is nonsense.
Core issues:
I would guess i lost not more than 5-10 planes as a result of getting “written off” (mostly with dead engine), but i lost over the years hundreds of kills, the score & task progress due to wt classic:
A small hit on a plane (no crit & no severe damage) doing evasive maneuvers whilst you perform a high speed attack puts your target to flat spin. I would guess in years of playing wt less than 5 aircraft (i remember 2 190s) managed to recover after floating for several thousand meters downwards.
And the outcome of those flat spinning or simply going down aircraft has 3 outcomes:
- A team mate thinks it is a good idea to shot at those planes, despite he hasn’t disabled the enemy (so he has done nothing active and just benefits from your previous efforts)
- The plane crashes after several minutes and rewards u with a kill
- The plane crashes and rewards you just with the initial hit, sometimes the kill gets stolen by own af aaa and you might get an assist.
So the core problem of wt remains unchanged:
Gaijin is unable or unwilling to implement a system which is able to detect delayed kills. A damaged aircraft unable to make it back to base is a delayed kill - full stop. Same with aircraft in irrecoverable spins, death spirals or going down without wings.
If you manage to inflict an oil & water leak on a low Bf 109 20 km away from his airfield it simply doesn’t matter if some of your team mates finishes the guy - he was already dead.
The pure fact that some tankers or pilots got killed by “dead” planes is imho mainly a skill issue as they either lost situational awareness, assessed incoming threats wrong - or they relied on either the indicators “aircraft destroyed” or the “black” marker (=enemy dead).
So from a holistic pov the new mechanic just helps the guys with skill issues (so the tanker will not cease fire after “severe damage score” and the pilot will not see a black marker and comes to the wrong conclusions).
So imho this fellow player is on the right path with this:
The main issues as described above are simply not suited to reward decisive actions and just support players with the desire to benefit from efforts of others.
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.
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I learned that from you :-)
Joke aside, the topic in itself is rather complex and has multiple dimensions.
This:
combined with this:
is just a clear sign that spending time in this forum discussing this topic is rather a waste of time.
I share the same pov.
Have a good one!
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They must narrow the condition where ‘severe damage’ is given more specifically to prevent the situations like you described. Although it would be impossible for them(or anyone at this moment) to fully calculate the probability of ‘B Kill’, they’d be able to partially simulate the ‘A Kill’ condition according to the damage done to the plane. That would be the first step.
This problem is more vivid in higher rank battles where single shell or missile can obliterate several parts of the plane. This often leaves more visible damage and decrease of flight performance which are both easy to recognize. Of course, players can always look at the battle log when they are really unsure whether the target is severely damaged or not.
For example,
That is still ‘severe damage’, because yeah, my tail is still attached and one of my pilots is still alive. And when someone simply puts a single 50 cal bullet to the surviving pilot, the kill goes to him, not the poor guy who crippled my plane to that point. I dare say it’s way more unfair and frustrating than mistaking a severely damaged plane for a healthy one.
As I mentioned, I still think the player who inflicted severe damage deserves the larger portion of the reward AND the kill count. But of course, Gaijin gotta work on the standard seperating severe damage from the simple crits.
For easier recognition, they might bring back the old kill log system at the bottom right of the screen. There used to be 3 kinds of logs some years ago : ‘A set afire by B’, ‘A critically damaged by B’, ‘A shot down by B’. People could easily find out ‘who did what to whom’ without having to press M or Tab to scroll up the battle log. Just add a line like ‘A severely damaged by B’ and it’s going to work enough with more detailed standard.
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A short reminder regarding “written off” aircraft (so as soon as either tickets or time runs out):
- If you score a “written off” kill - it will not be counted as kill to your service record.
- If you were “written off” - it will be counted as loss in your service record.
So no need to trade “severe damages” in the last seconds of a battle…
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It’s worth mentioning that this is almost certainly a bug. This is something that breaks stats and it simply doesn’t make sense, so I don’t see how this could be intentional. The same problem is when the target you severely damage crashes, after you already left the battle, you won’t get a kill credit. This again is almost certainly a bug, because this again doesn’t make sense.
The problem is, there is no way to contact the devs. You can only write a bug report, but then it’s up to bug moderator to pass it to devs or most likely close it with “not a bug” label. Because in his opinion your report sounds more like a suggestion to change the mechanics (you have no prove this behaviour is not intentional).
I saw this many times in the past and this is the huge problem with the bug reporting system. You can also see this with my bug report about the black horizontal stabilizers. It’s still not touched by bug moderators (they clearly don’t know what to do with it), and there is a huge chance it will be closed and when I ask them about the details, they will tell me to write a suggestion about this.
I wrote a few suggestions in the past, and I saw how this system works, even when you have a lot of support from other players. I basically only wasted a lot of time writing suggestions. There is pretty much no way to reach the devs this way.
Well, at least they fixed the bug where severe damage kills didn’t count for tasks and challenges. I suspect we will have to live with all the other bugs added with the severe damage mechanics for many more years.
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Yup, bombers shouldn’t be paper.
Alright Gaijin,
I’ve just gone to unlock the event vehicle for the battle pass event (score 2000 points in the P51) and found that SIM is not included…why? we get all this severe damage stuff because of some drama in AB/RB but we’re never included in any of the fun stuff. We’re in the realm of fantasy, why not include the fantasy maps from AB/RB? Why? It’s getting harder and harder to find anything positive about this game.
I’ve had my wings ripped off at the root countless times by a glancing blow from spits, I’ve flown back to the airfield with one wing missing, I’ve popped bombers with one tap, this never happened before the new damage model, there is only a few of the top players that could do that in the past. Either leave SIM alone or include us in everything. There’s something seriously wrong with you, get your head looked at.
Yes it does.
First, the new mechanic encourages ks.
Second, now I always have to check if the damaged enemy aircraft I’m gonna shoot at has been “severe damaged” and I have already unintentionally ks like 10 times or more, which makes me feel sick. Plus,it is often the case that my teammate and I were both shooting at a target, Han shot first, but I got the kill-----this is stupid, you get a kill on service record not because you are quicker, but because you are slow.
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If an a/c has severe damage and is finished off by someone else then both parties get the kill, with the original person getting 80% of a kill reward (SL, RP), and hte one who finishes it off 40%
In one of their articles they actually suggested this will be a bigger problem, when they add severe damage mechanics to the game:
Welcome to the “Severe damage” mechanic
As of now [in the old system], the death of an aircraft is counted under one of the following conditions: the pilot was knocked out; the aircraft crashed into an object and was completely destroyed; the aircraft had its tail torn off; the aircraft received damage that causes it to be counted as dead but it can still conduct further combat.
Relating to the last part, currently [in the old system] when an enemy aircraft gets destroyed (“Target destroyed”), they can sometimes still fly, shoot, land to repair and have no automatic bail out. The aim of this was to allow you to score a frag and at the same time prevent another player from finishing off the heavily damaged enemy aircraft and steal the frag.
We’d rather not count the aircraft as destroyed based on “guesses”, but instead would like to leave you the opportunity to attempt to control a “severely” damaged aircraft until it’s either completely destroyed or returns to the airfield to repair.
(…) we’re proposing to remove this condition from the game mechanics and instead replace it with the “Severe damage” mechanic. How will this work? If an aircraft is damaged to the extent where it would have been counted as being destroyed previously, despite still being able to fly, shoot and land to repair, this new mechanic will count it as severely damaged. No destruction or death will be credited until the severely damaged aircraft is further finished off.
But people usually don’t read these articles.
The old system was designed to prevent kill stealing. Because of that, the system credited kills earlier, based on “guesses”. That’s why the old system was sometimes wrong and dead planes could still fly and even kill someone.
The new system basically don’t have this issue, because it removed almost all previous kill conditions. But this creates more kill stealing problems.
I guess it depends how you look at things. From the service records perspective the full kill credit was moved in the new system to the person, who finishes the enemy. In the old system the person who caused a severe damage got a full kill credit and 100% rewards. Now the person who severely damage the enemy only gets tasks and challenges kill credit (but no service records kill credit) and only 80% rewards. So you lost rewards and lost service record kill credit, if you look from the perspective of the person who only severely damaged the enemy (and someone else finished the target).
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If you want full credit then do the full kill - as has always been the case!
This is not correct. In the old system you would get kills sooner. The severe damage mechanics delays kills. You need to damage the enemy more than previously to get the full kill credit.
Just read the quote in my previous post, it’s all explained there. Especially the last part.
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In the old system you could have a seriously damaged aircraft “killed” by someone else and you got an assist.
If you want a full kill credit then you need to finish them off - just like always.
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In the old system severe damage was called a destruction. It’s all explained in the quote. I made it shorter:
If an aircraft is damaged to the extent where it would have been counted as being destroyed previously, this new mechanic will count it as severely damaged. No destruction or death will be credited until the severely damaged aircraft is further finished off.
Old system: severe damage = destruction with a full kill credit (including service record kill) and 100% of rewards. Finishing destroyed plane = assist (that counts for tasks and challenges) with 67% of kill rewards.
New system: severe damage = partial kill credit (that counts for tasks and challenges) with 80% of rewards. Finishing severely damaged plane = full kill credit (including service record kill) and 40% of kill rewards.
That’s how the severe damage mechanics works in general. You can find details about it in this topic, because some additional conditions were also changed.
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Well done for missing the point - which is that you should finish kills to get the full kill credit - NO MATTER THE SYSTEM.
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I understand this part, that’s why I’m not arguing with it. I’m an Arcade player, so for me it’s normal.
I only tried to explain the part, when you said that nothing has changed between both systems in the kill credit, because this is not correct. It was easier to get full kills before. The new system requires you to damage the plane more to get the same kill credit as in the old system. Destruction in the old system was worth the same as severe damage + finishing in the new system.
So I only wanted to correct this part, that’s all. My impression was that you misunderstood the new system. Because the truth is, many players did.
BTW: This reminded me a situation I had yesterday, when I played Air Realistic battle:
Spoiler
For some reason most players think the severe damage mechanics was introduced to prevent such situations. But that’s not the case. Everything is fine in this situation. I got an assist, because I didn’t damage the enemy enough for it to be considered severely damaged (destroyed in the old system).
It’s just funny how the mentality of some players allows them to praise the new system they don’t even understand. This situation is not a bug in the severe damage mechanics. I just didn’t do enough damage, that’s all, the severe damage mechanics has nothing to do with this situation. In the old or new system the result is exactly the same, only an assist.
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