With this major update, we are seeing the introduction of rewards for maneuver kills, whether the crash occurred in proximity of the player or a missile. This mechanic is being added to all gamemodes except air simulator due to concerns regarding exploitation. Whilst air simulator has had a bad history with being exploited, it also has a long standing history of both the gamemode and the playerbase being neglected by the devs and this is no exception. Rather than tackling the issues around exploitation, they have simply decided not to add it all together, despite the fact that J-outs and crashes to deny a kill happen all the time, and due to the harder controls and first person perspective, maneuver kills happen more frequently.
Now whether or not there is any concern regarding exploitation is very much a debate to be had. If the reward is only 50%, then surely the rewards would be a lot better to actually kill the target, rather than exploiting this mechanic, and if anyone was exploiting this mechanic by crashing over and over again near someone specific, it would be obvious and easy to ban. And even after that, the current capped rewards were introduced to prevent this very kind of exploitation before, so does it need even more?
So to that end, I believe this mechanic needs to be added to Air Simulator, and for Gaijin to deal with anyone trying to exploit this mechanic accordingly.
Now if there is a requirement to have some form of mitigation for Air Sim only, then the best solution to this that I can think of is some kind of cooldown timer. So that you can only benefit from this mechanic in set intervals rather than every kill being rewarded, every single time.
I can see two approaches to this.
The first is a hard cooldown, You can only get the reward from a maneuver kill once every 5 minutes (time could be increased if it’s too short to prevent exploitation). This way some kills would still get rewarded, but would be much harder to mass exploit. Given the typical time between engagements and general pacing of the gamemode, anyone playing normally is unlikely to be negatively affected by this.
The second would be to have a diminishing returns mechanic, get too many, too quickly the rewards begin to drop off and eventually fall to 0, until such time that a set period of time has passed (like 15-20 minutes) and then rewards come back again. That way if you do get 2 or 3 within rapid succession you don’t lose out on all the rewards, but it can’t be exploited. This would take more effort to both implement and balance, but would be a meaningful addition.
What would you like to see, I would be very interested in finding out:
Would you like to see this mechanic added to Air Simulator?
- Yes
- No
How concerned are you about exploitation in Air Simulator if this mechanic was added?
- Very concerned
- Mildly concerned
- No opinion
- Not concerned
Which of these solutions would you like to see?
- Option 1
- Option 2
- Another Option (comment below)