Scheduled Maintenance on 22.04.25

Official News, Development Blogs and Updates
1

On April 22nd at 07:00 GMT, we plan to conduct a brief update of the matchmaking infrastructure. As a result, the game servers may be unavailable for about 10 minutes.

The rules for calculating the average Battle Rating in Air Arcade Battles have been simplified. Previously, the rounding of the rating could depend on the number of aircraft in the crewslots when a player used fewer than three aircraft. For more details on matchmaking based on average Battle Rating, please check out the article on the Wiki.

Thank you for your understanding!

11 Likes
2

For 1 vehicle

If only one vehicle participates in the battle, then the average BR will be equal to its BR.

heh

5 Likes
4

I hope the Wiki is still not fully updated, so we just have wrong info there. If that’s not the case then again the devs are doing something that doesn’t make any sense.

According to the linked Wiki article, if you will use a lineup of e.g. one 4.0 BR plane, you will get 4.0 BR matchmaker.

But if you use a lineup of 4.0, 3.7, 3.3 planes, you will get 3.7 BR matchmaker, even if you won’t use 3.7 and 3.3 planes in the battle.

This doesn’t make sense, because to get around this new rule, you will just have to add 2 “fake” planes to your lineup. You don’t have to play them, just add them to the lineup to have easier matchmaker. I don’t see any logic here.

Why not just use the same rules as in other game modes and consider the highest BR vehicle in the lineup as the matchmaker BR? If your highest plane has 4.0 BR, just consider this as 4.0 BR lineup. It just makes the most sense and it won’t allow players to downtier powerful vehicles by creating “fake” lineups.

At the same time, Air Arcade really needs a limit of spawns, because some players can spawn 10 or more times and it’s just ridiculous. Why not limiting number of spawns to e.g. 5? Ground Arcade has spawns limited to 3, Naval Arcade has spawns limited to 5 (3 vessels, 2 planes), Air Arcade has no spawn limit (if you have 10 crew slots, you can spawn 20 times using backups).

5 Likes
5

well not sure but I think this is against those who abuse some prems in low tier lobbies, camping spawns so called. You’ll just lock crew if not a single plane, but there are plenty prems to abuse in different nations. And if I’m not mistaken you can avoid even this by J’out 2 times from a reserve plane in 4th slot.

here I desegree, sometimes there are very interesting matches when left smth like 5v5 with 6-8 deaths if matchmaker made close enough teams, anyway haven’t seen any problem with mass spawning, if u just fly-suicide usually game ends on smth near 5-6

6

Should just make Air AB like every other mode in the game, highest BR in line up = BR the matchmaker uses to set you into a game. There is no longer any need to do it any other way. All that the “averaging” does now is allow players to manipulate it to get advantage in the matches. I can see it’s purpose and usefulness in the old 20 tier system, but that has been gone for over a decade.
The number of slots used/vehicles brought into the game(except for AIR RB, no one should even be able to queue with less than 3 vehicles anyway . . but that’s another story) shouldn’t really matter on the “line ups BR” . . .
Highest BR = what the matchmaker uses to put you into games.
Simple

9 Likes
7

I played lately some battles at lower BRs, and I get what you mean. I saw many players “abusing” He 112, because it’s a very strong plane that can be downtiered to 1.0 - 2.0 BR matchmaker:

Spoiler

The only difference will be that such players will change their lineup to this:

Spoiler

They will still “abuse” this plane exactly the same way, they will still face 1.0 BR planes, they will still get crazy number of kills. This change won’t really affect them.

Yes, you can go around this “problem”. But if you play the vehicle correctly, you won’t die too often anyway. And keep in mind, you always have a backup. I don’t see the possible crew lock as such a big deal. In the worst case scenario, you can just wait a few minutes for your whole crew to unlock and play at lower BR again.

I had a lot of battles, where one side won only because they had more crew slots than the other side, which is unfair and it doesn’t make the battle any better. Quite the opposite.

For example, some time ago I had this battle:

Spoiler

Enemies played this battle terribly, they were just awful. Notice that only 2 players (from 15) in the enemy team had more kills than deaths! That’s just ridiculous and it shows how bad they were. But they won, because my team stopped respawning, and they kept respawning. At the end I was the only player alive in my team and I couldn’t do anything at all. They still had like 5-6 players alive and they could respawn I don’t even know how many more times. How does this make the battle better? It’s more like pay to win (basically which side bought more crew slots).

8

Games don’t normally last long enough to get 10 spawns . . . even the longest games played you will rarely see anyone with more than 6 or 7 deaths.
And some have 10 vehicle line ups, with back ups that is a potential 20 spawns per game . . . just ain’t gonna happen. I think you have played enough games in Air AB to know what I mean, yeah?
The whole thing is about seeking/getting unnecessary advantages. The ability to spawn more than 3 times is there for everyone, it’s not really an advantage, it’s an option. And seriously, if you need more than 4 or 5 spawns, you’re prolly dying too much anyway.
But I also realize that sometimes, you have to do such things trying to finish a task or wager or are working on spading a plane . . there are times it is useful.
But otherwise, there is no reason to limit spawns . . players don’t want to give up any of the freedoms we do have. Limiting line ups is why I stopped playing Sim tanks years ago. . . . just saying

9

Personally, I stopped caring about wins or loses in battles, because battles are too random.

But they can also be abused thanks to this unlimited spawn in Air Arcade and I saw this many times in the past. There were whole squadrons with above 90% win rates, that kept playing in squads of 4 players this way:

  • spawn (ideally a strike aircraft/bomber)
  • dive
  • bomb/kill AI targets
  • die
  • repeat

If you have like 6-8 slots (and you play in squad of 4 players), that’s good enough to win the battle easily. You don’t have to worry about enemies. When you dive, your speed will be high and you will be very hard to intercept at least before you kill a few AI units (and then it doesn’t matter for you anyway, as you just spawn the next plane). I saw squads of 4 players winning battles in 3-4 minutes using this tactics. There is nothing you can do to stop them.

I personally don’t find this way of playing fun, but if someone cares about the stats that’s a very good way to get amazing win rate.

BTW: This is also one of the reasons why Gold Wagers were removed from the game. There were ways to abuse them in some game modes. Air Arcade was one of these game modes thanks to unlimited spawns.

3 Likes
10

Yeah, I agree about some of that too. Planes with rifle calibre guns should not have to face 20mm’s at all. Reserves, 1.0’s and some 1.3’s I guess . . . those should face each other on a level playing field. I wonder how many gave up the game over the years getting seal clubbed in the manner you suggest and never came back. But there are also inequities and imbalance all up and down the trees in many places, so may as well get used to it early on . . . lol
Sometimes you’re the windshield, sometimes you’re the bug . . ☻
But yeah, it could be better

1 Like
11

Air arcade prioritizes spawn count more than individual plane performance.

12

So we’re catering to low br arcade players that will probably quit playing in a month and still haven’t fixed rb matchmaking?

1 Like
13

The one plane that is impacted by this is the Sakeen, currently BR 3.3 which gets downtiered to 3.0, since there is no lower BR plane in the tree it’ll just go up to it’s actual BR of 3.3 :/

Also as I understand this new system, if you just want to play a single plane and have it downtiered every plane except the Sakeen can be paired with 2 reserve planes and will be downtiered, if you use regular planes at BR -.3 and BR -.6 they will get crewlocked and the plane you want to fly gets no downtier… strange system…

14

lmao yeah exactly this match is bad
maybe there should be restriction on spawns, but definitely not 5

how limiting respawns can affect such games? such tactics has nothing to do with 10+ spawns, if you are not doing this in first few you are done, gg. Because enemy knows what to do and just a lot better

15

No, all multispawn modes should have unlimited respawns. Naval and ground struggling cause the 3 respawn rule since introduction.

They do it anyway no matter the amount of spawns. Absents of random players normal random group interaction(like penalting the rewards for group play) and solo gaming orientation(basically group slows you in infinity going marathons and BP tasks grind) is the reason, not spawns. The more solo player can spawn there more he can oppose 4 player team.

16

I think people are misreading this.

There’s not much change to the rule for 3 or more aircraft in slots in AB sometimes giving you a 0.3 BR advantage (but see below). The bigger change seems to be if you choose to have only 1-2 aircraft in slots.

Before:

“If you want to send less than 3 vehicles into battle (specifically the number of serviceable aircraft in the crew slots is less than 3), so the BR values for the missing aircraft in the formula will be counted as A-0.6.”

Now:
"For 2 vehicles
If only two crews go into the battle (the number of usable aircraft in the crew slots is 2), then the calculation of the average BR uses the same principles but different formula:
BR = A/2+B/2
where A and B are the BRs of the vehicles in the crew slots.

"For 1 vehicle
If only one vehicle participates in the battle, then the average BR will be equal to its BR."

It’s the two-plane rule that seems the interesting change here.

Before if you took one plane into lineup you got a 0.3 BR offset (so a Sakeen at 3.3 with nothing else became a 3.0). That is apparently going away for the single plane. Before, if you only two planes, it also normally gave you that same 0.3 offset (so a 4.3 plus a 4.7 became a 4.3 lineup). Sounds like the one thing this would change would be if you took two planes, and if it’s a 4.3 plus a 3.7 or below, you’d still get the 4.0 lineup, but if you took two planes and it’s a 4.7 plus a 4.3, then it becomes a 4.7, same as the new single-plane situation? Guess we’ll find out in the morning.

Graphic of the old system that made sense to me, will wait to see the new one:

Spoiler

image

For 3+ vehicle lineups, it reads like(?) the exception for vehicles 2.0 BR or below changing the calculation could also be gone (note, that’s not for sure), which would make the new rule look like this, in the same format:

Spoiler

newformat
newformat1463×2475 499 KB

So before, if one of your vehicles was 2.0+ BR below it was ignored, so you ended up with the higher BR anyway. It appears that’s gone now (since it’s not in the new writeup, and that WOULD be a simplification), so if that exception is also gone you should be able to get that 0.3 BR bonus with a wider range of sub-BR vehicles in slots 2 and 3 than before. At least that’s my read.

17

Hope that in the br changes the zsu 23-4M2 goes to 7.7 and the radar one 8.0 makes zero sense having a ta 152 c3 or a p-51H and a spit mk24 having the impossible to fly against a quad barrelled automatic 23mm and the same goes to the m163 it shouldn´t be 7.3 they abuse enough on downtiers.

18

I think no one said that. Any changes to 1-2 slots are useless cause you can cheese these rules by taking 3 planes and playing those 1 or 2 as usual, that’s what we was talking about. Those who really want to abuse single plane BR reduction will continue, just with minor adjustments

1 Like
19

I mean with plentiful backups a six-Sakeen lineup at 3.0 instead of 3.3 was perfectly doable, so this only makes sense, really, from a fairness perspective. I am curious if the removal of the +2.0 BR lower planes not counting for an offset in full lineups is a thing or they just forgot to add that existing exception to the Wiki.

20

what do you mean six-Sakeen? you can’t use more than 1 backup on each plane. Sakeen is the only case where this change will work just because there are no other planes, 3.0 and 2.7 for example. Most other broken planes that people usually abuse can be added to setup BR/-0.3/-0.6 and you are gucchi, just play your single plane.

21

Btw I just remembered another one abuse, Junkers 288C. Especially during event people just spam single one. And 6.0 instead of 5.7 are pretty much more jets you are facing = not so effective farm. And here crewlock is a problem cause almost no alternatives with equal efficiency, maybe fresh He-177 from BP, but same nation