You have to be out of your drone taking action to gain points from your intel. The only thing that you can do besides is scout or call in artillery.
Your team has equal access to scout drones. There is no nation lock for the ability.
This is like labeling APFSDS a “crutch” compared to HEAT-FS. You should utilize the tools available to you.
Light tanks are more vulnerable to penetrating shots. “Why are light tanks able to scout” because that is their role in real life. We don’t have simulated comms / VOIP so scout drones provide this function ingame.
There isn’t a benefit to staying in the sky constantly unless you’re relaying information over VOIP or marking consistently for your team to engage. Constant camera flicking like you’re playing FNAF is possible, yes, but you’re not taking action while you’re in the drone. You have to play the game at some point if you want to take action on the information.
Adding a timed flight would prevent team scouting yes. It will not prevent players from using it to spot you around a corner. I personally find the dynamic introduced by scouting for your team to be worth the trade off in “balance” that being lack of direct intel.
As a mechanic both teams are able to engage with your argument can only be that you don’t enjoy the gameplay presented from the mechanic. I will have to disagree with you.
I do knock down drones with WZZ305 proxy shell, but it is quirky in it’s hit detection. There are times you you’ll get the puff of black smoke but no hit, but I’ve found that if it’s flying across your path it’s more apt to get a damage hit.
This seems like massive cope, they are really only OP if you have active coms with squadmates or your team. I personally use it to make sure an area is safe to move into or from. Imma be honest, I think there are more important things to do in your SPAA other than lob things at these small nuisances.
If you want realism then the shockwave from those proxy shells in the video posted above would have blown that piece of flying fiberglass to bits. I have shot at and watched these scout drones survive being hit with air to ground missiles. You think these things are realistic? You think tank commanders pop up and just yeet these things out of a hatch out of thin air? Realism in war thunder? Not for a long time. We cannot even get proper immersion with the way Gaijin balances this game.
War Thunder is currently realistic, and just as and more realistic than DCS.
There already is proper immersion; if you don’t feel that, then you have an incorrect view of what realism is, for which I recommend looking it up in the dictionary to start.
Then view videos on “realism vs authenticity” and “realism is not what people think/people don’t know what realism is”.
It is entirely possible to know the range of a drone from the controlling vehicle, and a laser range finder to tell you distance to target.
Granted, they should be hover-drones, but that’s about the only real discrepancy between the game and real life.
We don’t know whether the rounds would fuze because the drone is a small target IRL…
…but, in game, the shells burst but the hit detection is incredibly spotty. I shoot at them with the Begleitswagen and it’s one of the more ammo consuming targets. Even Puma which can lock it takes like half a dozen ‘hits’ to take it down.
