With the new patch notes, I learnt that spotting an already damaged vehicle will give reduced rewards and it will give different Achievement called “Not By Intelligence”, ironically named.
Fair part is, obviously, someone else physically spotted and managed to land a shot on unspotted vehicle, so scout vehicles are just spotting an already exposed vehicle is easy mode.
Unfair part is, spotting is still hugely useful, that alerts whole team for 30 seconds about enemy position, instead of 3 seconds by normal damage. And some tasks are bound to the Intelligence achievement, so it will make scout play less rewarding and push people into sniper mode fully.
Agreed. I very much enjoy playing light tanks, so this is probably going to hurt me in the long term. At the very least, the scouting marker should show up even within the 60 seconds of the “Not by Intelligence” situation, with the scout just not receiving anything but some SL as normal. (No aircraft SP reduction in RB/artillery reduction in AB.)
I think this would be the perfect solution, since the original player who shot the target gets the added advantage of easily tracking that player, while the scout at least gets some SL.
EDIT: Just realized that is exactly what happens. XD So, I do think the 60 second cooldown is excessive, 15 would be more realistic. I mean, who spots an enemy tank that was just shot (and probably just killed your poor teammate who had shot him) and spends a whole minute chasing it just to scoutit? Seriously?
Rewards were non-existent to begin with, but now you’re denied the Intelligence awards which make the daily tasks and special medals and such significantly more grindy, and very likely the according to intelligence award as well.
This certainly has some up and down sides. But I am mainly concerned about the latter.
First of all, how long does it take for a spotted target to become “unspotted” and be ready to be scouted again by a light tank for example. How would the player know if he can press scout or should wait a few more seconds so that he can potentially get the reward in the end? Gaijin didn’t really go into details about this.
Secondly (and this might be somewhat controversial), if the “not by intelligence” doesn’t reduce aircraft spawn costs then as a result less aircraft will be flying around and AA players won’t have as many targets as they used to do. Obviously this is good from the perspective of an anti-CAS PoV but we can’t just leave AA players alone and do nothing to compensate them. Instead, Gaijin should counteract this by increasing the rewards respectively for shooting down an aircraft so that the overall rewards remain the same.
Thirdly, as already mentioned in some of the replies above, many of the daily, special and battlepass tasks heavly rely on these features affecting mainly the ones that have to do with air kills in ground battles and scouting in ground battles. Gaijin should adjust the requirements for these as well.