I can’t speak about free repairs, because i don’t use them. And imho every long term player don’t need them - especially if you play Rank III & IV only. But imho preserving your aircraft is at least in Air RB with a single spawn the key to win - as you can’t influence the outcome if you are dead.
If you play just for fun and without any grinding intentions, you become the longer you play way more experienced than your average opponents. Subsequently you die less often and you earn more SL & RP as you can leverage your experience advantage to play way more successful - at least in theory.
Imho i die mainly due to own stupidity - either by wrong decision making or plain errors like air brakes too early too late. But i rarely get outplayed, and if this happens i simply lost situational awareness.
Example for basic & stupid mistakes
I had recently an 8 minute fight 1 vs 1 vs a Yak-3 in my B7A2 - i made at least 4 maybe 6 or 7 basic mistakes alone in the dogfight - because i was hungry and tired and greedy to score 3 kills for the BP challenge.
Upfront the turnfight the energy saving of the TV turned it off (black screen) whilst diving on him trying to score a bomb kill (perfect timing) - and our tomcat attacked/distracted me various times whilst turn fighting - he came home and was hungry too.
I ran out of ammo after 6 minutes and he tried to lure me into his main af aaa. I turned away, he followed and used my gunner to shoot his right wing off (~1.3 km). Replay; skip to 10:00 minutes; shows also my potato aim with joystick :-)
If you focus on the planes you really enjoy there is no need for free repairs as you collect SLs just as a side effect of having fun and you come to the point where you have a lot of SLs but nothing worth to spend them as you have all you need.
That why i invested (wasted) around 90 to 120 million SLs in the last 3 loot box / crate events, i did not count them precisely and i don’t care.
Regarding announcing your exit to the enemy: Different players, different experiences - and imho it depends also on your positioning. As i prefer aircraft with good dive performance and air brake i can exit quite fast. And if they try to challenge af aaa - my planes are good enough to dodge if i am able to keep enough speed.
Edit:
A classic example of outplayed by climbing to secure ticket win. In this replay you see a classic case of lack of map know-how combined with wrong decision making. The enemy team needed tank kills to reduce ticket advantage - and was not aware of it. So they killed other useless ground units and lost by tickets. Surviving 1 vs 5 for 14 minutes was easy as they went too early too low and went for rather cheap kills instead of using their brains.
Their only plane (J26) able to climb and catch me was busy collecting points. EZ win. And ofc i was called out as “passive” despite i scored a player kill and a base kill. If your job is to stay alive to generate the RP and SL bonus - i will do this any day of the week…
On an inactive account just to get it’s weaknesses. The pre-nerf Re 2005 killed it easily below 7-8 km. I avoid post-war / non WW2 combat props due to various reasons.
I am confused regarding the wording “now” - is this arcade specific? Air RB (see tag) deals for years with those claims - and to be fair i welcomed the removal of aaa on forward airfields in prop BRs - it reduced the no-fly zone significantly.
But on the other hand i see since a while every 2nd match guys killed by aaa defending the 4 mini bases - even if they haven’t attacked ground units. Alone the fact that you had an A2G loadout triggers them to kill anybody 3-4 km near them. Even as i was aware of this i got killed today whilst attacking their last player…
i meant realistic players that should really play arcade bcoz they want to turn realistic into arcade. Those people especially nowadays are being so ridiculous. They don’t want tickets, don’t want bases, don’t want the big airfield aas(and sometimes even airfields as a whole), they don’t want anything that makes realistic not arcade. I support changes but only smart ones.
“Why am I getting reported for actively dragging out a match by abusing the absolutely busted airfield AA and hindering the experience of other players? This is unfair stop reporting me for passiveness!!!”
You’re doing doughnuts over your airfield while you KNOW that the AA at airfields will shoot them down 9 times out of 10. You are hindering the progress of other players because you don’t want to admit your team lost. Absolutely childish behavior.
You just proved that you didn’t read the OP - i quote:
The whole tread deals with the rarely happening chance to win by tickets as last player. And this happens either due to high unbalanced maps or mostly due to wrong decision making of plain stupid players on the enemy team - as they see Air RB in props as a pure TDM mode.
And ticket leads happen usually due to ticket relevant player actions and ticket defeats due to non ticket relevant actions.
In other words your whole post is useless regarding the topic and can be described as:
While I do understand where OP is coming from, sitting and abusing the busted airfield mechanic is still textbook passive behavior. While I get wanting to preserve a possible win, having to deal with someone camping their airfield to abuse the busted AA is absurd and obnoxious to the entire enemy team.
Climbing at the start of the match to drop down on unsuspecting targets or for an energy advantage is nowhere near similar to camping your airfield to avoid being shot down as the last guy on your team.
Climbing actively results in actions being done against the enemy team, be it shooting bombers or dropping down on fighters.
Camping does nothing but prolong the match needlessly.
Even when playing the objective, there are plenty of times where I’ve ended up losing due to ticket bleed because of the AI aircraft. Even if you try to shoot them down there are sometimes just rapid moments of ticket bleed. Either way having the last guy on the enemy team abusing airfield AA is obnoxious and an issue that needs to be resolved with more than a reporting category.
My ultimate point is that those matches WOULD have been won had the last guy not sat at the airfield abusing the AA.
Again, there are also times where the symmetrical ticket bleed isn’t due to player activity. Winning/losing on tickets sucks in a gamemode which has it’s primary focus on PvP.
Well thats map balance related, not in essence about what OP is about.
*where one of the focuses is PvP. The objective is very explicitly about winning which has multiple paths to winning it, ultimately being about tickets.
I mean if they choose to put themselves in a loosing posituon, thats just skill issue/poor gameplay on their part. If the enemy is in an advantagous position i see no reason why a player would engage any other way.
And the enemy has plenty of opportunity to prompt a response from the player
Both teams have same tickets, AI and most maps have same winning objectives. Its not team death match, there is more than 16 aircraft on your team, AI aircraft, tanks, boats, artillery, AAA it all adds up. And there are no rules
It’s always funny that both the Fighter Jocks and many general players forget that AAB, ARB and ASB are not TDM.
You have other objectives to complete to drain tickets; destroy ground and air AI, bases and the airfield at the applicable BR.
The team that loses often does so not because they failed to defeat all the enemy players, but because they didn’t fully PTFO. That’s not the random Joe whose circling his AF’s problem when his team has ticket advantage, that’s the losing team’s problem for not PTFO’ing properly. The team that PTFOs properly is the team that wins most of the time, even at top tier where most people treat it as TDM but again, it is not. There are always other objectives to complete to win aside from full shoot-down of the enemy team. The ignorant arguments need to stop, especially this nonsensical bullshit that circling the AF is against ToS - No, it isn’t so give it a rest. Yes, it’s annoying as hell but it’s not against the rules. Never has been.