Exactly!
The whole game is about grind. Fighter and assault planes play together. You can hardly expect cooperation from random team.
That is why I create my own missions, where bots follow the scenario.
Btw, did you play my mission?
1 Like
Not yet. My top is MiG-27 rn
There’s a lot to be said about the rather false belief that “F2P game must be unplayable without payment.”
F2P stuff
Warframe was already mentioned, but one can also mention TF2, LoL, Dota2 as easy off-the-cuff answers. FF14 is not F2P, but their “Free trial” offers incredible quantities of content spanning many months of active and regular gameplay and Eve was mentioned to which I contrast Old School Runescape. In old school runescape 2-3 hours of raiding on saturday/sunday will not only cover your premium time indefinitely, but give you increasing subscription time (in fact, you might get lucky and get 160+ days of subscription on a 0.25% roll every ~10 minutes doing difficult content that has no supply cost beyond your patience and skill.
But that’s kind of off-topic. Let us simply agree on the following:
List of statements
- A competetive, multiplayer game requires players to be present in sufficient quantities to act as content.
- It is possible to play Air Arcade, Air Realistic, Ground Arcade, Ground Realistic, Ground Simulator, Naval Arcade, Naval Realistic all day long exclusively without ever having to play any other mode to support your continued gameplay of that game mode regardless of what tier you are playing as a free to play player. Your rate of progression may be significantly hampered by doing so, but you will never go persistently negative in income unless you literally spawn in, do nothing and j out after 10 or so minutes. Even head-on suiciding into enemy fighters a hundred games in a row with a 10.3 plane will not lose you SL due to repair costs scaling with time alive and even minimal score (glancing shots) will get you positive (barely)
- It is NOT possible to play air simulator with rank IV and above planes on its own as a free to play player without seriously hampering both you AND your opponent’s gameplay (You go for 600-800 score to get 75-86% reward, disengage and circle in orbit around your runway for at least 2 full useful action cycles per spawn).
- Air sim EC is abusable with PvE lobbies, lobby/match fixing, lobby-shopping for easy stomps. Abusers can earn incredible SL and progress, while people actually playing in populated lobbies against near-peers or superior opponents will begin losing SL unless they engage in anti-fun activities
- The ideal competetive multiplayer match is one where near-peers face off against each other in a close battle where the victor is only determined after a long and engaging back-and-forth struggle - stomps are boring for the winner, discouraging for the loser.
- For a game mode to be healthy, it needs a constant new players. New players are less skilled and need to learn. If learning is punished, they will not come.
- The techniques, intuition and reflexes developed for flying World War 2 aircraft is not well-transferrable to early korean and vietnam war aircraft
- Air sim EC is not a constant action, it lacks constant availability of ways to score. Objectives appear randomly, finding players has techniques but also not a guarantee. It’s also possible to rack up 4 kills in 15 minutes contesting an A point, RTB and by the time you’re able to engage an objective again you ended up with an over-satisfied UA cycle and an empty UA cycle
So, with that declared… I was thinking - how can we encourage new players to fly a wide variety of planes, how can we encourage healthy gameplay behaviour that leads to mutual engagement and fun, how can we prevent this system from being abused?
Well, In the F2P stuff I mentioned OS Runescape and thus the idea came to me:
DEATH BANKS
Originally, I thought “What if score rolled over between useful action cycles?” but that’s clearly abusable and would just solve the issue of “People leave lobbies” as getting the full reward requires sitting out multiple UA cycles until the roll-over runs out.
Still, this is one of the biggest issues: It takes 30 minutes of very anti-fun flying to afford 1 respawn (due to initial spawn cost) that hurts both the player and their opponent’s experience and it’d solve that quite well.
How can we avoid it being abused?
It’s simple.
When you gain score, you are REWARDED like you currently are. Logarithmic function with a maximum of 92% at 1050 for 15 minutes’ survival and landing.
However, if you exceed 1050 score in a 15 minute cycle you start being rewarded a “death bank” for individual excess actions. This means you accumulate silver lions you will never earn or otherwise “take home.”
Instead, it’s used to pay for spawning new planes and it has no maximum cap and does not expire within the match.
So! You spawn in. You see an A point. You sneak in through the clouds and dive down skillfully on a train of enemies and get four kills in rapid succession. You are awarded for ~2.5 of those kills (1050 cap), while the overflow fourth kill adds ~5500 silver lions to your death bank at the rank IV/V (and whatever you get for rank VI/VII/VIII planes in ARB for severe damage & kill ). Lingering and winning the air superiority point earns you another 5500 silver lions (fully capping a point gives you same score as a kill, so same SL makes sense)
This means lobby-shopping is now punished as you lose your accumulated death bank. You are still encouraged to survive the full 15 minutes and land to receive your REWARD, but you are not discouraged (in fact: you’re encouraged to over-perform) to stay fighting and take risks. Worst case, your death bank goes down by ~15K SL (if negative, you pay your actual balance). Best case, your death bank gets another 5500 SL allowing you to take even more risks.
I’ve no idea what’s an equivalent SL quantity for base bombing or ground targets we could yoink from ABR. We could go with ~5500 (at rank IV/V) for a full base kill excess of the 1050 maximum (only base kills - not bomb damage to avoid airfield farming), and ~500 SL for each ground target destroyed. A.I bombers/survey planes/attackers could go for ~1250 sl/kill IF done after reaching the 1050 score maximum.
This does not entirely help completely new players to a new brand of planes they are struggling to learn - but that would instead be helped by my earlier suggestions of “Underdog discounts” (Flying a 8.0 plane in a 8.0-9.0 lobby gives a 20 to 40% spawn cost discount if you died to an enemy plane at least 0.6 BR higher than you) - encouraging the use of “trainer planes” and making lobbies more varied.
3 Likes
Who said it’s unplayable? It’s absolutely playable on free account, maybe it’s just you play bad and die a lot?
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In an evenly matched lobby, you SHOULD be dying. Your opponent should be more than capable of winning 50% of the engagements against you if you’re fighting someone who is your equal. Teams skew this of course, but how are you going to learn anything flying in a lobby where the enemy team flies like bots?
An deathratio with the F2H-2 will cost you -15K for each respawn and if you’re actually playing the game your useful actions cycles WILL be interrupted and ideally both sides should have about equal kill potential and threat. Even if you do end up going 2 to 1 in your favour, you will be hemorrhaging SL like nobody’s business.
Which of these rank 3 games do you think was more enjoyable for both sides?
A game I had in my japanese props where americans were full of corsairs lawn-mowing at like 250 km/h and flying in a straight line without any effort to fight back or threaten anyone on my team. I died zero times there, I got “good SL.”
Or a game where a bunch of bombers decided to bomb the hell out of Calais, so we all joined them in formation as escorts and it was a constant exchange of fighters and bombers falling out of the skies as bombing raids just barely succeeded against a (relative to our team) quite competent luftwaffe doing their best to fight us off. I think the lobby ended up with even kills for each team.
Why can’t we have similar games with korean jets as the fun one? Why must korean jets tuck tail between their legs the moment they get two kills and camp safety for 2 useful actions cycles to offset spawning cost? Why must lobbies empty out within moments the second someone dies 2-3 times?
Edit:
But all that is irrelevant.
Why?
How do you expect anyone to learn how to fly a sabre or a banshee or a mig or meteor if they go broke figuring out how to track much faster enemies and how to deal with jet acceleration from the cockpit?
It took me ~24 hours of flying my mustangs and various F4Us until I got confident enough with those very specific planes to start engaging in dogfights and having a chance to win. I could afford this as they were rank 2 and rank 3 planes. This ended up fairly transferrable to between props but not to planes flying ~700-900 km/h.
I cannot afford that kind of trial by fire with the Banshee or Sabres.
Do you want full and populated lobbies?
You want people to have the ability to actually learn their planes in high-stress environments against equal or superior opponents, not hunting bots (or people who fly in a straight line without reacting to any stimuli because they’re alt-tabbed between bombing ground units or bases).
Guy must be bored enough to come on here and try to pretend like sim is profitable f2p
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Depends on the BR - lower BRs are fine (but not as they should be).
Above rank IV sim can´t be profitable for 80% of the lobby without premium if played in a proper PvPvE way.
Sure the top 10% with 5:1 K/D won´t have a problem to stay positive, but the majority will loose SL.
That’s how this stupid system is built up.
Dying is so expensive, despite being an essential part of the game with a pvp mode. Someone has to die after all, if you want to get kills.
You loose rewards AND have to pay the respawn costs.
I had games where I got over 1500 points (3 kills) in the first 5 minutes of the UA cycle and then got shot down.
Common sense would say: “You did well, 3:1, good performance, go on!”
UA says: “Oh, you only completed one third of the cycle, that’s only 33% of the max. 92% of 1050 points, so here is your money for your heroic 318 points: 4835 SL. Now please pay 16000 SL to continue.”
I´ve been bullshitted on many dubious souvenir markets on my trips, but gaijin tops all of it.
4 Likes
Then be among them. Or stay safe for 15 minutes, don’t risk and look around for possible threats.
Spoiler
Or just pay twenty bucks
Why do you ask for casual gameplay but demand rewards?
You must be an employee of Gaijin who works on how to earn more money from players.
4 Likes
Yeah, sure, I have +15GE for post.
So, you don’t want people to play sim, learn how to fly and have full lobbies?
Because if it’s impossible to afford to learn flying, nobody will fly korean jets.
A competetive game needs a healthy amount of constant new players to keep the numbers up.
Have you looked at BR 7.0-8.7ish brackets? They’re dead. They’re full of zombers. The moment you have a bit of PvP it immediately fizzles out as people cannot afford to respawn more than 3 times as that’s already -50K SL for some planes.
I want people to be able to play sim exclusively, be able to join sim without previous flight experience and have space to learn in live and intense lobbies where back and forth is the norm, where people fly in to help their buddies, where people escort bombers, where people…
Don’t fly off the moment they get ~600 score and afk for 10 minutes in the corner on Denmark or Afghanistan or the like.
I want people to play on the likes of Tunisia with constant push and pull.
3 Likes
I think that’s what I said
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That’s a fantastic advice for new players…
Just don’t suck in a game mode you try to learn and others have played for years.
Or just hide and do nothing useful or interesting.
Do you understand that most of us here don’t cry for higher rewards to get 500k SL after a match or so much RP that we can grind a complete TT in one weekend, but simply for SIM to be sustainable?
For a system that allows new players to learn the game mode without inventing 2 million SL or 20 bucks to be shot down all the time?
Because this is how you loose players.
5 Likes
Yeah, this is only advice from hardcore PVP players. They truly believe it will work.
Unfortunately, this is how this game works.
The primary purpose of this game is not to bring you joy from playing it, but to make you bring money to the game.
Gaijin was not able to create good PVE gameplay when everybody could enjoy it.
Instead they created 100% competitive game. Some players support this idea, that is why you hear a lot of talk about improving your skills, increasing your K/D etc.
2 Likes
I mainly fly for PvP.
The current economics actively discourages PvP.
If anything, it’s advice applicable to “avoid other players like they’re plague-carriers, only attack A.I as there’s no risk of dying and afk in the corner” style of gameplay.
Actual PvP oriented gameplay is heavily punished.
1 Like
I don’t like pure PvP.
I don’t look for player enemy, I can just protect myself with a couple of AAMs.
I don’t like to jettison my payload to fight a plane on my way to target, so I’d rather hide.
In addition, I constantly have to take on the role of a strike aircraft to win the round, because the fighter team always loses.
I’d rather answer to an ally going “Cover me!” and engage whatever enemy was there in hopes of killing them.
I’d rather patrol near a ground battle hoping to find an enemy strike craft to engage.
I’d rather intercept the IL-28s and Tu-4s rather than hide with tail between legs.
I’d rather fly into an air supremacy point and contest it to the bitter end rather than hide from other players.
I’d rather tag along a bomber formation, ai or player, to escort it and secure their bombing run than hide in the corner with tail between legs.
I’d rather play on 64x64 tunisia with my F2H-2 where hiding is very improbable rather than yet another afganishtan/Denmark match where after flying around for 30-45 minutes, the only player I found was a bomber that promptly J’d out to deny the kill.
I’d rather play against an opponent that has the ability to outmaneuver/outsmart and kill me with a dangerous plane rather than shoot a guy stalling out their mig with less than 1 hours of flight time.
I’d rather play this multiplayer game as a multiplayer game in an active, involved manner that interacts with my team and my enemy rather than hide in the corner and watch as my chat fills with “Cover me!” and nobody responds because it’s too risky.
I’d rather play this multiplayer game against opponents who will not ditch the lobby after losing an A point and dying 2-3 times, but rather struggle against tenacious foes who try and turn the match around.
I’d rather play this multiplayer game with teammates who stick around and support each other mutually rather than ditching the moment they notice a fighter showed up on the enemy team and is hunting bandits.
I enjoy single player flight sims. Microsoft flight sim X: Steam edition and KSP with FAR and Planetside GAP+Extras are a lot of fun. I play warthunder for the multiplayer aspect.
So why are we punishing people for engaging in that multiplayer aspect? Why are we encouraging anti-gameplay, anti-engagement, anti-multiplayer behaviours like “Score 600 score and hide in the corner of a 164x164 map where the fastest jet barely reaches 950 km/h while redlining in a lobby that’s 4vs4 or ideally 4vs1”
You were lucky to play in that session. Only a couple of average players.
Will see how it will go when you play Su-25 vs F-14/16.
Every average player launched an AiM-9L at me.
Flying Su-17 against A-6 and A-10 is a little tricky.
Yep. Don’t have 12.0 yet.