First and foremost, I’m an air player through and through. The only time I touch ground is when I’m taking off, landing, or doing a forced and unscheduled pyrotechnical disassembly. I don’t have any experience regarding ground forces past Tier I, but I am fairly certain that the ground players can likely relate to this in some manner.
We’ve all had it. Getting into a game with your just-wheeled-out-of-the-factory-brand-spanking-new in your… say 10.3 jet or tank. You get into match and you see some names of vehicles you’ve only heard of before, but never seen in game. And in the first few seconds of the engagement (or maybe before you even enter the engagement), you’re immediately destroyed because of the superiority of an 11.3’s vehicle’s weaponry. Then the next match, you’re in a full downtier to 9.3, slamming those plebes with your technologically superior weaponry.
With the most recent update “Air Superiority”, the wise masters of Gaijin have added in newer fourth generation fighters with loadouts involving the newest and most up to date weaponry. And you’d expect that, similar to the release of the F-16C/D and MiG-29SMT in “Kings of Battle” which upped the max Air RB BR to 12.3, the addition of the F-15A/J, Su-27S, and JAS-39A/C would increase the max BR again, right? Maybe to 12.7, maybe 13.0?
Wrong. The max BR remains still at 12.3 for air RB. A JAS-39A/C with 6 AIM-9M/RB-74(M) and 720 countermeasures can decide that he wants to dance around your 11.3 that you earned and was working on spading (or bought) and there’s nothing you can do about it unless they’re caught off guard in a really bad place. Because the JAS-39A/C, with it’s UFO flight model and countermeasures that allows the pilot to dogfight a quarter to half of the red team at once, is at a BR where an aircraft where an F-4 or MiG-23 can do nothing but pray for an inadequate pilot.
Nor is the Su-27S, with the capability of loading 6 of the strongest performing SARHs (R-27ER) in the game along with 4 of the most oppressive short range IRs (R-73, bar the Magic 2) or longest range IRs (R-27ET) in the game at 13.0, right along side it. No, instead these beasts of aviation are at 12.3.
At any point in time when you’re poked into an uptier you face drastically improved technology that outclasses your own in every way in most cases. One such instance is any of the jets in the 9.0-10.3 bracket that get access to no flares (unless they want to weigh down their aircraft with rockets) yet face aircraft such as the A-10A(Early/Late) or Su-25(K) which have 2 (or 4, in the A-10A(Late)'s case) 30g all aspect missiles? Yes, the missiles are for self defense; but once a lumberthing Thunderbolt II or transonic Frogfoot get into the middle of the battlefield, you think they’re going to use those free kill missiles for self defense? No, they’re clicking on any enemy they see and getting easy kills because they don’t have flares. There is no reason for transonic aircraft introduced in the 1950s to face 1980s attack aircraft with all aspect missiles. Or having F-5A/C/E’s duke it out with MiG-23M(L/LD/LA)s.
Fix the BR compression before you add any new some fangle-dangled weaponry like Fox 3s (which will, invariably, be Russian dominated) in the next major update. Up the max BR to 14, 15, however high it needs to be to ensure that the little guys in downtiers aren’t getting utterly decimated. At the very least, decrease the max up/downtier from 1.0 BR change to 0.6/0.7 BR change.
Went off into a bit of a rant, sorry. Just decompress the dang BRs. Pad out the BRs. Any player who has spent any time in the 9.0-11.3 BR bracket can tell you it is agony to play in an uptier, being outperformed on every metric by every aircraft (bar attackers, sometimes) and like kicking kids with steel toed boots in a downtier.