Lately I’ve noticed that low level bombing in sim battles has become increasingly difficult.
As someone that prefers to fly bombers in sim battles and most of the times flies very low to avoid being spotted, bombing base targets used to be a fun and leisurely activity. By flying at tree top level or lower when possible, hiding behind, following rivers while flying at water level, etc. Your bomber usually won’t be detected by enemies from a distance no matter how big it is, and you will be able to go bomb the base of your choice and come back without much trouble and with the added fun of flying your big machine low to the ground.
However, it has become increasingly difficult to perform low level bombing, and at the latest almost impossible. In the cases where the AAA don’t just straight up kill you, it leaves you crippled enough that you won’t be able to return to your airfield.
I would like to know what your guy’s opinion on the matter is. It’s true that this can be avoided by just flying high, but that’s just not as fun in my opinion leading to the classic AFK flying, but also leaves you vulnerable to the usual “bomber’s fun” of being a big and expensive piñata. I honestly don’t see the reason of making low level bombing unviable other than to further shift the game towards fighters by removing the fun from bomber players.
This was done in an attempt to stop mass botting with bomb-equipped premiums such as the Wyvern, A2D-1, and later of course the multitude of multirole jets with large payloads both tech tree & not. Accounts would be created en masse (mainly but not always by Chinese players), played using botting scripts, and after being fattened up, sold to the highest buyer on 3rd party websites.
Snail responded by clamping down on economy in every aspect in Sim, and made it overall much grindier, even though someone must understand that the game being so insanely grindy is why such a market exists for dishonest play like that.
Back when it was king of the hill, for instance, the British Phantom which could go supersonic with full payload at low alt costed more than 100k to spawn because of abuse like this.
Sadly big slow WW2 bombers paid the price.
I learned this when I took my stock B-26s to Sim to spade them, as they were utter trash anywhere else. Still spaded them anyways and found ways to make it entertaining, but alas not much reason to play EC except that.
You don’t really believe they’d implement less income and increased grind for everyone “to fight botters”?
Gaijin profits from them eversince cause they buy high tier premiums. They simply use them as a scapegoat to increase grind for everyone so that people buy more stuff… Has been like that eversince in SB EC. And guess what, botters never disappeared and nowadays you can play for two hours and pretty much make 0 progress. While on the other hand you can simply buy that progress.
They straight-up said many of the economic changes were directly due to average earnings being too high per player. Even though in actuality it was probably less than 5% of the Sim playerbase spamming such “bomb & bail” tactics, that smallish number of accounts was sufficient to distort the average into provoking an algorithmic nerf to SL income.
As more honest players gradually left due to ability to stay in the green dried up, botters made up more and more of the total player pool, causing average earnings to remain high and provoke more dumb economic nerfs.
Most of them have been automated repair cost recalculations. Only a handful have been direct and manually adjusted.
Shortsighted, they are, yes, but vindictive, frankly no. About the closest we saw to Gaijin being vindictive in a very crafty way was after the Parts & FPE xxxxstorm blew over, they then made up a reason to saddle every stock high-tier tank with only chemical rounds, which nullified any “advantage” gained from the prior xxxxstorm leading to Parts & FPE being made less grindy.