Team killing policy - follow up thread

Game Discussion General Discussion
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39

No offense here, but the TK algorithm is very poor… I TK kill stealers nearly 100% of the time when it’s deliberate on an absolutely dead enemy (flat spinning, burning, you get it - 100% should be a kill for me … NOT someone who has been crit but is still “in the game”). I don’t care, I will throw away my position and possibly the game to wipe those people off the face of the planet.

I have been doing this since 2014 and I have no intention to stop doing that.

Altogether I have received a pop-up ONCE saying I have been naughty and 10 people complained.

And that’s it.

If your game would be worth something then

  • There would be a system in place already for years which awards the kill appropriately. I understand something along those lines is in development now, but man, this should have been there so so long ago… outside of pure toxicity on take-off, this is the PRIMARY reason for people TK one another. I do it, others do it, there’s nothing wrong with it within the current set of game mechanics - someone else doesn’t deserve your kill, your RP/SL, your effort. Kill stealers are the toxic waste of the community and have to be eradicated

  • There would be a system in place that auto kicks and 1 day ban when people TK off the runway or within the first 30 seconds of the game… no ifs and buts about it, no need to reach some weekly quota, none of that. People who are just there to cause grief can go play some other game instead and cool down for a day

  • The SL penalty is hilarious, you think people care? People have in the 10s or 100s of million SL. Make it a % of the total SL, people will care

  • Increasing a period of banning an account doesn’t work (1 day, 3 day, 14 day, etc), what you think there’s only WT in the world? You ban someone for 10 days because a steak of TK, he will just go play another game for 10 days. Instead of punishing the offense you should be fixing the cause the offense happened in the first place by analyzing the game mechanics that lead to it and changing them. Here, I’m not talking about people TK constantly off the runway, but systemic issues in WT that lead to people getting frustrated by your game and TK another player for it

But yea, sure, Gaijin trusts some algorithm is solving the issues around TK and washes their hands without actually looking into it. Surely its some effort to address these issues, but man, the game mechanics around getting kills and awards could be done so much better and not such utter frustration as it has been for over a decade… there were/are many posts on the old forum since day-1 of WT stating these issues, and its nearly 2024 now and we are still at the same point

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40

Although i agree with most of the content of your recent posts here, i think you might consider going one step back. It is not about protection, it is imho an issue of your view on the game itself and of your personal goals whilst playing the game.

  • So if you play the game as a plain shooter i fully agree with your pov. Including all of the negative effects on game play, individual score, ranking, statistics and income.

  • But - you might agree that you are surrounded by 90-95% noobs every match with have severe issues to understand basic game mechanics, damage models, importance of positioning vs kills and the long term effects of kill steals mid to late game.

  • In addition i fully agree that gaijin is unable or unwilling to implement reasonable rules for actual kills which supports kill stealing and unable to punish teamkillers hard and fast enough.

I actually play the match for fun too, but i don’t care about my kill numbers as i do not see any correlation between fun and high kill numbers.

  • In fact i prefer non op planes/pure fighters to have a challenge - and if i end up a game with 1-3 assists of stolen aircraft kills idc anymore.

  • If they would add a new column called “assists” in their statistical overview you might see the hundred or thousands of kill steals over the years - and i talk about flat spinning aircraft tumbling down several kilometers or bombers/fighters going down in flames unable to recover or made it back to their af.

  • I have way more fun if i am able to drag 3 XP-50s away from the center and giving my team a chance to climb than looking for high kill numbers in a fighter, so as long as we have different goals whilst playing the game we might have different views on the same aspect.

If you see the game as a whole the purpose of this thread is to discuss about team kills - imho easy to solve with disabling friendly fire at least for props (either by time like to protect take off or by proximitiy of enemies). So i understand your frustration in certain aspects of the game, but i am not defending or protecting kill stealers, i simply don’t care anymore.

41

Please no, lets not advocate to dumb down the game

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42

imho the major aspect is in brackets:

What’s wrong with that “or”?

43

By time on take off is ok, but this will not address someone just waiting the timer and then starting

By proximity of enemies isn’t ok, because it will lead to a stream off people behind a single enemy just all blasting their guns without thought. This is an issue for the actual person being chased because he will have a LOT of ammo flying his way and no real way to defend against it as they can’t damage each other

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44

Got your point from the enemy perspective - i was aiming at things like “there is no enemy within gun range” or say “3 km”: it would prevent intentional team kills.

I see a hell of team kills based on griefing (Bombers and stuff like Wyverns) in prop BRs every week whilst running to bases…

45

So then people can kill steal without getting revenge killed :) Nah man, playing with how friendly fire works shouldn’t be on the table in this discussion imo. Rather focus on the reasons why TK happens in the first place

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46

There is per se no such thing as kill steal: You get the kill, or not.

Sure, this mechanic or how it works may be flawed and has room for improvement (and I think this is worked on, no?), but it really doesn’t allow for retaliatory TK.

What’s worse: having a kill denied, or getting killed by a “friend”?

47

I don’t think anything else should be done so long as Gaijin allows " FailSquads " into matches.

Winning at high/top tier air/ground is hard enough. When squads for example in ARB show up on my team with only 1 BR-relative aircraft and the rest of the squad is 2/3/4/5+ BRs outside of the actual matchmaking? TeamKilling the entire squad is justified. They are purposefully sabotaging and griefing teams.

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48

Although i understand your pov from a “self justice” angle - imho the majority of team kills happen due to griefing, toxic trolling and reckless game play.

And most of those imho rather rare “kill steal revenge kills” are either based on wrong perception and missing understanding of damage models - and are committed by way less experienced players than you.

So from a holistic pov you are rejecting an easy way to prevent the overwhelming majority of team kills just to punish kill stealing players in case they can be objectively seen as “clean” kill stealers. Somehow understandable from your pov - but imho the game overall would benefit more if the high number of teamkills would go down first…

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49

Only reason I TK time to time is due to people killstealing… when I start playing, I tend to not care too much, but you have matches where you have 2 or sometimes more kills stolen, and that gets on my nerves to the point rational thought goes out the window and the person who happened to have done it is going to get it. Yes, it’s just some nonsense point on the statcard, but I spend my time in this game just like anyone else, team mates do not somehow have more rights to it when all the effort came from someone else. If I don’t feel that effort is displayed anywhere, then there’s no point to play this game because what else is there to do in WT? Nothing. It’s an arcade shooter just like FPS games. WT, while trying to be, isn’t a team game; the game objectives aren’t aligned, there’s no proper communication system, there are no team goals if you want a high win rate. Team mates are random, may or may not help you and even so, may not pick the right target because you cannot communicate properly in this game. This is a single player game for all intends and purposes unfortunately.

Gaijin can easily address this, and honestly I CANT WAIT until they make this new kill award system where basically both the person who shot the plane dead but not the pilot and the other person who “steals” both get +1 kill awarded. At that point I personally will not give a damn anymore if people go and shoot the planes that are flatspinning in the air to clean them up. I will get my kill regardless, so will the other person. I do not care about the SL/RP rewards whatsoever.

You watch some good players streaming random ARB who aren’t under your partner program, you see the same. Killsteals are nearly always retaliated. It’s just how it is.

You can’t fix this really, it happens but it’s unintentional and not that often

Usually other way around, competitive players will TK for it, casual people tend to not care too much outside of some ranting in chat perhaps… still, nobody likes it when their kill is stolen

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50

Oh - this was aimed at the fellow Ground RB players, some friends are somehow addicted to tanks - and they have severe issues with reckless Pe-8 users. In the linked thread of the old forum you see some examples of players actually caught by this auto-ban thing, and (ofc) a Pe-8 player…

Mhm - we play different games. I see a lot of “revenge” team kills rather at the lower side of player experience. So if we could agree on the the fact that experienced players are even rarer than “revenge team kills”, it seems obvious to me as spectator that a lack of actual know-how drives the majority of those “kill steal revenge team killers”.

They can’t distinguish between hits and crits, they can’t determine the damage they inflicted (“but i set them on fire”), have zero clue about effects of smoking engines, missing wingtips, etc. and even if friendlies scored objectively clean kills, they found ways to insult each other and subsequently commit team kills, as not all actual kill steals are that easy to determine like the classic flat spinning guy tumbling down like a leaf.

Most of those guys just lack the experiences of several thousand matches to come to the “right” conclusions - as they never had the “pleasure” to set an A6M5 3 times on fire in the same match and seeing them repairing 2 times after the first 2 fires.

And to qualify the “flat spinning” or “going down in flames” kill steals - imho this is just another example of totally ineffective/stupid game settings. So especially if you are not “kill driven” and don’t follow those planes, you see quite often 2 contrary effects:

  1. The crit leading to those “irrecoverable” plane crashes has a kind of timer - sometimes the enemy just “crashes” into the ground without rewarding you with the kill.
  2. If you sent down a Bv 238 by damaging a wing and set fires at the inner engines at around 5 km, your victim gets usually swarmed by your lower team mates and they are going in like there is no tomorrow - somehow the Bv is able to score multiple kills on it’s way down, got damaged several times and somehow you still get rewarded with the kill…

Although i have the same understanding of wt like you and i fully support your view on things in your first paragraph, i do not share your view on things of this “one enemy - 2 kills” approach.

If you read the fine print of this proposal you see that gaijin tries to exchange a rewarded single kill today into a possible 2 kill allocation of the same plane in the future - imho this proposal is another episode of “with good intentions is the opposite of good”. So a plane that is a clear kill today (black marker) might result in 2 possible kills in the future, your “kill steal issue” won’t be solved by this proposal.

As we agree that wt in just a plain shooter, your view looks comprehensible regarding the outcome, so the total number of player kills on your stat card.

But imho wt is also attractive for plane enthusiasts, and if you have any passion for WW 2 aerial warfare you might acknowledge that everything outside “one enemy - one kill” is just another attempt of gaijin to deal with their inability to allocate kills correctly.

51

Like, plenty of examples just like this, room for improvement? No, they should just delete whatever code they have now and make it properly… there are so many flaws in the current system.

This guy was totally undamaged, that other Yak-3 didn’t crit him or anything before… he just spray and didn’t even kill him – yet still somehow the kill STILL goes to him for whatever reason.

Yea good system, not at all makes people upset. And if it only would be a 1-off type of thing, but it isn’t.

https://streamable.com/6qfk6h

With whatever they are going to change, they hopefully remove this type of kill assignment entirely because it makes no sense whatsoever.

This is the game being the equivalent of a burning bowl of spaghetti

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52

This mechanic is utterly BS - i can’t create vids via xbox, so i have to work with replay links.

  • In this match (replay link) i critted an total oblivious B-17 at 7.300 meters. I damaged his tail, right wing root and wing tip, damaged one engine and shot his rudder completely away. He tried to land, but without rudder and with the wing damage he lost control and ripped his other wing off. Result: B-17 “crashed”, no kill or points for me - despite the battle log within the replay says: 13:57 “Player credited for kill: Uncle…” - this is exactly the scenario i described in my last post. And it happens quite often.

And just 2 matches later the same incident, i severely damage a plane, nobody else touches it and my target “crashed”, no kill, no points, no SL/RP - nothing. And the replay battlelog says “Player credited for kill: Uncle…”

  • I heavily critted in this match (replay link) a low Sterling at 4:32 - and this guy bombed himself to death due to missing time fuze at 6:48. The battle log says “player credited for kill Uncle…” and I did not even got an assist. Lousy 200 point score instead of 6-700 points (we have a grinding event running) and ~ 700 SL for the crit instead of 7.060 SL for a kill (i have 32% boosters running = 2x20%)

So instead of defending these nonsense mechanics it would be great if you can use your privilege access to gaijin to improve the game.

And even if i am not “number/kill driven” - the fellow player above is right - game mechanics with major flaws are creating frustration and are leading subsequently to intentional team kills. At the end every player wants to get rewarded for his actions and not get robbed by others or faulty coding…

And: Bug reports are imho useless for such things.
There are countless open reports for intentional team killing by ramming (and blaming the victim as teamkiller), and even bug reports for missing reward allocations (like here) remain untouched - 3 times missing “mission decider” reward in 2-3 weeks is a joke…

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53

As I said, “may be flawed”, but that’s not the topic here, the topic being TK, and the stance is “there is no excuse for a TK”.

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54

That’s fine, but there are 2 types of TK…

  1. Person wants to be toxic, kills team mates for no reason, unprovoked
  2. Person gets frustrated by the game and expresses this on a team mate

The first you can not really address, well sorta by banning, but the second you can…

  • TK happens because of kill steals and the reward system attached to how kills are attributed to a player, or;
  • TK happens among base rushers because someone happens to go for the same base which is a direct result from the increase of the base respawn timer in games. They feel someone else is ruining their run for some RP/SL but in fact its the game that is causing that. You can’t reasonably expect people to just “fly around” and be no good until the base finally respawns. Understand that these people have no interest in any air combat and their planes are loaded with bombs making them wholly ineffective in that role to start with

These people aren’t there to “be toxic”, they just want to have fun. They don’t want the (broken) game mechanics to annoy them. They get frustrated after years of it…

To fix those issues, you could of course do the following:

  1. Fix the kill award system, which is a WIP I guess
  2. Bases have a fixed amount of health, increase it by a LOT and attach the damage it took to some small amount of tickets and RP/SL reward. This way a single base would require multiple bomb runs (or multiple planes dropping their bombs on a single base). It shouldn’t be that a single plane can just rush and kill 2-3 or all 4 bases. Also, make their sizes bigger, work on what they represent (Manufacturing area, Power plant, Radar site, etc, give it surrounding buildings/structures to destroy, give it some defenses and not some random placed SPAA, I dunno, make it engaging in some way and give it purpose)
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55

No, you still don’t understand. There are no two types (which would imply “good” and “bad” TK’s).

TK’s are not allowed, no matter how frustrated you are about anything that happens to you in the game.

Any discussion about “…but I get frustrated when someone does this or that…” are completely irrelevant. Just as your not allowed to become abusive and insulting in chat, your not allowed to damage or kill your team member, neither by intention or by neglect.

You seem to be arguing or at least implying that TK is ok in situation where the game mechanics lets players behave in a way that you dislike (a way which however - please note - is not forbidden).

Good suggestions, I wholeheartedly agree there is room for improvement, but again, i no way are those shortcomings any relevant argument that would justify a TK.

Yes, I get frustrated too when someone kills the base I aimed for. But he was there first, and if positions are switched I will also engage the base when I’m closer, and not wait for the other guy.

Because of this I usually always mark the base I aim for (in Sim EC), and immediately also send a “follow me” radio command, so others aiming for the base may judge if they’re closer or farther away and should try to engage or not.

Of course, it depends a lot on the situation, but the main point is: I don’t “own” a base just because I marked it, and I don’t “own” a kill only because I was the first to inflict damage to a target.

Marking helps organise the players, helps them to decide what action to take. Nothing else.

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56

If we could agree on the fact that wt has the outstanding ability to keep you emotionally attached - even if you played it for years - it is logical that these emotions can result in non-rational behaviour if you get disappointed by game mechanics. So imho gaijin is responsible to prevent negative emotions if they are rooted in faulty game mechanics.

No offense, but imho it looks like that some topics are either too expensive to fix (and therefore ignored) or the janitors cleaning server rooms are using to much water - there is way too much RNG in wt.

We have (again) op midmap AA (hitscan) on certain maps either killing you if you dogfight near a enemy mini-base - or killing you above your own mini-base if you perform a BnZ attack on an enemy player near a base.(replay, killed at 2:51 by own aa). Just check this thread: Link.

So closing the circle to team kills:

  1. Lower the treshhold for your auto-ban tk mechanic to catch toxic players
  2. Fix this intentional ramming issue to punish rammers, not their victims
  3. Implement comprehensible game mechanics which prevent frustration

Have a good one!

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57

Nonsense. When there are Fail Squads sabotaging teams and matches, TeamKilling the entire squad is absolutely good and justified.

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58

Why don’t you just ban the people here and in the game who try to promote, justify, suggest and defend teamkilling? The teamkilling goes on because moderation is not harsh enough at this topic so they take courage to defend teamkilling and do it themselves sometimes. I am talking about intentional teamkilling, accidents sometimes happen even if you are too careful about IFF, which happens to me too, sometimes I do it and sometimes it is done to me. But intentional teamkill and promoting/defending this disgusting thing has to be hammered hardly so no one else will ever talk positive about this irritating idea. Enough is enough. I started the game back in 2021 Spring…it is end of 2023 and if we try to talk about this instead of punishments, this will be a popular topic even in 2030. I know you may be already punishing teamkillers but more discouraging approach should be choosen if you would ask me @Schindibee