Team killing policy - follow up thread

Game Discussion General Discussion
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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.

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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

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Yes, great approach, just silence and remove people who may be dissatisfied with how the game mechanics work instead of trying to work with them and come to a happy medium where everyone compromises to some extend and things can move forward. Sounds like a plan.

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60

There is no compromise that can be applied to a violent way of rule breaking. This is like protesting against the law that makes it illegal to stab people with knives in real life. What compromise are you talking about?

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First, this isn’t real life. That’s an entirely invalid comparison to make.

Second, the argument here is that people can get frustrated by the game mechanics which have quite a lot of room for improvement. It’s not like its something new. These mechanics have been criticized since the inception of this game… they make people mad, mad people do things which are not rational in hindsight. You can make a choice, just f those “angry” players into the ground as you suggest, or, you can try and understand the reasons behind that frustration and address those.

What do you imagine has the most positive outcome?

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63

Disabling TK on and in the immediate vicinity of the runway would not “dumb down” the game.

That being said, Gaijin has no desire whatsoever to do anything about TK so you have nothing to worry about.

Its a complicit part of their game/business model and although they may posture they aren’t going to really do anything to address it.

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That comment was related to his other suggestion, not about disabling FF on the runway (as you could have read). To that I responded that it won’t fix it because people can still just take off and wait for FF to be enabled again before blasting. I also commented that this type of TK’s, unprovoked at the start of the game, you aren’t going to address through mechanics other than handing out bans - as I also suggested.

Besides those TK’s resulting from sheer toxicity, there are also other TK’s resulting from pure frustration. Those can be addressed through game mechanic changes.

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Nothing you’ve said in your response negates my point.

It’s the malicious Team Kills that are the problem, not the ones in the heat of battle.

And, the lions share of those malicious TK happen at the beginning of the match either sitting on the runway during take off, or immediately after.

They greatly reduce afterwards because the planes disperse and even the toxic players that commit the malicious TK refocus on the game.

You can keep the TK active during battle, which doesn’t dumb down the game, and eliminate it around the airfields which would take it away from the toxic players.

But again I don’t think we have to worry about it either way, Gaijin has made it abundantly clear, to me personally, they have no intention at all to address the issue in any serious manner.

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It is same as real life in behavior context. Only here the outcome is digital and people have more courage to break the rules because they are safe in their home. If things were in order than no one could dare to break the rules even in this environment where they think they are safe to break any rules. Same with bullying that happens excessively online like the other person has done who replied to my previous post, just to give you an example. Both in real life and in online games with communities there are rules, they are comparable. In one example someone else has given, when you “think” you own a bomb base as soon as you ping it and someone else bombs it, you are responsible for creating your own frustration by at the first place “thinking” it was your bomb target. You are responsible for that frustration but you kill your teammate, just an example, I don’t mean you behave that way. Like in real life when you see a stone with no owner from far on the ground and someone else gets there sooner and picks up and claims the stone, you don’t have the right to pull your gun and shoot them. This is just an example, I have said more than enough for someone who wants to understand, the rest will be a waste of time if one insists not to understand.

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My words are clear and does not imply any of what you understood. They are clear for anyone who wants to understand. Someone who tries hard not to understand, trying to tell that person may be helpless as long as that person closes themself.

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Not defending intentional TK literally means that even cases like this are not allowed.

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Imagine 2 squads in an air rb team, 4 members each…someone from one of the squads kills the other in the other squad for “base stealing”(so called) and then the rest go into a 3v4 civil war. Is this the war thunder community behaviour that you are defending and supporting? Instead of simply reporting the teamkiller, encouraging teamkilling is also disrespecting the game moderators by not trusting their answer to the situation.