I’d be far more worried if Gaijin has ever shown an interest in listening to player feedback.
Also, having now played a decent number of games in the 12.0 Viggen D, I have to say F-15s are far lower on my list of concerns than, say, the ARHs I meet in uptiers, the F-16s that club me in a dogfight if they survive the merge, the ERs which swat me every time I deign to go above multipath height, and the hordes of brainless F-4S and MiG 23 ML players who are like a lead weight on the team balancing.
We’ll say, for the sake of argument, that 12.0 is now safe. It’s not, there’s still F-16 and F-18s running around, clubbing all these unmanuverable 3rd gens to death, especially now that a lot of the things they had to worry about got moved up, but we’ll ignore that for now.
In this new MM, the F-15 will still be terrible. As will the Mirage 4000, the Gripen, and other ARHless 13.0s. The Su-27 will be on suicide watch, ERs are potent missiles but combined with the base Su-27’s mid RADAR and questionable RWR, it’s just going to be food, especially if it’s only slightly below competant ARH slingers.
There’s always going to be a final BR where the last of the SARH slingers sits, and as long as that’s within 1.0 BR of the competant ARH slingers, they’re always going to suffer from it. And since Gaijin is never going to add a gap like that to the game, the only fix is to change the gamemode so that getting an early BVR kill isn’t the sole thing that matters.
With the exception of IRCCM ones, the F-16A has distinct disdvantages - no presence in opener, low presence in furball, no radar missiles etc. It isnt such one sided matchup.
So move them up as well, we now have space to do so.
So move those up as well.
Su-27/33 is much better platform than legacy ARH slingers. That matchup is fine.
As for much better ARH slingers, these can and should be moved up as well.
The decompression im talking about needs to be widespread and large scal, not just limited to few aircraft.
But RB EC does not automatically exclude decompression. You can want both.
I can and do. But decompression without EC doesn’t solve the underlying issue, at least not realistically. Gaijin has never done a BR gap, let alone the 1.0 one that would be required to seperate the SARH slingers from the ARH slingers.
It’s also one they’re highly likely to not want to do. Gaijin has consistently monetized top tier by making the penultimate tier exceptionally painful to grind through. Forcing players to slog through the 13.0 bracket means that they’re much more likely to shell out for one of those premiums that’s currently ruining their experience. None of this current suffering is a bug to them.
And, frankly, continuing to decompress around how well vehicles perform in Air RB (Or, in the case of the F-15, despite that) seems rather pointless. You’re using flawed metric of how well vehicles will perform to balance them, instead of putting them in an enviroment where you can actually get some useful data.
We won’t have decompression at top tier either, at least until Gaijin has milked enough its Su-30s at 13.3, which would only happen on June at the very least with a sale each.
The decompression narrative has failed the community the moment Gaijin explicitly chose to compress 12.7 to 13.3 with both TT planes easily more versatile than most of SARH slingers at the BR range and handheld premiums, simple as. And therefore, planes at 13.0 that were already struggling such as the F-15A or the Mirage 4000 simply don’t deserve to be flying piñatas for the whole spam of premiums and compressed flankers.
And if that means being probably both the best 12.7s for many of you, so be it. It’s not like compression hasn’t already made other vehicles good or straightup meta to begin with (BMP-Ts, Su-11, SA JAS39C, XM800T, etc.)
This. Because of the 13.3 premium milking things like the f15a, which has, and mig29 will probably see br decreases due to the compression. Su27/su33 should stay 13.0.
Realistically? Yeah we wont. Still, doesnt change a thing about what I said - vehicle performance needs to be judged on how they perform or would perform in current air battles enviroment.
Two wrongs dont make a right.
Yes realistically that will be the case, doesnt mean we should stop asking for it as community.
Does gaijins decision (ie. not players decision) invalidate the efforts that were made so far in regard to compression?
See, I agree with you here, I just think that out of the two possible solutions to this issue, moving F-15A down is the worse one.
Because when you think about it, this argument isnt F-15A or M4K specific. X doesnt deserve to be flying pinata for Y can apply to lot of planes.
Issue is, when you decide to solve this by moving X plane down away from Y, you inevitably create more of this problem - now it is Z plane that doesnt deserve to be flying pinata for X. So you move Z plane down and whole cycle repeats.
Eventually, you run out of BRs to move planes down to since BR cant go below 1.0.
Thats why any solution must be made by moving stuff up where you can expand max BR and thus number of BR steps ad infinitum.
is WT actually enjoyable, lol?
i have been grinding for the AMX M4 and i only enjoyed the french gameplay before reaching rank 2/3 (yeah, i enjoyed french lowtier…) AND after unlocking AMX M4.
i just got Rafale a few weeks ago, and the stock grind sucks. even worse, the Rafale doesn’t look like a good aircraft anymore: u lose all ur speed in a single turn, MICA-EMs suck over 20km (which is impossible to do since there’s always at least 4 different players targetting u from +20km cuz u’re “a threat”), and i usually end matches dying or surviving all the entire f*cking match with 0 kills 0 assists.
the thing is, my Rafale’s fate depends if i rush to the furball/side climb with afterburner or without afterburner lmao.
It doesn’t, which is fairly worse than the players not expressing anything at all, as we’ve been explicitly ignored for far too long.
There’s zero chance we haven’t been read by someone who’s able to do something about the compression issue, yet the problem stayed after both the last BR changes and the imminent update.
And I agree following the decompression > recompression logic, it makes sense.
The problem starts when I consider to be deeply unfair for premium vehicles to get a free pass on sealclubbing with a minimal sense of skill, whereas planes like the ones we’re mentioning require a decent amount of focus and strategy to make them work not even consistently, but to begin with.
The moment compression begins to benefit premium vehicles as much as TT ones, the fabric of the convention where “decompression is the only answer” is entirely shattered, as an skilled player may pick a premium jet and vastly outperform the most mediocre jet at the same BR without even flinching, to which I ask: What’s the point of grinding a mediocre vehicle if someone may pick something objectively better at the same BR while earning 2x RP and SL?
And again, it only gets to a point where compression is fair or unfair enough, I still believe technological gaps should be the main consideration when applying recompression, especially at higher ranks where the difference between for instance, a non PD and a PD radar is that on the former, you just have to pop a single chaff, and the latter you must have to pull a whole maneuver + chaff.
Gaijin moving the F-15A/J/Baz down won’t fix things long-term, but its a clear sign they prefer recompression even after whole threads of complains.
I play 12.0 quite a bit. Still never seen a f15a on top of a leaderboard. Cant even remember being killed by one either.
F14 iran still dominates the BR range… Phantom with HMD is getting more kills until the end game where the f15a never even gets to anyway. f18s are also different level than the f15a. The f16s are another struggle 12.7 but having f15 radar and sparrow combo is doing exactly nothing so f16 is still better even though itself is below mid. Even the Mig 29 also better as 2 guaranteed kills + HMD.
Only thing i like about the f15a is its CM count and man does it need them
The stock grind? Definitely not, the M4K’s stock grind is by far the best of any high tier plane that I’m aware of. You unlock your full missile kit with a tier two mod, which can be the second thing you research on the plane. By comparison, the F-15s don’t get their full load of their most effective missiles (The 9Ms/AAM-3s) until tier 4, and only get their full SARH load at tier 2. Have to waste time unlocking AIM-9Ls.
If you mean in terms of performance… Maybe? It’s hard to say, both suffer from similar problems. The main differences are that the 4k has a marginally better flight model for dogfighting, more IR missiles at the cost of them being worse, a TWS that’s limited to HDN only, and no PD RADAR that isn’t HDN. The F-15 is a lower BR now, but that doesn’t really affect it’s performance all that much.