The root of Air RB's problems and a suggestion on how to address it

Game Discussion Realistic Battle
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  • Yes - from a player perspective if he expects more than point and click.
  • No - from gaijin’s perspective as they satisfy the overwhelming masses which are used to play CoD etc. are exactly looking for this kind of game play.

Seeing the development of Air RB in the last 3-5 years, the mode became Air RB+, basically all changes made skill less important, the MM and BR setting policy is “engagement optimized” and suited to satisfy the average player, but not long term players.

And the numbers of players increased constantly.

A few years ago you were happy if you got 1 or 2 kills whilst flying German 109s (as US teams get totally outclimbed) and if you were able to kill one or 2 out of the hordes of J2M2 and Ki-84s at your six whilst flying a P-51 for the US - and getting chased for 1 hour like on Wake Island.

Today - all go low and enjoy headon orgies…

Yes and no. Imho it is more a fight for grind for most players.

  • As long as PvE players play Air RB just for the sake of grind (so without enjoying the here and now) as they are on a journey to somewhere else, nothing will change.

  • So the low skill floor to get SL/RP with base bombing is luring a hell of players into battles which serve just the purpose of being prey for PvP players…

  • And the PvP players see wt as it is: A plain shooter. So there is nothing wrong with being " kill driven".

From my perspective “real” team play is very rare - at the end of the day wt is a contest of kills / being on top of the scoreboard, so you compete with enemies in blue, at least from a holistic pov. So most people see team play not as a desired goal. Maybe as a tool to get more kills/points, you see this just by the ever increasing number of kill steals or team kills…

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You’re missing my point.

The objectives in and of themselves are not the root of the problem.

It’s the fact that just a single one of the three is enough to auto-end the round that is.

Most of the time, fighters clean up the enemy team and tickets auto-bleed to zero. Any non-fighters simply do what they can manage, but the reality is that your team’s fighters won in spite of you using a non-fighter, since any input on your objective is rendered near-irrelevant by activation of the fighter TDM auto-end ticket bleed.

Right now there is no reason from a dev perspective to give nonfighters anything more interesting to do, because the fighter TDM autowin bleed will override it most matches anyway (unless someone hides on their runway or in orbit).

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I do remember back in the day on one of the old Essen maps repeatedly ending the match within a couple of minutes in a prop bomber because I would just flank and bomb the airfield. I did this until the fighter mains figured out what I had been doing and started intercepting me. That night I made my Me-264 the most important aircraft in the match.

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Killing ground units doesn’t net any meaningful rewards and leave you open to fighters. Noone wants to ground pound in Air RB because it isn’t worth your time. That is beside the fact that there is no interesting gameplay because most of the targets are static positions, they are highlighted on the map and in view, and the convoys barely fire back with AA fire. No danger, no invigorating gameplay. Taking 6 Mavericks in an F-16C just means you wasted 2 pylons because 6 Mavericks won’t net you the same rewards as an air to air kill, let alone 2. Ground RB is where people go to bomb because it is much more interesting searching for targets and being rewarded for destroying them. Along with the actual damage models being present, it is much more interesting gameplay as well because you can use stealth, which is not really an option in Air RB with the markers.

Destroying bases slow you down and leaves you vulnerable to fighters, but gives absolutely massive rewards for the little effort isually put into it. This has caused 11.3 to become a shitshow with F-4S players that have a PD radar that shows them chaff doesn’t effect those radar styles chaffing in order to avoid radar missiles from MTI and PD systems. All the while actual strikers can’t even make it to bases, and as we discussed above ground striking isn’t worth the effort put into it. In low tier, ground strikers get an airspawn much closer to objectives and are faster than bombers so they get there first most of the time and destroy the usefulness of bombers in the only mode they actually do anything useful for rewards. The only level bombers people in ground rb give two shits about is the Pe-8 and Lancasters with the large bombs.

Going air to air requires knowledge of weapons/airframes to be successful. PVP is the basis of the mode now, not much to say there.

I mean, the incentive for them to change it really isn’t present with Ground RB. Most people do ground strike there. If you got rid of the “no hostile players left on the enemy team” ticket bleed it would just prolong the games for no real reason.

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Right now with how uninspired the objectives are, yes there is “no reason” to remove the “no active players left on enemy team” auto-end ticket bleed.

But, crucially on damn near every map these days, every ground unit counts towards the ticket levels, which used to not be the case where only hard things like (Light) Pillboxes & Tanks did.

As long as each objective is so much as able to end games wholly on its own, there is no incentive for the devs to make CAS & Bombing objectives more interesting, more skillful, more varied by map, or add new objectives to either of those categories.

The fighter TDM bleed is crowding out the other two for the most part unless someone runs or hides excessively. The current mode doesn’t even have the framework needed to evolve into something better because the three objectives which should work together currently compete against one another. There is no room to begin adding improvements currently of any real value.

I don’t want to interfere with fighter mains’ fun - I fly fighters plenty myself, too. I just want to see them doing their jobs not automatically prevent everyone else from doing theirs. And vice versa for those flying attackers and bombers.

For instance, say a standard game has 7200 tickets.

  • 72 ground units worth 50 tickets each (3600 total)

  • 16 player aircraft + 9 AI attacker aircraft, 144 tickets each (3600 total)

  • 10 bombing targets, 360 tickets each (3600 total)

To prevent games being “left hanging,” the additional objective of extra vehicles appearing 20min into a match would be kept and reinstated on all maps, worth 2400 tickets total. It’d be called “sever enemy supply lines” or something.

As I said already, the above is merely a framework for further improvement. The current somewhat boring CAS and Bombing objectives can be gradually replaced with ones requiring more skill input now that reason to invest dev effort into such things actually exists.

Fighter mains must recognize they’re (probably unintentionally) strangling the mode to death and back off enough to let it grow into something better.

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Imho i was just not clear enough. If you see my two previous posts together, this was my core message:

  1. Air RB is flooded with new players - unable or unwilling to invest time in learning how the game works. The current SL/RP gains for killing bases allows players to research whole tech trees without having any clue about aerial warfare, tactics and strategy.

  2. WT is nothing more than a plain shooter with a massive grind challenge. As in all shooters, mainly kills are decisive. Game objectives are there to enforce engagements and to give some people the illusion that they can influence the outcome of a PvP (=shooter) game with PvE actions.

  3. The only cases in which PvE is able to decide matches right now, are prop BRs below 5.0 (outside Ju 288 black hole) - and this only on certain maps like Tunisia when attacker can win the game in 4 minutes, or if the PvP players were unable to made the “right” decisions (attacking the wrong targets) or if they got outplayed by a more experienced player.

  4. The other exception is when the enemy team is clueless, allowing an experienced player to win by tickets after 25 minutes - even 1 vs 8. But this requires the right balance between PvP and PvE - and an extensive know how of the strengths and weaknesses of all aircraft in the BR range - and the “right” plane choices and playing outside jet BRs.

An example:

In this replay you see me flying a B7A2 - playing 1 vs 9 after 8 minutes on Poland. I killed one cocky Yak, finished a base and played easy prey for them by flying in their plain view - dragging them so high that they had no engine power to catch me. It was pure luck that i crossed long before the flight path of their only bomber, i shot him to pieces before he could drop (ofc he was stolen, flat spinning and burning) , so my ticket win was based on the fact, that my team killed all 3 bases and their time none.

  1. As a summary:
    The objectives - together with the average player skill - are the reason for the current mess. Objectives are way too easy (like bombing respawning bases) and give way too much rewards for the imho limited skill necessary. And ofc the players are grind driven and look for the easiest way.

I fully support your idea of a rework of win objectives to have the 3 ways:

  1. TDM
  2. Ticket win either by killing all tickets or by time
  3. Airfield kill

…to win a match. But imho you project your higher experience level as baseline for all - and this is way too optimistic. You might want to check this post and see that gaijin itself creates boredom with unbalanced map design and also the ai ticket bleed was often discussed in this forum.

All in all gaijin should rethink their reward structure for killing targets. I understand that point and click on stationary ground targets should not give the same rewards than an A2A player kill, but the current reward structure has created lobbies full with fighters attacking bases…

Have a good one!

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Would the simplest solution to all of this just be to copy Sim EC into RB?

I mean Air RB at the upper tiers is in such a bad state atm and Gaijin seems unwilling to invest ANY time in game mode development so maybe just copy Sim EC to Air RB and throw it in the events tab.

I dont wanna let the perfect be the enemy of the good here.

Yea there’s better solutions but Gaijin doesn’t seem to be willing to explore any of those solutions.

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The objectives cannot become more complex and varied if there is no framework to build them upon. With how >95% of games being won by enemy team obliteration, there is currently no dev incentive to overhaul the PvE objectives.

I’m not talking about RP/SL value, but ticket value for game-winning purposes. As long as TDM alone is able to auto-end things without input from the other two, there is literally no room to expand the PvE objectives which are the mode’s missing flavor. At least not without bringing back far more of the “bomber/attacker zergrush” nonsense that was and occasionally still is just as awful as TDM auto-ending things in my book.

If this game was meant to be just a PvP slugfest and nothing else, we wouldn’t have player-controlled ground attackers or bombers at all, except the small handful which can play like fighters.

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Tbh - one positive aspect of the current situation is: You know what you get when entering Air RB. And frankly spoken - you saw the disaster when they put Rocky Canyon into prop BRs.

I even fought with my IT P-47 on an EC map (Spain) - 15 minutes flying to potential dots, found 2 264s plus 190 D-12 escort, 7 minutes to equalize his alt/energy advantage, 3 minutes dogfight (from 9k to tree top), got the kill and game ended seconds later…dentist visits make more fun.

As long as there are full lobbies 24/7 nothing will change.
The game is full of flaws and they sell high tier jets like sliced bread.

Again, low player experience, stupid map design/ game mechanics and wrong incentives for low skill tasks like base bombing brought the game play here…

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Outright replacing RB Air with RB EC and no enemy markers like in the other two modes? Count me in.

The objective structure of the current mode is the root of the problem. Maps, markers, midmap AAA, position of AI ground units, position of bombing targets, and lack of diversity in PvE objectives are all separate challenges that would need to be solved after reforming the root of the mess.

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And so long as each of the three objectives is capable of ending the game by itself, with PvP TDM having a far easier time of achieving victory than the other two in nearly every case at every BR, it is not possible to change things like stupid map design.

I am not against PvP TDM - I like my fighters. But I also like my nonfighters - and right now either my nonfighters are fighter bait or they are totally irrelevant to match outcome. And the rare cases where they are relevant, they are forced to take away from fighter players’ fun. That is wrong.

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Adding the huge maps to props was really dumb so maps definitely need to be tailored to BR levels.

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SL/RP income is steering player behavior & actions.

As long as i got 5.348 SL (prem B7A2) for a player kill - which requires outside headons some skill - and ~ 5.800 SL for a 0 skill task like bombing a respawning base (reducing tickets between 180-300), there is no incentive for new players to improve.

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The objective structure of the current mode is the root of the problem.

I’d follow up on that and say the objective structure is a result of needing an objective for any of the possible varieties of aircraft a player could spawn with. So, you can never tailor a map/mode to a specific kind of aircraft, and you get a mish mash where fighters end of dominating (which makes sense!).

Solutions as I see them:

  1. Split up the game modes to CAS, fighter battle, bomber raid, etc. (bad, fractures playerbase)
  2. Players select a roster (bomber, CAS, fighter, helicopter, SPAA(?!)) in advance, and then their options are limited based on whatever game mode comes up.

*yes this implies player controlled SPAA in AB could be an option
**dividing the aircraft types would be a task, but you could do single-seat/AI gunner/bomb bay as a first pass, with air battle, tactical strike, and strategic bombing as a rough mission spread

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i agree with the vast majority of what you said, if not all.

I do believe you missed 1 thing however - Majority of air rb players these days simply do not care.

They want short matches, they dont care about anything other than SL or RP, the whole COD type behaviour and mentality has seeped into WT.

They dont want to use tactics or strategy, they want to just rush in and headon the first person they see, they want to only be in the most powerful vehicles and rack up kills.

They dont wanna fly for long, they wanna rush in, get what they can and get out and go into the next one, personally i HATE it, but i cannot ignore what i believe to be the common behaviour.

The majority simply do not care or want to actually play, i mean majority use every vehicle the same regardless of planes ability etc, take the bombers for example, perfectly content with flying straight into the enemy team over and over again, they dont want to do anything else, its like dangling a carrot and they take it because its all they know.

I want change, i want it to be more like what you said and more involving but i dont think this opinion is reciprocated.

I am not quite wording this right and i dont quite know how to say it but i think you understand what i am getting at.

Its a problem for sure.

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If the TO guys have not gotten their nirvana mode after nearly a decade of complaining, then I highly doubt we’ll get a split mode of any sort for aircraft.

Hence, we must reform the current mode we have, or outright replace it with a better mode more inclusive of all plane types.

Bombers and attackers simply can never matter much so long as fighters don’t need to care about them to win matches easily. Years ago when the reverse was true with attacker and bomber zergrushes was just as awful, and too many people think either the current situation or that are the only options.

Matchmaker reform can actually play a role here - if we already have a limit of 4 bombers per team, why not institute limits for every other plane class, too? Then nonfighters are no longer “flotsam taking up fighter slots” like some fighter diehards on the old forum would say from time to time.

Ideally, I would say in a 16-man team, 10 fighter slots and 6 non-fighter slots. People would be shepherded into their roles by an additional reward multiplier - do stuff according to your job, get more rewards than now, do stuff outside your job, get less rewards than now. A multirole plane picks a job in hangar before queuing, can change roles on the runway mid-match (provided there is an empty team slot available for it), and gets the corresponding bonus for that role.

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Oh I do understand, man. It was not great years ago when I joined, and its only deteriorated further since. PvE planes and their objectives are this mode’s missing flavor, and the constant gutting of the planes’ ability to matter in a match by fighter mains and gutting of their weapon effectiveness by tank mains will only make them even worse over time.

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I’m not saying any particular way is better as of yet, but the main issues I see with type limits are:

  1. Even if the objective requires ground attack, Fighters are still going to be dominant on a gameplay basis. So if your fighter team gets swept you’ll be a sitting duck as bombers/CAS.
  2. If ground attack is the objective, and only a smaller portion of the team can complete it effectively, and that portion has no idea what they’re doing, that team has lost on setup.

I think take the slots idea just a littttttle further, and instead of 10 fighter slots and 6 non-fighter slots one game, have 16 fighter slots the first game, and 16 non-fighter slots the second. (It’s not strict, play with those numbers however you like, just bear in mind #1 and #2 above).

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The only way to make fighters and nonfighters work together is to make the two need each other, like in real missions that were not purely air superiority like Battle of Britain.

And that means neither one should be able to easily end rounds all by itself.

Most matches should end via a fighter deathmatch phase and then a followup phase of bombing and strafing. Which is how the small battles in EC play out already. I have nothing against fighters having their fun. My objection stems from fighters doing their job preventing nonfighters from doing theirs.

Fighter-centric objectives would be worth 50% of the tickets (total value of all enemy players and AI strike aircraft). CAS objectives would be worth 50% of the tickets (all ground units). Bombing objectives would be worth 50% of the tickets (turn off base respawning, add more simultaneous active bases).

This is just a new framework which would then support all the more interesting PvE objectives the game has lacked for years - factory bombing, radar stations, the Tirpitz being a target on the Norway map, the possibilities are honestly endless. But right now there is no reason to bother when fighters end games 99% of the time anyways.

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I think the thing is non-fighters only need fighters to not get killed by other fighters. Which still gives the round-ending ability to fighters, when present, because they can kill all the other aircraft.

Though I think what you might be getting at is having fewer targets–one ball bearing factory, one radar station, one Tirpitz–which translates to one engagement. So, you have one engagement, with one macro “pass”, and not a bunch of spread-out targets that you invariably get your ticket punched by a fighter when flying between.