16v16 is not fun. There’s no BVR, no dogfights, and you can’t tell what’s going on. It all ends up in a giant furball where one team stomps the other team. Please Gaijin reduce team sizes to a range from 7v7 to 12v12 depending on map size. Another benefit from this would be shorter matchmaking time.
3 Likes
It would increase MM time, and the majority of playerbase prefer this type of gameplay.
1 Like
The majority of the playerbase preferring this type of gameplay is just not true at all.
The playerbase is almost perfectly split. Reddit and the old forum had a few poles that gained over a thousand votes and both they showed that the playerbase wants a split for top tier Air RB.
They want a regular Air RB with smaller teams and no respawns and a separate Air RB EC with respawns and larger teams/maps.
They DONT want is this current compromised game mode that fits nobody. Even the CC’s that literally get gifted vehicles and get kickbacks to showcase the game have pretty universally admitted top tier Air RB is broken.
The matchmaker was an excuse BVVD made back in 2019. The playerbase has nearly tripled since then. The MM may take a small hit but it will be small.
Air RB needs to be split.
There’s really no way forward unless they just plan to abandon the mode which is very possible.
I don’t think Gaijin has much interest in air anymore. Im kind of doubting many of them even play much Air anymore. Their statements about aviation and their decisions for air gamemodes just seem to be randomly picked out of a hat.
I get the feeling that Aviation just seems to be used as a support tree for Ground.
Maybe one day we’ll get an air game mode that feels modern.
6 Likes
i cant stand these ec maps nobody uses 70% because they made the stupid decision of putting the airfields in line of each other
2 Likes
I play props.
Air RB is basically AB+ now.
The games are so short - normally it’s over in under 10 mins unless someone camps or space climbs.
There is very little climbing, it’s just a race to the middle, full commit head-ons, turn, die, new game.
You can’t have good, prolonged, fights due to 16 vs 16 - you better kill that enemy fast and escape, because you will get 3rd partied.
5 Likes
That is not at all the issue. Don’t be so pompous
I can imagine to some extent why GAIJIN does not want to implement AirRBEC.
As far as I remember, we had held AirRBEC a few times in the distant past, but the event was not that well received and ended relatively shortly.
Based on this experience, I predict that GAIJIN is not keen on AirRBEC.
But if so, I think GAIJIN is mistaken.
One of the reasons why RBEC back then was not fun was that they applied the normal RB visibility system directly to the SBEC map, which resulted in a huge crowd of people crowding into one battlefield to form a huge fur ball.
It is easy to imagine that if we were to hold RBEC now, as it was before, we would have a very large and chaotic fur ball, especially in the higher ranks
This is why I mentioned in an earlier post that the visibility system needed adjustment
Other ideas would be to have mission objectives in multiple locations on the map to spread out the density of players (the current mission style in SB is not good enough).
Another reason was that RBECs at that time were held with very low ranking aircraft (rank 2, I think - Bf109E, yak1, etc.) and it took a long time to travel even to relatively close battlefields.
In addition, the regular AirRBs were not so chaotic back then, and on machine gun based battlefields, you had to get very close, within 1km, to attack or be attacked
But now things are different.
7 Likes
I am going to echo the same point but with a couple of caveats.
A lot of people that want to see RB EC have never played an EC match or they have selective memories of the good EC matches. They don’t remember the bad ones.
There already is a version of top tier EC in Simulator Battles and it has its own sets of problems that the RB playerbase does not see and problems that would be even more obvious if applied to RB.
The first problem is that at top tier the games are never full. Most of the lobbies are only 1/4 to 1/2 full and people will leave once they die a couple times. There is a whole entire snowball cycle where lobbies tend to empty out and favor one team.
The second problem is that set respawns and respawn points means that one team with eventually get pushed towards their spawn. Jump into an EC on Denmark and you are often times getting radar locked on your own runway. This would end up being much worse in a 16v16 game where one team gains PvP advantage or in the eventual 16v8 that will happen because players like to kill other players but don’t like being killed.
The third problem is that the EC rewards system is easily exploitable and as a result has been reduced to such an extent that grinding is much longer.
Overall the people that have fond memories of Air RB EC are remembering playing in small rooms with mainly bots on the enemy team. Even without a spotting system while being limited to cockpit view large Sim EC games play very similar to Air RB games. The idea that EC gameplay would promote more methodical gameplay or smaller engagements is a myth; the team that sticks closer together and has better players always crushes the team that spreads out across the map.
1 Like
I understand that, so I don’t think just combining what we have now will make RBEC better.
I also play SB and DCS, but I still like the easygoing system of RB, so I don’t want the visibility system to be invisible like in SB, but I also don’t want to be able to know the position of distant enemies if my allies are in view, like in RB now.
For example, the visibility system needs to be modified to only share visibility information of allies within 10km.
The second problem is also undesirable to implement the current SB system as it is.
For example, the closer one gets to the airport, the more dense the anti-aircraft defenses become, making it virtually impossible to approach, or, if the system allows, setting up areas that are off-limits to enemy teams
Third problem, I understand that the current SB rewards are making it less attractive to play, but I think the time dependent reward system of the past was also a problem.
So I think it would be healthier to simply change the reward system to a simpler reward system for shooting down enemy fighters and destroying ground targets.
Similarly, I have a problem with the current reward system in RB. Because a match that lasts 16 minutes with 2 kills is more rewarding than a match that lasts 5 minutes with 5 kills.
I think the reward system should be changed so that a player’s contribution, whether SB or RB, is more fairly evaluated.
And the last problem arises because the game is ultimately decided by air battles. As seen in other games, in a game system where there are multiple targets to be attacked, if Team A deploys all its forces to Base A, even if it can capture Base A, the other bases will be captured by Team B. In such a system, the more targets there are to achieve and the more bases there are to capture, the more balance must be maintained between concentration and dispersion of forces. In such a system, concentration and dispersion of forces must be balanced, so that excessive concentration can be curbed by game design.
The current mission system, like SB’s, seems to be corrupt in gathering players to “fight here”, whether for air control or ground attack, so as I said in my previous post, the current SB mission system is not good enoug
There are still many things to consider, but I think it is not impossible to create a great game, not only with what we have now, but also with the design of the games we are going to create.
Personally, I cannot say that the current game design of “WarThunder” is excellent
I believe that with more ingenuity and gimmicks, it could become an irreplaceable game!
P.S. I use a translation tool, so there may be some strange parts in long sentences, in which case, I apologize.
3 Likes
I completely agree that simply copying Sim EC into Air RB isn’t ideal.
The issues Sim EC has could be countered by game mode design elements. For example, if one team gains an advantage over the other and pushes towards their airfields, maybe their airfields could gain a significantly more powerful SPAA or SAM defense network.
Or maybe the losing team would get some AI aircraft assistance. AI obviously needs some work in WT.
Also people definitely will leave the lobby if the match timer is 2+ hours. I would say an Air RB EC match timer should be more like 45 mins to 1 hour to help mitigate this issue. And maybe if one team is just dominating, tickets would last about 30 mins.
Spotting is also a mechanic that would need to be fine tuned. I would say that enemies within a certain distance from your airfields or carriers or bases should be spotted and maybe certain aircraft get a spotting mechanic. Other than that im kind of in favor of no spotting. Also i dont think enemy airfields or carriers should be spotted.
There’s also the question of how respawning could work. Do you just allow infinite respawns in whatever vehicle you want so long as you have the SL for the repair or do you introduce a spawn point system similar to Ground RB?
Even with a spawn point system, i would say there should be vehicles that cost very few or no spawn points. Either planes 1.0+ BR under the match BR or maybe even add in heli/drone airfields closer to the front line and give everyone a reserve drone like Ground RB to farm spawn points if they run out. Just a few ideas here.
Either way, it will require some dev work to make Air RB EC viable but i think it would be really healthy for the game overall and future-proof aviation in WT.
2 Likes
Why are RB players who want a better experience so reluctant to give SimEC a try? It has everything you’re asking for…
Don’t be afraid to learn something new. It might be difficult at first, but there’s a huge sense of accomplishment when flying your plane under your own controls. A lot of people do very well with the Mouse-joy emulation system.
SimEC still experiences it’s own problems with bad map design for top tier, but the lower tiers provide a much better experience than the current RB meta.
1 Like
Many of us have played Sim EC which is why we’re baffled that the EC mode isn’t an option for RB.
Sim is just a very different experience than RB with the cockpit only view. I personally feel that the sim experience is much better with other games but thats just my opinion.
3 Likes
Your earlier breakdown of air RB’s casual vs competitive nature makes sense.
We need smaller team sizes for regular RB air, and a larger-scale EC type mode that will serve as a draw for the non-competitive players out there.
Instead of pure PvP focus, the EC mode should have big, scripted events for the groundpounders to deal with - more than the weak sauce AI convoys and fronts we have now. Events like random weather systems or AI reinforcements could spice up the gameplay.
To deal with spawn-camping, enemies too close to the bases should have their positions marked by ground radar on the runways. Then, people who are spawning at other bases will have someone to focus down. There is no way to 100% fix spawncamping in a multi-respawn mode without imbalancing one side or the other, but this is a good temporary solution.
To compensate for the ‘I am in a dogfight with 1 dude, why am I suddenly being swarmed’ issue, we could remove quick-chat, or make it so that ‘cover me’ gives only a vague clue to location instead of the pinpoint marker it does in SB. Then you won’t get dogpiled instantly because the other guy was spamming T-4-2.
EC is not a magical groundpounder mode where we all coexist and make free RP. It should be place where the attack planes are more useful and stop filling up air RB, which is is badly designed for casual PvE play.
6 Likes