We need to talk about scouting

Game Discussion Realistic Battle
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Revised Post:

First of all, this is a complex topic, and I want to make it clear upfront that I don’t want light tanks to become bad. Quite the opposite. This is more about restructuring Ground RB to bring back a long-lost aspect of it.

Recently, I—and I’m sure many others—have noticed how much the scouting mechanic in Realism mode (Ground RB) influences gameplay. Light tanks constantly mark enemies, so that often a large portion of the enemy team is permanently spotted. It now feels more like arcade than realism.
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And that’s precisely the problem. One of the biggest differences between Arcade and Realism has been the degree of overview and uncertainty:

  • In Arcade, everything is visible, you’re rarely surprised—the game is faster and less tactical.

  • In Realism mode, on the other hand, a “fog of war” prevailed: Those who read the environment correctly, anticipate enemy movements, and are well positioned have the upper hand.
    But the scouting mechanics increasingly clear this fog. Moments of surprise? Oftentimes gone. Tactical approach? Usually pointless if you happen to be spotted by a light tank whose player isn’t even actively fighting you. It’s not as if you can always avoid being scouted.

The result is a clear disadvantage for playstyles that rely on stealth and positioning. Vehicles designed for flanking maneuvers, ambushes, or unconventional routes are losing massive relevance.
At the same time, a meta of certain light tanks is emerging: Especially at ranks 5 - 7 they offer everything a medium tank can do, plus free scouting.
Vehicles like the DF-105, TAM or the Type 16 are thus replacing their related medium tanks not because of better tank design, but because of a single, yet overpowering, mechanic. It’s to the point where the team with the most scout tanks has a higher probability of winning.

The idea behind scouting was originally sound: light tanks should become more attractive again after more and more urban maps and close-quarters gameplay had weakened their role. But instead of adjusting maps, they were given an ability of scouting that undermines the entire game system – and not just affects them, but changes every match for all participants.

What would be a better solution?

Light tanks shouldn’t degenerate into mere “spotting agents,” but should be able to play to their natural strengths: mobility, flexibility, and (occasionally) firepower.

This will only be possible if:

  • Maps offer more open flanking routes and tactical freedom,

  • and, above all, the scouting mechanic in RB is removed.

Paradoxically, this is precisely what would benefit many light tanks: Without spotting, they could once again move undetected and strike precisely – as their role actually requires.

Those who prefer a playstyle with permanent enemy marking already have a suitable mode in Arcade. Ground RB, on the other hand, should maintain its characteristics of being able to move undetected – and not be devalued by mechanics that make it degrade to some weird version of Arcade, where vehicles aren’t automatically spotted, but are scouted to everyone by clicking on them.

Perhaps Arcade should instead be made more attractive, for example, by offering more realistic vehicles.

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The scouting mechanic needs to change, but not the way you said.
Smoke removing the “spotted” would break the matches, because several times there is one person in a sneaky camp spot, second, even though the scout shows up behind walls and you can follow, IT IS NOT accurate.

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That person doesn’t have an infinite amount of smoke grenades, the scouting tank has an infinite amount of scouts, though + if he smokes everybody sees him.

It’s pretty accurate. It’s just inaccurate enough to not be a literal wall hack.
The fact is that it helps you in the ways I described in my post, and that’s NOT how it should be. It should only be a strategic tool and not one that let’s you track enemies down like that.

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If you want to suggest those kind of backward changes, first of all War Thunder needs to be realistic, which is not, and is far from being a realistic game, and changes to the scout mechanic will not make more realistic, but at the moment, how the game is, unnecessarily complex.

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Please edit the last part of the post, the red color is reserved only for for Administration and the Website Managers.

thank you.

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A detailed interim conclusion:

What was criticized about my proposal:

1: Camping spots:

  1. If that person in the sneaky camping spot has to smoke to get rid of the spotting, he draws attention to himself doing that. There would be a big smoking screen everybody could see.

  2. In my post I suggested showing the last known position on the minimap, even after getting rid of the marker, so the position itself would still be visible to the team mates:

Also: I don’t know if you know that but scouting wasn’t a thing for a very long time (I think until ~2019 or 2020).
Camping could be annoying indeed but judging from these times I can tell you that theoretically the game would still be playable with scouting removed completely, which is not even what I’m asking for.

2: Scout being inaccurate:

I don’t know where that counters anything I said. This is just a strawman argument.
It is accurate enough to track the enemy’s movements, that’s all I said.
Ofc you cannot just use it as a literal wall-hack and shoot at it for a guaranteed hit but I never said that.

3: Scouting would be too complex:

I don’t think the marker vanishing after being in cover is that hard to understand and adapt to.
Calling it too complex (what you text might imply) would be exaggerated.

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I appreciate you having a look at a mechanic that most people just take for granted.

Rather than trying to outright nerf the scouting function perhaps you should consider ways to integrate it into the game in a more engaging way.

Generally speaking, the scouting function appears in war thunder similar to most other games, however normally it is referred to as tagging the enemy. Additionally, the tagging function in other games is typically for infantry based shooters where the complexity of the terrain in much greater.

I think the simplicity of the terrain in war thunder is partly responsible for the issues you’re describing. I don’t necessarily think that the scouting function provides too much information to players rather that players have are able to familiarise themselves with the terrain as to be able to accurately judge the position of the enemy. I’m not a great player but I can generally read the terrain well enough to hit players concealed by foliage or walls when I don’t have have a direct line of sight.

Additionally, the scouting function is compensating for the inability to relay effective information in game to other players compared to the ability of armed forces to communicate in reality.

A compromise I would suggest that you might consider:

  • Firstly reduce the refresh rate on the scouting function to 0.5 sec for the scouting vehicle, and remove the penalty for not targeting an actual vehicle.
  • Make the marker static very bright and visble for 1 second and then fade away (it no longer follows the scouted vehicle).
  • It appears on the on the teammates HUDs and minimaps as normal and its highly accurate but only from the instance of being scouted, the second the player moves the marker is in accurate.

The goal of what I’m proposing is to make scouting a constant process for the scouting vehicle. They need to continually ping the enemy position to refresh the marker, rather than the ping and forget system, it also allows multiple scouting vehicles to effectively use the function rather than one guy scouting everything and the other scouts getting told that the vehicle has already been spotted.

This way the scouting function starts to act like an enhanced version of the hit markers we already have which appear after damaging the module of an enemy tank.

So effectively we get precision scouting that is only accurate information so long as the scouting vehicle maintains line of sight and tracks the enemy vehicle, therefor the function is only as effective as the player is willing to meaningfully engage with the system and it will likely come at the expense of combat also.

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Your propose would make scouting more interactive and require more action from the scouting player which I think is really good.

What I don’t agree with, is removing the penalty for not targeting an actual vehicle. Without the penalty you can just spam it to find you where an enemy is.
Smoke for example would be completely unusable, you could just spam-click into the smoke cloud until the enemy is spotted and due to him being spotted accurately you will know the exact position and can just shoot at it.
So to combo of no penalty + accurate marker would be broken in my opinion.

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Do you not even know how the spotting system works, because you can’t do this.

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He’s responding to my proposed change to the mechanic.

@_Marco

I see what you mean, I think the accuracy of the marker would then need to be sacrificed. My opinion is that you need the high refresh rate for the mechanic to work as I proposed and the cool down penalty in my opinion had to go. I remember players would abuse this system as early as Battlefield 3 and I’ve known this to be an issue however consider this:

In War Thunder realistic, we already know where the players are going to be concentrated due to the map design funneling players into lanes and being too small for any real maneuvers to executed effectively, so in reality the scouts abusing the mechanic are going to be spotting players that we already know are there, given that I’m proposing we reduce the duration the marker is presented I’m thinking players that spam the function are going to provide erroneous information as there’s no way of knowing if they markers are unique or if you’ve just pinged the same person 5 times. Additionally, players that actually manage to sneak out to unique positions are going to be relatively safe from the scrying eyes of sweaty players. Additionally people are already watching the typical sniper spots anyway.

In short, I agree that the penalty should remain however it should be reduced proportionally, also the positional accuracy of the marker should remain vague enough as not to guarantee hits if you aim at it, or at the very least the marker should not be a substitute for a line of sight.

P.S. Depending on how we propose to change the scouting mechanic, this could add functions for 3rd party laser guided kills. Ground vehicles (scouts) could have a laser designator function to paint targets for TDs Jets and Helis. This could also work as a precision scouting function but require direct LOS to be maintained.

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The reality is it doesn’t actually need to be changed then. Other than having smoke have effect so it completely blocks, but that also depends at which stage of the smoke as I can see through smoke until it envelops the target.

When people proclaim they have issues with base mechanics, and commonly say they need to be fixed, the common thing is someone trying to play a game, ignorant to or beyond what is, the game itself.

Re: CAS, spawn camping, airfield camping, OP tanks, winrates of teams/nations, ODLs, and so on.

Sure there’s a contingent coming with them, the base issue is that it’s what they perceive as the reason for them being got, and thus that needs to change as they’d have had a wonderful match if it wasn’t that way.

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The reality is it doesn’t actually need to be changed then. Other than having smoke have effect so it completely blocks, but that also depends at which stage of the smoke as I can see through smoke until it envelops the target.

Yeah that’s cool but we actually appear to be brainstorming ideas in a somewhat constructive way so If it’s alright with you I wouldn’t mind seeing this fleshed out 😅

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To a point… It all comes back to the negativity and the constant pining for different outcomes had they had this marvelous addition in.

Commonly they avoid the true mechanics at play, and are fixated on just them having died to the game.

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add it for every vehicle

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If this happens, I propose that all the awards for ‘according to intelligence’ and ‘intelligence’ be removed and just have the scouting rewards rolled into the assist reward system

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i can live with that, yeah

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Smoke for example would be completely unusable, you could just spam-click into the smoke cloud until the enemy is spotted and due to him being spotted accurately you will know the exact position and can just shoot at it.

Just a thought: you can already do this with machine guns and autocannons.

Although I still agree that the precision of the marker should not be accurate enough as to be a substitue for line of site

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Not every vehicle, but some others should, such as command vehicles, and even let teir 1s that are command vehicles have it in that sense. Not just ‘every light tank t2+’ style.

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that can work too,
personally every vehicle can have it since they all have radios