You said that there was nothing wrong with short matches, and I said something that proves you wrong.
Last I checked real battles don’t happen in a 100km by 100km square with 32 planes.
The short travel and setup time is quite similar to AAB, and it leads to less variety and stuff in matches.
Why shouldn’t we be able to have better quality matches that don’t end instantly? What’s wrong with a longer match?
and real battles dont happen with just 16 fighters in a whole airspace
obviously if there arent sams and the airspace is contested you can have hundreds of fighters taking on each other on a relatively small area of where the hostile is trying to penetrate
dude flying straight for 10 minutes isnt “less variety and less stuff”
its just more bullsh*t. why should i have to fly straight for 10 minutes into where i want to be doing nothing but staring at a radar what kind of fun gameplay and fun use of my time is that? its way better to just get there in 5 minutes instead of adding artificial time of doing NOTHING.
its lower quality game play if you have to sit like a duck and do nothing due to artificial made up reasons.
What is definetly needed is an RB EC gamemode. There is a time and place for sub 10 minute matches and some people prefer those. So I dont think we should be radically altering that gamemode. But adding an alternative for that want different. Now that would be awesome.
(also RB EC could result in SB getting the TLC its needed for years)
I agree.
I just think air RB could be better. Currently matches are too short, and they’ve started to feel very much like an arcade match. They should be made better too.
Have you read the rest of my post?
The current match design literally limits aircraft and tactical variety.
You do not have time to climb to high altitude to bank energy for fighting in aircraft that got good instantaneous turn but lack the acceleration to sustain it without spending energy (thus kind of favoring a downward spiraling fight). With ARB’s snowballing and player density, you cannot afford to take an aircraft with a heavy airframe compared to its engines to proper altitude AND accelerate to good speed because the match ends by that time. You either have decent speed and no altitude, which means you have nowhere to dive and spiral to sustain the speed needed for your maneuvers; or you climb to altitude but are sitting at something like 270 km/h where your roll rate feels like a brick.
You do not have the time and space to methodically engage your enemies. You dive, make a pass and extend/climb away. By the time you’ve harassed your target down to a speed and altitude they cannot dodge from, the match is over due to snowballing.
Non-squadded air RB favours only 2 tactics:
It does not allow you to (unless everyone else died on both teams equally and you get a 4vs4 or similar. Those are a lot of fun when they happen. However, a.i ticket bleed killed a lot of these)
Given that outside of a successful ambush the enemy was unaware of and failed to evade/defend themselves, even lopsided engagements can be at least a minute long… how do you expect varied gameplay when the total match time is rarely more than 10 minutes even at prop/gunfighter jet tiers (other than hunting stragglers who cannot put up a fun match up due to number disparities)?
The above issues stem from:
These two images should summarize the issues of ARB vs SB EC:
RB Vietnam:
Most of the fighting occurs at E-F 4-5-6 with most of it around 4-5. This amounts to a roughly 32-48 km wide frontline. Actual map width is 128km.
SB Smolensk (same size as Vietnam):
This was taken not long after a air superiority fight at B5. As visible from the damaged base, there’s playerbombers going for E6 (BCDE - 4x16, 56, 2x16 - roughly 70 km apart assuming edge to edge and diagonal.). There’s also an a.i objective that when left alone/cleared makes a significant impact on which side wins at d7 (BCD - 3x16, 567, 3x16 - roughly 65-70 km again). Later on, air superiority showed up at F4 or somewhere around there while the ground battles still continued at BC45.
In short: We got 128x128 of play area. There’s incentives to use all that 128x128 area, even if those incentives don’t always appear together at the same time - there’s still a pretty decent incentive to at least split players into two groups.
you can go climb high without participating in the furball.
bro would get shot down in 7 seconds. just like in real life. you think you would have an awesome dogfight with many players in the team however they would be able to know that there is an enemy in the dogfight and they would hear there and get either of you. extended dogfights are a death sentence if you decide to have them at the start of match and your points only apply to there.
you can have these nice dogfights when you have low amount of players in the game with the current system too. and you wont get missiled.
ill just shoot a missile up your ass.
There’s no missiles anywhere the F4Us, Bf109s, zeros and the like.
In ARB, battles only become fun if both teams mutually anhiliate to a 4vs4 or similar. ARB is not even able to consistently support propeller/gunfighter jet eras with its current objective design.
In ASB, barring zomber lobbies/fixed games and the like, you’ll have fun almost always flying most planes at prop tiers. Taking a low-BR early war plane into a 128x128 map that’s 3v3 zombers zombing sucks. Taking late-war planes into same lobby on a 12v12 or 16v16 was a lot of fun. Tunisia is almost always fun.
ok we were talking about high tier as per the OP’s post. so dont stray from there.
Was grinding the air event last night and had multiple matches where 4-5 people didn’t even manage to take off from the airfield. If we had to start at the beginning - taking off would be a good first step.
Or TKs. Had an F-15 intentioinally ram me out the sky and then shoot down a teammate with an AMRAAM.
That too. When they handed out all those bans for tk, I thought maybe we had turned a corner. Especially during a time when missing out on gametime would mean missing out on the event. But nope, tk city, still.
Similar principles apply. Spreading out the targets (and especially bases) spread out the players which leads to longer matches.
The issue is, TKs like how the F-15 got me, by knocking out my rudder and then resulting in me crashing, counted as a suicide not a TK.
I did report them in the replay, but most cant be bothered with that and so I guess loads go unreported.
So tweaking the automated system to log when a crash is caused by a collision with a teammate would help a lot.
ARB is broken all across the board though. Matches are far too short even at prop tiers. They end at the first merge and usually turn into a unfun straggler chase or impossible odds.
These issues affect all ranges of ARB and the solution remains functional throughout for at least dogfight-oriented/short range brackets -
Time to 4.5K is usually around 3-4 minutes for P47 variants/p51-D-5 while at 280 km/h IAS while minimum ideal turn speeds usually sit around 320-340 IAS. Climbing at ideal minimum turning speed makes this take even longer. Furball merges ~2 minutes in and the battle is over by the time you’re at a speed where you can turn effectively and have altitude to maintain that speed (because props and early jets provide the unique advantage that competetive turn rates either slow you down as your engines cannot sustain the energy cost or you must pay with altitude in a descending spiral.)
Why we still have a single AF (to spawn at) is beyond me.
you were making arguments about prop matches though.
talk about jet matches. on topic.
I got a 1 day ban on one account and I can’t remember any tk on purpose. Only false missiles.
So there can’t be many reports. But the time to the ban is way to long in my opinion.
An automatic system with a direct punishment would be better, especially for takeoff TKs or TKs before the first attack.
I find it hilarious that they’re the reason ARB matches last for 2 minutes while in AAB you can kill them 13 times over and they’d still keep spawning in 15 minutes later
Their also needs to be a higher level cap, or at least base it off of matches played / in-game playtime.
I wasn’t the one talking about prop matches, but they weren’t wrong in their analysis of why matches are so short and compressed.
Spreading the players out and reducing player counts is by far the best way to make ARB better. A 10v10 limit above 12.7 is good, same with removing all enemy markers for enemies 10km+ away. Multiple spawn points also need to be added.
I very rarely see top tier matches take longer than 6 minutes, and that’s an issue. Currently there isn’t a mode for players wanting longer matches that isn’t sim (which has it’s own issues). ARB should become that mode that fills the 10-20m match length niche, while arcade and sim are suited for shorter and longer sessions/match lengths.
There is hope.