When will Gaijin address the issue of dive bombers being abused as fighters with airspawn?

[Aisbitt034-psn]

Solution is simple. If it gets anything above 12.7mm as standard then it gets attacker.

If it equips gun pods, it gets attacker

[iegaatdao]

It will affect aircraft like Do-217s and leave out planes like the hs-123

Just check for a bombsight, if not then strike spawn.

Only exception are B7As, but those are coming up now.

Also bomber players can be blamed, since a lot of them just fly in a beeline towards a base instead of flanking and/or climbing (bombers like Ki-49 or LeOs can just climb to +5km of altitude easy)

[Ckasaron]

@Real_K_Soze

You would simply kill the sole grinding tool for “not so” passionate players which play Air RB just for the sake of getting aircraft for their real passion called Ground RB.

From a pure game play perspective you make it impossible for them to score - simply because we have a 4 bomber limit, but no strike aircraft number limit. Evading this by using a strategic bomber is a no-brainer as their survival /drop rates are even lower.

Besides that: Gaijin earns money with premium bombers of all kinds - and they are actually just there to play more or less ez targets for fighter players unable to kill enemy fighters.

If the sole “purpose” these days is maintaining a barebones mode for people to grind aircraft for Combined Arms modes, then you’d think they would have lifted the 4-bomber limit years ago after removing the very airfield destruction system that made them institute that limit with the Tu-4 in the first place.

@Real_K_Soze

If i would use the same logic in your general view on things there would also be a need to deny any player to strap max payload on his fighter - competing with tactical / strategic bombers for bases, despite the fact that their initial role is to fight enemy aircraft.

I do in fact have a separate idea on this very front, it is detailed below in response to another of your points.

@Real_K_Soze

From a holistic pov Air RB would have needed years ago drastic changes to keep the former crown jewel game mode viable. But gaijin just adopted to the needs of their gazillions of new customers to spend money - turning Air RB into a pure grinding tool was the logical result - and created this mess.

Air RB in general still does need drastic changes - it is in a bad state yes but its hardly unfixable.

The issue in my eyes was and always has been the objective setup of the game mode not encouraging development of any sort of interesting stuff for non-fighters to perform.

Bombers and attackers currently have largely the same easy objectives they have always had. Due to being rather boring at times, fighters naturally attract more people. Therefore crying from fighter mains to nerf nonfighters whenever the latter manage to be relevant will overpower any intelligent responses trying to defend nonfighters. The nerfing makes nonfighters less relevant still, leading to fewer people playing them in a positive feedback loop.

Therefore, first the obnoxious win conditions need upending - each one of the three (A2A, CAS, and Bombing) is only capable of bleeding up to 50% of the ticket bar on its own. Then no single objective is capable of erasing all relevance of the other two.

To address the team composition problem that has plagued the game since the game’s dawn, the game needs to split its flavorless matchmaker in the mode into dedicated “Fighter” and “Not Fighter” slots, where I suggest for a 16-man team 10 Fighter and 6 Non-Fighter slots. Then nonfighters are not “taking fighter slots on the team” by simply existing, helping remove animosity.

To address the cases of people abusing planes well outside their actual roles (such as using airspawns to hunt fighters in your dive bomber), I propose an additional reward multiplier based on what your plane is and what you kill.

• Kill what is in your chosen role’s purpose, you get 5x more rewards. Thus Fighters killing Fighters, Attackers mowing grass, Bombers hitting their objectives, etc. all pay more.
• Kill what is outside your chosen role’s purpose, you get 10x less rewards - intentionally punishing off-target gameplay with the disproportionately steep penalty. Fighters cutting grass, attackers and bombers abusing airspawns to hunt fighters on the climb phase, attackers and bombers gunshipping, etc.
• All Non-Strategic Bombers would get Attacker type airspawns, queue as attackers, and be given the reward bonus+malus of Attackers.
• All of the “Interceptor” and “Air Defense Fighter” classifications would get merged into a global “Bomber Hunter” category that gets its bonus rewards from shooting down bombers and attackers, and reduced rewards for killing anything else.
• For planes which can be used in multiple distinct roles, you pick your role before you queue, and queue as that role. Thus you can load up a P-47D with as much ordinance as you want, queue as an attacker, not take Fighter team slots, and spawn with the Attackers. Can someone abuse this to hunt Fighters for kicks? Sure, but it will pay fuck all.

Once those are taken care of, then the actual objectives of nonfighters are important enough to warrant the devs updating them to more modern ones for the current state of the game. Right now precisely because fighters win rounds all the time and render nonfighters irrelevant the devs have little reason to give them anything more interesting. Despite the fact that they have tested in recent years a Deep Strike event for building-based bombing objectives and more recently the Wild Weasel SEAD events. Nevermind of course Nuclear Thunder.

• Bombers in Air RB need a Deep Strike style objective to all coordinate on bombing, surrounded by strong but not ridiculous AI defenses that Attackers would help with killing.
• Besides killing the defenses around the factory building, the usual tank columns and fortification emplacements would of course be present too.