Gotta feed the rock eaters…
Sometimes I pulled that off. Most of the time it wasn’t worth the tradeoff. If you have an 18s reload and just wasted a shot on a pixel hunt between six billion palm trees and an IS-3 serenely drives by the path below on the way to C, you’re going to have some serious egg on your face. It wasn’t a big window to help out the guys pushing the cap.
Try that in a big casemate. You’re exposing your broadside to the opposing hill. You had to preemptively not let someone push you to be “safe”.
Besides many TDs are very slow at hull traverse
As for CAS: I am not the one that chose to balance the game as rock, paper, scissors, Gaijin did. We can debate alternate systems all day long, but that’s not the point. If Gaijin wants rock paper scissors, why do they dull the scissors?
“it’s balanced IF you happen to be in a giant slow casemate and IF your reload is 20 seconds, even though there’s no reason why either of those things is necessarily the case” is just a longwinded way of saying “it isn’t balanced”. It’s not like there’s a security guard that checks if you’re in a panzer IV instead and doesn’t let you onto the hill if so…
Rock paper scissors
I’m not understanding the metaphor here. Sniper beats… SPAA? SPAA beats CAS, CAS beats sniper? Huh?
it’s more like
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SPAA beats CAS sometimes
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CAS also beats SPAA
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CAS beats sniper
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CAS beats brawler
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Sniper beats any ground unit
…and any resemblance has broken down already
Those vehicles exist, you know. There should be maps where they can excel, just like a brawling vehicle can excel in the countless urban maps we currently have in game. Those spots could all be restored at a snap of fingers and still corner peeking urban combat would be the overwhelmingly vast majority of the scenarios we face anyway. That is a balance problem.
Gaijin more or less openly wants GRB to be based on counters, since they want people “slugging it out” rather than “sit and camp”. Having problems with a sniper? CAS will take it out. Having problems with CAS? Spawn SPAA. Is SPAA being a nuisance to your friend who’s in a plane? He’ll ask you to use your tank to remove the SPAA.
I don’t think it works as intended, in fact, I think it’s broken in almost every respect, but since Gaijin is the one making the map changes, it makes sense to try and see them from their point of view.
Their words, not mine, are that CAS is among other things a detrenchment mechanism, except they remove spots where to entrench. So why bother with CAS, then? Sometimes I wonder why bother with such a broad selection of vehicles when 90% of the maps we play are the size of a postcard.
Yes, there’s a whole bunch of them. El Alamain, Volodoskoskosk or whatever it’s called, Fire Arc, Sands of Sinai, etc. Meanwhile, short range brawlers do terribly on those maps.
What are actually the best maps are the ones with multiple distinct zones (“lanes” if you wish to be cynical) where there’s a rolling hills area, and a town area, etc. Like Tunisia, or Finland, or the Pac Man map, or the atomic heart map. So you can excel in all vehicles by just going to your spot for that type of vehicle.
Gaijin more or less openly wants GRB to be based on counters
Citation? Because they’re doing a horrendous job of it if so, to the extent that just looking at the game, I see no clear passive evidence of that principle in its design itself, without them having actually talked about it.
Even this example itself. CAS is a terrible design solution to entrenchment, because nothing even remotely limits it to that or even really pushes it toward that use at all. It’s way easier to just CAS the enemy’s spawn, or capture zones, neither of which are what you’re want an anti entrenchment tool to do… if you want a rock paper scissors anti entrenchment option, then make Artillery way stronger, give it a longer lead up time and a longer duration of actual shells as well, and disallow people from clicking cap points or spawns with it. For example. So that it actually just gets used for what you needed a tool for.
Fire Arc is no longer available to BRs lower than 6.7, and I haven’t seen it in my map rotation in months. Volokolamsk is also incredibly rare, I get it a couple times a month at most, and even then it’s usually the small version, not Surroundings (which has also been BR-restricted IIRC). Sands Of Sinai is the only one of those that I get semi-regularly, thank god.
You can dispense with the “etc.” There are eight maps in GFRB that are of sufficient size to provide for actual long range engagements: Fulda, Maginot, Red Desert, Fields of Poland, Surroundings of Volokolamsk, European Province, Sands Of Sinai, and Fire Arc.
Of these, Fulda and Red Desert are not available pre Cold War.
Still, even if you count them, that’s eight out of, I think, 56 maps at this point. Fifty-six.
On top of that, consider that some of these maps are large only in the sense that they require a long ass drive to get to the cap, where you’ll slug it out at 300 metres anyway.
On top of that, consider that we haven’t factored in all the Conquest variants of the map, which are significantly smaller, in some cases pathetically so (Ardennes Conquest with the cap in the little village has something like 800m from spawn to spawn).
On top of that, consider that maps do not feature equally in the map rotation, the CQC maps are over-represented in terms of weight too, not just numbers.
So, yes. I want all playstyles to be viable, and have no grudge against people who love CQC, but I think they can put up with the occasional match at Volokolamsk, since I put up with dozens of games on Golden Quarry.
I agree in theory, though the implementation we have for many of them leaves a lot to be desired.
Latest example in this thread.
Oh I know ^^ ive lost count my self… But, it is not going anywhere, the ones that complain just want to camp and snipe in peace… but the developers have pretty much said this is not a sniping game, and the developers want players slugging it out
I share that opinion.
One of the biggest problems with CAS in this game is that it’s a kill-streak power up, yes: you have a clear path to get there, an advantage if you get there first, and it literally makes you stronger as it opens up a lot of possibilities. The only tradeoff is the inability to cap. For the intended counter to work, SPAA would need a big buff (and some real tutorials…).
That’s something I often bring up as well. It was the #1 tank killer IRL, a lot more so than CAS, and it’s currently a bit of a joke in WT.
Fire Arc is no longer available to BRs lower than 6.7
Wait what? I’m confused why you’d want maps even as big as the ones you listed, lower than 6.7. That sounds horrendous. There’s no thermals, there’s no laser rangefinders, the optics can’t even really see that far, below 6.7. I thought you were talking about top tier all this time.
Latest example in [this thread]
That’s just some other random dude like you and me claiming that the devs said this in some third location. That’s “Your princess is in another castle”, not a citation. Also I can’t read that OP’s full comment, because I blocked him for seeing enough evidence to know he objectively lied to me multiple times in different conversations. (Which in turn means I don’t trust whatever he said even if I could read it, just on faith.)
I suspect they don’t really want rock paper scissors all that much, and are more so just using history as a crutch for core design, then tweaking things that seem broken for a game only when necessary beyond that.
Anyway, seems like we 80% agree mostly
Fire Arc was awesome in low BRs, not low low, but half BRs… Don’t need laser rangefinders to function on that map, just need to be pushing as a group and covering each other.
I didn’t lie to you, and you’re ignoring the ‘reveal ignored post’ that you can easily check and see when you actually pay attention.
Please, learn to use the forum before trying to enclose yourself in an echo chamber, much the same as your want to paint me out as ‘lying’ to you, because it makes it all the more easy to IGNORE the point.
Why? Why is that “what sniping should be”?
I mean, objectively that isn’t what the term means. And if you like doing what you describe, hiding behind buildings and shooting under bridges, have at it. But I’m not clear on why you think that your preferred play style is “right” and my preferred style is “wrong”.
I’m the OP. I don’t recall every having been in a thread with you before.
They’re referring to the link they were handed, which is my thread, and proclaiming I lied to them when they couldn’t handle an opposing opinion coupled with hypotheticals based on experiences and knowledge that didn’t fit with what they were trying to express…
I believe he’s rather proven that point.
I explained several times already above: because one person holding down the entire map is not balanced well for a team game with 16 people. If you want to lock down the entire map with snipers, you should need like 4, 5, 6 snipers. A significant investment of team members. Paying a price for that in other roles being understaffed. Multiple narrow corridors accomplishes that.
It’s just a bad team game if one person can basically win the game for the team, especially without even any crazy series of good decisions and situational awareness and so on, but simply sitting there like a toad on a log in one spot pointing and clicking.
objectively that isn’t what the term means.
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yes it is: “Snipe, verb. shoot at someone from a hiding place, especially accurately and at long range.” ← nothing about “while being able to see an entire valley from your position”. Narrow corridors is still definitely sniping.
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The game doesn’t actually LABEL any tank as a “sniper tank” in the first place, so why would it even matter what the word meant in the dictionary, when gaijin doesn’t advertise that phrase?
I’m the OP. I don’t recall every having been in a thread with you before.
He linked me to another thread. The OP of THAT thread.
I didn’t lie to you in the slightest, you make out that I lied because you couldn’t address the point that was posed to you and ignored out of frustration that you couldn’t make the argument.
Which is very much at odds with how you defined it in your last post:
Please do not insult us by claiming this is the same thing.
Strawman argument, no one has advocated this.
What we want is them to fix the actual problems without being lazy and just blasting 100 foot high rock walls in front of every bit of high ground and thereby ruining the map while also making it look dumb as well.
I just finished a match in Maginot. One of the few maps left with good sniping. Always love the duels that break out across the two hills covering C. Very ballanced, each side has equal capability. Absolutely love those matches.
Are you saying that should be removed?
Because I started the thread using the term “sniping” and you told us “what sniping should be” which was something that was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike sniping.
In any event, there are many vehicles in the game, like much of the British cold-war range and basically every AT and missile tank, which are designed specifically to snipe. Removing the sniping spots basically makes them useless.
There are many other types of vehicles as well. For instance, the AML-90 and AUBL are absolutely wonderful vehicles for driving around quickly and nailing your targets on the sides and abaft. And that’s awesome if that’s what you’re into.
But I’m not, and the heavy handed “solutions” to some problematic maps is ruining the vehicles I love the most and the response is invariably “use some other vehicle” or that that style of play is “scummy”.
Yes, that looks across half the map… including some transition areas from and to the areas of the map it doesn’t see directly.
Strawman argument, no one has advocated this.
Anyone complaining about overwatch positions that see the entire map being removed, i.e. the whole topic of the thread, advocates this. Otherwise they wouldn’t be complaining.
Are you saying that should be removed?
I don’t know which hill you’re referring to, but if it ONLY covers C, not 2-3 caps and a bunch of land in between, and has an equal hill, then no. That would be a narrow corridor and more of a “laned” map where you go to that area for that type of tank, but others are needed for the rest. That’s fine. I already said maps with distinct types of terrain in different lanes are good. That’s also not what almost any removed sniping position was like, though.
Because I started the thread using the term “sniping” and you told us “what sniping should be”
Yes, and it’s fine for discussion, but since it’s not actually used in game, getting too hung up on the precise definition is pointless. War Thunder doesn’t guarantee ANY sniping being part of the game to begin with.
Removing the sniping spots basically makes them useless.
I agree. Good thing they didn’t remove all sniping spots, then, huh? Good thing they only removed OP, broad, sweeping, map-wide overwatch sniping spots, not all sniping spots.
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They could’ve rather placed more obstacles around the map, nerfing said spot(s) enough so they aren’t OP but would be still perfectly usable.
Sadly, they’ve gone for another approach to “fixing” this, and in my opinion it’s kind of a “half assed” job.
As I said above, instead of completely blocking off sniper spots from maps like Middle East or 38th Parallel, they simply could’ve added more concealment to the other side(s), so people can much easier move from spawn to near-cap areas, but I guess that was too hard for them to do.
Instead of improving the map layouts in general, they are going for an easy way out, butchering the maps like each and every vehicle in the game is a capable brawler.
What’s even worse, they are not just removing sniping spots, they are removing flanking routes as well.
They’ve flattened area around A on American Desert and on Maginot Line they’ve made the route behind ridge near C inaccessible, while both of those routes being pretty easy to counter early on.
It seems like they are removing “skill check” spots/flanks since quite honestly, loads of people won’t bother with stuff outside of holding W and pressing LMB, so people like that will get frustrated easily at “muh OP routes/spots” and will cry profusely.
I can’t recall how many times I’ve actually used my fast vehicles as intended and flanked behind C on Maginot Line, using that ridge I mentioned above. (works from both sides as well)
Guess what, no one even noticed me there since they are simply too inexperienced to know someone can get there, but honestly, that’s not my problem, so after they get absolutely farmed from the flank a couple of times, they should learn how to prevent that from happening again.
It goes both ways, your ability to look at half of the map means half of the map can look at you as well.
This means you will be exposed to many different angles at the same time, which isn’t good in any case.
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The entire issue summarised in one nice sentence.
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What’s even worse is the fact people actually support these changes that totally delete the sniping spot(s) out of the map, while providing no new alternatives.
We have more than enough pure CQC maps out there, Gaijin should stop trying to make every map like that, it’s stupid.
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It seems that the majority loves these changes. Gaijin isn’t responding to the concerns that people who prefer strategic gameplay have. It’s a clear direction. Time to move on I’m afraid. It’s been a decent few years though.
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