Why did everything interesting get moved? Where are the norway-like maps in ARB? I haven’t even been around long enough to even see these, but you’re telling me the game used to be 100 times more interesting years ago and they erased all that in favor of copy pasting the same boring gamemode?
There’s no dynamics, no coolness factor, no historical context to support the real vehicles this game builds itself on. It’s boring, it’s bland and I just have to vent this out because why on gods green earth is nothing being done about it, infact it’s being made worse and worse. The title may be a bit misleading, this could apply to the game as a whole. But prop ARB may be the best example of the terrible model gaijin is leading.
Commonly people complained about random things, like one-sided maps, ‘pre-defined’ outcomes (Where AI units were going to push and win anyway and no-one could do anything about it), or even that the map was too difficult overall.
I miss White Rock Fortress myself, and I hope it makes a return.
With the maps that have been removed, people should try and make missions that are balanced on them and show why they should be brought back into the cycle.
I’ll be honest White Rock Fortress isn’t the best example of a good map from what I can tell, looking at the old footage. It follows the same design principle of huge slopes and hills with a lot of brawling and getting shot from the back out of the blue. This isn’t an environment that looks like tanks would actually fight in (like most maps.) That is in stark contrast to the Norway ARB map I mentioned which is based on real operations. I don’t disagree with the core of what you said, though just because something is old doesn’t make it great. But in general it feels like with time things have degraded.
Bit of an understatement, the white r(c)ock fortress was perfect blend of so many things going wrong.
Mud. Mud everywhere. So low BR tanks struggled to get anywhere in time.
Top tier tanks had little trouble traversing the mud, but map was too damn small for them.
Spawns could be shot into from armored bastions.
AA either sat in spawn and had absolutely zero chance of seeing, well, anything since it was in deep valley with fortress walls on both sides, or drove on the fortifications and got domed from halfway across the map.
Middle point was absolute thunderdome, providing literal octagon cage with lot of cover and only three access points (which provided no cover whatsoever), meaning that good player could hold the middle point for long, long time.
Terrible map overall, glad it is gone.
Probably combinaton of too much work making historical maps, well, historically accurate in regards to AI units and their movements etc. and balancing issues.
I never got to play it, it looks like it was one of the better low tier maps. please can gaijin replace the crap we see all the time with some stuff like white rock again
Map design & layout adapted to the gazillions of low skill Ground RB players or “grinders” (=playing to get shiny jets the can’t handle) flooding Air RB as the map in itself required some brainpower (aka as tactic/strategy) - like Operation Iskra.
So if your players become less smart on average it makes no sense to offer them a 50$ steak if a 10$ burger (=smaller map and instant “pew-pew” action) is way more appreciated.
Example of a rather recent fight on Norway:
Regarding the vid:
The vid shows also that the CC had often a very limited or plain superficial know-how of maps or aircraft he mentioned in his vids.
Example #1: Killing the 3 allied carriers (mentioned ~ 8:30) was rather easy and had the advantage that (as long as your team defended the A point vs landing craft) there was zero place to land for allied fighters - in theory. Unfortunately the carriers simply respawn after a few minutes.
Example #2: His strategy of killing the u-boat bunker is wrong - all you have to do is to torpedo the destroyer anchored on the left and the bunker gets killed as a side effect.
Pretty much. Appearing to the lowest common nominator at the sacrifice of any soul the game had. I just don’t understand why though? Arcade exists solely for those kinds of people. What’s the point of separating the modes if the differences are superfluous at best. I’m not even burned out from the game, but I’m slowly getting pulled away just because there’s no addressing of these issues. Top tier ARB recently got turned into full on air realistic arcade. Air spawns are guaranteed now and with the sizes of these maps, I just give up. The death balls lose their novelty in 2 matches.
GRB is in an absolutely atrocious state. WW2s fighting time travelers. Maps that are so awfully janky to play. If they wanted to replicate AAA devs making unfinished products, calling them esports ready games only focusing on milking the dead cow, they’ve definitely succeeded!
I got pulled in because the start was pretty lenient and promising but it never got better. Sucked in and stayed by sunk cost fallacy. Then finding out the game actually has a decade of getting worse and worse. Not better, but worse! It just kills any optimism and if I could go back I would’ve told my friend to fuck off with getting me to try.
Think I’m gonna put this down, come back only if there’s any news of change. I’ve told my piece on the forums.
The decline of Air RB (as former crown jewel of wt) is imho the result of various factors, imho players and gaijin are equally guilty, it just matters on which pov you prefer.
I stated in multiple posts that the game looks exactly like the overwhelming majority of players want it to be: A more or less zero skill requiring grinding tool for a plain vehicle based shooter optimized to cater shooter driven minors.
Imho this forum is not even remotely addressing the needs and challenges of newer players - usually just a few vets and long-term players address certain weaknesses from their perspective (which are usually valid points) without considering that they are not gaijin’s target audience.
The forum in itself has from gaijin’s pov just 2 functions:
A cost-free feedback tool for updates/patches which supports their low-cost / non-existent quality control
A tool to control certain narratives and/or eliminating of justified criticism
Always a good idea - an alternative is to find a niche suited for your preferred game play with the smallest amount of compromises. After a few thousand matches you are aware of all flaws and weaknesses and you can play around them.
I mean every long term player needs from time to time a break - but from my pov Air RB has no real competition as the alternatives are either more sim or more arcade - so i still enjoy it.
Edit: I love to farm wannabe aces trying to bully low tier lobbies. In this match you see me smoking a “God of War”:
Because it’s a more popular system with a lot of players, and Gaijin, being a for-profit company, has an obvious incentive to listen.
People like standardisation. They don’t like having to come up with something new every match. Even as it is, when we get Battle in ground RB instead of Conquest or Domination you’ll see people in chat complaining that it isn’t a “normal” match…
This is the player side of the blame.
The company side of the blame is that the non standard set up had problems. Some events (back when they didn’t all require earning mission score) were problematic. Some mission types or specific maps were unbalanced. Especially historical maps (like Berlin in ground) since real world geography does not concern itself with PvP balance.
Standardisation fixes both issues at once. Low hanging fruit.
Another problem worth noting is that in a pvp game, people always flock to the stronger side (real or perceived) which makes asymmetric mission types especially problematic since people will just quit right away or queue on one side and not the other.
In summary: this is a problem of incentives, and it will not be changed if the incentive structure remains the same.
I enjoy WT on its own terms and scratch my history itch with other games.
