Very Brief TLDR for those who don’t want to read: Scout UAVs collapse risk and reward and highlight nation asymmetry in solutions.
Foreword: I love the light vehicle class, and its by far are my most played vehicles, and I abuse the ever living shit out of Scout UAVs.
The current implementation of this feature is poorly thought out, mainly for several reasons.
1. Nation Asymmetry for ways of dealing with drones
Right now, the only reliable ways to deal with scout UAVs is proximity fuse autocannons (often with IRST). To a lesser degree missile spaas work, with the caveat of having to spawn one early, and manpads are inconsistent at hitting them.
This often creates and enviroment where one side of a battle can deny information at almost no cost, while the other has to commit early to spawning a consistent missile based SPAA, or trying their luck with IRST and conventional autocannons, often taking that side much more time and often with the downside of being down a person or two, as that nations only reliable offering to deny drones early are these dedicated SPAA systems, and not hybrids.
2. The lack of Risk / Reward
Before Scouting UAVs, scouting had a much better risk & reward. Do I try and scout someone through a wall or behind a hill without exactly knowing where they are? Do I try and expose myself a bit more to see if I can get more information and not risk the scouting cooldown? Or do I only use scouts when its definitive I will get it.
Those choices carried an actual cost, exposure, timing, positioning, map knowledge.
Scout UAVs, especially with direct scouting from them collapsed that. The correct answer is almost always just use the drone. You get near perfect information at no cost. If the drone gets shot down, it was always going to get shot down, you don’t lose anything from it.
As a result of this, scouting at the BRs where these UAVs are available isn’t risk and reward, its not skill expression, its just a team comp check. Do you have nations where players play vehicles that can double as drone killers, or do you have someone willing to shoulder the burden and bring out a SPAA early to clear the enemy teams drones, and then go idle until more drones come or CAS / Helis come in.
3. Promote snowballing and rushing
Keeping the prior two points in mind, this also begins to have fairly perverse effects across many other play patterns.
First and foremost, it compounds snowballing, making comebacks harder and harder to mount as one side loses more and more people, it becomes easier to have near total knowledge on every enemy players whereabouts and to keep them all scouted with a single UAV. The advantage this provides leads to fewer losses, reinforcing this advantage. The losing side is then forcedinto a damned if you do, damned if you dont scenario. Either spend time and spawns dealing these this drones, or accept being perpetually spotted.
This ties also into the second part, rushing. Previously, aggressive pushes had to act with imperfect information and risk. Light vehicles pushing into strong positions had to gamble on timing and uncertainty for what could be a very lucrative reward in these strongpoint locations. With scouting however, there risk is mitigated or removed entirely, now allowing these players to never have to gamble on what is now a certainty.
Extra: The bloated light vehicle class
The light vehicle class is just bloated at higher BRs. It needs to be broken out.
You have things like the 2s38 which is a light vehicle, a pseudo SPAA, and can hold its own against some tanks with its main gun.
You have light vehicles that are also tank destroyers of the M10 Booker and Stryker, both given the M900 dart at lower BRs to make up their lack of armor.
Then you have the begleit panzer, which is sort of its own thing, both anti air, anti tank and also still a light vehicle.
Then you have a ton of very lightly armed light vehicles (20mm-30mm autocannons with sub 100mm pen) that often have to make up for the lack of gun by using pure speed, ambushing and barrel torture.
Basically, what im getting at is that the “Light Tank” feature set is used way to liberally to the point where its slapped on too many vehicles. It should be a way of giving actually light vehicles, ones with very limited other roles extra battlefield utility, not slapped onto almost every vehicle that isn’t a MBT.