While this true for you, I think it’s important to consider that increasing the BR of a vehicle should come from it over performing in the hands of an average player, not especially skilled players.
Otherwise we end up with the issue of sub trees having over tiered vehicles on account of skilled player driving the BR.
I think it was Oddbawz or Oxy that pointes out years ago that uptiering certain vehicles only punishes the average player. He was using the french autoloading tanks as an example. The premise is that skilled players aren’t impacted by BR changes, if a vehicle’s battle rating increases, it generally won’t impact their performance. The opposite is true for the average or less skilled players who are in far greater numbers, increasing the BR of vehicles can render a vehicle unplayable for most people. It’ll be interesting to see how the popularity of the KV-1E changes now that its facing 5.3 vehicles, the F-32 76mm gun is going to be at the absolute limit of its performance now AS 30-40mm autocannons have more penetration than it.
Even if German equipment was superior (it wasn’t, M4 best tonk of WW2), they were outmanufactured and were out of oil already by 1942. Also out of tungsten hence German APDS development went nowhere (they had a lot of working APDS designs, but they made little sense without tungsten cores).
Fighter performance matters in so far that the Duck and similar aircraft are awfully vulnerable to enemy aircraft and only really stand a chance if their opponent overshoots and keeps flying in a straight line afk.
Yak-9k has the duck’s air-to-ground potential while also being a capable enough fighter to use its roll rate to jink, use scissors for reversals and then play for trajectory to get a shot off on at least bf109G10s.
The idea is thus to bump its BR up so that it’s equivalent to the duck (pure A2G) rather than multirole.
I believe vehicles should be balanced around players achieving their skill floor requirement while also giving regard to their skill ceiling impact. We observe the opposite problem you describe happening constantly - a vehicle with unusual characteristics, difficult controls with incredible potential once you stop fighting the vehicle often ends up significantly undertiered due to that skill floor, leading to those who are capable of hitting the skillfloor bullying players with that vehicle.
I think it’s worse to have multiple other players made victims than to ‘gatekeep’ a vehicle to some active hours’ worth of mindful practice.
The idea is thus to bump its BR up so that it’s equivalent to the duck (pure A2G) rather than multirole.
Did you not understand that I too am arguing to raise the BR?
The point that I was trying to make was that the capability as a ground attacker is the only element that needs to be balanced, and that while it can readily dispatch other fighters in Air to Air, it is not in my opinion over performing as a fighter. I wholly agree that yes, the flight characteristics are a major part of it’s overperformance, however seeing as its battle rating can be adjusted separately in ground RB, there’s no reason why we can’t uptier it until it has to contend with Radar SPAA. My opinion is that you can freely adjust the battle rating of the Yak 9K with no consideration for its ability to dogfight as a limiting factor.
Can you give me an example, bear in mind I’m approaching this from a ground perspective only so I haven’t consideres planes or game modes other than ground RB. Additionally, your comment as far as I can tell is simply describing a skilled player achieving better results as result of practise and experience. I can scarcely imagine any ground vehicles that have such a unique and obscure playstyle as not to have mostly transferable skills, as if to say that any player thay can unlock major hidden potential in slme vehicles isn’t already overperforming in every vehicle they use and no amount of BR manipulation is going to change that.
leading to those who are capable of hitting the skillfloor bullying players with that vehicle.
I think it’s worse to have multiple other players made victims than to ‘gatekeep’ a vehicle to some active hours’ worth of mindful practice.
The text reads like you making a counter argument but I can’t help but wonder if you’re actually disagreeing with me or not.
Air RB - Classic example is U.S fighters getting downtiered because people flat-turn everything in them (F8F). Just because U.S planes don’t do well in the intuitive response (ring round the rosey), they aren’t bad planes.
Air SB - Spitfires is what comes to mind. At my skill level, unless I do intentional practice beforehand to ease into them, I spend more time trying to control my plane than doing things to win. As such, I grossly underperform compared to the potential of spitfires. If you took someone like me and considered my performance for balancin, you might consider downtiering the plane because compared to other vehicles I use (e.g a6m3, bf109g14, mustang mk ia), it’s seriously underperforming. However, give spitfire to someone who made controlling it second nature and the mk 9 becomes a very dominant player.
In case of the Yak-9k, the difference between has the skill floor met/learning isn’t that big, but with given differences in observed results, footage posted and counter-claims, I do feel there’s at least a significant enough skill floor that might make it seem to underperform. From Percussion’s reports (or was it someone else?) for instance, it seems people tend to be very tunnel visioned while flying it making it easy to catch them out, which judging from my own experience flying it around for dogfighting comes from low ammo count and fire rate making you hyperfocus on setting up that perfect shot, so the skill floor is learning to “use the force” and developing a muscle memory for when to shoot.
However
I concede I reacted assuming you were defending the yak-9k due to the mention of balancing around skilled/average/learning players, since earlier in the thread we’ve had people claim they don’t get the amazing results others claim.