Zombers have always been a problem at high BRs.
While anyone can play how they want, air sim has a significant amount of basically bot lobbies, where players fly straight towards the base on the deck and don’t react when being attacked. This makes the game extremely boring and drives PvP players away.
Some of these bomber players also act in bad faith. They try to fix lobbies to PvE only (though rarely have the means to enforce it) and J out or crash on purpose to deny the kill, as a deterrence tactic, so that the PvP player would get bored and leave.
For years air sim has been advertised by youtubers as a grind game mode. As a result there is a group of players who feel entitled to be able to bomb bases uninterrupted. The most popular sim videos are not about actually playing sim, but using it as a grind exploit.
Gaijin tried to combat them by decreasing rewards for playing the game mode, but it only punished active players.
The main problem with zombers, is that it takes too much effort to kill them for an unrewarding kill that didn’t require any skill. You have to spend a lot of time to kill a guy who is basically AFK.
At lower BRs, it’s pretty hard to find them with radars without PD or without any radar at all.
At higher BRs finding them isn’t as difficult, but you have to get close to either gun them down or fire a Fox 3 or Fox 1 top down, to bypass multipathing.
Changing rewards won’t fix this issue, as players do zombing not because it pays a lot, but because it requires no skill or effort.
I can think of several things that could help solve this problem.
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Make the action of bombing bases appear on kill feed with ID for each base
For example: Player123 (plane X) bombed Base 3 -
Further decrease multipathing (while adjusting tree height and adding stock chaff)
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Add SPAAs around bases
Either guns only like in ground battles/convoys, or with missiles like the airfield AA
This would make it easier to locate and kill zombers, as well as make zombing itself harder.
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