Messing with the meta rewards is NOT a good way to balance the game. It can be used to encourage very general behaviors, like playing to the objective and trying to win, but if there is a conflict between being effective and getting rewarded for your efforts, you’re setting up for failure. For just a quick example here, what does that do for veteran players who already have the unlocks they want? Suddenly the “penalty” for using a half track with a flack cannon to gun down infantry vanishes. Or if the game is close and one particularly strong push will result in victory, which, with good reason, has its own xp reward? Then boom, best course of action for anyone is to grab the op tool and use it despite not getting as much xp.
1 Like
In all honesty, I don’t think SPAA would neccesarily be super overpowered against ground targets, as long as it was still taking up the tank slot. It would end up being a lot like the early SPG the allies get in normandy. Fast and deadly against infantry, but lacking in protection and unable to handle hardened targets nearly as well as other options.
Also I think in a lot of cases just adding the targetting sights to tanks that already have effective anti air weapons, like capola guns and fast firing autocannons, would do a lot to help here. The Russian t60 for example is actually pretty good against planes, for example, its just hard to aim at them.
I made several suggestions for this in a past thread and everyone called me stupid because they said they would just be used to kill infantry…
1 Like
what do you mean by meta rewards?
also i think removing or severely limiting the xp reward for killing infantry as spaa would help to limit the majority of uses of spaa for anti-infantry, since unless i am wrong even players with maxed-out factions still play for xp. on the other hand, speculating doesn’t really do much (esp. when compared to actual testing), i could be very wrong. who knows?
Meta would be stuff like xp or score. Anything that doesn’t actually impact your ability to win or lose the particular game you are playing. For what I think is a pretty straight forward scenario here, imagine making it so that explosion packs no longer give any xp for kills against infantry. They still do just as much damage to them, but don’t give any long term rewards. Obviously this discourages using them in a lot of situations where they work just fine, and players need to make choices about this. Do they not throw a grenade into a crowded point, and instead just try to hit them with their rifle because that is actually more rewarding, even if it means much less kills? Do you start bringing more of the other grenade types just to avoid the penalty, even if it means you can’t deal with tanks as well anymore? Or do you just ignore it, and keep equipping your soldiers and fighting with them in the way that seems most likely to result in victory, even if it means taking a meaningful hit to how quickly you progress in some cases? And what about all the players who won’t know about the xp penalty, and so will be frustrated by getting less experiance than they think they should for their performance?
I don’t really think any of those types of choices are good for players or the game as a whole. The players who are already the best equipped aren’t affected, new players get confused, and everyone else is forced to choose between what helps their grind, and what is fun and helps the team. And even if you pick and deploy an SPAA to shoot down a pesky bomber, what do you do when you’ve killed it and no new planes spawn? You either get out, wait and do nothing, or start killing infantry anyway. It just doesn’t work well for anyone.
I really don’t have any opposition to the idea of adding these types of vehicles. I think they can be pretty interesting and would give an alternative option for new levels other than “Another tank but its better”. I just oppose the idea of using xp as a way to keep them from being abusive. There are lots of other, better options for that.
i see your points. do you have any alternative ideas for making people use spaa for its intended use/discouraging the use of spaa for anti-infantry?
The main one would just be “Don’t make them crazy strong against infantry”. If they have crew members vulnerable to small arms fire and or particularly poor armor, I think that is mostly done, to be honest. They aren’t going to be able to fight against tanks, at least not especially well, the gunner will either have the same sort of vision problems all the other armored vehicles have, or be exposed, and they can’t fill a room with death the way the already present infantry support tanks can with their large and powerful high explosive rounds.
As long as they do actually work against air targets, and shooting down planes is actually productive, people will use them as such.They will also use them against infantry when doing so is effective, but if its not vastly more effective in that role than a more typical tank, which I doubt they will be, then its not really an issue if they do. They will however suffer the same problems that fighters and static flack have right now, though, which is that for the most part, shooting at enemy air craft just doesn’t really mean a whole lot. The ability for the enemy to just quickly spawn another plane, and the inability to actually prevent at least one pass from happening, means that its usually more productive to just keep focusing on the ground game instead, in my experiance anyway.
1 Like
I see what you mean, i myself do fully agree that players efforts should be rewarded accordingly, but nonetheless they are still getting rewarded by killing infantry but not as much, i do also expect that even with such decentivize players would still kill infantry with them, gaining few xp per single target but a ton from the possible killing potential SPAA would have against infantry
In my head, lowering xp gained by killing infantry while in a SPAA was not to punish those who did but to mostly reward those who did play their intended role, by greatly increasing xp gained per aircraft destroyed.
because as i said, lowering the xp gain would not stop at all players of using SPAA that way.
So it’s not about nerfing the player unintended actions but to buff their intended actions
It’s what I’d call : making people do what you want them to do by rewarding them, way more if they were to not do it, the diminished xp gain is just a little more incentive, but in the end, we as players can only offer our suggestions and ideas to the devs, the matter of diminished xp gain be a positive thing for the gameplay is for the devs to (possibly) test it out, not us.
This is something that i didn’t really thought about while making the suggestion, but yes, you’re right and suicide bombing is another issue that should be addressed and severely penalized.
Grey zone is also another issue that needs to be dealt with… this game is full of issues…lol?
I feel you but don’t freet about it be sure that all those SPAA haters are all airplane mains and they just want just want the unbalanced status quo to continue so that their 200-0 k/d doesn’t get affected, and for the ones saying that SPAA would super op at a anti-infantry ole kinda forget that tanks are in the game and they would just perform either the same way a tank would perform or slightly better or worse, while still taking a vehicle slot so i don’t see no issue in that.
1 Like
The only reason I can see to make killing infantry with an SPAA specifically give less xp than killing infantry with a plane, tank, or infantry does, is to attempt to discourage killing infantry with that weapon. If shooting down planes needs to be more rewarding, then it can give more xp, thats fine, but that is a separate issue.
By lowering the xp reward against infantry, you are saying “Do not deploy this vehicle unless there is a plane, even if it is somewhat more effective in the current game state than your other options”, which strikes me as entirely unnecessary and counterproductive. The fact of the matter is that often times there is no plane, either because no one has spawned one, or it was just shot down, and many or most players only have one vehicle slot.
Saying that its fine that each kill gets less because you can get more kills just goes to “Why is that not true of any of the vehicles already in the game?”. Tanks get lots of kills, they still get full xp, more actually, since they get free assists. Generally speaking though, using vehicles well is helpful to the team, and should be encouraged. And, since tanks threaten eachother and grant a fair bit of xp on kill, tanks still shoot other tanks, even though they get full xp for killing infantry. The same would likely be true with mobile aa.
inserts m16 MGMC
problem is how would a computer program identify the player’s intent?
there are many posts about this one
You don’t actually need to know player intent to fix the issue, and I think intent isn’t actually the problem. The problem is that the first pass takes half or less as long as all of the others, since you start loaded, there aren’t really all that much consequences for crashing, and frankly flying a plane is pretty boring. Unless someone is actively shooting at you, you’re only actually doing anything for the 30 or so seconds when you are executing an attack run. The rest of the time you point at the resupply sign, and wait, or you point at the ground map, and wait. Oh, and its also a lot easier to hit a target if you don’t need to survive the process.
So, as a result of those factors, often the most effective and or most enjoyable method of using a plane is “Die to a tank or large group of infantry, fly a plane at that threat, drop bombs, crash, respawn as something else”.
Fighters are even worse. You’re supposed to shoot down bombers, but that frankly doesn’t usually mean a whole lot due to the fact that most bombers that don’t suicide actually don’t achieve a whole lot, and as soon as you shoot down a bomber that is present, unless another bomber shows up right away you really can’t do much of anything. Part of why I hate how many fighters have zero proper air to ground weapons is that it essentially leaves you with the choice of either wait or suicide as soon as you get one air kill.
Anyway, I think the most important thing for fixing suicide bombing is cutting down on how much downtime attack planes have between runs, followed by decreasing their replaceability. I don’t know how best to do that, since obviously letting them spend more time bombing stuff makes them much more impactful, but I don’t think there will ever be a healthy air game if that issue is not addressed.
Those vehicles were designed to fight infantry, not SPAA, thus the reason for the penalty
If there was no penalty, players would just mow down infantry without a care for planes since they give less xp, thus bringing a addition that is completely useless since not enough players would perform their intended role to make a difference from the plane meta.
This fellow player already gave a great suggestion to your question
one of the ideas ive heard to imporve bombers is to get resupply closer, but increase respawn time
more powerful bombers and more rewarding bomber kills
Right, which is why you make the planes give more xp in general. Carrots are great, sticks are not.
In all seriousness as far as end user experiance goes, carrots are better than sticks even if the end result is 100% identical mechanically. If you’re familiar with WOW, the “Rest XP Bonus” used to be the “Rest XP Penalty”. When it was a penalty for not having rested, people hated it, when they played with the numbers so the xp gained was the same in all situations, but it now looked like a rest bonus, players loved it.
Historically SPAA was absolutely used against infantry, light vehicles, and anything else it could do damage to. They aren’t any less designed for fighting infantry than a long barreled, armor piercing focused tank.
Ugh , whatever mate I’m tired of arguing about this, the devs won’t do shit about this or implement anything related to that to make the game better in that regard, not as long they can sell their 50 dollars premium planes, the status quo remains, darkflow continues to get more money from premium aircrafts and filthy airplanes edglords mains continue to get their 200/0 games, everyone wins, aside from infantry players and the community respect for this game and the developers, don’t respond to this, I’m tired of shouting into the wind.
I think that power could be partially neutralized by only giving us the open platform SPAAs like the early Soviet trucks, M19A1, early Flakpanzers, AS 42 etc. that would allow snipers to counter them fairly easily. That way SPAAs would turn into glass cannons that have to either hang back and do their actual jobs or rely on ambushes.
insert m16 MGMC