Suicide bombing is a waste of:
an aircraft slot
time
attacker tickets
Suicide bombing needs to be punished harder. It wastes the attacking team’s tickets and gives defending teams a constant cycle of aircraft going nose-down into the battlefield. It can also promote the addition of Parachutes - instead of teleporting a pilot to spawn when out-of-bounds, bring them to the nearest area of the map which can allow for flanking, at least this way the pilot slot is not completely wasted.
To fix suicide bombing you must address the cause not the symptom.
The cause is a broken infantry vs vehicle dynamics system. The players in vehicles can’t keep pace with not only teleporting (via respawn points) but also terrain independent movement mode for infantry.
Fix infantry movement and you provide time for players to come to grips with the situation as well as flying or driving their machines. The current super arcade run and gun system focused purely on infantry is effectively breaking the rest of the alleged combined arms experience.
With more common sense and proper testing they can get the balance right between all the elements in a combined arms sense, but they have to be consistent. Ironically, following the failpath of all the other FPS by re-inventing guns, calibres and associated damage is just snatching developmental defeat from the jaws of a really good game concept.
This is why even the youtubers streaming this game for profit suicide bomb like they are simply switching weapons in a bizzare multi model load out.
It’s so frustrating watching these guys auger in, i’ll be all set to lineup on them in my 202 and they just fly right into the ground…
I don’t know what the percentage of people that do this is but it’s Gotta be high
It’s not like it’s not ridiculously easy to target something with a bomb and drop on it and kill it especially if you have a larger bomb, the starting planes with bombs in Tunisia which is what I mostly play are all super easy to kill things with you don’t even have to land close to a tank to kill it with 500kg bomb
My assumption is that some of these guys don’t know how to fly the planes and they’re killing themselves because they don’t know what else to do, but I think it’s a small percentage, I think a larger percentage is that they don’t have the patience for the plans, And they’re trying to take as many out With them as they can, and then I think some of it is an emotional reaction to having been killed by somebody and they’re trying to kill them by flying into them essentially, so it makes me kind of wonder why they even have a plane in the lineup at least for a large percentage of them
A huge part of the game is the fact that there is absolutely no penalty for dying a lot, you might see a guy at the end of a match with 100 kills but he’s died 20 times and who knows how many men were in his sections he might actually be negative another words it cost his side more for him to get those hundred kills if you follow my thinking but there isn’t really any way to account for that negative kill death ratio should be part of the game there should be some incentive for people not just wasting tickets The problem I think of course is that the player base probably isn’t patient enough for that
2 key observations in follow up:
You are 100% correct in the latter part of your observation - the players don’t have the patience to fly on a low pay off and high time consumption platform in relation to the dynamic pace of the game on the ground.
Playing Devil’s advocate for the suiciders, there is no mechanism in game, that allows you to swap from a vehicle squad into an infantry squad without suicide. So a player can jump into a plane and do a kamikaze run that guarantees more accuracy than a regular bomb drop, particularly for the folks without practice, and they treat it as an equivalent of an arty strike or a Stalingrad bomb run, and their weapon of choice will reset in a short while to do it again.
They get higher pay off and are back in the game with more options, rather than flying around to re-arm, and then heading back in hoping that someone will work out where the v key is on their keyboard and mark a target.
Except for the Japanese. they don’t need to be punished
But when you die you have time to select what squad you want, or maybe they don’t realize that you can do that, they don’t have to use the next squad in the lineup they can pick whichever one they want, which I suppose suggests that they are intentionally picking the plane, to… do a kamikaze run
I like flying the planes but I guess I’m probably more patient than the average player, it is just so easy to kill tanks with them that you can do quite well at the end of the game with an airplane certainly being able to finish in the top two or three places, but it’s not everybody’s cup of tea I can see that, A lot of players won’t play the support roles either presumably for the same reason
I enjoy all three disciplines the game has to offer, but it really depends on what mood I’m in, and what the daily challenges asking me to do, currently I think the best way to shoot down an airplane is probably with an AA gun they are much more lethal now than they used to be
Some of these players may not be suiciding, it might just be too fast and can’t pull up, as the way you spawn in at 450 in front of target, probably means new players continue towards target and have no idea about compression or max speed limits…
Exactly. I play aircraft as primarily anti-air then anti-tank, and if there is nothing else for me to do I enjoy the strategy of parachuting behind enemy lines with an SMG and causing as much chaos as I can. Crashing into the Earth, and, most of the time, missing, wastes your planes potential future runs, plus it takes away quite a few tickets from the attackers.
“But you can’t complain!!! I have 130 kills!!”
I think what else needs to be done as a main solution for lack of anti-air capabilities is some sort of heavy AAA station, which cannot point at any ground in order to prevent abuse of it. Basically it can only point at the sky because it only needs to point at the sky. these guns do massive damage to aircraft and can be situated somewhere covered from infantry and tanks at range, so only aircraft can destroy them (such as a village like those on the far axis side of D-Day, or a dug-out emplacement - we already see these in some Normandy maps). These AAA stations can also be repaired by engineers and are available since the beginning of the match. every second cap point could unlock 1 additional zone to build a heavy AAA gun, besides in conquest, although these take a while to build - longer than a repair, probably to a limit of 3 total, or even 4.