Emergency landing in an aircraft, and being in 'spectator mode' upon spawning in a plane

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Very difficult to do but I’ve done it on several occasions, granted usually in the water but I’ve also managed it on land. I’ve taken repair kids with my pilots but have never actually been able to repair my plane so I guess that’s just not a thing, and probably shouldn’t be. Planes are WAY more complex than tanks… but still, what can the pilot do at that point? You step out of your vehicle and you’re out of bounds, the battlefield probably a kilometer or more away. Seems like the options are to sit your pilot in the vehicle and wait for the game to end, or, make the suicidal run in the direction of the battlefield but inevitably be killed in less than a minute for being out of bounds. I currently have my pilots holding onto four medkits each though, an experiment to see if maybe that’ll buy me enough time to actually get my pilot into the ground warfare going on.

Perhaps we can make it an option for the pilot to step out of the downed craft and hold down a certain key for them to ‘go back to base’ instead of just die. I don’t know, but it seems like the issue of pilots who survive landing outside of the battlefield is a matter that needs to be touched upon. It’s quite rare though so I can see it being overlooked while other more immediate matters are looked into.

As for the second half of this topic’s title, hopefully I’m not alone in this but SEVERAL times I’ve spawned into my aircraft seemingly on ‘spectator mode.’ My control over the camera is almost non-existent, and in one instance I could only look directly left and directly right, not towards the front whatsoever. Once or twice I managed to still deliver my ordnance successfully to the enemy, but never have I been able to resupply and make a second delivery. Usually, though, when this happens, I struggle but inevitably crash. I don’t know how to fix it when it happens, I’m basically just completely screwed, and I also don’t know why it happens. Hopefully others will be able to chime in with their own experiences. Hmm, perhaps this aspect should be put in ‘bug reports,’ but the first bit of this topic isn’t so much of a bug as, well, just how the game is right now. Pilots who survive landing out of bounds are basically fated to die and cannot go to join the ground battle.

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I dont see how a lone pilot wandering around with nothing more than a pistol, or maybe an SMG, is a big problem. Plus this would encourage people spamming landings and then returning to base to get back into their plane.

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Personally I outfit all my vehicle soldiers with SMGs, since I just plain old have so many of them, but that doesn’t particularly matter. For the interest of brevity I didn’t include this aspect in my initial comment, but there IS the worry that if pilots are allowed to be outside of bounds then people might just decide to go on an adventure. Firstly, testing one’s self in landing a plane is itself quite interesting and, if successful, rewarding. Secondly, troops might just want to land behind enemy lines, even if it’s a kilometer or more (hard to specifically choose WHERE you want to land, in my experience) and try some serious flanking, perhaps even aiming to find their spawn point to harass them. This would waste the pilot spot.

So, my thinking is, once the plane has received a reasonable amount of damage and/or if the fuel is dangerously low, that is when it is triggered that if the pilot ends up being out of bounds (meaning also outside of his plane), then they will not be killed off by the game. If they land the plane, and there’s lots of fuel, and they took little-to-no enemy fire, then they ought to just be done away with because clearly they’re being foolish.

Finally, as for the ‘return to base’ thing, it is fine if they can then respawn but cannot be a pilot again until later on, which is how it typically works when you die as a pilot. Though, if pilots can do this, then why couldn’t one final living member of a squad decide to go back to spawn and hit that ‘return to base’ button to spare them a squad death, which itself, doesn’t seem to have much negative repercussion. Also, people might abuse this somehow. Like they want to attack a certain point as a certain squad, but they don’t have an engineer in that squad and wants to be able to spawn at a certain location they know, or indeed they know a good sniping position and have some sniping squads but none with engineers so they spawn with a squad that has an engineer, they go and put down the spawn beacon in the place they want, maybe ammo too, and then shag off back to base. This can be avoided, in theory, by only allowing a squad to return after some or all of them have been wounded, but well, if every soldier has explosives then they could easily just almost-kill themselves with those and return. So can it be specified that it must be damage from the enemy? Also, does reducing the amount of squad deaths REALLY help at all? Not in any tangible way I don’t think, unless it saves tickets from being used up. Personally when there’s only one soldier left, I often take that opportunity to try some sneaky-sneaky flanking maneuvers or just go balls-to-the-wall to try an take the point, but I digress. It’s a tricky thing, being a game developer, it seems.

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Some already do that to deny you a frag.

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I have had the spectator bug every time I switch from my tank squad to my plane. It’s an absolutely horrible bug that has persisted for too long

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Thank you so much for sharing. It is indeed dreadful. Perhaps it is best that, if you are going to spawn as a plane, to only do so after you were initially an infantry squad?

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Yes that’s how I have to do it and I dont believe I’ve had the issue going from infantry to planes. I’ve been able to recreate the issue going from tank to plane numerous times

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I see, well thank you for the info, hopefully I’ll be spared that terrible bug too, and hopefully others will read your comment and likewise do what they can to avoid it because it sucks pretty dang hard.

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I think twice now I’ve gone directly from a tank to a plane and I have not experienced the ‘spectator’ glitch. If that is where it comes from, it doesn’t seem to be particularly consistent.