- Yes, it absolutely needs to be changed.
- No, it should stay historically accurate.
Back when I voted for moving the ISU-152 to BR3, a bunch of Germany mains labeled me a diehard Soviet main. Personally, I’m impartial and treat every nation fairly; the Soviet Union is just one of them. Honestly, the Slavic forums are basically beyond saving at this point—might as well call them the Fourth Reich instead.
Here’s the link to that old poll. Besides the Soviet tank proposal, there are two more polls: one for Germany’s large-caliber artillery and another for the German Panzer IV, plus a vote to lower the battle rating of electric rail vehicles. Anyone interested in German tanks is welcome to join the poll.
From the discussions on the battle rating of the ISU series, to those about the German Panzer IV series, as well as Japanese tanks
As for the .303 Lewis gun, everyone knows its iron sights are absolutely terrible, awful, and downright unusable.
Honestly, this feels completely intentional. It’s like DF has always wanted to spite players deliberately. They stick rigidly to historical details, yet always implement them in the most frustrating, user-unfriendly way possible. I can genuinely feel a deliberate bad faith attitude behind it.
Take the M2 Stinger for example. When it first came out, everyone thought it was overpowered. It had a 200-round magazine and perfectly clear, clean sights, mowing down enemies with ease. It hasn’t returned in minor events for over a year now. The last event only gave out two copies, and it’s never come back since. I’d bet most newer players have never even seen or owned this weapon.
But you have to keep in mind, if we look at it from the third-person perspective, the sliding sight scale is actually folded down. After all, this is an anti-aircraft machine gun taken off bombers. To achieve long-range fire when engaging air targets, machine guns of this type are usually fitted with narrow-aperture sights, much like the one on the Lewis.
Just imagine what it would look like if the M2 Stinger’s sight were raised into place.
Exactly, this is what it historically looked like! The aperture is ridiculously tiny, even narrower than a 2mm gap.
- This is what real historical accuracy looks like.
- It’s perfectly fine.
- It’s absolutely terrible.
At the end of the day, the logic is pretty simple: this weapon is far too overpowered, so they had to come up with something like this to nerf it, keeping it from being completely broken.
Just imagine how it would play if the gun actually shipped with this historical sight. Personally, I think it’d be practically unplayable. You’d be firing almost blind. Not to mention when the graphics glitches kick in — it’ll end up blocked just like the bug players are reporting on the .303 Lewis right now. You’d be shooting totally sightless. You’d have to glance at the target for a split second, then fire purely from memory afterward. It’s honestly infuriating.
So I’d say when DF designs new content, they clearly go out of their way to spite players to some degree. The only reason not many people mind is that while they nerf Soviet and Allied loadouts, they hand Germany and Japan really solid weaponry instead.
If the Stinger weren’t such an iconic, well-known weapon? If they’d dared release it right out the gate with this terrible sight, the forums would’ve been flooded with at least a dozen threads bashing DF. Back then the game wasn’t even on Steam yet—we didn’t even have a way to leave negative reviews. They really had free rein to do whatever they wanted.
So to put it another way, if you were a real soldier, you’d definitely want to modify your weapon to be as comfortable to use as possible. At the very least, you wouldn’t settle for the current situation where you can’t even aim at enemies that are less than five meters away. I’ve looked around online and found a few improvement solutions, which I’ll share with everyone here.
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Remove the square aperture in the middle of the ladder sight that’s designed for long-range aiming, leaving only the outer frame. This would look cleaner and feel much more comfortable to use.
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Remove the entire rear graduated sight assembly entirely, keeping only the front sight post.
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Adopt a new anti-aircraft sight with crosshair and target-style reticles, similar to the sight on the game’s Bren with the 100-round drum. Just like the Bren, its original drum is oversized and the stock iron sight is far too small to be practical, so it deserves a properly upgraded sight setup.
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Equip it with a telescopic sight—not a reflector sight—similar to the Japanese sniper machine gun at BR 2. With this, even the 97-round version could pair with binoculars and compete with the high-rate-of-fire German machine guns at BR 5.
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Improve the sight by adjusting the aiming perspective or widening the aperture; alternatively, increase the overall sight size for both the Soviet and Allied variants of the Lewis.
This approach requires reworking both the camera perspective and the sight model itself, which means two sets of adjustments have to be done properly. It would be quite a lot of work, and honestly feels the least likely to ever happen.
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- Remove only the circular aperture sight, keep the frame sight.
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- Remove both, leaving only the front sight post.
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- Replace the entire sight with a new one, either a crosshair sight or an anti‑aircraft sight similar to the Degtyaryov’s.
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- Fit it with a sniper scope.
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- Slightly enlarge the aperture on the original sight(Though I don’t think this option is nearly as appealing as the ones above.)
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- How about doing nothing to the Lewis, and instead giving the Stinger this exact same sight?