Sorry, eekeeboo, but in my opinion if feedback is split up amongst half-a-dozen or more topics it will be lost in noise. I prefer, and will, collate my feedback in this one post. When I think I'm done then I'll look at splitting it out into the separate topics.
All the below should be read on the understanding that we ought to "live" with the patch for a while before we settle on a final opinion on it. This is a work in progress; notes from the field, if you like. I apologise if anything below is inaccurate. There are numerous changes and I realise I may not have understood some of them fully yet.
Disliked
1. In the new consumables configuration you can choose either to have a medical kit or a fire extinguisher but you can no longer have both.
2. I appear to have a new bug. The game "black screens" my monitor so that I cannot see it, any other program that is running or my desktop. The solution is to sign out and log back it, losing any work, &c, done in other programs. That's happened twice in an hour.
3. Specialist missions; for instance, the Me P. 1101 mission requires 130 tokens to skip. It's 90 tokens for the RB-17. These are, in my opinion, far too high. It would be better if the amount of tokens required reduced as you partially completed the mission conditions. However, this does not appear to be the way the mission is implemented.
4. I'm exclusively a v2.0 player. Nonetheless, I've ground my way through all lines and I have all 157 regular aircraft in the game, plus 45 premiums (yes, I know - silly). Now I have a choice; either to go back and grind them all again or just grind favourite aircraft. From my point of view, I was done with grinding. I'm not pleased to find that I have to revisit aircraft I'd previously "completed". I suppose a slight mitigation is that there is something to do when a tier 10 aircraft is acquired, but going back down the tiers doesn't appeal to me much.
5. In the battle results screen there is a progress note on the 'Specialist' mission. You are invited to click it to view details. This closes the battle result screen, but brings nothing up for the 'Specialist' mission.
6. Calibration and enhancement; I like the idea of calibration and enhancement in concept, but to me it makes no sense to punish the player who, for example, enhances his gunsight by making it more likely that his pilot will be injured - especially as he also now has to choose between a medical kit or a fire extinguisher. If he also wants to boost his engine, which means increasing the risk of fire caused by enemy action, he's in a position where he must compromise his aircraft by having no consumable to cover the increased likelihood of one of the adverse critical events (pilot injury or fire). I don't know yet if the specialist configuration allows you to mitigate this in some way.
7. Calibration: if you decide to gamble with calibration, for instance, improving the accuracy of your gunsight whilst exposing your pilot to a greater risk of injury, you have the option of cancelling (more accurately, not applying) the outcome if you decide you don't like it. However, you lose the credits and the materials if you cancel. I think this is wrong. You should not be penalised in this way.
8. Materials: I don't see why, if a player has had a good battle in a losing game, he should not receive materials. I realise the concept is that the winning team has won control of the battlefield, both air and ground, and that therefore it is its salvage party that can collect materials from downed aircraft, but I think materials should be tied to individual achievement, not team victory or defeat (incidentally, if you want to see your stock of these new materials this can be seen alongside equipment, consumables, &c., in your depot).
9. Daily multipliers appear to be bugged. After winning a battle the multiplier appears to be applied, which is good. However, the "x2" in the aircraft image does not disappear.
10. The loss of concealing livery and rear gun turret stabilisation equipment represents, on the face of it, a serious nerf to ground attackers unless the AA has also been nerfed. Again, I don't know if this can be mitigated in the 'Specialist' configuration of the aircraft.
11. Marina Litvyakova, the Soviet female pilot, is bugged. Her 'Femme Fatale' skill no longer sets a target on fire when sufficient damage has been done to unarmoured sections of it. It's not clear if the 'Supernova' skill is also broken. (Thanks to Angel/AgileThrust for pointing this out).*
12. The hangar UI feels very slow. I've heard a couple of comments about this, including from players with a fairly small number of aircraft, so I'm not going to attribute this to the fact I have 202 aircraft.
13. This system feels complicated and I wonder if new players, say at tiers I-IV, should have only been exposed to the old system and then encountered this new one thereafter. Not only that, but they'll have somewhat less chance of optimising their aircraft against experienced players forced to drop down to low tiers to complete daily missions for much-needed tokens or, worse, to seal club intentionally. I think we're all concerned about bringing new blood into the game and this doesn't feel like the kind of change that will draw new players in, more the opposite.
14. Some of the aircraft specialist missions aren't appropriate to the aircraft. For example, the Yak-9 is not suited to attacking ground targets, being a sniper with a big, nasty cannon, but its specialist mission requires it to earn 2,200 points for destroying sections of ground targets. The tier 9 Starfire is even less suited to attacking ground targets; good luck completing the specialist mission except by spending tokens. I dare say there's a standard 'template' mission for multiroles, but more thought could have been given to this. (Thanks to Angel/AgileThrust for pointing this out).
15. Patches, even extensive ones of this kind, should not reset a player's customised settings. It is irritating to fly into battle only to find your button assignments have been changed and you have the wrong measurement system, no HUD, and so on.
16. Aircraft in the specialist configuration are highlighted in the game with a pair of wings around their aircraft type symbol. Why should anybody else know that I am flying my aircraft in a specialist configuration? Probably this will lead to more people ignoring what needs to be done to win a game in order to indulge in the nuisance that is player hunting.
17. New premium (that is, costing gold) consumables, e.g. fuel, explosives, warheads, &c., have been introduced into the game. I think most people want these kinds of items to be removed from the game. I do, so this is a disappointing development.
18. There is a new in-game bug where hit registration, both on enemy aircraft and your own aircraft, lags badly. This isn't game breaking, but leads to situations where you spend some time shooting at something you don't realise you've already destroyed.
No feeling either way
1. Equipment has been rationalised. It is now possible use your tokens to move for free, for instance, a gun sight (with all enhancements and calibrations) between aircraft in the same historical period. Being able to move a gun sight from a Pancake to a Me. P.1101 to an Attacker (note that one particularly - no more special UK, or indeed US, gun sights) is a real boon useful, but how useful will depend on how many tokens you have and if you're willing to spare any for this purpose. I don't know how far this flexibility extends with respect to other equipment. (Blue indicates added text replacing the text that has been struck through). **
2. Ideally, it needs to be made clearer what, for example, an 8% increase in gun sight accuracy and a 5% decrease in a pilot's ability to resist injury means. To take the latter, if, say, a pilot had a 10% chance of injury under enemy fire and this is increased by 5%, does this mean that the new chance of injury is 10.5% (5% of 10% added to the 10%) or does it mean it is 15% (5% on top of 10%)? I would be surprised if it meant the latter, given what I know about WG mechanisms, but I think it needs to be stated expressly or, if it has been stated, highlighted more strongly.
Liked
1. In-hangar aircraft statistics (right panel in the UI) have been greatly improved. I know this information was available elsewhere on the web, but it's good to have it in-game. (Thanks to Diminios for pointing this out).
2. Replays are back. It would have been nice if we were able to set the directory in which they are stored, but that's a quibble. ***
Current brief opinion of the patch
I'm not persuaded that the changes amount to an improvement to the game. There are some aspects I really dislike. Most importantly, I'm concerned that this will tend to make the game less welcoming to new players (see point 13 under 'Disliked' above).
* See later post. Apparently, despite this not being in the patch notes, the nerfing, which is all but the removal, of the Femme Fatale skill from the Soviet female pilot is intentional. This is ridiculous. The skill is now next to useless and everybody who spent hours and hours on an event weekend trying to obtain her has, pretty much IMO, wasted their time.
** Originally I thought this was free and I liked the idea. However, I've now seen it costs tokens to move equipment around. I no longer like this, but I don't dislike it either.
*** This is more than a quibble if you have, for instance, an SSD C drive and you don't want replays consuming space and affecting performance. It is possible to mitigate this by clearing out the folder often and the game will allow you to do this up to a point.
Edited by RoyalFlyingCorps, 15 June 2018 - 06:05 PM.
1
