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Being a top tier in the team, and how that influences the chances of winning the battle, and personal efficiency, has become a hot topic. And justly so. There's usually a large performance gap between tiers and being top dog or the fodder really does impact the outcome. It's even more pronounced if you take personal skill difference into account, where you being low tier see your human top tiers failing miserably, dragging the whole team down with them.

I've seen some suggestions of battles on a single tier. It would be much more fair, and down more to skill than luck with MM. But it would also be utterly boring, seeing the same planes all the time. But what if it didn't have to?

So here's my idea. What if we indeed had all the human players put on a same tier, and give them bots in planes of one tier below and one tier above theirs? Players would have a generous selection of targets to go after, depending on how strong do they feel, and we could even reward them more for shooting down higher tiers. Players struggling to grasp the basics of this game would still have a chance to feel like they're achieving something, going after lower tiers, controlled by bots, not so competitive by nature, and elite players could find better challenge taking on bots in higher tiers, where the tier difference would at least to a degree mitigate the limits of the bot effectiveness against human pilots. And PvP would be taking place on the same tier, offering much more even ground than what we have currently. The variety of planes in a battle would also greatly improve. We could have larger teams too, making battles more dramatic.

And what about tier 10 planes, you might ask? Well, WG could come up with tier 11 planes to be piloted exclusively by bots, significantly stronger than tier 10 ones, to serve as the end game "bosses", tough, fast, nimble, with as good bots as the game can offer. Surely there would be plenty iconic machines to choose from. But "low effort" approach is also possible, with simply recycling the current planes, and arbitrarily boosting their characteristics to be significantly better, making them a sort of "elite planes" so they offer a good fight to the human pilots.

What do you think? Would that work? Would it improve the gameplay?

I'm not sure if this is an unnecessary complication or a really good idea, it needs to be tested, but they probably won't spend money on modeling tier 11 planes just for bots or even buffed versions.

A simple solution is to make a MM rule that top-tier platoons in both teams must be the same-tier planes. You can still have situations with high-tier bots, but platoons must stay the same tier. Having platoons that are tier higher than opponents is an enormous advantage, the difference between some planes in tier 9vs8 or tier 5vs4 are like +3 MM in World of tanks,  sometimes you can have those sweet underdog wins against players who don't play well as a higher tier, but in most cases, it's a loss from the start.

WG could also implement some rules for solo playing so that you can't be bottom tier in 3 games in a row, something similar is already in WoT.

It is also a good thing to have some variety in battles, situations when you are in a dominant plane, and others when your chances are slim, but having these situations constantly is a very bad thing and they could happen in a game with the low players base. Even though WoW is 'slightly profitable' as they say, making some changes in MM rules is not a big investment I hope.

There are a couple of practical considerations that make your idea impracticable.

For one, rules of MM are sort of uniform across all three platforms. A move you propose would have to have some popularity in other titles as well, I imagine. As far and forgotten as the idea of shared universe across WoT/WoWP/WoWS is, the three still try to work with the same basic concepts.

For two, bots themselves would make it not worth the effort. Their skills are defined by periods, so on most of the tiers you'd still meet the same incompetent bots. However it could make life a lot harsher for humans on t4 (meeting period 2) and t7 (metting period 3 - additionaly flying jets) bots. Some players might hit a wall there, especially on lower tiers. Other than that, I don't see any point. Bots are handicapped by their skills, if we had bots playing for stakes here - a la Skynet - humans would not survive long.

For three, basis of all learning is making mistakes, or going against the odds. Bots usually do not provide a challenge, while humans (mostly) do. Were you to limit tiers in MM, it would just make the game go completely stale. Perhaps there is some historical validity in the idea, as it was rather rare to have biplanes fighting all-metal monoplanes etc, but on the other hand technological parity was almost never achieved on any of the fronts. Fighting against same level of opposition may perhaps be satisfying (and, I'd think, would give rise to more common 'one plane wonder' class of pilots, people who choose planes that are best tier-for-tier and use only them), but on the other hand... where's the challenge? Where's the learning? Personally, I know I never complained about being lower tier, because that forced me to learn. Learn how humans fly, learn what planes can do, learn what am I to expect when I advance in tiers. I think current system is well-suited for this type of approach, where you learn by accepting your losses and trying to overcome your/plane's shortcomings. If those are rooted in flying a 'worse', and 'obsolete' plane, then perhaps players might focus their attention to personal skill - and that's how I view current situation. I know I learned more by getting spanked than I did by obliterating lower tiers.

As a sidenote, you do have t11 planes in game already. They are called bombers. I'm only partially joking, Discord's community basically agrees that some planes are performing way over their nominal capabilities (EF131 is commonly looked at as t11 plane).

All in all I believe current MM is fine as it is. This comes from a player who owns nearly 300 planes, all (except bombers) specialized without using tokens, and most importantly from someone who flies almost exclusively solo. I am subject to the usual MM tendency of putting players as bottom tier (and in my experience this happens in at least in 2/3 of my battles). This is one of the reasons I am so vehemently against splittiering (yay!), and I do not think MM is to be blamed for one's failures. I've played nearly 50k battles since 1.0, and for me victories when I was alone AND bottom tier did count for more than all those simple roflstomps over bots or lower tiers.