Inflation in prices and deflation in capability

[blazing basalt]

When KC_Air asked about other assets (18 months ago), to add to realism and what an actual CAS stack would look like, the difficulty was increased disproportionately to what we got and what we were up against.

We got capabilities such as HARM’s, which wasn’t really asked for, but at the same time SAM-sites increased multiple times over, leaving people who don’t know how to operate with Karma Lib proprietary SAM’s at the same time as they don’t know how to use HARM’s.

This has meant that pilots have had to become insanely more skilled, while their actual impact on the battlefield has been reduced.

Certainly a fair (over)correction to make it more balanced compared to how it was in the previous 2 years prior to the changes.

What actually happened during the period when the push for CAS procedures and other aircraft other than the A-10 was made? (A period where the server was a healthy 100+ players on weekdays and a single ship A-10 was allowed to roam freely for 2 weeks, because there was no red air and negligent SAM threat)

What happened was that there was an effort to make CAS somewhat more realistic initiated from the player base, in the form of actual players dedicating hundreds of hours of their time to "teaching" (in all its forms, whether on the training server, private servers or in discord) creating and maintaining a new culture, somewhat grounded in real life procedures and tactics, instead of the game breaking way of how CAS was utilized before “Go kill every single vehicle on that objective”.

Creating a culture is incredibly difficult in a public environment, where the players, rules and conditions are constantly changing.

Although as these are conditions that all players at Karmakut 24/7 Liberation has to deal with, I believe we as a community still have a culture based on three concepts.

[blazing basalt]

1: We strive for a "realistic experience" and we achieve it by teaching others, new as veteran.
2: We are open and make people love Arma 3 by being humble about it being a difficult game with a lot of new information and accountability.
3: Constant challenge and a tireless effort from CS to make sure there isn't a meta.

Anyways, I think these are fine values that should be maintained.

The point of this text is an invitation to think about why a very specific part of the total experience requires such an enormous amount of prior knowledge to be able to be played as expected (in relation to the threats it’s faced with), while the barrier to play is minimal. This in combination with inflation of prices for FW aircraft being on par with GTA Online's inflation.

***correction, this is not entirely true, this change actually happened when the server was in a rot, player base started to dwindle after Taunus because of the terrible map performance and this happens just after it.

[blazing basalt]

My own notes:

I think flying on Lib is more fun now than ever, this is challenging and properly fun.

But it’s also properly frustrating seeing the same mistakes being done over and over again. Easily corrected and usually is once pointed out.

“Unfortunately” the community don’t decide on the prerequisites for perms, neither or grades exams, meaning that we’re stuck in an endless loop of a small few getting better at something, while a big majority continually tries and doesn’t succeed, (then never returns to the role because they’re discouraged)

Discouragement to continue happens because the community hounds you when fucking up big value assets. This is Bound to happen because of 3 things:

1: You can’t train for Karma Lib SAM’s outside of the liberation server. (So you’re fucked from day 1)
2: Assets are way too expensive considering the difficulty which is geared way beyond the expected medium skill level of a low entry public server
3: The bar to play doesn’t reflect what new pilots will face at all, where in practice stalker = gives you reaper.

Just looking at it, it seems like the purpose of the status quo is just creating division in KC_Command, not really gameplay balance.

[true gust]

Yes yes yes. This is exactly what I'm thinking too. Keep the difficulty, but give people the option to make mistakes.

[blazing basalt]

I’m not this unhinged in real life where I sit and write 4500 character opinion pieces about insignificant stuff at 4 in the morning, but happy that a part of my rant resonated with you 😂

[lean wing]

Yh, the massive lack of quality control means you can have either people with a lot of experience, or people with none and the loss of 1 asset can negatively effect the whole server so it's almost discouraging to do certain things because people are too scared to make mistakes, there should be the worry to lose something, but not so much that it discourages you to not do it