"Good God man," exclaimed Hudson, "what the bloody hell have you been up to? Even your sidcot is shot throught. Aren't you hurt?"
"I'm all right, I've only been following Beal, He won't be back."
There was a scorched tear in his right thigh, and a brown mark as though someone had laid a hot poker lightly on his left arm which meant
that a bullet had grazed. A piece was smashed out of the center section strut within a few inches of his face; he remembered feeling the
splinters blow against him. Several bracing wires were broken, and the petrol tank holed near the top. There were two holes in the floor of the cockpit. The total number of holes was over sixty. It must be one of the most remarkable escapes ever made. He certainly had a reliable gaurdian angel.
Excerpt from "Winged Victory" by V.M. Yeates
The paragraph above described the kind of real damage pilots walked away from in WW1.
I am a mission builder that flies online with a squad and builds missions. I love this game and have nothing but the highest of praise for 777 and Jason's work.
As a squad we don't fly to rack up points or to beat out other flyers, but to have realistic competition between squads and
among friends in the incredible WW1 environment that this game creates.
Lately I have been experimenting with building in features in the mission where in game events effect real outcomes. When you lose enough planes, aerodromes shut down. If you nurse a damaged plane
back to your home base you save a plane that you will need to defend the factory.
If you build it right and make it fair than the same mission can be run a dozen times with different outcomes based on how many people are flying and their skill level.
I've had so many complaints about Kill logic in this game, that I spent a few days trying to carefully document what happens with those notifications as well as others that are typically tied to complex triggers in the mission builder. I created a mission with subtitles that post events as they occur in the game, so that others can try it out.
The pages below show the results. I've given real examples and screen shots and some diagrams to try and explain it.
This is not news, a known issue with the game, but the KILL event is so messed up from a logic perspective that it affects how flyers fly.
When someone spends a half hour doing photo recon and prangs his prop on landing...he's dead
When you bump your prop on take off, your dead.
Nurse a damaged plane all the way back to base, carefully land with your engine smoking and your goggles bloody, safely land, your engine dies, your dead.
For a game that gets so much right and has accomplished so much, this really needs to get fixed!
If your interest is in competitive events a flaw like this means squads fly differently to accomodate the games logic. It really hampers the immersion and even the types of missions you can build.
Any historical book on the life as an aviator in WWI involves pilots that take off with a dud engine and return to base or tip their plane nose over as a rookie learning how to fly or pilots making heroic efforts to nurse their limping crate back home. Getting this wrong really hurts the immersion in the game.
If you go thru the pages attached you will see that the Aerostat has events that could be signs of a solution to this problem, but they are not functional in the game at this time ( at least I couldn't get them to work)
Separate the pilot death from equipment failure, give us events for pilot wounded, pilot dead, plane crashed, plane destroyed. This is so basic regarding strategy in the game and his historically accurate. How many pilots do we have? Are the new planes ready for duty?
This is not a rant, but a lament from a flyer who loves this game, and a mission builder trying to take his mission building to another level. This problem really should be fixed and have posted this stuff to try and move the conversation along in hopes that 777 might consider moving it up on their priority list of things to consider.
At least than it would be worth while to make that lonely flight back to your aerodrome, barely conscious, hoping your gaurdian angel is on your shoulder!
Salute!
WWGeezer
here are the mission files for the test mission, if you want to try it yourself, be sure to choose subtitles on
www.wingwalkers.org/vault/wwgeezer/KillTest/KillTestv9.zipHere are the results of the tests I ran