Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-4196571-20160623173550/@comment-4196571-20160625235449

BlkThunder001 wrote: And there's something else: sorry, but I believe that your planes are a little bit weak despite the fact that both are very close to 1500Cst. Try using something already stronger but with fewer and weaker parts. I used to use a lv.6 F-14A -CH- filled with many good parts, and I was still falling behind many other 1500Cst planes. So I tried it at lv.10 with very few parts (homing was the only good part), and I could see a clear improvement. If you really want to win in a 1500Cst room, I'm afraid your lv.1 CFA-44 -SL- is obsolete even if it does reach the 1500Cst. About other players, this is a F2P game, so it's obvious there are many people who will just dominate the game for having many maxed out planes. And yet, there are people who dominate in a 1500Cst room. In this case, maybe they're really just that good, or your team didn't really help by stopping them. And I'm still playing ACI because I think it's still fun to play (yes, I do believe), and the good thing about the current SPM system is that now I can save up medals to buy some planes I really want. I typically use my level 7 ASF-X or my level 7 MiG-31B -Gaviria- in 1500cst rooms, which are both very good aircraft, but I forgot to outfit them for NTDM (you pretty much have to maximize homing capabilities or you won't hit anything, ever, and I have them outfitted for damage output in Co-op) so I was using my "for fun" 1500cst set at that point in time (which is the CFA-44 -SL-).

When I use those, I still often get outperformed on rare occasions despite how good they are. I am not an unskilled player, that's for sure: I have nearly 2000cst and I don't have a single plane above level nine, and I try to avoid playing in rooms with people +/- 200cst from me. So at the moment, I won't play with anyone below 1800cst or above 2200cst unless no other rooms are available. So it's not like I got my player rating from farming noobs, I was playing equally skilled opponents. The only limiting factor is aircraft and weapon performance, really, as I see players who literally just run at the enemy fleet, drop tons of SFFS bombs, and then let themselves get killed before repeating (taking advantage of the temporary post-respawn invisibility), and they rack up MASSIVE scores. That requires very little skill, but very powerful bombs, and admittedly they're probably destroying their profit, but if you make 100,000 points in an NTDM match and then use Forced Sorties and contracts, profit loss is not something you're afraid of.

Most of the players I see who perform ridiculously well in 1500cst rooms have their planes at 1300+ base cst (evidenced by their very limited usage of parts). It's ridiculous when I work for weeks to get my ASF-X leveled up only to find that some shmuck with a big wallet has used forced sorties to get his F-16C Windhover to Level 15 so he can dominate 1500cst rooms.

And saving up for a plane you want with Skilled Pilot Medals is nice and all, but it'd take me about 25 successful tournaments to save up for any of the 100 medal aircraft that I want, and I doubt there are that many scheduled tournaments left and I don't want to put in such a ridiculous amount of time and effort for such mediocre rewards. And I physically cannot get more than 4-8 skilled pilot medals per tournament, believe me I've tried storing up stocked fuel and using forced sorties, but I can never breach the 1000th place marker. The gap between 3,000th place and 1,000th place is actually very large usually, last tournament I would've have to double the number of ranking points I had to get from 3,000th to 1,000th.