Here is part 2 of the March Dev QnA, klick here for part 1

Q: Will there be a mode without respawn?

A: Definitely not for the current game modes. Maybe in the future, but only as a special additional hardcore mode.

Q: Will the training room be modified to allow more rules (game mode, number of NPC bots, etc.)

A: There will be an option to select game modes in the training room once several game modes become available simultaneously in the main game. The number of bots on the team can already be adjusted in the training room settings.

Q: Any chance you are creating smaller maps for Tiers I–IV?

A: We have already added a small night map in the last update. And we will add more.

Q: Why do players spawn into the game even if they are not loaded in the battle? With how often the game crashes, this is incredibly frustrating. Even though the game crashes, and I’m not in battle, I still spawn into the battle, so by the time I load back in, I’m in the middle of the map with half my HP gone. Will WG allow players to not spawn unless they click the battle button themselves? Why is there an auto timer on spawning into battle?

A: We cannot remove the forced entry into the battle, because otherwise the respawn mechanic can be abused. You would hardly like it if one of your team members decides that his participation is not needed and he goes AFK in the middle of the battle, without fearing that their aircraft would be destroyed over and over again losing him credits. As for the forced spawn of the aircraft at the start of the battle, we are considering an option for transferring control to a bot for the time when the player has not yet loaded or is in the process of reconnecting.

Q: Bot maneuvering seems pretty unrealistic, It was discussed earlier and was stated that the evasive maneuvers would be made less sporadic and more predictable. Was this implemented? And are there plans to tweak this further? If you want a specific example, bot planes seem to be able to pitch down just as quickly as they are able to pitch up.  They also add roll, yaw, to a pitch down, which puts them in a pretty unrealistic spiral or turn.  At high tiers, it sometimes feels like you are chasing the ‘snitch’ from Harry Potter.

A: At the moment we don’t have any plans to rework bot behavior in evasive maneuvers. We might make it more variable in the future though. As for bots seeming to pitch down as quickly as pitching up — they fly the same aircraft as players, so their flight characteristics are absolutely the same. Their AI doesn’t affect their machine’s capabilities.

Q: Bot heavy fighters (air defense heavies in particular) are fully prepared to ram straight through incoming planes, which again, seems very unrealistic. Obviously, it is effective in the game’s current mechanics, but I wouldn’t think a realistic bot sim would want to crash their plane in such a manner. Is this going to be altered?

A: The defender bots have very limited AI compared to the regular ones. They don’t have complicated conditional mechanics for ramming that would consider when it’s justified or not. We will take a look at the statistics for bots ramming players and if it turns out to be much more aggressive than we expect, we will fix it.

Q: Greater variety in defense bots would be nice.

A: Agreed, but it’s not a priority at the moment.

Q: Are there plans to match the air defense craft to the tier of the battle?

A: No. The defenders aircraft models, tier, and skill are tuned in such a way as to demonstrate that they are less dangerous than aircraft on the enemy team.

Q: Are engine, boost, and gun sounds going to be reworked? They seem very quiet (especially boost) compared to everything else.

A: Yes, the upcoming major patches will include numerous changes to audio and sound content improvements.

Q: When will the next patch come and what will it include (technical and gameplay fixes, new content)?

A: Here’s the basic outline of our plans for the coming months: in April we will release a bugfix/improvement update, in May a large content and gameplay expansion will follow. Overall, there will be a lot of new content and features this year, including new game modes, aircraft, and the aforementioned “advanced progression” system for them.

Q: Will there ever be a Test Server for WoWP again?
A: No such plans for future updates at the moment.

Q: Are there any plans for maps in Berlin, London, Dresden, and Hiroshima/Nagasaki? I ask this because they are the sites of major bombings/air raids. Especially with the London Blitz.
A: That is possible by the end of the year, but no promises yet.

Q: Would it be possible to add HP bars to individual ground targets?

A: Currently, we consider this to be unnecessary, but we’ll think about it. Maybe this will be added as an advanced HUD setting.

Q: WoT and WoWS (and 1.9 WoWP) all had the team lists visible during battle. Any plans on bringing this back as an option again? It was always optional to show them, can they be disabled by default, and would we have the option to enable them?

A: We plan to bring this back in some form in autumn.

Q: It was stated during the second Dev Q&A live stream that there were several hundred customization options currently built into the game, they are just disabled for the players. What options will be brought back, and when?

A: To even start working on it, we need a concrete set of requests from our players: what you need customizable and why. Then we can assess if it fits our vision, how we can do it, and how much work it will require. The workload on our team is huge and, for the moment, we can’t afford to jump on every individual request that we get from time to time. We would rather collect these issues and make a large update and improvement for them later.

Q: For WoT and WoWS, we’ve had an insight into what research is done to uncover blueprints, designs, and prototypes for various tanks and warships. For example, the tanks devs uncovered archived blueprints for tanks that nobody had heard of before. Are similar efforts undertaken for WoWP?

A: There’s a whole separate department in WoT that does this kind of research. We don’t have one currently, so no.

Q: Why are ground attackers seemingly earning far less experience than other aircraft, even with identical or better combat and mastery scores? Most commonly noticed on first win of the day, with x2 or x3 multipliers.

A: In terms of economic balance, there are specified limits on rewards that a specific aircraft can earn. The entire in-game economy is balanced in such a way that some aircraft earn more credits while others farm XP faster. This is normal. Historically, since 1.x, our attack aircraft farmed credits, not XP, and it fits the overall economy. In 2.0, you earn XP for specific actions in battle. Yet there are additional, internal balancing ratios that affect the rewards. They are used to tune the economy balance correctly. But their hidden workings are exactly what confuses players. This problem is obvious to both our team and our player community, this internal system that “converts” players’ actions into credits and XP is unclear and cannot be properly conveyed to them. We plan to start working on making the economy easier to understand.