A few easy kills
The report is as old as the game: it’s too hard. We already sharpened the guns so a burst that lands actually counts. But strong guns don’t help a new pilot who can’t get anyone in front of them long enough to shoot. So this pass adds the other half: a mercy wing. Some of the enemy planes are now, frankly, there to be shot down.
The pilot who wants to be caught
Meet the greenhorn. A quarter of every fighter lobby now flies his doctrine, and he is the opposite of an ace in every axis that matters to a struggling player. He stays out of the vertical — no zoom climbs, no bunts into a dive; if he changes height at all he does it in a long, shallow drift. He turns like a loaded bus, wide and flat, never standing on a wingtip. When you finally slide onto his six, he doesn’t break — he wobbles, a slow lazy weave that looks alive and shakes nobody. And given a human anywhere within three kilometres, he will drift over and hand you his tail: he steers for a point out past your own nose, so the moment you turn in behind him that point sits beyond his tail and he ambles away in a straight line, leaving you a clean, closing shot.
He carries guns, and he’ll loose the occasional hopeful burst if an enemy all but parks on his nose — with an aim error wide enough that he’s mostly hosing empty sky. A target that just occasionally, embarrassingly, bites back. You’ll know him by his name in the killfeed, too: the greenhorns fly as Wobbles McGee, Nervous Nigel, Tailspin Tammy and Cadet Clumsy, so the pushover reads in the feed and not just in the air.
Still a real plane, just a gentler one
The greenhorn isn’t a cheat or a paper target — he’s a real fighter flying the same skies as everyone else, just with a timid pilot at the controls. He never leads a formation and never drags a wingman into a fight; he flies alone, and he keeps the two instincts every pilot has: flare up off the ground and turn back at the edge of the arena. A lamb that flies itself into a hill is a kill nobody gets to enjoy, so the greenhorn at least stays alive long enough for you to bag him.
And he only haunts the pure air war. The naval, land and combined-arms skies are balanced on their own terms, and no greenhorn ever wanders into them — the mercy wing is a helping hand for the dogfight lobby, and nowhere else.
The kill you finally get
The point of all this is one honest, satisfying kill early on. A new pilot who could never keep a target in the gunsight now has a handful of planes in every furball that will practically deliver themselves — enough to feel the guns bite, watch a bandit smoke and fall, and want to go again. The rest of the sky stays exactly as busy and as dangerous as it was; the aces are still aces. The greenhorns just make sure the hunt succeeds now and then.
And spotting one is its own reward: read “Wobbles McGee” in the corner of a lazy left turn and you know a free kill just wandered into range. A player who hunts the soft targets on purpose will do far better than one who stumbles into them.