Wear your career
Warbirds has always kept a career — lifetime kills, ships sunk, medals, a title on the scoreboard. But none of it was visible: a 500-kill veteran flew a plane that looked exactly like a first-timer's. This update makes the career something you wear into the fight.
A paint shop that gates on the medal case
The hangar gains a PAINT row of earnable schemes. Each one restyles the fuselage and trim — sand Duneworn, near-black Midnight Reaper, olive Campaigner — and each unlocks off the exact same career counter that drives a medal: Duneworn wants the 30 ground kills of a SIEGE MASTER, Midnight the 15 night kills of a NIGHT ACE, Victory Stripes the 50 that make you an ACE. So the medal case finally has something to spend itself on, and a paint job means you actually did the thing.
One rule holds the whole system together: the team colour is never repainted. A scheme may only touch the fuselage, the trim, and a fin stripe — the wings and tail keep their crimson or cobalt hue no matter what you equip. That guarantees the one read that actually matters in a dogfight, friend-or-foe, survives every cosmetic in the game. The server is the backstop, exactly like the aircraft unlocks: ask for a paint you haven't earned and it's quietly ignored; the client greys the locked swatches with the counter they need.
Kill marks that stack as you fly
Under the cockpit, one small stencil appears per kill you score this round, in two neat rows capped at twenty. A pilot on a rampage visibly wears the streak — and because the marks come straight off the per-round kill count already broadcast on the scoreboard, they cost zero new data. They only render up close (past ~120 m the mesh is skipped entirely), so they're a detail you notice when you slide in behind someone, not a scoreboard floating over the map.
Aces you can see — but only after the merge
A pilot who's crossed the ACE threshold flies marked: a small gold spinner cap, a team-coloured pennant on the fin, and a second line under the callsign showing the career title. The temptation with a marker like this is that it becomes a targeting beacon — everyone hunts the ace from across the map. So the balance rules are deliberate: the markers are geometry only (no glow, invisible at night beyond the airframe itself), they're hard-cut at 400 m, and nothing about them touches the minimap, the radar, or the bots' target selection. You notice you just got jumped by NIGHT ACE Moss at knife range — and it means something — but the merge happened blind, same as always.
The cheap way to ship identity
None of this touches the flight model or the binary snapshot. Paint, title and ace status ride the JSON roster we already send at join — a scheme index, a title string, an ace flag — so they cost a handful of bytes once, not per-frame. A live repaint or a freshly-earned ACE ribbon arrives as one small event and the plane restyles in every browser without a reconnect. The career was always there in the database; now it's painted on the side of the plane, and it didn't cost the netcode a thing.
It's the first of a run of identity features — profile pages, seasons, and prestige rides are next — all working the same seam: the ledger has been keeping score for a long time, and it's finally time the sky could see it.