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 only touches the fuselage, the trim, and a fin stripe — the wings and tail keep their crimson or cobalt no matter what you equip. That way the one read that actually matters in a dogfight, friend or foe, survives every paint job in the game. And there’s no wearing a scheme you haven’t earned: locked swatches sit greyed out with the count you still need to reach.
Kill marks that stack as you fly
Under the cockpit, one small stencil appears per kill you score this round, in two neat rows. A pilot on a rampage visibly wears the streak. They only show up close, so they’re a detail you notice when you slide in behind someone — not a scoreboard floating over the map. Slide onto a tail and you can read exactly how dangerous the pilot in front of you has been.
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 it’s deliberately kept close: no glow, invisible at night beyond the airframe itself, gone entirely at range, and it never shows up on the minimap, the radar, or a bot’s target picker. 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 record, on the airframe
Repaint in the hangar or earn your ACE ribbon mid-round and the change arrives instantly — the plane restyles in every pilot’s view with no reconnect, no interruption. Your career was always there, quietly keeping score. Now it’s painted on the side of the plane for everyone to see.
It’s the first of a run of identity features — profile pages, seasons, and prestige rides are next. The sky’s been keeping score for a long time; it’s finally time it could show it.