That would make Premiums completely pointless.
The whole point of spending money on a Premium vehicle is to skip grinding time… if you have to grind all the way to the previous rank of the vehicle, then spending money on said vehicle is pointless, since you have already been forced to grind all the way up there anyway, so… why spend money now, when you already did most of the job without it?
They are Gaijin’s primary source of income because most War Thunder players are interested in Top Tier, AKA modern vehicles.
Keep in mind not everyone has the physical time or willpower to spend months grinding through vehicles they don’t like or even enjoy playing at all just to get to the ones they actually want to play…
In my case, I am a student who likes modern tanks. Currently I have Top Tier in 8 trees, and most of them have been thanks to Top Tier premiums.
Without them, I would NEVER have been able or bothered to go through all the interwar, WW2, postwar and Cold War vehicles for months till I could finally get a taste of the modern tanks I was looking forward to play.
Basically, this is how I grinded my trees:
-Without Premium Top Tiers: Germany, Russia.
-With Premium Top Tiers, starting from Rank IV-V: U.K, U.S, Japan.
-With Premium Top Tiers, from scratch: Israel, France, Sweden.
So… basically, without Top Tier Premiums, I would only have Germany and Russia; maybe U.K too, if anything. But… that would be it. 3 nations instead of 8.
You guys should keep in mind that not all of us like or are interested in vehicles that aren’t modern MBTs, so not allowing us to skip the non-modern MBT grind even by paying is forcing us to spend huge amounts of time not even enjoying the game just because some customers are bad players, just like many veterans.
And even then, I constantly see at Top Tier Level 100s with full lineups performing horribly bad and/or leaving the match after 1 death because they rage-quitted, dislike the map, or any other reason. So it’s not like poor performance or one-death leaving is a Premium player issue exclusively.
In fact, sometimes I see Premium players putting more effort than the rest of the team; on the one hand, T-90Ms, KA-52s, M1A2 SEPs, TKXs and Leopard 2A7Vs leaving after one death even though they have full lineups available; on the other hand, a M1A1 Click-Bait player who not only spawns a backup Click-Bait, but also then spawns M1A1 AIM and, after that, a backup AIM. So the “evil Premium player” has already put more effort into the match than the “supper dupper veteran who grinded through sweat and tears” did when they left after a single death.