Hey everyone! Today I’d like to share my perspective on three core systemic issues that War Thunder urgently needs to address to maintain a healthy player experience.
- The Urgent Need for Battle Rating (BR) Decompression
As an Air Realistic Battles (Air RB) main, I will focus primarily on air matchmaking, though BR compression remains a universal issue across all game modes. Currently, matchmaking compression completely destroys the balance across multiple generations of aviation.
The Prop-to-Jet Transition: It makes absolutely no sense for late-era propeller aircraft to constantly face early jet-engine planes, where the performance gap is mathematically insurmountable.
The Top-Tier Fox-3 Absolute Chaos: This issue is equally disastrous in the modern jet brackets. For instance, early F/A-18 Hornet models sit around the 12.3–12.7 BR range. On their own, their flight performance and characteristics are highly impressive. However, these jets suffer immensely due to their compressed matchmaking environment.
How are these Semi-Active Radar Homing (SARH) missile-reliant jets supposed to fairly fight in a match flooded with 13.3+ Active Radar Homing (ARH) Fox-3 missiles? Because a vehicle’s viability is ultimately defined by its comparative competitiveness within its bracket, even a fundamentally great jet is instantly relegated to ‘absolute trash tier’ simply because it is constantly uptiered into a completely different technological era.
- Atrocious Grinding for Tech Tree and Squadron Vehicles
The current progression pacing has become exhausting and deeply unrewarding for the player base.
Squadron Vehicles: Even if you maximize your activity within a squadron, you are strictly capped at 20,000 research points every 3 days. Since high-tier squadron vehicles require roughly 600,000 points, players are forced to wait a literal 90 days just to unlock a single vehicle. This artificial time-gating is unacceptable.
The 9-to-5 Nightmare: The standard tech tree grind is no better. The RP requirements are tuned so harshly that an average player working a 9-to-5 job would need nearly a year of consistent grinding to reach a top-tier vehicle—even with an active premium account.
While I understand that Gaijin needs to regulate content consumption speed to maintain player retention, forcing a year-long grind for top-tier jets just to play a single, repetitive game mode is a disaster. Air RB has devolved into a basic Team Deathmatch combined with a mini-base bombing speedrun. If we are expected to invest this much time, Gaijin needs to implement more dynamic, engaging, and objective-driven game modes for Air RB.
- Absurd Premium Vehicle Pricing Tactics
To be clear, I have no issue with the developers introducing premium vehicles to monetize the game and support ongoing development. However, the current pricing model has completely lost touch with reality.
Charging $80 USD for a single digital asset is frankly absurd. Major AAA studios sell entire, ground-breaking new games for $69.99 to $79.99. When a single premium pack in War Thunder costs as much as—or more than—a massive standalone title like GTA 6, Gaijin’s microtransaction pricing strategy feels completely disconnected from the value it actually provides to the player.
I love this game and want to see it thrive, but the combination of severe matchmaking compression, exhausting progression loops, and predatory pricing makes it incredibly difficult to stay invested. I hope Gaijin takes this constructive criticism seriously.