Balancing perspectives and ... perspectives

Game Discussion Realistic Battle
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I was recently watching a video where the YT (not gonna name - don’t want to point fingers) was talking about BR compression.

This is a heavy topic. Many different perspectives and many opinions.

Currently I want to gather some knowledge about some of the thinking / decision making process involving balancing.

I want to ask the WarThunder team about how balancing goes behind the scenes.

!!! For any player reading this: We don’t point fingers here, we want to understand and work together with the team to make things better. !!!

  1. How do you define and measure “balance” internally?

Specifically: which metrics carry the most weight (win rate, K/D, average lifespan, damage dealt, capture rate, player skill brackets, lineup synergy, etc.), and how do you separate vehicle performance from player skill or nation popularity effects?

  1. What is the decision framework for BR adjustments?

What thresholds or trends trigger a BR change, how long does data need to be stable before action is taken, and how do you evaluate whether a previous BR change actually improved the ecosystem rather than just shifting compression elsewhere?

  1. How do you approach BR compression at a systemic level?

Is compression treated as a structural design constraint (queue times, matchmaking spread, progression pacing), and are there internal discussions about decompression, BR caps, or alternative matchmaking models to reduce extreme performance gaps within a single match?

  1. To what extent can the community meaningfully influence BR adjustment decisions, and through what structured mechanisms?

Would you consider more transparent feedback loops (e.g., public test seasons, published metric thresholds, or structured proposal formats)? Is there a formal review pipeline where community-submitted analysis is evaluated alongside internal telemetry? What forms of feedback are actually considered actionable? (statistical breakdowns, replay evidence, large-sample spreadsheets, forum discussions, content creator input, surveys, etc.)

I would be extremely interested in finding responses for these question for having some piece of mind over the balancing of this game.

Thanks in advance,
David - CommingInHot a Sukhoi enjoyer

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Whilst I appreciate your efforts “balancing” looks (at least for me) more like a general misunderstanding - it is more than obvious that gaijin has a totally different understanding of “balancing” than the majority of players.

So whilst players see a fair and balanced game/match set up in fights between vehicles with similar combat capabilities (=fair fights) it seems that gaijin sees balancing with a way more holistic approach and determines BRs based on actual combat effectiveness based on plain average results (=earned SL & RP) and strives for the “Holy Grail” for devs: Perfect balance equals 50% WR and SL/RP income within predetermined target earnings - following the ultimate goal to be able to steer the progress of the whole player base.

Therefore asking gaijin to reveal their thoughts & mechanics behind their value setting process will most likely be ignored.

Have a good one!

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Its balanced by how much silver the vic makes

The jet could.have a 0.1 KD but if it bombs bases and makes silver its balanced

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For me, it would be more interesting to know if there is any hidden balancing, such as tanks with suspensions that have an exaggerated roll, or ammunition with greater randomness in damage and penetration to impair their effectiveness, thus preventing them from having good statistics in the game.

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This needs to be in equal parts player stats and common sense. It is obvious when there are 2 highly disproporiate performance vehicles at the same/similar BR and that needs to be corrected.

At the moment they put waaaaay too much emphasis on bare minimum performance, i.e, can this aircraft get 1x base kill? then its fine.

They also seem truly terrified of ground attack aircraft and have multiple mechanics to nerf them and their potential rewards (Diminishing returns, poor gamemode design, high BRs)

Its pretty clear Gaijin cares more about queue times than gameplay quality, which is stupid as hell, but I Would simply keep moving things up until BRs reach an equilibrium. BR cap increases shouldn’t be something we have to beg for for literally years to happen, it should just be the default.

Take the recent decision to move the F-15s down instead of the Su-30 premiums up. They should have just taken them and everything above them and increased them by 0.3 instead and then seen if more is needed.

They dont, as far as I am concerned, they ignore the feedback threads entirely. I routinely post sensible changes (like moving the 3x 11.7 Tornado IDS down to 11.3) that get 50-100 likes and after more than 2 years, nothing has changed

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At least for aircraft, some planes have balance factors that only come up with certain control modes.

Flying with full-real controls vs realistic (autotrim) makes planes behave very differently, as does realistic vs simplified (instructor-lite) or mouse aim(full instructor)

Would think this is inconsequential: People flying AAB/ARB use mouse aim, simmers use full-real.

However, with Aces of Thunder’s release, I’ve come to realize (based on the steam reviews) that there may have been a not insignificant number of players flying in Arcade and ARB using controllers (quite a few reviews go “finally everyone plays on level playing field!” when SB exists which indicates they were trying to play AAB/ARB vs mouse aim with controller or HOTAS).

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IMO Somethings got to change
I keep seeing in game- is anyone else stuck in 12.7- 13.7. Players are noticing

Its that bad moving the f15a has had no effect on the f15a or others around its BR.

Not sure what gaijins issue is as wait times is pure nonsense.

Gaijin doesnt even want to give anything the players ask for. “Buff mig29” buffs flanker instead.
Harrier has a great report made about its lift/ turn rate and other tweeks- ignored for years.

What makes even less sense is that buffing mig29/ harrier will eqate to players spending £££…

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Yeah… Gaijins handling of bug reporting or balance just makes no sense

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Harrier buffed to be able to use viff and dogfight the F5…

Few youtube videos later and the £££ roll in.
Not sure what they are scared of as it will always be slow so jets can just run away.

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Yeah… I just dont think they want to put in the effort

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Blockquote gaijin sees balancing with a way more holistic approach and determines BRs based on actual combat effectiveness based on plain average results (=earned SL & RP)

Does that mean that, let’s say vehicle 1 is overperforming but it doesn’t get much SL & RP averages means that vehicle 1 is … balanced, but vehicle 2 is underperforming but it has a high SL & RP averages vehicle again is … balanced?

Correct me if I am wrong

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It is a matter of what your understanding of “overperforming” and “underperforming” is. From my pov the determination by gaijin is decisive - and gaijin emphasizes obviously SL&RP income and actual flight characteristics play a secondary role.

  1. That means that good aircraft which are rather hard to use produce less SL & RP for the average players and the BR goes down. But experienced players able to use them properly can produce incredibly good results with them.

  2. On the other hand rather mediocre aircraft flown mainly by experienced pilots produce way too good results (SL & RP) and the BR increases. The logical result is that new players struggle flying them and skip them. But the experienced players still use them and the BRs are way higher than the pure flight & armament characteristics would justify.

Examples:

  • Italian & JP props are usually over-BRd as their players are on average more experienced than the majority of their opponents - the higher BR is a kind of “skill tax”

  • US and USSR props are usually undertiered as their average players are not able to utilize the often way superior flight performance - so the low BRs makes it easy for experienced players to score. Just compare the average results of the USSR Yak-3 with the French premium version - or the average results of the US P-51 C with the various BP/Prem versions in other TTs.

From my pov you might consider to do some research about “balancing” in video games. BRs are part of balancing and player steering - but the frequency of 2-4 BR adjustment rounds per year is way too low - it is obvious that the MM (nation pairing, skill distribution within the teams and uptier-/downtier frequency) plays a way more decisive role than most players are aware of.

In other words: A game developer balances vehicles so that the overall goal of the game (=to earn money) is supported - BRs and MM are tools to keep the players attached with the goal to motivate them to spend money - as much and as long as possible.

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It shouldnt be hot take to say that machine specifications only matter. Anything further leads to panzer IV G being 3.3.
gaijin wants mass player to have ~50 winrate ratio and ~1 kd ratio, meaning they balance not by what techs can do and how good, but rather with how players perform with those. And looks like they dont count if the player was bad or the techs is bad, cuz we get Pz IV at 3.3 and T20 at 6.3.

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Do you have a post or some read that can confirm these claims?

I’m genuinely curios on reading more on how gaijin perceives “balanced”

Thanks in advance

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No - simply because as that is the reason because your won’t get any official answer to basically the same questions in your OP.

As soon as you have played wt for several years in thousands of battles you can make educated guesses. Despite that the OS of the human brain is eager to identify patterns even if there are no patterns ( Apophenia ) it is safe to say that if you observe the game and its mechanics long enough you will find enough circumstantial evidence.

I wrote some years ago about the “flow channel”(behind the spoiler in this post):

For general topics regarding video games - there are dozens of studies of player steering & monetization in the web - even some really good vids on yt.

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What I love is the game’s balance: You play with a tank that, because it only has HEAT-FS, does almost no damage and you die many times without killing more than one enemy. Then, suddenly, in one match, the game decides it has to do the correct damage, so you end up killing 9 or 10 without losing the tank, only for you to then have matches where the game won’t let you kill anything. Couldn’t they just leave the damage as a fixed, realistic value and be done with it? If the tanks are killing a lot, they should increase their BR a little, but they shouldn’t do this thing of secretly lowering their damage for several matches, only to then restore it in one match so you can get kills and maintain the K/D balance.

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While we’re here, we’d like to give some additional context behind Battle Ratings and how they’re decided. Battle Ratings are decided based on how much a vehicle earns, but this is not purely economical. We use this metric because it’s all encompassing and considers every action a player makes with their vehicle, so this considers frags, assists, caps, and effectively every useful action a vehicle can perform all bundled into one universal metric.

This is the “Efficiency” of each vehicle and gives us a very well rounded perspective on all of its abilities and how it’s actually being used.

If a vehicle has high efficiency, it’s outperforming its contemporaries in multiple ways the majority of times it spawns on the map, and as a result may have to be increased in Battle Rating. Whereas a vehicle with low efficiency is not performing well across the board against what it fights, and may be moved down. However this is not purely a data driven process, we often consider additional factors such as the volume of players using a certain vehicle, its lineup, new features that may be altering performance in different ways etc — and this often leads us to delay a change we otherwise would have made to gather more information. Even though we do primarily go by this efficiency metric, we aren’t bound by it, and spend a lot of time each Battle Rating cycle to look over feedback for different perspectives and elements we may not have initially considered.

Ultimately, it’s very hard to balance a vehicle in a vacuum. On paper an aircraft might have incredible speed, or a tank might have great penetration for its Battle Rating, but this is cold data, in the sense that just because a vehicle on the surface has a very impressive asset, it doesn’t mean that asset guarantees high performance. It’s more about how a vehicle is actually functioning in the game, rather than weighing up its assets in isolation. So efficiency is good data to be informed by as it considers everything and everyone.

We’d like to note that when balancing aircraft before the introduction of separate Battle Ratings by mode, in the vast majority of cases the Battle Rating was set according to the performance for Air Battles, and not Ground Battles. We understand that many of you wanted a Battle Rating reduction for strike aircraft in Air Battles, so we have some additional answers for you on this below.

This prolly contributes to air sim’s weird balance tbf due to how weirdly SL is calculated there plus massively variable lobby lengths.