If you’ve played War Thunder on console you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about. Hold the left trigger with an enemy selected and your turret or aircraft smoothly tracks them automatically. It’s intuitive, it works, and it’s a core part of what makes controller play feel good. Now imagine switching to PC for better graphics and performance, plugging in your controller, and finding that feature is just gone. Not broken. Not buried in settings. Simply removed. That is the reality for every single War Thunder player using a controller on PC right now.
When players raise this — and they do, constantly, with threads still being posted on the official forums as recently as 2026 — the implied response from Gaijin is that adding target tracking to PC would unbalance the game and give controller users an unfair advantage over mouse and keyboard players. That sounds reasonable until you think about it for more than five seconds.
This game is cross platform. Console and PC players are in the same lobbies. Right now, in any given match you play on PC with a controller, there are console players with full left trigger tracking already active. That feature is already in your game. It is already in your lobbies. Gaijin has already decided that is fine. So the balance argument isn’t just weak, it’s completely contradictory. They have already accepted tracking in cross platform lobbies. The only person being left out is the PC controller player.
And what about mouse and keyboard players? A good mouse and keyboard player can already track any target manually with far more precision and speed than a controller ever could with auto tracking. So the feature isn’t giving controller users an advantage over them either. It’s simply bringing PC controller players up to the same level as console controller players using the exact same input device in the exact same lobbies.
That is the key point. A controller is a controller. It doesn’t matter whether it’s plugged into a PlayStation, an Xbox, or a Windows PC. The hardware is identical. The input method is identical. The only thing that changes is the operating system running in the background, and that should have absolutely nothing to do with which features you have access to. This should be input based, not platform based.!!! If you are playing on a controller you should have the features built for a controller. Full stop!!!
What makes this even harder to excuse is that Gaijin already detects your input method. They already display a controller icon next to your name in lobbies when you’re using one on PC. The detection system is already there. Tying left trigger tracking to controller input rather than platform would not be a massive technical undertaking. The infrastructure exists. They just haven’t used it.
The bottom line is this. PC players who choose to use a controller are being actively penalised for playing the way they enjoy, on the platform they chose, in the same lobbies as console players who face no such penalty. That isn’t balance. That is an oversight that has been ignored for years while the community keeps asking for a fix. If you’re a console player thinking about moving to PC, know that you will lose a core feature you rely on for no good reason whatsoever. And if you’re already a PC controller player, you already know exactly how this feels.
Sort it out Gaijin.