Create a gap between ww2 and cold war vehicles and tech

So how would this work with French tanks specifically designed and delivered in the last 1940s based on lessons learned of WWII that are now facing 1980s tanks… Where would they fall. The T44 and 54 were immediately at the close of WWII. Is the T44 a WWII tank or Cold War?

The underlying issue is that we have tanks that fall between. Those are the tanks most debated.

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I’ll pose the same question to you that I’ve posed to others a couple times now.

Why are you playing the T29 into a full uptier?

The American 6.7/7.0 lineup is full to bursting with better options for uptiers. You have the M46, M56, T92, M50, M41A1 and M109. These are all mobile vehicles with access to rounds that can deal with anything you’re likely to see. They are purpose built for working regardless of the tier.

Instead, you’re taking a tank that’s on some level reliant on it’s armor, and trying to force it to work at a tier where it’s armor cannot stand up against enemy fire. Then you’re complaining that it doesn’t work.

I get having a preference for a certain tank, or even a certain playstyle. But this is a (somewhat) balanced PVP game, you cannot have it all your way every time. Relegate your T29 to playing in downtiers primarily, and use the tools you are given to perform better in uptiers.

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I don’t have nor play the T29 but I often bring a premium into uptiers such as that simply to mitigate losses given that people generally perform significantly worse. So if I am going to inevitably score worse in an uptier, I might as well do it with an RP and SL bonus.

I agree that tier IV would be an ideal place for a division split.

OK so some line ups suffer but they are crummy half developed line ups any way and whose fault is it Gajin can’t fill them or make them work. They are empty without a divisional split.

I agree and with a split at rank IV the T29 would be top tier div 2 and safe from the game destroying up tier so many of us hate.

Why shouldn’t he play it ? It’s there to be played so why not?

Dont make game issues into player issues.

There does and so many are asking for it have been for a long time.
Accepting every issue with the game does not solve issues.

Cutting the game in half gives you no more issues than you currently have as you already have a bottom tier and top tier with nothing below or above.

With newer later and faster vehicles (filler) clash with the established doctrine/meta/canon whatever, the gap is getting more and more pronounce and the game in heavy tanks less and less enjoyable.

Is the forum here to try and make the game better or just proudly announce how you support every long-term fault with it?

You enjoyed it ? How dare you :)

So the Jadgtiger is so broken only an uptier can make it work? We have to face it at 5.7 in the up tier all the time so what difference would making it top tier in div 2 make?

So you might say that top tier Div only faces its own BR or lower but how is that different from top tier as it is presently.

If you only comeback is to say top tier does not work currently then that is a major issue and criticism of WT who may wish to defend that or acknowledge it true.

If we accept the game works at top tier then it would work with a separate cut off point for the WW2/Early Cold war era in the same way.

I fail to see how anybody with an interest in WW2 would be against a cutoff point, but I see as play that tier that the game unravels and the Heavies of the early era clash.

I hate the up tier with WW2 against 80s vehicle’s, yet I am willing to try and out flank a Tiger 2 in an M18 just as my ancestors would have done. I don’t think that is a crime and I don’t think it is unreasonable or illogical to demand that from a game, any game.
We still have CAS to bring balance as it was indeed to do and I suspect needed to do.

I’ve also enjoyed the five (out of my six) nukes that I’ve gotten with it… of which four were achieved in uptiers/full uptiers. The first two of which, even before the summer BR changes, when 6.7 - 7.7 was a hellscape of compression.

The difference between the two however is that the latter enjoyment is not to the detriment of other players and doesn’t require waiting for ten minutes only to spawn in a match with 15 German players vs 5 American players.

And because everyone wasn’t spawning in at the same time, you could set up in a power position and just farm whoever came in…

Not at all. It is fine at 6.7. But we’re not discussing its BR, we are discussing historical matchmaker.

Rather than rewrite everything I’ll just quote what I’ve said previously on the matter:

the problem is that the average player doesn’t want to play against the odds, or feel like they’re overcoming the challenge of facing a meta vehicle. The average player would like to be in the meta vehicle.

You can see this by looking at any competitive MMO… whenever there is one side that is clearly stronger than the other, people flock to it and don’t bother to play anything else. It’s what is creating so many problems for Enlisted on certain maps/campaigns, for example, and it’s also what nuked the last season of World War, when everyone wanted to play the German side for obvious reasons.

Nobody likes to get punched in the face.

As such, the method of balancing by performance is very sound, and doesn’t really need anything else. In a perfect world, every vehicle in WT would have exactly a 50% win rate, and while we obviously can’t achieve perfection, balance by performance can get us close to those numbers.

But…

When there are BR issues, it’s not because the chosen method (performance) is wrong. It’s because of implementation issues. For example there being too few BRs to allow you to spread out vehicles properly.

Top tier is a hellhole and we should not aspire to turn any other BRs into a mess that resembles that one tbh.

I do not, in fact, believe the game works at top tier at all, which is why I have no interest in playing it. It’s impossible to balance it correctly.

We have an entire category of premiums in the game that exist for the only purpose of being 1 BR below top tier and therefore give these guys cannon fodder to kill, because otherwise not enough people would play 1 BR below the top. You literally pay to get punched in the face with the promise that you’ll get faster to a point where you can punch someone else in the face.

I’m interested in WW2. I’m against a cutoff point because nations like Sweden could not really compete, because the unintended consequences on player behaviour would lead to a situation where 80% of a lobby wants to spawn in the same vehicle or nation and so you’re forced to have “civil war” matches all the time, and because balancing by performance is on the whole a lot cleaner.

Besides… I like detonating vehicles from the Cold War with good ol’ reliable :D grandpa’s still got it! I think the helicopter I nuked out of the sky with the Jagdtiger on Wallonia/large Ardennes once remains one of my favourite personal highlights of my time in the game.

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People play the tanks they want or the tanks they bought. Rarely do people pick vehicles based on performance.

Not all tanks are suitable for all matches. Doesn’t matter how badly I want to play something like a Nashorn, it’s entirely possible (Likely, even) that the game will give me match where the Nashorn is not a good idea. Sweden, Advance to the Rhine, etc.

I can still play that tank if I really feel like it, but I accept that based on the map I’m probably not going to be doing well in it. It’s not a fault of the tank, it’s that the tank just isn’t suitable for the match I got put into.

This goes for a wide selection of tanks. It’s a bad idea to play an S tank in a brawling map, or a T95 on a super large one. It doesn’t mean these a bad tanks, nor that they need some form of special matchmaker to ensure they don’t get these bad maps, it’s just that they aren’t very flexible, and thus you need to pair them with more flexible tanks if you want to have a good lineup.

The same is equally true for armored tanks and uptiers. Armored tanks are inevitably linked on their matchmaker, because their advantage is solely determined by what’s being fired at them. Ideally, they be put into a spot where they aren’t completely useless in a full uptier, and not completely dominating in a full downtier. Thanks to the current BR compression, this is often impossible.

6.7-7.7 heavies have this problem more than most. Most of them are almost entirely immune to APHE from the front, but very susceptible to ADPS/HEAT. Put them at too low a tier, and in downtiers they’re going to dominate everything. Put them too high, and their armor ceases to function at all. So Gaijin compromised and put them at a tier where they are pretty to very strong in a downtier, but pretty to very weak in an uptier.

Accordingly, players need to pick them with this fact in mind. If you have a bullminded determination to use a round peg regardless of the situation, you have to accept the fact that occasionally you’re going to be presented with a square hole. The problem isn’t the peg or the hole, it’s in your refusal to use the most appropriate tool for the job.

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Cool thing is you didn’t even quote the entire idea. You’re like a shit reporter, but let me correct it for you. If there is a split for Early Cold War and WW2 the there needs to be one for Interwar and WW2. It only makes sense as there was a doctrine/technology leap at the beginning of WW2 just like there was after WW2.

It gives the game twice the issues that it had before. Two top tiers, two bottom tiers and dozens of vehicles that become useless because of it.

The forum is for discussion and change, but this idea of era matchmaking or splitting the game for the sake of heavy tanks is rediculous. They do perfectly well in uptiers and downtiers. The 6.7 German lineup heavy tabks are a force to be reckoned with, the 7.7 US lineup heavy tanks are a force to be reckoned with, stop trying to make it seem like they are helpless. This idea has been flushed out and discussed many times already, and it isn’t going to go anywhere. The reason why it isn’t making progress is because it isn’t good for the game, at all. You guys talk about this split and don’t even talk about how it’ll work for aircraft either because you only care about heavy tanks. The people against this idea are the ones who play other vehicles than heavy tanks. People who don’t want to see the Maus, Tiger 2, IS-3, IS-4, T32, T34, T29, Jadgtiger, Ferdinand, T95, T28, and any other slow heavily armored upgunned vehicle on every corner when they are trying to play vehicles with the 76mm (US), 90mm (US), 88mm (Germany), 75 (Germany), 85mm (USSR), and 100mm (USSR).

You’re upset the heavy tanks armor isn’t infallible in an uptier, but don’t see the irony that those heavy tanks have guns that nullify the armor of every other vehicle other than heavies. Yea, in an uptier they aren’t invincible, but in downtiers these heavy tanks do the same thing that you claim HEATFS and ATGMs do. They make eveything else die without a second thought.

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I grew up in middle Europe. We can exchange slurs, but i can guarantee that i will win. In my language one can swear for a long time without repeating a word…

Also sorry that truth hurts.

helicopter-hand

And it is nowhere close to APHE, which is the most common shell at that BR. Any tank with a well placed shell will do better than an M-51, Ikv, etc.

giphy

Are you talking about the Ikv? because that has so little armor, that it will not stop anything, yet it has enough armor to fuse APHE. It’s gunner can also be killed by literally the smallest MG fire, because his head sticks out.
If you are talking about an M-51, then whe are you bringing up HE?
Either way, it just tells a lot about your skill issue.

image
You happy now?

It is neither.
Stug 4:


Jagdpanzer IV:

Panzer IV/70A:
s1mexut

image

I just finished playing the Pershing a few days ago, with a gun, that has less than half of the pen, that drops off with distance, and my K/D in it is over 12.
And even with other 5.7-6.3 mediums, i have by far the worst K/D in the M-51.







I rather use a reliable shell with less pen, than HEAT, that can just do nothing because reasons. Even the Panther’s really bad APHE is orders of magnitude better.

daddy-chill

Check your mental health dude.

Also, maybe use some actual arguments instead of insults. Arguments tend to work better :)

Are you suprized? A germany main complaining about HEAT shooting tanks, while he didn’t even play with any of them? Never seen before thing!

It would not.

USSR would completly dominate, because they would have IS-3s, IS-4s, T-44 variants, while all ofther nations would have nothing that can counter them in any meaningful way.

I played the Type 69, and even it’s awful dart was better than HEAT. The only exception is tanks with thicher, but not very angled plates, like german tanks. Against those, HEAT is better, but in general, it is worse.
And HEAT compared to something, like an L7 APDS is just laughably bad.

Chi-Nu II a jack of all trades? WHAT?! (and you didn’t even play it). it is literally a glasscannon, even more so than a Panzer 4.

And while something, like a chinese IS-2 can just HE kill an IS-4, the T34 can’t, becuase it lacks 1mm pen.

Well said.

Because it is a WWII tank. There is ZERO WWII tank, that can reliably counter it, except 30mm+ pen HE on the turret roof.

The T29 would see nothing but late WWII heavies, that can just LOLpen it, while you can’t pen them… Great. And that’s even if it will be classed as WWII. To my knowledge, it was only finished after the war ended, so it can potentially be classed as cold war.

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So basically the game can’t work without BR to save its ass. Possibly the same with CAS.
Its not a very good game is it really?

The trouble is with your argument (and I understand your argument) is that this terrible idea of facing the Uptier is one we already have and far too often.

Again it would bring no new issues to the party only underline those we already have and those that many of the forum base deny exist. The game cant always exists with a tier above it, top tier is the example. Presumably at some point in the games history 6-7 BR would have been the upper limit.

We all complain about the uptier under normal circumstances and are told it’s a skill issue etc., now suddenly its a game killer and an unmountable hurdle.

Only inexperienced players say this, or maybe a specific vehicle/nation/BR combos. The uptier complaints are just another symptom of the dumbing down, same with the aircraft complaints (outside of new mode suggestions purely in a “something different” context).

Top Tier has always existed, just the game slowly pushed forward to extend this Top Tier until we now have things like the Challenger 3! In my opinion Top Tier has always been the most wonky part of the game and only for those wanting to be ahead of an imaginery curve (get there first and you can make it work).

Top tier is a personal goal and not the “end-game”. There is no “end game” as it is essentially open-ended with play what you want. The grind system exists which makes the game open for money making but then creates a false expectation of there being some goal to the current top tier other than it just being an artificial end.

Uptiers are a player problem for the most part, not a game issue. First place/most impactful player is not automatically the top BR vehicle, in some cases can be the worst position to be top BR dependant on lineup/map. At least that is how I viewed the game.

You’re overlooking one fundamental difference between top tier and everything else. What utterly breaks top tier is that it doesn’t follow the normal rules of quantitative matchmaking.

TEC talked about it during one of the recent TEC talks, I won’t repeat the explanation in full, but suffice to say that if only 4 top tier players at one time could be in a match, their queue times would be pretty bad. So what happens at top tier is that you have matches with “nominal” higher BR (and literal higher BR if the right aircraft comes along). That is what makes it unbalanceable for those who are right below it.

Also, the lack of vehicle variety, speed of engagements, and the range at which some machines can engage, don’t exactly help the situation of top tier.

It’s certainly a very successful game: few MMOs are so long-lived, and vehicle combat is a small niche. Yet during the Christmas holidays War Thunder was in the top 20 or 30 of many Steam Charts.

Now, is it good?

I believe it is, even if it suffers from several issues. I mean, that goes without saying, I have nearly 3k hours in the damn thing, if I really thought it was a bad game I just wouldn’t play it, and would play something else, right? There’s plenty of choice. Life is short, and work is stressful enough, I’m not going to pursue a hobby I dislike. If I really were so unhappy with the game I would simply drop it.

Now, War Thunder is basically the only MMO I play. I don’t really like MMOs. The business model that makes them possible, leads to many design choices that are really not for me. War Thunder is a remarkable exception in that regard, it’s actually lured me in and made me stay, which no other MMO has achieved. And it’s been doing this to a lot of players for many many years. So in spite of the popular trope that Gaijin are all bumbling idiots, they clearly know at least some of what they’re doing, or we wouldn’t be talking here, yes?

However, MMOs follow their own logic and you can’t ignore that if you want to evaluate how good or bad a game is. For example:

I’m not sure about CAS, but yeah, basically, a game with 2000 vehicles is always going to have huge balancing issues.

No single player game about war would ever have 2000 different vehicles in, all at the same time. Stop for a moment and think about how insane that is. Look at how many tank models, or even just units in general, are in Company Of Heroes 3, or IL-2 Tank Crew. So you have a binary choice here. And obviously when it’s not PVP, things are much easier to balance because you can just tweak the AI.

And not just because of balance, by the way, but because no dev team is going to be able to output 2000 vehicles in the short period of a few years that is the development cycle of a “normal” game. War Thunder can keep producing insane amounts of content, most of it free, because of its business model. Last year we got 200 vehicles added.

If you want to understand WT, you need to do it on its terms.

Say you’re a WT dev, you have a binary choice. You can create a more cohesive experience with a smaller number of vehicles, or you can have 2000 vehicles and need to find some way to balance it over time. Only one of these options allows you to constantly add content over a period of time, which is how MMOs stay alive. Are you surprised they went with the latter? Given how well the game is doing, are you so confident to say that they made the wrong choice?

Then there is the next layer to this decision. The BR system isn’t just about balance. It’s also about managing player progress, because if some of your matches are more difficult and some easier, your progress will be slower. Because if you face a smaller array of vehicles, your matches will be more predictable, and your efficiency at research and progression would increase. Because when you get frustrated with the grind you’re more tempted to pay and get to top tier faster.

Also the fact that we’re all uptiered most of the time means that the first time you see a “new” tank, you’re seeing how well it does in a downtier, and you think, damn, I want that too, I’ll grind it out so I can finally start to have fun. Then you start playing it mostly in uptiers and the cycle of disappointment begins anew.

Do I like this system of incentives? No. Can a free to play MMO survive without using these marketing tactics? I don’t know. What I do know is that once I recognise that pattern of incentives, I can avoid it and enjoy the game on my own terms rather than Gaijin’s, and that’s good enough for me.

And to close out - simulator already has lists in place of BRs, and yet has basically identical strengths and weaknesses as the rest of the game. Because the BR system is just the “how”, not the “why” of decisions being made. So even if you replaced it with something else, you would still end up in the same spot: this is an MMO, it functions like MMOs, and players who expect a single-player-like experience from it (like I did) are always going to be disappointed.

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That made sense but to me cutting the game in two solves issues for many while not creating any issues we dont already have. Top tier by rights should collapase yet it is the point every player is stampeding towards.Some might say it is the reason for the sucess of which ypu speak.To give on immersion is to give up on the game for me.Just my two pennies worth.

“Cutting the game in two” is not the whole story either.

If we cut the game in two but we maintain performance-based matchmaking, the M-51 will still be in the WW2 division, and so will many Swedish and French postwar vehicles. Because they’re not good enough to be anywhere else. So you have created a new area of the game where there are issues akin to top tier’s, but you still don’t have the immersion you’re asking for.

If we cut the game in two on historical lines - an arbitrary line that will bring up countless disputes about where borderline vehicles should be, and why the Puma gets to face stuff from the 1930s instead of Normandy 1944 lineups - you run into the same issues of historical matchmaking. A lot of tanks Gaijin has developed and implemented will not be played anymore because they can’t be competitive.

Want to grind Sweden, already a nation not as played as the Big Three? Tough luck, 90% of it is in division two, because it’s postwar. And they’re also terrible vehicles, so you might as well just not bother. I don’t even need to go further - we’ve already effectively killed an entire ground tree just with this proposal alone.

This also leads nicely into the next point. What about the grind? Can you grind either division independently of the other? So all the players who just like the modern stuff jump into division 2 without ever touching the world war stuff? You have just cut 50% of their grind to top tier. Do you really think Gaijin would ever consider that? That it wouldn’t impact lobbies? That it wouldn’t impact player quality since a fresh-faced rookie would be starting with an M109 or an IKV?

And if you do need to grind division 1 first, what about Sweden, France, Japan, with their minimal lineups from the WW2 era? Do you have to grind one of the WW2 main nations first before you unlock one of the cold war minnows, like Israel now? Because that’s a terrible system and one of the reasons why the Israeli tech tree should have never been added except as a subtree.

You make it sound simple, but it only sounds simple if you ignore all the side effects it would have. Hard as it is to believe, there are players out there who actually do enjoy playing Sweden, and I want them to have as much fun as I have. And that’s before you even bring the business side of it into this conversation.

It probably has something to do with that, yes. That doesn’t scale linearly though. It doesn’t mean that a “second top tier” would lead more players into the game.

The fact that top tier is good for marketing and bad for gameplay, doesn’t mean that two top tiers would be good for marketing and somehow also good for gameplay.

Immersion is completely subjective. Even with a perfectly historical matchmaking, I wouldn’t be immersed in a historical sense in War Thunder. I just can’t unsee the fact that there’s no infantry, no arty, no supplies, no logistics, the battlefield makes no sense, there are no orders, no mission command or command structure in general… The vehicles themselves feel realistic and so fleshed out you could almost touch them, and that’s where most of WT’s immersion comes from. But I just treat it like a game.

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Splitting game in two makes zero changes to grind. At rank IV m51 would be facing what currently faces. I think you are massively overthinking it

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So… You would still fight M-51s in Tiger IIs. How does that change your immersion in any way?

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Except for the fact that you could skip out on half the tree which is critical for new players to learn the basics of the game instead of being thrown into the more complicated higher tiers immediately, which is something that has already been mentioned…

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I just have an as much of an issue with it ,dont get me wrong ,you could remove Isreal entirely as far as I am concerned but unless the m51 went to 7 br we would be stuck with it