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.