BR placement is one of the most talked about things when it comes to War Thunder’s balancing issues, but I wanted to ask for some input on what a better BR formula/decision matrix (I’ll just use formula for brevity) would be like both for Ground battles.
Some things like hull or turret armor, penetration values of ammo, or number/size of weakspots are easy things to implement in a formula; things like mobility, post-pen damage, or a vehicle’s optimal playstyle (thinking of how people say some tanks are only meant to flank, for example), or just general jank in a tank’s model are harder to quantify, though.
What is you guys’ opinions on how these performance measures should be evaluated? If you have any (declassified, for the love of god) primary or secondary sources that go over real-world evaluations of the harder-to-quantify aspects to a vehicle’s performance, that would also help a ton.
I’d like to have this be a bit of a research and modeling project for me to work on over the next few months, and once the formula is finished I’d like it to be something that could be proposed to the devs. I’ve got finals for uni coming up in the next month but I plan on working on it more after that.
I don’t think you even have to go that far into IRL documents.
Currently, BR adjustments are made based on player stats in those vehicles, but they’re not normalized for said players’ overall stats. A major issue is that bad players (which are usually new) will gravitate towards certain tech trees (USA air/germany ground) and will then get bad stats in those vehicles. Gaijin only sees the bad stats part and decides those vehicles are too weak.
Like with the italian CL-13 debacle a few years ago, a group of very good players started playing the italian CL-13 - the worst of the CL-13 Sabres - to see if they could get it uptiered, and they did. Not many played italy, so their very good stats made it appear as overperforming.
It didn’t matter that they were doing worse than they otherwise would because that plane was subpar, only that they were doing above average overall - ie higher than a 1.0 KD ratio and 50% winrate (in reality the average KD is probably lower as many people crash/J out).
We see the same in the USA air tree with very undertiered aircraft like the P-39N, or for example the Re2005 and A6M5s, which are very overtiered because they get better than average players.
Player stat-based BR changes should take into account that vehicle’s playerbase - if they’re all averaging say a 60% winrate, getting an “above average” 55% winrate in a certain vehicle should mean it is underperforming, NOT overperforming as gaijin would consider it now. If they’re all 40%ers and they’re “just fine” at a 50% average, then that vehicle really should go up in BR.
The same goes for KD ratios as it is quite important, but I wanted to keep it shorter.
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