Usually, if strength is balanced, only fools would go to war.
When I said “right away” I was saying that talismans don’t give you an ace crew in a very short amount of time. It would still be pay to win if it was like what you just said.
I get your point, but do you get mine?
Then what if Ace could only be bought once you reached 25% of the needed RP? Then you could not get it right away but needed to collect some points too.
I think the original point may have gotten lost because I am not even a “resources player.” I have had a premium account continuous for probably 4-5 years now. I have been playing the game since 2015. My highest level crew is like Level 120 out of 150…
If I am struggling with crew skills, the only people who aren’t are the people who literally do nothing but play War Thunder all day every day or who opt to purchase the Ace crew to skip the grind. The point is that crew skills are a pay-to-win mechanic even for the most dedicated players who have already invested heavily in the game.
A useful comparison are gotcha games like Raid… The top 5% of players who have already spent hundreds to thousands of dollars to make it to the top are milked by the devs for their money by continuously adding the “next best thing” which you have to buy if you want to remain competitive. Here, this takes the form of meta vehicles, modifications, and crew skills. Vehicles and modifications can be obtained easily enough for players with premium accounts, but Ace crews can’t within a reasonable time-frame (by the time you get your ace crew freely, WT will have released a new meta vehicle that beats the old meta). It’s WT’s equivalent to premium ammo.
I’m not saying WT shouldn’t be in the money-making business, but they need to find a new way to do it. This is both a pay-to-win mechanic and borderline predatory. It hurts everyone because instead of actually producing concrete content that everyone will enjoy, they instead are lazily turning to more passive forms of making money by selling buffs to a subset of addicts and occassionally releasing shitty maps and copy-paste vehicles.
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Why does it matter if someone has a talisman, if someone goes through the tiers quicker than yourself it does not mean he has won, it might just mean he is going to burn out his game before you! And wast his cash.
Dont worry about what others are doing, its just a game after all
Imagine blaming crew skills for being bad at positioning and gunnery, reaching new lows here…
Crew skills make some difference when you have NONE compared to someone with lvl 75 + expert. But between expert and ace? Dude, you for real? The difference is tiny. You buy yourself into top tier on a fresh account by going straight to a Tier 7 premium with a level 1 crew, that’s on you.
Barely being able to go 1:1 in jets, that has nothing to do with crew skills.
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You assumed a bunch of things which are untrue. Gaijin wouldn’t sell the qualification so high if enough people wouldn’t buy it at that price point to raise revenue, and people wouldn’t buy it unless there was a palpable difference in performance.
Why you would want to cry “skill issue” when removing this mechanic would help literally everyone is beyond my understanding.
Ace skill makes no difference to Expert crew in the amount of success you have in WT, there are much more important things to qualify as a good pilot. Crew skill is very very low on that list in an ARB setting.
There’s no “palpable difference” whatsoever, the difference between both Expert and Ace is so small that it becomes extremely niche in which case it may make a difference and even then it’s extremely small.
You’re here making a storm in a glass of water
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I didn’t say that there weren’t other factors. Obviously there are other factors.
There is definitely a palpable difference and it’s not in “niche” situations. There are plenty of situations where having even a slightly higher G resistance/stamina will win you a dogfight.
Okay, if that were true, then why are you hell-bent on arguing the point? Do you have a dog in this fight or do you just like arguing about something that doesn’t make a difference?
World of tanks did crews pretty decently - they were assigned to a tank and cost a little bit to move them to other tanks at the cost of small credits (75%) or a small amount of gold for 100% - and you kept your perks. It was very easy to get even a 50% crew up to 100%.
Now having crew slots is also good - so you can put any vehicle you want and have base crew skills - minus paying for expert or ace.
However - it still stupid. I do agree the G situation is stupid and having an ace crew on my Jag has let me dunk on F5E’s.
Ground is even worse - double the points for air and not to mention how expensive these crews are just for expert.
IDK, I’ve never felt the need to ace anything using money yet.
For aircraft, experting is all that’s needed for the G-forces and bomb scattering improvements.
Going from 35 to 21 scattering is a bigger leap than 21 to 17.
And going from 5.9G to 6.2G is no real change IMO.
As for tanks, the biggest improvement is reload, which I have on KV-1E & M4A2 earned through just playing. Black Prince is just over halfway aced.
Maybe there should be a Silver Lions alternative to acing crews.
Say 3600GE worth of SL is 1,560,000SL. So let’s say a “free” acing costs 2mil, 2.5mil, or 3mil SL.
More than the GE cost, but still reasonable.
You want that M1A2 SEP aced faster than RP? I’d spend a total of 5,000,000SL to do that on a SEP.
I wouldn’t for BVM cause there’s no benefits, but that’s just me.
So a 20% increase from the base level is incignificant. And locking them behind literla 1000ths of hours of grind or a 10-50€ pay wall is not P2W?
Sorry but it is. It is a increase in performance locked behind a paywall. even just 1% or 0.000001% would be P2W.
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Crew skills should like every other grind in War Thunder be reduced.
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Very good idea.
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Crew skills should not be able to be purchased with GE forcing players that skip to high tier to suffer.
P2W? Nah, except in the case of air but I fully aced my French air crew by the time I reached 8.3 so I can’t say it was insane. G force is the only thing “required” and I had that by level ~30
Reload rate is beaten by autoloaders and you lose the reload when your loader is shot anyway. They make autoloaders a really compelling choice beyond losing the reload when your loader is shot.
The grind should be less, they shouldn’t be purchasable with GE, they do serve a purpose though.
It does not matter if it is required or not. P2W is not “oh you need to buy that to finish the game” it is “This is a gameplay/damage advantage you get by simply paying which you could not readily get without paying real money”. Does not matter if it is “free” technically. Mathematically you would need to spend 2 years of your live playing just top tier to get Ace on all current top tier Jets, Tanks and Ships. If not more. And again the Ace crew is 20% more in all creew skills. Does not matter if for one tank that is just 0.1° of traverse and 0.1s of faster reload.
It is quite simply a P2W feature. Yes the impact is at times limited, but still. P2W is P2W.
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All of them! -Gaijin
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and
It is the same effect whether it is immediate or gradual.
your “definition” is cherry picking an unimportant distinction - except insofar as it supports your illogical conclusion.
Remove. Maybe extreme, but they are certainly outdated and the fact that Expert/Ace is so unreasonably expensive a top tier needs a serious looking at. Especially as they are slot specific.
My suggestion:
- Slot specific Expert SL cost to be reduced to 25% of the current cost (1 million SL to 250k)
- Add any slot Expert for 75% of the current cost (1 million SL to 750k)
- Reduce RP cost for Ace to be 1-1.5 times the RP cost of the vehicle. not the Current 3x, so from 1.28 million to 400-600k, but ideally on the lower end. (with Ace following the vehicle, so long as the crew is experted depending on above) (Also crew RP for Ace should start accumulating as soon as the vehicle is spaded, not when you have Expert)
For Crew skills in general. Crew XP gains need to be increased by at least double, maybe triple short term, before a total overhaul of how Crew XP works and Crew skills in general. I half get things like G-lock, as that is on the “crew”. But things like Turret rotation speed in Ground makes no sense to me, thats a vehicle limitation not anything to do with the crew.
That being said, G-lock resistance from the G-suit needs to be increased and G-lock resistance from Crew skill needs to be reduced proportionally. Some jets you blackout instantly without Ace, and that is just bad game design
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THIS^^ is my impression…crew skills have a minor effect on gameplay…a few seconds more reloading or so. I actually think the other way around…i dont make an effort to improve crew skills…i just improve them as i play (for free)…no worth a big investment i think. (Just read the specs and the actual numbers…sometimes the improvement is 0.2s in reload)
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