Crew Skills Need to Be Removed

For tank that might be true, for air though, its slow but not too bad. Even with only prem time and not prem vehicle or talisman. I’ve nearly gotten it on the Tornado Gr1 and its not taken all that long, and i’ve not really been pushing for it either.

Certainly true at higher BR. At lower BRs, it comes quickly. For instance, I have 5 swedish crews aced on the rank III B18. And trust me, I didn’t even pay for one of them. IIRC The highest ACE I have is on rank V planes. I move good vehicles from crew to crew to spread the XP. If I would not do this, I would have way more ace crews.

Having spent so much time mostly only playing ARB or ASB I’ve got one slot maxed out and the others are all relatively low. Made a point over the past few months to actually get some more slots up. buts its slow. Definetly a big mistake i made when working through the tree. Especially noticable in both GRB and NRB not having maxed crew.

I think I do agree with you here. I’d be OK if you can buy it after 50% RP research.

I don’t really have any idea about how much bought ACE is there in higher ranks. I wouldn’t waste my GE on it but I wonder how many people do.

I’ve only bought ace once for a top tier, and that was the Gr7 because it was especially noticable the difference that made (though this was back when it was rank 7 so I think it was more like 2000 ish). Especially in SB. But not bothered with a lot of other aircraft at top tier currently. Though might consider it for the Sea Harrier FA2 and the Typhoon when they come respectively if I feel its really needed, especially when spading and more dependent on things like gun fighting.

A max rank plane, like the Tornado F3 is 3400 GE the highest tank I’ve got the first Chally 2 is 2100

Having started out in arcade air, I have many crews in all nations. I have maxed air crew skill in most older nations. For the US, I bought a ninth crew 1.5 years ago. It is maxed out in air by now too.

My reservation to the effect of crew skill comes from the experience of playing the all maxed out US vs a new nation with green crews. As long as I progress at the suggested pace, I don’t notice much of a difference really. Not enough to make me a better or worse player.

I notice the difference between make crew and low crew. If I do lower tier GRB and stick something like a Spitfire that I have not just max crew but maybe expert as well, in a slot that is low rank slot i really feel it and it catches me out sometimes in certain moves. But i feel like expert and sometime ace is needed on top tier aircraft only rarely. Harrier Gr7 was one of those times. I kept G-locking everytime I VIFFed even with max crew. At least now with ACE i can pull back on the stick and not necessarily G-Lock

I disagree. The grind needs to be balanced with what a reasonably productive person would have time to grind while enjoying the rest of the game. Ideally ace crew skills would be so easy to obtain that they wouldn’t require a money shortcut for most people, or be so time and cost prohibitive that like five people in the entire game have them. This middle-of-the-road approach is the worst of both worlds because it’s easy to bypass for a moderate amount of money, is nearly impossible to grind for productive people, and they create a relatively common in-game disparity which encourages people to continue to buy them.

This is assuming that this system should be implemented at all, and I don’t think it should given there are already plenty of disparities in game stemming from more systemic issues such as modifications. Experience alone should constitute the advantage that dedicated players receive (i.e. knowing vehicles, maps, and other game mechanics).

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How many people actually use one vehicle long enough to Ace it?

I do think that the Expert SL requirements should be drastically reduced, but Ace should be something to be earned. Something that rewards the player for the effort that was dedicated to that single vehicle, rather than progressing past it. I wouldn’t say Ace provides a game breaking advantage over Expert qualifications, so I’m not against it being earned.

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They both need to be drastically reduced. The only people who have them currently are the basement dwellers and those with deep pockets. I don’t think that’s healthy for the player base.

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I think this is where oppinions diverge. Give self centered people a reason to explain their own failure and they are likely to use it. So we may look at what you say (an in-game-disparity) or we may look at people having a need to explain their failings with exterior causes. Same effect as people claiming that premium includes further hidden bonuses which works against them free players. Or people with premium claiming that it makes things worse so that they spend even more money. In any case, the fault is elsewhere, not with them.

And both may be true too. The people blaming stuff on ace may usually be blaming cases where there is no ace involved while the (few?) cases where ace actually gave an advantage might not be noticed.

It would be interesting to remove ace effects for a while and see if people notice this.

I am really interested in which effect actually prevails in the ace-effect: perception or fact.

I kind of stopped using it for many vehicles in higher tiers now. Personally, I see that as needing more attention than ace.

Gaijin when they see this: Are you serious? do you have a hole in your head? removing the feature means throwing the money away, do you ask us to throw away our income? how about you throw away your business, example you have a coffee shop, just stop selling coffee and see what happen next br0

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It takes some time to obtain the ace for free, but it is also closely related to how well you perform in battle. I believe 4,000 hours for solely top BR is quite an exaggeration, considering my total time in War Thunder up to this point has been just over 5,000 hours, and YET I have crews for many BR lineups for multiple nations aced for free by simply playing.

A player who performs well will get an ace significantly faster than a player who performs mediocrely.

In addition, there is no paywall. There are numerous events in this game that provide multiple opportunities throughout the year to earn rewards that you can then sell in the marketplace for Gaijin coins. The Gaijin coins you earn can be used to buy golden eagles, which can then be used to help you ace the crews even faster. To be honest, I think this is incredibly generous and not seen in other games. Personally, I think you have a misunderstanding of what a “paywall” is.

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But a player, who performs mediocrely, may prefer to believe that the other guys good performance is based on his ace crew.

The preference for blaming the focus on something else rather than self-reflecting. Nothing was ever my fault. The most significant crew abilities in tank, in my opinion, are reloading and repairing, and in air, it is usually G-tolerance and stamina - both of which can be readily levelled up with enough dedication. :)))

The majority of the vehicles in this game have a fairly standard reload rate (less than 10 seconds), so whether a crew is an expert or ace has little effect on your overall performance. How many times throughout combat does a 0.3-second reduction in reload time actually matter? One in every ten engagements? At least in my experience, most engagements occur without you even realizing that the enemy is there, so the little reduction in reload does not matter at all.

Repair time is slightly more important, but how many times has “fewer seconds of repair” saved you from being destroyed? Often, the second shot will hit you before you have even started the repair.

As this thread is tagged air-rb:

In Air RB? Dozens of times over they years (i play props only).

You are the last player, have a blind hunt on you and you limp back to base due to damage - you crashland and wait for repair. Without an ace crew and the 10 seconds repair you get killed by guys in suicide dives (as they don’t care that they can’t pull out of their dives) - with an ace crew a lot of these superbrains pancaked at my previous repair location - the 1 or 2 seconds less repair time saved me.

It boils down that even with a 10 seconds repair very fast divers kill you if they are less 5 km away, with 6 km distance it gets often very close. Don’t come with af aaa - if you have low clouds above your af the af aaa has severe issues to track or kill very fast planes, Wyverns and P-47s go almost 900 IAS in a dive and on certain maps (like Battle of the Rhine) you can kill the af aaa easy (works only for the side with railroad cars as target).

And i do not think that crew skills shall be removed - and from my pov for anything above rank III the possibility to buy the ace qualification with GEs (SLs are ok as you have earned them) is highly questionable.

Either you enjoy the plane (and the game itself) and you are doing well in it - or not. Shortcuts to increase crew effectiveness with GE / real money are imho not really supporting player commitment and from my pov just has zero impact on the individual learning curve of “not really passionate” pilots…

I do agree that the difference to expert is small, but if you have played the same plane in an ace slot an then in a second slot with (just) expert the difference is there.

If your game play relies on relative and absolute positioning vs opponents and decision making / situational awareness the extra “power” of an ace spotting (vertical spotting especially on cloudy / dusk / fog maps) is there - i often watch my replays and if you switch in view of your opponents you can see when your dot appears for them - usually too late, whilst their dot appeared for me long before.

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Simple skill blaming.
My numbers are based on reality and averages. So your point is utterly invalid and ignorant.

Oh there very much is.
The events you describe are a full time job. They are impossible to take part in if you can not spend 6h+ each day in game. For normal people who can 0lay 1-2h a day they are impossible to participate in.

It is not generous at all. And certainly it is seen in all other games. WoT and WoWs literally gift the player free gold once a month just for logging in 10 times a month. On top of that you get it out of free container your earn every 20 minutes of gamplay or faster if you are an above average player. With the same time to play as I have in WT I never once spend 1 cent on premium time in WOWs and never played without.
War Thunder is by far the most grindy game in existence regarding free to play PvP gamss. You should play other games and woden your horizon. Gajin has warped your sense of reality.
Another example. BATTLEFRONT II the grind to unlock every content piece in that game, at release, was 4000h. And that game, while not free to play, was often compared to free to play games. Games like WoT, WoWs, Apex Legends, LoL and many more. War Thunder also found mention. As the only negative example. As the level of grind was compared to BF 2 and WT was seen as even worse. So GG.

Yoir entire point boils down to
“Git gud”

And has already been taken up by others. Gj mate

I see you have 0 interest in removing a clear P2W mechanic feom the game or improving the game overall. Gajin warped your sense of reality, and WT will forever lose 95% of its new players like it has for the past 5 years.

War Thuder is the most grindy game on the market at its size. That is a fact.

And a simple mind will go to insults rather than face reality.

Ace Creews are P2W
Thay is a fact. It is a gameplay advantage hidden behind excessive grind or a paywall.

My point is correct and entirely valid. A top-tier plane takes 1 million plus RP to ace, and 6 slots translate to 6-8 million RP. You are here claiming that players need 4,000 hours to obtain 6-8 million RP? Even with tailsman and a premium account? That is extremely inefficient. I played the British Phantom for 14 days (an average of 2 hours per day) for this event without a tailsman or a premium account, and I am halfway to acing it.

Crafting events are longer, but definitely not the event where you have to earn stars. The stars event is relatively easy to do, often requiring less than 2 hours per star. Spending six hours a day? Maybe for a crafting event, but even then, I have never heard somebody spend that much time, it is generally around 3-4 hours.

I have played many other games and have a far broader viewpoint than you expected. But I must remind you to be mindful of your comments here in order to prevent coming across as aggressive.

So in your world, a top tier jet comes with the level 70 creew required to obtain an expert and then grind ACE? Getting the creew up takes no time?
Interesting. Are we playing the same game?
Sure once you have optained sufficient creew level it gets faster, in planes significantly so.(sth like 2 to 3 times faster) but getting there is part of the grind and can be skipped by a bit of GE. A classic case of “bait and extort” players spend 1k GE for essentially all the skills they need in a plane, so what is another 2 or so 3k.
In tanks it is far worse. In my Tiger IIH I have around 100 games with roughly a 1.7 KD. It was also my firs expert creew. When I got the Tiger II the slot was around lvl 5 when I had around 50 games in it and fully spaded it as well as researched the next vehicle the creew was level 8. To get to a point of me being able to expert it on the tiger II I played the TAM IIP for over 100 games on that slot researching all the way to 8.7 and I spend an aditional 500GE on it. Now the creew is lvl 43. That is insane. In a different threat I once calculated how long it takes to get all creew skills unlocked for ground RB if you start at the optimal point for the grind (sth around 8. I belive) and using yhe most effective method to grind cree Exp (PvE due to its air RB bonus and multipel respawns model) and ended up with sth like 280-450h (I need to look it up again)just to get the necessary skills (repair, reload, leadership and one medium skill like targeting, tangefinding, driving of your choosing) for an entire creew it was more like 1000h for a single slot. That btw is with premium and no talisman.

3-4h, with an average of 1800 points per match and 15 minutes per match, is not anywhere near 75k points. I manage around 13k points in an hour playing ground. Which is above average from all I could see. Gajin themselves consider 1800 mission score to be a good game and anything above 2500 to be exceptional. So even by gajins Own Metric, we need 6+h a day.

Even the last event with 20k points was hard for me. As I had to combine my dailys with the event I managed to get 8 out of 10 for ground while I had 2 days off during that time and could play 1h a day. (I worked 6 days a week for that timeframe)
Hence why I know how many points I can manage in an hour. But if it had been 25k I woukd not have managed. Or 20k a day I would have been unable to do it. Getting all prizes would have required me to play at least 5h each day.
Ofcs I know some.people used special aircraft to get 20k pointa in 30minutes, but that is jo option for the average joe.

With the amount of time I have to play even daylies are a roll of the dice. Anything that requires x number of wins is impossible. Anything requiring more than two games to complete (get x two games in a row) is usually impossible. Get x kills depends heavily on what I need to kill. HT is fine, medium and lights demand to many kills to be realistic. And so on.
Do not underestimate how little 1h is.
4h of gameplay is not 4times 1. In 1h you do not always enter the zone and play your best. In 4h you btter do that. 1h stresses you out as you want to complete what you can, which makes you fail more often.

Until I started to be affected by such limiters I said the same stuff as you. “4h is enough” never actually looking how long it took me in reality.

I once did an experiment in WoWs of how long it takes to get from tier 1 stock to tier 10 spaded with only premium time, no boosters, no free exp. It took me 64h. During that time I also got one level 19 (max) and one lvl 16 captain.
This would be the equivalent of getting from reserve to 1 spaded rank 5 tank/ most of rank 4 researched, in WT while getting at least 1 maxed creew.
Yet in 64h in WT you will probably not even have finished rank 3 tanks and maybe have three points in reload, 2 points in leadership, and 1 point in repair.

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