Yeah. We have just enough special snowflakes who want to keep their vehicles while also gatekeeping them from others that option 1 is never happening lol.
giving them to everyone through gambling and persistence seems like the best way to appease the ocean of hypocrites
plus artificial scarcity is probably a good thing with vehicles like the Ho-Ri Production and Flak 341 which are extraordinarily busted. Don’t need 7 billion Coelians ruining 6.0-8.0 games every anniversary :)
Tbf, that’s not really it. It genuinely is understandable why Gaijin won’t remove them fully. Let me put it this way. Do you think you own a premium vehicle you’ve paid GE for?
WT is not a game that you buy but a live service. The GE you spent give you access to that premium vehicle, to that service. You don’t own it. It can be taken away any time with GE refunded. But if that ever happened, would you feel comfortable spending real money to buy GE to purchase access to a vehicle that may simply disappear some day?
Or, in the case of a TT vehicle. You spade it, maybe grind out the camos and get the ace crew and then one day, poof. It disappears. Or an event vehicle you complete 9 45k stages for, and then poof, gone. That’s a massive disincentive to grind anything ever again. Ergo, the death of the game.
F2P MMO = the model is “pay a lot or play a lot” and both things require trust in the company. Again, the illusion of ownership.
So while the full removal option would be internally consistent it would be a non starter because of the massive negative impact it would have on the game. Which leaves us with the other two.
The thing about removing them isn’t really that deep.
In games that run for such a long time, it’s something that is likely to happen at one point, but Devs understandably try to avoid doing that for as long as possible.
Usually when that happens the players that lose access to something get reimbursed in some way to let them keep some level of “pride” for having unlocked the thing that was removed.
Some pretentious people just like to get extremely upset when they can’t gatekeep something anymore. There is a reason why Gaijin never brings back certain beta vehicles or vehicles that they treat as limited editions (German Shepard, that one T-34, the original Tu-2, etc).
The absolute majority of people doesn’t mind these “collectors” vehicles being unavailable, because those vehicles aren’t all that special gameplay-wise (and we’ll, they aren’t unrealistic lol).
The thing with the unrealistic vehicles is that they could be replaced with “realistic” versions and the people that unlocked them before could be given some cosmetics.
Alternatively the original vehicles could be remodeled while another remodeled copy is added to the TTs, basically letting the original owners own two copies, with one marked as a legacy unlock.
I personally wouldn’t even mind being unable to unlock these vehicles, as long as they adhere to the realism that Gaijin loves to pretend is so important for WT.
The Ho-Ris and R2Y2s V2/3 were completely fake.
The Coelian, Panther II, Tiger II 10,5cm and R2Y2 V1 weren’t completely fake. The plans for them exist, Gaijin didn’t make them up and unlike the Ho-Ris, the plans weren’t forged.
There is nothing stopping Gaijin from remodeling the unrealistic vehicles to either be as realistic as possible or from just straight up replacing them with different, realistic vehicles.