Every so often Gaijin adds a game mode that isn’t standard PvP and a lot of people get genuinely excited. The new event is the latest example. Years of players asking for something like this, and when it finally arrives the AI is so overtuned it’s functionally unplayable, the economy is gutted, and within a week most people have moved on.
Look at the options currently available if you don’t want to play standard PvP: Helicopter EC, which has been a notoriously frustrating experience for years with no meaningful fixes. Sim battles, which is a small and self-selecting community. And now this event, which launched broken. Every alternative mode either has the income nerfed into the ground, the AI tuned to be punishing rather than fun, or both simultaneously. It creates a ceiling that pushes people away before they can get comfortable.
Wargaming figured this out years ago with world of warships. They built proper, functional PvE modes - not as an afterthought, not nerfed into irrelevance - and a massive community of non-competitive players showed up, spent money, and stuck around. Because the game respected that not everyone wants to sweat. War Thunder has more vehicles, more nations, more depth than WoWS ever had. The playerbase is already here paying attention. Gaijin just keeps driving them away.
Consider something as simple as loadout freedom. If you want to take an F-16 out with a realistic multi-role loadout; some air-to-air, some ground ordnance, just flying the thing the way it was actually used - competitive PvP punishes you for it. You take only the missiles that win games, or you’re a liability. That’s not a problem with the players, it’s a problem with the design philosophy. A functioning PvE mode is where that kind of play should live, and it keeps getting sabotaged.
There are a lot of players who want to engage with this game without it being a sweatfest. They would grind, spend, and stick around - if the experience wasn’t actively working against them.
The interest is there. The playerbase is there. At some point you have to ask whether this is incompetence or whether something else is driving the decision to keep every non-PvP mode in a half-broken state.