Got bored enough to try it again after a year, its the biggest pile of dogshit ever put in this game. Would take me like 60 hours to spade in a heli with a premium account.
Just remove TT helis and make them all premiums at this point Jesus. Would unironically be cheaper to buy a premium 60 dollar heli on sale than to GE the mods.
The problem is that rewards in Helicopter PvE are limited. For optimal rewards, you want to get between 300 and 400 score every 10-minute period. Getting less than 300 can significantly reduce your rewards, while getting more than 400 won’t increase them much.
That’s because there are no direct action-based rewards in Helicopter PvE. Killing enemies or completing objectives doesn’t give you anything beyond additional score. Rewards are based on how much score you earn over time, but there’s a cap tied to your activity percentage.
It’s a very strange system that doesn’t encourage players to actively play. In fact, the best strategy is to reach 400 score in about 5 minutes and then alt-tab to do something else for the remaining 5 minutes. Then just repeat that. Even if you manage to play for the full 10 minutes and get 800 score, it doesn’t make much difference, because you won’t earn significantly more. 400 score already corresponds to about 98% activity, so doing twice as much only gets you 2% more in rewards.
Honestly, I don’t know any other multiplayer game that works this way. A game should encourage players to play more to earn more - it’s the logical way to design a reward system. But in War Thunder, we have a time-based system that works differently. It’s actually counter-intuitive, and most players never even try to understand how it works. They don’t realize that doing twice as much in a match won’t give them twice the rewards.
From my perspective, Helicopter PvE is a good game mode to have running in the background. You can watch movies, listen to music, or even work on something while “playing” this game mode. It’s also a good idea to use big RP boosters in Helicopter PvE - just make sure you get 300-400 score in each of the first three 10-minute periods.
As you can see, this reward system has many issues. If you’re wondering why the devs implemented it this way, it’s because it gives them an easy way to control the pace of player progression. With limited rewards, even the best players flying the best helicopters can’t break through that reward ceiling.
So you could say that the current progression speed in Helicopter PvE is exactly where the devs wanted it to be. But yes, I agree - especially the RP rewards are very bad from the player’s perspective. Personally, I think they should be doubled.