So I go through some of the relevant stats on this question here: Data Analysis #6: The state of the War Thunder squadron system at the start of 2026
As Poul says in the thread, the time to get all squadron vehicles starting from zero today in a max-participation squadron is now 7.5 years, so yes, a recalibration on rewards does seem overdue.
The complicating issue is that squadron research is a combination of the player’s own activity and their squadron’s. Only about 360 out of that 20,000 points is you, really. The rest is being in a big squadron and having contributing teammates. So there’s a couple variables to manipulate here, not just one, and at least three ways to do either of the options in your poll (with various subvariations on each). Focussing on the first option (40,000):
Option 1: Increasing the value of a player’s contribution (so the player has to do 720, equivalent to 144,000 game RP every three days to keep pace in a 40,000 point-capped squadron) would likely be quite onerous for a lot of people, unless it came with a significant boost in in-game RP rewards as well. At, say, 5,000 RP a game that works out to 9 games a day, every day, to keep pace and not risk being booted for poor performance.
Option 2: Increasing the value of the squadron’s contribution while keeping the max players the same (so the player still does 360, but the squadron can squeeze more out of the same number of players) would benefit a very small component of the player base. Only 89 out of 67,000 active squadrons, representing about 11,000 players worldwide, easily less than 1% of the number of accounts, were able to keep a 400,000 activity score, at the peak of the event that just passed. Everyone else would suffer by comparison to them in terms of progression. While this would probably help Gaijin, as more people would just buy squadron vehicles than try to grind them, the overall player benefits are questionable.
Option 3: Increasing the number of players per squadron (so the player still does 360, but now there’s up to 256 players grinding) would encourage the growth of larger squadrons and increase average player returns across the player base (if you’re in a squadron). The downside there is that it would become increasingly unattractive to start new squadrons or to stay in smaller ones because you like the vibe or the name as the gap from 1 member to 256 in terms of relative performance grows. People don’t like to be forced to join things, and this would have this effect even more than the current system.
An intriguing option (call it 3a) I personally like would be to establish squadron alliances, so that squadrons could benefit from each other’s research in another layer of structure, while still keeping the max accounts per squadron at 128.
Say your target was 50% more squadron research for everybody (so, 30,000 against a vehicle if you’re maxing out, every 3 days): you could have it so that your squadron could name up to 5 allied squadrons, each contributing up to 10% added squadron activity outputs on top of your own to get that extra 10,000, or a single 1-on-1 alliance that contributed half of their research (half of 20k, or 10,000) on top of what your own squadron made. This might not only be easier to implement on top of old code: I suspect this would be more positive for player agency (in addition to players leaving, you could ally or de-ally if your allied squadrons were no longer doing things you liked), could help future large events like World War Mode where even fully committed 128-person squadrons proved unable to keep up 24/7 play, or possibly open up some new options for any future revamp to the squadron battles system. This would benefit both large and small (buddy) squadrons equally, encourage squadrons to team up on joint Discord sites to build broader communities, and not lock the game into a smaller number of more powerful squadrons, especially now with player growth levelling off.
(Of course the simplest thing for Gaijin to do here (option 4) would just be to recognize you now have too many squadron vehicles, and shave some RP (and SL) off the cost of all of them. Cutting the vehicle cost in squadron RP has the same effect as doubling rewards and shouldn’t be off the table either).