Is War Thunder showing it's age now?

Yeah before you would get points for your armour deflecting the shot, not only your modules being damaged

2015 which means you were not there when planes were the only option.

They also didn’t.

I’m very doubtful it was easier to grind.

@Uncle_J_Wick Need to ask you a question, if you were there back then, around the time that Luque 13 was saying was it easier or was it worse?.

Sry man - i joined later - i was addicted to SWBF 2015 those days.

To be fair - the fellow player @luque13 is imho right with his statements - especially regarding game design, difficulty of grind and the overall goal of gaijin to earn money with minors.

2018 / 2019 was as far i can remember the peak time of playing Air RB in props - after a few hundred / thousand battles you knew most of your team mates and your enemies, so what they flew, which tactics they use, etc. - and how to play on which maps.

Yes, it was often boring in the axis vs allied world, but getting kills was much harder vs experienced enemies - much harder than today due to the sheer masses of untrained pilots. I just came out of a 1 vs 4 victory which i had never won 5 years ago - i caught 2 guys on their airfield and managed to kill the last 2 guys in a severe disadvantageous position.

No, I don’t think so. The graphics are a little older, but in my opinion this is actually beneficial, because the graphics requirements are very low, so that people with smaller budgets from less wealthy countries can also play the game.

What is more of a problem, however, are more modern systems that you try to implement in a game with WW2 mechanics.
The best example are the small maps, which make a lot of sense with 50mm cannons without a rangefinder and little sight zoom, but have no place in top tier

Graphically I can’t comment because I can’t even run max graphics. But some mechanics definitely feel outdated. Such as:

  • Crew training cost when purchasing a new vehicle. It’s already a grind.

  • Superprop repair costs. Why bother flying out iconic super props when they will bankrupt an average player?

  • Lack of unique Fire Control Systems on vehicles save for customising the visual sight.

  • Velocity of a whole cannon belt being determined by the first shell

We aren’t talking about Graphics.

1 Like

Extra points can also be earn by registering more hits, the other day I caught this player having his ass stick out of a building, so I start shooting it and caught the engine and it set on fire, so I repeatedly shoot it with machine gun and continue to hit its engine and tracks, two minutes later his vehicle is destroyed I think he went through both the fire extinguishers bro and I accumulated around 600sp from the hit counts and killing him, almost ran out of ammo though lol

Seriously.

Why does my f4u-2b costing 12k to spawn in sim?! Even the f86 sabre is cheaper there, while the f2h2 banshee costs 15k.

The repair costs legit dont make sense. It is like they hit a peak at tier 4 and 5 for high cost low sl reward and then it gets better.

Not a clue. I don’t believe for a second that there are a large majority of players in superprops just teamwiping everyone.

When some win, the others have to lose. How will the F4U make any money if killed by a Ta-152 for example?

That’s almost always been the case for whatever reason. Back before repair costs were reduced the most expensive tanks were all rank IV/V, with stuff like the Lorraine 40t being 22k, and the Char25t being 15k to repair. It is extremely apparent in sim, since repair costs jump from 5-8k to 10k+ very quickly.

Give this a read. It has some outdated elements (it does not have severe damage for aircraft), but seems to be mostly in line with my experiences.

Kinda the opposite in my opinion.

War Thunder or Gaijin specifically are deconstructing the History and roots of the Game by having removed or plan to remove unique vehicles for dubious reasons like historical accuracy while adding more and more of the same bland modern vehicles, redesigning the maps into high octane Call of Duty brawling lobbies, making entire vehicle types and gameplay approaches unviable, amomg many more examples.

Since approx. 2019 with the culling of three certain German Tanks, the developers forced the Game to “grow up” too quickly, leading to completely ridicolous Era mixing and messed up Balance, one death leaving due to the Advertisement of the Modern ERA coupled with the aforementioned COD brawling maps and the inflation of Store bundle prices to up to 75 bucks, for example.

It is not War Thunder that is showing its age, but Gaijin, the Devs and workers behind it.

And I am not refering to the good Kind of age that could attain wisdom and competence, perhaps also compassion. But the bureaucratic Type, where they are stuck in outdated and no longer acceptable ways, because in the administrative branch we have the saying: “This is how we’ve always done it, so we will keep it this way.”

1 Like

Whilst i agree to most of your views the answer to your question is imho obvious.

  • The wording “superprops” is attached to very late or postwar aircraft which mostly never saw combat or scored an air kill. And the “super” refers mainly to engine performance based on 115/130/150 octane fuel - and not to superior design.

  • Technically seen we have just 3 non-US WW 2 superprops: the Mk 22 Spitfire, the Ta 152 H and the Fiat G 56, whilst just the first 2 saw combat and scored kills. The rather poor USSR late war and post war designs excel in Air RB mostly due to too low BRs and insane mid to low alt performance like the post war Yak-3U.

  • The rest of the so called superprops were US made and scored not a single kill in WW 2. Even the BR 5.0 P-51 D-30 scored not a single kill.

  • So the comparably high repair cost have to be seen as balancing factor - a lot of experienced players rack up kills like there is no tomorrow, but masses of untrained players drag their BRs artificially lower than it should be. The plane performs too good to see a further lowering of the BR, so gaijin tries to increase the repair cost to create a kind of deterrence for newer players.

  • Thx to the player revolt in May 2023 we saw a general reduction of repair cost, but you might remember the days when you needed 3 kills to cover your own repair cost. Planes like the G 56 or the Ta 152 C had repair cost of ~ 50.000 SL and the B-28 had 74.000 SL repair cost at BR 6.3

Have a good one!

PS: You see the proof of my hypothesis if you check out Italian WW 2 props - they have all one thing in common: Too high BRs with rather poor plane performance and comparably high repair cost compared to adversaries at the same BR - but their pilots are able to close the performance gap with skill.

Have a good one!

1 Like

Big issue there is in sim, where your maximum earnings are capped. In ARB, you get get 3-4 kills for 33k SL/match - way outscaling your repair costs (especially once you realize that if you get critted/ignited/severe damaged irrecoverably - J-ing out gives you max repair cost while waiting until you hit the ground only gives you like 6-7k - less than you get for 1 kill or an assist if you die early. One of many systems rewarding the inverse of expected/realistic behaviour…) However, in air sim you stop receiving rewards after 600 score which caps at ~18000 SL if you survive the full 15 minutes and return to base to repair.

This leads to the vicious cycle of spawn in at 12k spawn cost in the F4U-4B, get 2 kills and then run away and afk on your airfield for 15 minutes. Taking any risk after those 2 kills means you lose money, as you lose the ~20% landing reward and whatever proportion was left in the 15 minutes if you die. This can lead to anti-team gameplay, as in my P-51 cannon mustang I am not punished for going to help a friendly who calls for help even with a maxed score - spawn cost is 3K, max pay is like 9k or so, thus surviving just 7 minutes will offset the costs while in the -4B I will have to consider the fact that I’ll likely go negative into SL if I risk myself for the friendly.

It’s the capped PvP rewards that cause a lot of issues for rank 4/rank 5 planes because even if planes are balanced with repair costs, such only works if you can actually make the plane work for you.

The score cap is that low? That’s incredibly stupid, no wonder my earnings were trash despite getting 6 kills and 9 ai kills in 50 minutes. I spawned 4 times, and I only gained 800sl when the match ended.

I’ve just been ignoring the system since I already have plenty of SL, and I just want to play the game without trying to optimize for rewards.

I see 600/800 thrown around usually.
Useful Action cycles:
image
Landings:
image

Max reward possible for P-51H: 1210/min. For 15 mins, that comes out at 18150.

At 1:55:19, I survived full 15 minutes with 1025 score and got 13222 SL, this is in ballpark of ~73% of the 18150 calculated. Then I landed and got 3.3K SL, which is ~18% of the 18150. Both are actually a bit below 80% and 20%. This also means that apparently ~9% of the reward is missing.

At 1:10, I survived full 15 minutes with 454 score and got 11477. This is 63%, landing represents 2869/18150 = 16%.

It seems a bit more complicated than a flat-out “score caps at 600”, but it seems to effectively cap there.

According to the original thread, Rewards for useful actions in the aviation SB mode - Simulator Battle Discussion - War Thunder - Official Forum

There is less of a “maximum score” and more the fact that it seems they use activity% for calculating useful action reward. Based on data in this post (Report on how scores, SL, and RP rewards are calculated), activity% is not a linear function and rather seems to have a maximum.

"ARB activity as function of score and time

image

On further research (Community Bug Reporting System), it appears that the 600 score consensus I’ve seen posted before is effectively a soft cap, 800 is also a soft cap. However, due to the non-linear way activity is calculated you will never exceed 92% activity no matter what score you earn.

ASB activity as a function of score against 15 minute survival

image

This also explains where the 9% of my reward went. Naturally, the bug reporting manager closed it as “not-a-bug”, so being unable to get 100% of your reward looks intended.

The max SL pay-out, it turns out, is even less than the theoretical maximum from the stat cards!

Some planes' reward% at 2k, 1k, 800 and 600 scores

image
image

This also explains why the belief that 600 is the max score has been something I’ve read stated and believed as truth. You receive 86% of the reward at 600 score, getting 800 gives you 90% and 1000 gives you 2%.

Quoting from the guy who did the researches:

200 points = 54% reward
400 points = 75% reward
600 points = 86% reward
800 points = 90% reward
1050+ points = 92% reward

Thus “2 kills and you effectively cap your reward” is true for practical purposes.

1 Like

I feel that it 100% does hold up and is not past it’s date.
It just needs more maps and more versatile ones that cater to the br’s. I feel this is the number 1 issue right now.
Air and Ground and even naval.

1 Like

With dev’s that don’t play their own game, or listen to the players, ya this game is showing it’s age, the Afterburner effects look the exact same as they did when it first came to the game.

They add Self-Propelled Artillery into the game yet refuse to allow us to use it as it was intended, the physics is super sub-par, the armor and shell physics is questionable, and quite Biased towards the Comrads.

Radars don’t work correctly, missiles don’t work correctly, Chaff don’t work correctly(at all)

Tank shells Can fly through Solid Terrain, and kill you because of how someone sets their graphics settings.(They can make it so they can see through the top half of a hill with certain graphics settings meant for lower end systems)

Tank shells will also kill you if they Fly way over you on your screen, but the hostile see’s the shell hit you, died many times this way.

Aircraft flight models are wonky.

WW2 tanks are fighting Cold-war tanks with thermals.
WW2 jets are fighting Cold-war jets with missiles.
because Gaijin’s Failed and poorly though out “balancing model” of using AI and a spread sheet of words, says an F-86-F2 should be fighting a mig-21smt.

This only happens because they don’t play their own game to see what should be lowerd and what should be raised.

Gaijin said Tank Camo nets couldn’t be added, yet they show up on 75usd copy paste tanks.

Gaijin keeps lowering SL and RP gains in an attempt to force people into buying Premium.

The player count keeps falling, and only rises when a new update comes out, because the game gets boring and tedious, because progress is so slow, it should not take 1-3 years to get your first jet as a casual player.

The only Time Gaijin “listens” to the players is when the get bad reviews en mass, then get “supprised pikachu face” when they see their rating tank and then proceed to blame the players, we Have not forgotten the “F2P article”
and lastly the Events are Trash - Mid at best. before the new Garbage event system was added, we got Trash crafting events which were limited by gaijin so we could only get 1 top reward from them, without spending 100usd minimum. and the Mid events were super grindy.

Their solution? Only have the Grindy Events with copy paste rewards and have them be 45k points per star for a rank 3 and 75k for rank 5-9. Because that’s what we wanted? I remember us asking for better events with unique rewards, not the same if not worse events with copy paste planes and tanks.

The Ground battles Maps are garbage, they take out good sniping positions, and leave the positions that allow spawn killing, and then claim spawn killing isn’t an issue, when 9/10 maps you get allow your team or the hostile team to vaporize the other within 5min of the match starting.

Gaijin: “Yup Spawn killing isn’t an issue”
That’s some hardcore denial on the snail’s part.

Oo let’s not forget, the helicopters can fire atgms from 24km away, while Spaa can do nothing about it, because gaijin lowered the effective range of their AA missiles. it’s even worse if you are using a Sam and cant lock them all together, because “SPAA too op” in gaijins eyes


Gaijin could actually listen for a change.

The devs could play their game and fix the balancing and compression issues by making a 20.0 BR and remove the .3, .7, ect br's and make it actually fun to play, anything but low - mid br.

Gaijin could fix the ground maps so 1 team won't be spawn camped 3min into the match when the enemy team reaches the hill in the center of the map.

They could update the graphics and physics to "modern" standards

Fix DLSS so it actually works, and doesn't make everything blurry.

Better Events Cmon Gaijin, we both know you can do better, it's almost like you don't care about your own game, and only care about the profits. I can tell you, if you make a product people actually enjoy and not see it as a soulless cash grab you will make far more than you have over the years.

I think that's it.
3 Likes

This is not true at all, and you got your information from a YT video. The 600 is in regards to mission score which is not true at all. During the f-14 event you would see everyone rocketing airbases. In the f-111 you could get a mission score between 700 and 1200 per run on the base. with the F-4 you could get a around the 700 to 800 and occasionally 1000 destroying a module of the airfield.

if you look at the strikemaster the cap of SL is 3900 SL per min so that is a cap of 58,500 per 15 min. which ive hit a few times. You can break that limit with SL boosters. Ive been able to get 200k in one 15 min run.

If you have premium time, the repair costs are covered as you will never loose money. Going back to the air event, everyone grinding that out had premium time. after 15 deaths 0 repair cost no SL lost. No gain ether but the point was to grind out the event, which you had the trade coupon by star 3 and less than two hours to complete the star task

See linked post, including links to the bug report/research/sheet.

Tl:dr

200 points = 54% reward
400 points = 75% reward
600 points = 86% reward
800 points = 90% reward
1050+ points = 92% reward

Example:

image
image

My own case:

image

Over twice the score (1025 vs 454), only 1700 more SL (13.2k vs 11.5k). This is without landing, of course but the ratios should speak all the same.