The Issue of Decompression
As a person who played high tier Air RB very frequently before Seek and Destroy, but only occasionally now, I would like to give my 2 cents.
Air RB does need major changes, and I hope that Gaijin realizes this need. However, many of the changes suggested in this post would be more damaging than no change at all. I have many points of contention with the topic post, but in this post I will address the topic of decompression.
This topic is a longstanding point of misjudgement by most of the community. While BR Decompression is needed, most players vastly overestimate the amount of decompression which would be best for War Thunder and it’s players. This is because of the widespread, mistaken belief that more BR decompression is always better.
This is not true due to a variety of reasons. Firstly, the most prominent issue, queue times, is not vague or distant, but an overarching danger for WT. Currently, queue times are tolerable expressly because Gaijin keeps BRs reasonably compressed. I believe that a max BR of 16.0, as is currently the majority in the poll, would not only be illogical, but would be damaging to the future of War Thunder.
But why not decompress dramatically?
BR Systems Logic
No other game has so many matchmaking brackets as War Thunder. War Thunder matches are divided by multiple modes, 4 servers, and tens of BRs for each mode (in Air RB, this is 40 BRs).
This multiplies queue times. The majority of players play the most popular modes, on popular servers (NA), and at the most popular BRs. Therefore, the prevalence of long queue times is understated in community discourse, whether on WT forums or other social media.
The truth is, even in Air RB, there are sometimes queue times of multiple minutes; these occur on less popular servers, at less popular BRs, and at less popular hours of the day. 3-5 minute queue times are not unheard of. Additionally, queue times as a function of players do not increase linearly, they increase EXPONENTIALLY. This is because more and more players will leave the queue the longer it is. Let me remind you that the amount of WT players has been stable, but not growing quickly, over the past year. More BR brackets means spreading players more thin.
Compression is not completely bad, just as decompression is not always good. Compressed BRs allow War Thunder matches to be more diverse. Fighting superior enemies at times and winning gives a higher sense of accomplishment. As any WT veteran would know, much of the potential for balance given by the current BR ceiling is actually wasted from Gaijin’s poor balancing within the BRs, not the compression itself!
Taking all this into account, the specific max BR for decompression should be reasonable. At this current time, 15.0 would be optimal.