one off prototypes or modifications of other vehicles and paper vehicles are interesting though, yes it breaks peoples “Immersion” but i honestly dont give a fuck its just more vehicles for me to enjoy playing with.
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Existing paper vehicles should be allowed to stay (and the german paper tanks should definitely be obtainable again).
However, when it comes to adding new ones there are several factors that should be considered.
I am all for prototypes and proposed/planned variants, but vehicles that weren’t even partially built should not be added unless absolutely necessary.
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I just want a fun game. If that means bringing in vehicles that weren’t able to hit the factory line, so be it.
I’d rather use an E-75 at 7.0 over a HEAT-FS slinger or LRF vehicle any day.
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That’s the “Fun” you could have in WoT?
WoT isn’t fun tho
That’s exactly the point.
Edit: “My point”.
WoT not being fun isn’t due to paper vehicles tho, the gameplay itself sucks ass
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That’s for sure as i see it too, but those paper Designs are adding a lot. For me at least.
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That’s fair, Wargaming is overdoing it a tad bit, to put it politely
I don’t want to play a game where i need to buy special ammo jus to be able to kill stuff
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Personally??? i prefer 1 million times better a similar date prototype than another stupid postwar time traveler.
I already played World of Tanks for 8 years. I came to WarThunder for a difference in gameplay. Your argument has nothing behind it. It’s just you trying to shame me for an opinion I’ve presented.
Paper vehicles are eventually going to be needed. There’s no way around it. There are only so many production and prototype tanks developed, especially for minor nations. We already have to deal with awkward holes that are currently being patched by slapping in a minor subtree and filling it with copy paste. Is that really preferable to paper vehicles?
This doesn’t have to descend into WoT style complete fictional lunacy. We can be selective of which paper tanks we chose to use, where we put them, and how we implement them. No need to go adding a paper vehicle if there are real vehicles that fill that niche. No need to add vehicles that we don’t know enough about to make a faithful representation.
Take the Italian P.43. We know enough about it to make a faithful representation of it. It fills a niche Italy badly needs (Tanks with actual armor), and one they have no other alternatives other than German big cat copy paste. And it’s a historically relevant design. This is a great example of a paper vehicle that would fit the game perferctly.
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No I don’t try to insult or shame you in any way.
Additionally i’ve played it for many years too.
But WoT has gone wild with their “tank designs”.
And i even didn’t meant their fictional stuff, i’m talking about additions like their Italien /Czech autoloader lines a.s.o.
And you will see it in WT too, if Gaijin starts to add tanks and Aircrafts without clear and sufficient informations about them.
The tanks I have listed are NOT fictional. They are real concepts that never saw the light of day.
Wargaming did not come up with their designs. Yes, Wargaming makes a lot of stupid stuff, but calling the group of tanks I listed before fabrications is extremely dishonest.
And would also be much more interesting to play with, or against, than yet another Sherman. I don’t understand how people are fine with the obvious downside that tech trees look more and more similar with every passing update…
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Agreed. Copy paste is worse for overall gameplay than a sane approach to paper vehicles. It dilutes gameplay variety for both the players who have to play the same tank 3-4 times across different nations, and for the players who fight in BR brackets where certain vehicles are a mainstay of several nation’s lineups. Seeing just how many more Pattons I’d have to play to ever see a Merkava has kept me far away from the Israeli tree.
Copy paste should be used as a last resort, if there are no production, prototype or even paper designs that can fill a badly needed niche.
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It’s entirely anecdotal as it only happened once, but it’s still very indicative. A few months back there was this match on Kuban where my team was Germany, Sweden and China were paired against the USSR and others. This led to the paradoxycal situation where we deployed many more T-34s than the Soviet team chose to spawn in… :D
I’m not making this into a historicity argument, I know WT is not about that. I’m making it a question of gameplay variety. If you abstract away from WT and think of any competitive team-based game with a multitude of units, it’s always worse for flavour when the factions involved are similar or even identical.
I’m sure people are thrilled at the idea of grinding an M109 five different times.
I barely ever play the German Patton. If I wanted to play Pattons I’d go over to the US tree. The idea that it’s meant to be a replacement of the “Gaijin” Panther II is seriously laughable to me from a pure gameplay perspective.
The “original sin” is the decision to implement so many separate tech trees. Gaijin themselves clearly acknowledge this was unwise, else we wouldn’t be seeing the implementation of subtrees like Hungary to Italy. War Thunder has outgrown its original nation-based structure. There simply aren’t enough AFVs in the world to fully support ten (or more!) almost entirely unique tech trees. So you have a choice: you can use copypaste and time-travelling vehicles, or you can turn to plausible blueprints and grounded what-if exercises.
Gaijin won’t choose the latter, because they want to be positioned as far as possible from WoT (even though Wargaming’s fake designs are, for the most part, outrageous, not grounded what-ifs at all). And marketing-wise, it works. Just look at this comment:
The complete mental short-circuit of derailing a discussion on War Thunder tech trees by bringing in WoT. It’s understandable why Gaijin uses this marketing spiel, because it’s clearly effective in fanning player elitism.
It’s also redundant though. What sets WT apart from WoT is not the criterion for vehicle additions. It’s the complexity of the damage model, the more immersive visual and sound elements, the lineup system with all the associated tactical complexity, the much more granular BR system.
You could erase every tank in WoT, and copypaste every single tank currently in War Thunder into WoT, and the games would still be massively different, appealing to massively different audiences. That’s so completely obvious that I’m shocked it even needs stating.
Besides, I think most people here genuinely don’t realise how “fake” the vehicles we already have in the game actually are. For example, players think that “paper vehicles not being bound to the compromises that always arise during R&D and field testing” is a concern.
Yet they have no issue with Sturmtiger reload being 40s aced (physically impossible), T-34 loaders loading the turret normally even when the turret is rotated (even though the early versions have no turret baskets), Tiger IIs can turn the turret at max speed even while going at top speed (physically impossible), or Jagdtigers serenely hitting 42km/h without the transmission exploding.
These vehicles are already balanced with fiction, because Gaijin correctly puts gameplay first and realism second. Paper vehicles would be the same. You avoid making them OP or the opposite, the same way you do with the “real” (lol) vehicles.
So long as it feels and looks good and immersive, and it has strong ties to reality, then blueprint or real makes literally zero difference in WT’s context.
There is one solution to this “gap” problem that does not require the use of blueprint vehicles. It’s to uncouple “tech trees” from “nations”, so you can have as many nations in game as you want, but they’re foldered inside a different organising principle based on criteria you determine. Then, it’s not an issue if you add - say - the Hungarian Tiger, because it will be fighting alongside regular Tigers, and the only “issue” with duplication becomes with genuinely captured vehicles.
I think that solution would have many benefits and I’ve talked about it multiple times, but I won’t rehash it here as this comment is already monstrous. Suffice to say that it’s not likely to ever happen, and so we’re back to the original dilemma. Copypaste, or blueprint.
Well, my answer to that dilemma is quite simple. Give me the choice between spawning a German Patton and a Panther II, and I’ll pick the Panther II, every time. Make of that what you will.
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Further on this, WoT has taken the “paper vehicles” concept far beyond what it should have been, to straight up fictional vehicles. Vehicles that weren’t even dreamed about before Wargaming had a tech tree to fill out. It leads to massive issues for anyone with even a passing interest in the historical basis of these vehicles. Especially when the standout vehicles aren’t just fictional, they’re also impossible as depicted.
This leads to people arguing that including paper tanks is a one way ticket to a similar level of inventive lunacy. A slipperly slope fallacy, but one with some amount of merit. Gaijin has a history of stating they’ll never do something, making an exception, and then immediately overdoing the thing they said they’d never do, often to the detriment of gameplay. Remember when they promised they’d never release top tier premiums? And how the flood of low level players in F4Ss and MiG 23 MLs has affected top tier gameplay since? It’s a similar story with the current spam of ~10.0 wheeled light tanks with 1/2 spawns in GRB.
They don’t have a great track record with the couple of paper vehicles they’ve implemented. The Kronstadt is a mix-match of different designs coupled with armor that wasn’t possible to produce at the time. There was a far more grounded historical design they could have gone with, but instead insisted on an earlier design that’s far less plausible. Doesn’t bode well for other additions if they keep the same “We’re going to cram it in where we want it, historical accuracy be damned” mindset.
I digress. Ultimately, paper vehicles are a bridge that will need to be crossed at some point, and doing it sooner rather than later, with a sane approach in mind, is a far better alternative to the constant stream of copy paste. So long as we can hold Gaijin accountable for how they go about it,
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I think they don’t have a great track record with many of the non-papers too… I look at the 2S38 for example and wonder what exactly would change if the policy was loosened. I expect them to be as inconsistent with paper vehicles as they have been with real ones. Sometimes you’ll get great products, sometimes you’ll get gaijin’d.
It’s worth remembering that no company is a single entity. There are probably several competing incentives and push-and-pull within Gaijin when it comes to this stuff. So to a degree the mess is inevitable. I just don’t see that as good enough reason to exclude paper vehicles because, on the same criteria, we would have to exclude real vehicles too. :D
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