Popular Consultation: Knowing the opinion of the community (Part 2)

Game Discussion General Discussion
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1

Are you happy with the latest major updates?

I’ll be honest here, the latest update tastes like meeeehh…

Of the following options, which would you like to see in the next update? Choose up to four options that interest you most. The goal is to understand community demand in order to try to improve Gaijin’s offering. Lately, I’ve seen too many people disappointed with the content added with each update.

  • New maps, new map rotations.
  • Modern tank
  • WWII tank
  • Cold War tank
  • Quality of life improvements (interface, customization, mechanics, etc)
  • New nation
  • New subtree
  • Modern aircraft
  • WWII aircraft
  • Cold War aircraft
  • Modern ship
  • WWII ship
  • Cold War ship
  • Helicopter
  • New game mode (please specify in the comments)
  • New vehicles to complete weak lineups
0 voters
2

I chose “New game mode”, but by it I mean:

  1. Please update Air Sim EC. Fix the objectives like the mach 1.4 cl-13 sabres for 40s jets to intercept. Fix the A.I CAP for airfields crashing into the runway and making it vibrate (video demonstrating the vibes), fix the convoy SPAA sniping ground-attack configured aircraft from 3-4km out making it an impossible objective to complete at WW2 brackets. Fix the rendering of enemy aircraft (both the jarring LoD switch between black blob into camoflagued aircraft and dots disappearing when you turn off radar and reappearing afterwards). Honestly, the list of bugs drags on too long
  2. Please make Navy EC permanent. Base navy game mode is unplayable, but I’m not always in the mood for navy EC on the weekend (I may rather fly my planes in air EC)
  3. Please make ground simulator battles playable as an exclusive gamemode for ground progression. As it is presently, the line-up system prevents using a lineup more than once per week, maybe twice at some treshold BRs. If you wanted to solely play GSB without any GRB or GAB, you’d take weeks to get out of just rank 1 due to only being able to play once per week and since it’s often on a weekday…
    This can be achieved by giving it a combination of Air sim’s rotating brackets and a “No lend-lease/captured vehicle as opfor” filter that the current lineups try (and fail horribly - hi italian hellcats and shermans on axis side!) and fail to provide.

By quality of life I mean:

  1. Fix air sim EC death costs, either reducing them outright or making them scale with time alive. Paying ~15-17K SL just to spawn in a Rank V Jet is absurd - you need to be alive for 30 minutes to break even in some jets, or make a profit greater than 1-2K SL.
  2. Alternatively, fix sim EC death costs by creating an “Insurance” wallet where you are rewarded “SL-equivalent” for your individual actions outside the UA system. You receive the same “SL-equivalent” as you would in Air RB, but this amount will not get paid out. Instead, it simply is subtracted by your next spawn cost - ergo, killing 2 mig-15s in your F86 reduces your spawn cost to only ~5000 SL next time you die rather than the 13.6K. This creates incentive to go above and beyond by removing punishment for NOT afking above your runway as currently after obtaining ~600 score, you’ve received 86% of your maximum possible reward and only risk for no gain (and 92% is where it caps out rather than 100% so you’re only missing out on 6% more - which 400 more points achieve)
  3. Update WW2 propeller aircraft cockpits to the standards of Spitfire MkVc or F4U-4, especially premium planes (including those that are TT with a premium copy)
  4. Fix broken MFDs, HUDs and gunsights
  5. Give us “Silver Lion Talisman” to let us fly our favourite aircraft and make reasonable silver lions - basically doubling SL gain. Currently, my choice is
    1. Fly weird prototype plane I don’t care about if I want premium vehicle bonus (ala xp-50)
    2. Fly the plane I want, except it’s on the enemy side (American Bf109F4, american A6M2, French Yak-3, Japanese F4U). (Allied copy-paste kinda works for some aircraft between US/Britain, thus my Mustang Mk Ia - whether I fly mustangs as Britain or america, I’m always on blue side. However, the british Corsair is one with the worse rear visibility (F4U-1, and I’d prefer F4U-4)
    3. Fly the plane I want, except without premium bonuses (F2H-2, F9F have no premium equivalents at all for instance - not even a slightly different model like corsairs at least have).
    4. Buy discontinued stuff from marketplace
  6. Make a sanity pass over WW2 aircraft flight models. Some planes feel weirdly on rails and don’t respond to stalls as one would expect or as historical accounts describe - either too twitchy or immune to AoA stalls. It’s really weird - some planes behave in joyful ways reproducing all sorts of flight dynamics and interactions as one would expect and make me wonder how anyone could call this anything but a sim and others make me understand why people call it arcadey.

On new maps,

  1. I want an “Island hopping” inspired Sim EC map whose objectives are actually balanced (unlike Denmark which favours bluefor on some airfield configurations), functional (Dover bombers just fly in circles and there’s no air superiority objectives) and have prevalent aircraft carrier operations without seriously stifling army aircraft.
  2. I want more ground RB/SB maps akin to “Sands of Sinai”, “Second Battle of El Alamaein”, “Maginot Line”.
7 Likes
3

Give me different air battles to try. I want guns only, IR only. Smaller matches less players flinging Fox 3.

3 Likes
4
  • New modes: Air RB EC, separate mode for Coastal fleet (maybe hardmode PVE/“dungeon-like” cooperative harbour assault);
  • Apart from that I would simply love lower tiers oriented update, especially in terms of aircraft (props and subsonic jets), I mean unique models and modifications, not just a copypaste;
  • Another improvement I want is the addition of “connection” between full copypaste vehicles (same model, same br, same researchable modifications), like you grind Italian M4A4 and French, as well as Chinese M4A4 get researched at the same time.
5

If you’ve ever played on the dev server you’ll know that 6v6 or even 3v3 air is really fun.

1 Like
6

One of the reasons I don’t play fox3 is the ridiculous missile spam.

1 Like
7

Definitely not happy with this update, or any of the recent updates really.

The core gamemodes are in dire need of reworks and additional depth.
Most maps need to be overhauled and new maps should be created with gameplay in mind first.
High to top tier ARB needs maps with more complex terrain and natural cover.
Trees on most of the air maps still need to be adjusted to no longer be unrealistically tall.
Having some more arcade-y maps with complex terrain would be a real treat. Following the terrain can be a lot of fun and doing CQC is a lot more thrilling when there are chasms, mountains and large rock formations to maneuver around.

There is also a severe lack of ocean-side maps in high/top tier ARB and the few ones we have do not feature any ships. Even without more AShMs being introduced, carriers and AI ships should appear on more maps and while the ocean-side maps would obviously lack complex terrain, they do allow people to do sea skimming.

High tier ground maps need to be designed with two important factors in mind. First, they should have a minimum size and a good amount of terrain around the spawns and second, they shouldn’t limit the ability to monitor the skies too much (no more maps like Sweden and Advance to Rhine).
Ideally ground maps also shouldn’t be completely surrounded by hills and mountains. Valley maps tend to offer way too much cover for CAS.

ARB EC should definitely make a return.

There should be more map objectives and they should have a bigger impact. Bombers and Strike aircraft should be able to make meaningful contributions to their teams efforts towards victory.
Enable airfield destruction at all BRs, denying the enemy their ability to refuel and rearm would be the ultimate goal for bombers and attackers.
Get rid of base respawns, add additional hidden base spawns around the maps, increase the healthpool of the four main bases and reintroduce the base AAs. The ticket drain caused by the destruction of a main base should be increased accordingly.
There should be enough AI and bombing targets on every map to completely drain the tickets, but the ticket values of the different targets should be redistributed to properly reflect the effort required to destroy each target.

Further it would be nice to see Heli PvE to get more polished with better BR progression.

They should work on a subtree rework.

They absolutely need to work on BR decompression and they should reconsider the way they balance the BRs of bomber and bomber-like attacker aircraft. The BRs of vehicles should never be based on average income.
The BRs of bombers and bomber-like attackers should almost entirely depend on their armament and characteristics. Average player performance should only matter if the plane massively over- or underperforms.
If a bomber or attacker just earns too much SL/RP on average per match the reward multiplier for that bomber or attacker should be adjusted, not the BR.

Finally, AI gunners could use a rework. The AA gunners on ships definitely need to be rebalanced to be less oppressive.
The gunners on planes on the other hand deserve some buffs. Obviously they shouldn’t be buffed to the point that would turn them into snipers, but they should get a little bit more range and there should be a way to pre-aim them and to designate a target for them.

2 Likes
8

I see a lot of suggestions that require a new AI for War Thunder as replies.

1 Like
9

Zero PVP game modes need overhauled, there’s a reason these game modes are still in use in the most modern of games.

Outside that, refer to my above post.

10

I’m actually hoping they do a bit of tweaking on it. From the idea of just having the old commander take to the field, and for people to protect them, to having them even be as a convoy that push through the outer edges of the battlefield, it could be good.

I’d want to see Advance to the Rhines AI battle turn up again in the field to the side… That was a good use for CAS.

1 Like
11

I’m not saying the game modes need to be fundamentally changed, their mechanics need to be adjusted and expanded though.

I am aware that at their core the PvP game modes will always remain deathmatches with optional objectives, but that doesn’t mean those additional objectives have to remain as meaningless as they currently are.

In regular ground battles this isn’t as much of an issue, as the control points sufficiently drain tickets. However in the base capture/defense mode (the one with the two control points and the 60 kill limit) the bases don’t feel like they matter nearly enough.
Enemy decapped your point? Who cares, not having control over it just means you can’t restock, but a lot of vehicles don’t need to get to the point to restock anyways, thanks to the way they made ammo boxes work. Unless an enemy is getting close to capturing it (which usually only happens when the defending team is down to a handful of players anyways) you don’t have to worry about it at all. Capping and recapping the point takes too long and the reward for recapping is so miniscule that nobody goes out of their way to do so unless they are in dire need of a restock.
Now, if losing control of the base meant that each kill scored by the enemy rewarded twice as many points or if the mode still used tickets like it used to and the usual point advantage ticket drain mechanic applied the bases would actually matter.
If that was too extreme, at least increase the rewards for capping and recapping and reduce the time it takes to do so a bit. Maybe change the reward distribution to a constant stream of RP/SL while capping instead of only rewarding points for full captures.

For air battles this is a much bigger issue though. The only incentive for destroying AI targets and bases are the RP/SL rewards. Base destruction causes next to no ticket drain and a lot of the times where only a couple of players are left you either cannot destroy enough AI targets to sufficiently drain tickets or there flat out aren’t enough targets to begin with because targets destroyed by other AI don’t cause ticket drain anymore. The larger EC maps are affected by this especially, as the AI ground targets tend to be way too aggressive for the little impact they have on the outcome of the match and the AI planes are just RP pinatas, as they can be completely ignored without any repercussions for letting the bombers get to their targets or for letting the surveillance planes do their laps.
In low tier this isn’t really an issue because a lot of the maps let you destroy the enemies airfield, but in high tier this mechanic isn’t present.
Maps that used to have actual objectives also don’t really work anymore, because even if the match drags on long enough for those objectives to come into play, their impact is basically non-existent.

As for naval, at least in high tier there is no real way to create meaningful objectives, as it really is just glorified realtime Version of the battleships boardgame.
Low tier naval is mostly fine, as the 3 and 1 control point maps work well enough.

12

Combined arms EC could be very interesting with such mechanics, but I don’t think there is any chance of us ever seeing such a thing

13

There have been over a dozen battles where I was in an aircraft that couldn’t dogfight [and another dozen where I was in a dogfight aircraft] where I ended the match in a victory because of AI target destruction.
The most notable was when I was in F-104S alone, which meant the only way I could win was via tickets.

14

new option: jeeps

3 Likes
15

Sure, that can still happen, I’ve finished matches by ground pounding as well, but again, now that AI on AI frags don’t cause ticket drain anymore and the passive ticket drain is gone it is very much possible that you end up without enough targets to destroy (or with enough targets, but no way to destroy them cough heavy pillboxes and the near indestructible medium tanks cough)

I’ve seen this happen a lot on maps like Spain, as that map has fewer targets to start with and a lot of them cannot be destroyed by a lot of the lighter planes. Granted, this could be fixed by either adding more soft targets, but ideally all maps, not just the ones like Spain, should have additional objectives that are specifically tailored towards bombers and bomber-like attackers.

16

While more votes are still needed, the provisional results are clear: people want fewer vehicles in exchange for an overall improvement in the game. They should only add vehicles to fill out the lineups, at least as a priority… For example, if we request a SPAA for Israel, don’t give us a premium aircraft. Remember when we players requested light vehicles for the UK? and they gave us even more Challengers? There are hundreds of examples of this. Add necessary vehicles, not filler!
New maps, for God’s sake! The rotation is horrible and the variety is limited. What about the game modes? The customization options? New skins or new decals? It’s so hard to add Chinese decals, for example…
The game gets terrible after a while. We want to play WT, but it’s like WT hates us and wants us to play no more than a couple of games a day.
I read hundreds of disappointments on the forums every day about how the Gaijin development team is handling major updates.

The clearest example of how Gaijin doesn’t listen to his community is naval: RIP (again)

Spoiler

Screenshot_20250320-163756-843
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We want quality improvements for the game, for example…

2 Likes
17

Sad, I cannot remember the last time a new prop plane was introduced in the game
image

3 Likes
18

I can’t remember the last time I was excited to receive a new update. This needs a breath of fresh air…

2 Likes
19

Chose QoL improvements and new mode.

For the new mode (that will never happen):

A 4v4 Air Realistic Battle mode featuring the following:

  1. A best-of-three round system with each round lasting a total of six minutes. If the match ends before one team can elimate the other, the round is given to whichever side has the most players alive but the surviving opponents do not take any damage or repair costs.
  2. Each player can take in a max of six missiles from their respective loadout per round. I.e. an F-14B takes two Aim-54s, two Aim-7s, and two Aim-9Hs. A Mig-29 can take two R-27ERs and four R-73s. Before the round kicks off, you are able to see what each team is bringing in plane wise, but not their loadout.
  3. Upon spawn, each team is broken up into flights of two at different but close by 25,000 ft air spawns on their respective side of the map. Large maps for supersonic jets, small to medium maps for props and subsonic jets.
  4. There are no missile indicators. You must rely on RWRs and/or game knowledge of what your enemy can/could carry. You can only see an enemy marker when you are within 6-10 miles of the enemy.
  5. The rewards are the standard reward per elimation of whatever plane down plus 2500 RP/10,000 SL per player for each win. If your team wins both rounds back to back (two of the three matches), you receive the “Ace” reward of an additional 5,000 RP and 20,000 SL for each player on the winning team.

These are rough details but the intent is for a moderately faster paced/small team tactical dogfighting mode.

20

All i want is decompression and things that arent fucking top tier.
Modern stuff is nice and all, but the snail can stop feeding me things with FOX-3 for an update or two

3 Likes