Premium vehicles should be sidegrades at best, not direct upgrades to Tech Tree vehicles

Game Discussion General Discussion
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I think premiums work best when they are slightly worse than a tech tree variant, but you get increased RP and SL for playing them as a trade-off.

Right now as things stand, I don’t really understand the purpose of grinding the F-14B if someone owns the premium F-14D.

Both are 13.0 in Air RB and have essentially the same flight performance, AIM-9Ms and AIM-7Ms. However, the F-14D also gets the much more capable AN/APG-71 radar/IRST suite and the AIM-54C+ instead of the F-14B’s AIM-54C.

So where is the tradeoff?

I’m completely fine with premium vehicles being good but putting a more capable version of an iconic aircraft behind a paywall while leaving the inferior version in the Tech Tree hurts the incentive to actually grind and progress through the game.

This is something I worry about long-term. If premium vehicles increasingly become direct upgrades over their Tech Tree counterparts, eventually the question becomes: why grind the vehicle at all when you can simply buy the better one?

I’d much rather see an equivalent F-14D/F-14D(R) available in the Tech Tree, or otherwise give the F-14B a meaningful niche relative to the premium.

6 Likes
2

Few hours after this, Gaijin announced that they are adding a tech tree variant for the F-14D.

This is why I love this game!!!

Thank you 🐌 ❤️

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I feel like extremely small upgrades (say +3km/h max speed in a jet or slightly better AA for a Bluewater ship) are also fine but preferably I would rather premiums be either side grades, identical or worse (preferably identical since that allows more unique stuff to either be squadron or TT).