Responding to issues regarding dev server reports & an update on spall lining armor from the developers

Official News, Development Blogs and Updates
206

I just don’t understand how u can ask people to provide exact numbers as one of ur mods in support ask

If you never had sources with numbers to begin with, for an issue that depends on numbers (e.g. armor thickness, not something like “thermals existing or not”), how did you even decide that the game is wrong in the first place? Why did you even submit a ticket? What are you even asking them to do, then?

Pick one:

  • You know there’s an inaccuracy in the tanks in game, and by how much, in a way that would be actionable? Great, then you must have gotten that from reliable sources, for YOU to have known it to be true in the first place. So just… share those sources.

  • You don’t know if there’s an inaccuracy in the tanks in the game, due to not having reliable sources? Then what are you even complaining about, exactly, and why? If you don’t know there to be an issue?

“I totally know XYZ is true, but can’t find sources for it” fundamentally doesn’t make sense. No, you never did know XYZ, then.

207

I waited 5 months for a response i gave all the information needed and still get not a bug they didn’t even try to consider it.

https://community.gaijin.net/issues/p/warthunder/i/rKy9tyRE481C

208

You got an answer from the devs. They decided they didn’t want to do that and intentionally chose the filling in game instead. So it’s objectively not a bug, since bugs are unintentional things.

COULD they give you a long detailed explanation of exactly why they think it’s better for the game and its balance or whatever to do it this way? Probably. SHOULD developers have to explain every single thing they do all day in painstaking detail to players, instead of just doing it? I don’t think they should.

Having been a game developer myself and a mod and working in other parts of the industry in other ways, having to do that all day for everything would mean I’d have gotten out like 1/5th as many actual releases and updates and fixed 1/5th as many bugs. Because I’d be spending 80% of my time arguing with players and documenting stuff for non experts (who know no background info and have to have EVERYTHING contextual included from scratch to understand). Instead of, you know, coding and developing.

Would you want to buy a car if the car came with a detailed explanation from the engineers written for a lay audience, about every tiny decision they made, why they chose the size they did for the cupholders, everything? In exchange for the car costing twice as much money, because they spent half their time documenting all that for you? Probably not.

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209

I get that problem is every time i try to put it as a suggestion they just remove it, i reached the point when i have to write the whole thing multiple time so i end up making a post about it so i can C/P as suggestion.

I don’t want detailed explanation i want nothing from them i am just annoyed that no matter what this community offer they will find a way to tell you no, btw this report that i made is not something that can be easily ignored changing the filling to Trialen 105 means that every ww2 German bomb from the smallest to the biggest will receive a 60% buff to their explosion yield

210

I think the Stingers is a worse example:

https://community.gaijin.net/issues/p/warthunder/i/BZtiBBaH7uwL

Multiple sources stating 20-22G. 7 month wait. Solution, give it 13G. Because 13G = 20-22G Apparently. With no explanation at all why they are choosing to ignore the provided data, that cannot be interpretted any other way

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211

This is another example but thisbis from the old forums

Even when the suggestions and reports get forwarded the still ignore it.

And this is a report that i made about the same subject if anyone wants informations or evidence.

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212

changing the filling to Trialen 105 means that every ww2 German bomb from the smallest to the biggest will receive a 60% buff to their explosion yield

In that case, I can tell you right now why they rejected it, because this one has a way more obvious reason to reject it than most tickets. Let’s walk through what would happen if they accepted your proposal:

    1. Every single (German) plane in WWII with bombs would suddenly massively overperform
    1. Every single plane in WWII with bombs would thus have to go up by like 0.3-1.3 BRs or something to get it back down to 50% win rates / normal balanced performance again, depending on how much it relies on bombs.
    1. 95% of players that use these airplanes would be incredibly pissed off that all their lineups are now broken and they have to spend hundreds of thousands of SL rearranging and training new crews, re-learning new metas, blah blah.
    1. What did we gain in exchange? Almost literally nothing. You and like 3 other dudes have a slightly increased historical immersion satisfaction, and pretty much nobody else would even know the difference or have any idea what bombs were supposed to historically have in them.

Huge huge huge cost (300,000 players royally pissed off), near-zero benefit (4 guys happy) = terrible thing to implement.

213

The issue here is that feedback system with this game and it’s developer is…bad? Poorly designed? Poorly implemented? Pointless? Pick some combination of not good. How do we know? Easy.

Ten, nearly eleven, years of players pointing out how anti-consumer/anti-player the in-game economy was and that ONLY changed after a review bombing. We can safely use a five year window for this sake of this argument to point how how long players have brought forth the issue how BR compression and yet nothing. Your player-base, for years, are bringing massive issues with your game to you, using the channels you told them to use to give feedback, and then you only address a few of them after a review bombing? It takes a Kotaku article? Game Rant article? A PC Gamer article for you to actually address a 10 year old issue? Gaijin could teach a Masterclass on how to not properly implement feed back.

Hell, we found out just today the bug reporting system didn’t even work right. Imagine taking all the tedious steps Gaijin expects you to make to file a bug report, doing so years ago, and finding out it probably got marked incorrectly because of a poorly implemented system. We can gloss over pre-existing bias many of us have come to have to put up with seeing bug forum moderators because we will never see that fixed. I’d be shocked if it was even addressed in the form of a denial.

I’m sorry but what is the point of this whole forum system and bug reporting system, community managers, and site-specific moderators if feedback isn’t even collected properly? And even then, 9 out of 10 times, nothing ever comes of it. This past year alone we have had several points of contention from a pretty sizable portion of the player-base and looking back, every single one of them was met with the now-traditional (at phrase at this point of “We have heard your feedback and will not change anything.” When you do that every single time, or a clear majority of the time, you devalue the purpose and credibility of your feedback channels.

Let’s stick with your car example. You want to make a car to sell. After coming up with something, you ask several others what we think of it. The color options are pretty good. The stereo is crips, clear, loud, all good. The air condition could be colder but it works. But the engine is sluggish and the transmission is janky. It’s frankly an uncomfortable ride. What do you think their reaction is going to be when, after taking all the steps you asked of them to submit that feedback and do nothing to address it?

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214

Massive issues to them =/= massive issues to me if I’m the developer.

Every customer in every industry ever will complain that “prices for this product are higher than I’d prefer” if you give them the chance. Duh. (In this case, the “price” of the product is effectively how slow it is to progress, since speeding progress is the monetized part of the game).

Just saying “Oh you want lower prices? Well why didn’t you say so earlier! Sure!!!” does not make your business more successful… They were not deaf to all the economy feedback, they just weren’t idiots. As long as people keep paying more than the drop in customers removes (i.e. you haven’t reached the market clearing price yet), you increase prices, not decrease.

When there’s a big pushback and a review bomb, that just means “You reached or exceeded the market clearing price, bring it back down, bit too far, whoops”, which they did. Same as McDonalds accidentally pricing a burger too high, not seeing as many sales as they expected, and making it a bit cheaper again.

None of this implies blindness, stupidity, bad design, or any such things, necessarily.

Hell, we found out just today the bug reporting system didn’t even work right. Imagine taking all the tedious steps Gaijin expects you to make to file a bug report, doing so years ago, and finding out it probably got marked incorrectly because of a poorly implemented system.

They actually said it wasn’t marked INFORMATIVELY, not functionally incorrectly. I.e. everything that was filtered out would have been filtered out anyway, just possibly under a more informative label, as far as I understand. That’s not really “broken” that’s just “not transparent”, not the same thing.

I’m sorry but what is the point of this whole forum system and bug reporting system, community managers, and site-specific moderators if feedback isn’t even collected properly?

I haven’t seen anything that says it wasn’t collected properly.

And even then, 9 out of 10 times, nothing ever comes of it.

if 1 out of 10 ideas from players is actually a good, sensible idea, then this community would be overwhelmingly better at suggesting things than most video game communities. That would be amazing results for a feedback system.

I don’t mean “historically technically correct” I mean “good for the GAME”. See example above: guy who wanted to break the BR balancing of every single WWII German airplane for basically no reason. Doesn’t matter if he was historically correct, that is a very bad suggestion that should not be implemented.

Let’s stick with your car example. You want to make a car to sell. After coming up with something, you ask several others what we think of it. The color options are pretty good. The stereo is crips, clear, loud, all good. The air condition could be colder but it works. But the engine is sluggish and the transmission is janky. It’s frankly an uncomfortable ride

Except that these don’t really line up with most of what we see in War Thunder. 90% of bug report things I see are either 1) Some infinite variation of “Make it cheaper I dun wunna spend money” or 2) Historical accuracy with no consideration having been taken for whether it makes the game actually more fun or not. Neither is a good analogy for your examples here, all of which are actually about the car being more useful and fun, etc.

215

Nope - sorry. I don’t buy the spiel in the article one bit.

We have multiple modern vehicles in the game with subpar armoured protection and seemingly every attempt to remedy it via official channels is blocked for vague and ambiguous reasons. Challenger 2 NERA, Leclerc, Abrams SEP, Type 10 - the lot. People have gone through a lot of effort to find unclassified information - unpaid research - but if the devs have their heart set on something (NATO bad, Rasha Stronk) nothing seems to change their mind.

Meanwhile, someone somewhere in deepest darkest Russia treads on a used hankerchief somewhere with a badly doodled sekrit dokument stating that the T-90M had 5000mm of RHA. It may look like rubber and egg box cartoons but trust me Vanya - it works great. Hic. File a bug report, don’t bother with any sources.

Immediately added and implemented by Gaijin in a flash.

Did you lot learn NOTHING from the last time? It was only May this year, how quickly the snail seems to forget…

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216

oh yeah? then why do f14s have arh?

if theyre the only planes to carry them, wheres the others? or better yet, why not remove them?

217

Did you read what i wrote.Im not saying that it should be only on RU applied,but to all vehicles…

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218

@Stona_WT While we are on the subject of miscommunication and bug reports, gaijin and by extension the player base have a serious problem with how the bug reports are working.

I will use the recent example of the stormer hvm. Approximately 5 months ago, the stormer hvm was broken in a patch. It had multiple issues prior to this, but it fundamentally broken where it couldn’t hit anything which was slightly moving, the missiles just phased through the target.

This bug left the brits with no effective spaa from 8.3 to 11.something when the adats comes in. Bugs reports were made, then nothing. For 5 months.

Now, I don’t know if you’re @Gunjob boss or not, but bless him he saw the screaming and it’s finally getting fixed, but Christ alive it shouldn’t have taken 5 months.

In those 5 months, the bugs just sat as “acknowledged”.

I will be clear, this is unacceptable and a failure of the triaging and bug reporting system that such an issue was allowed to remain for 5+ months.

Communication about significant bugs to the player base needs to be improved. It took a shit storm of a thread on the machinery of war forum for this issue to be addressed when people finally got pissed off enough about it.

In these circumstances, it’s not surprising incidents like yesterday happen. It’s not acceptable in any way, but it’s not surprising as it’s common for vehicles to be simply left in a broken state for years with no communication about them when they leave the dev server.

So, in conclusion, there needs to be a better way for the community to raise these issues rather than simply being ignored.

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219

yea and did YOU see what i wrote? all vehicles that can carry arh should carry them

220

Its the British Preliminary Report and Panzer Tracts.

Also, this is a game, you are a bit overstepping here, tho even 10°/sec for the Pz III would be a miracle in game.

And once again, soley the statement that the rest have 14°/sec so the earlyer ones should also have it, cince they have the same system, like the Tetrach recived still stands.

221

But this is simply untrue, sometimes they act exactly like gatekeepers, perhaps unknowingly.

Like this bugreport about the launcher issue submitted 8 months ago. 4 months later @KnightoftheAbyss simply closed it without requesting any additional info or even checking if the issue still exist (it still exist to this day!), even thought report contained all steps to reproduce and even code to fix the launcher. Further commenting was also closed, report hidden, no tag label given.
When I tried to reach mod through PM I have not received a reply. When I reached him on Steam community, my post with question simply disappeared.

Does it look like comfortable platform with clear communication for players to submit their bug reports? I don’t think so.

It is understandable that mods have to deal with a ton of irrelevant “not a bug, support ticket” junk reports, but it really feels like majority of reports are simply drowned and untouched, and some other shot down without even reading and usually lost (unless reporter is annoyingly persistent).

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222

The fact they fixed weight values but have done NOTHING to fix the missing armour is very sad. The Arietes need some love in the game. Hopefully before the update drops something may be able to be changed.

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223

Ah yes, pay-for-convenience. Implying the game in its natural state is inconvenient. I guess that could make for a good justification for botting now that I think about it. If the developer’s goal is to achieve just the right amount of inconvenience to pressure you to pay IRL money for an “easier” rate of progression, I could see why players will attempt to find tools to minimize their levels of inconvenience.

And since the gaming industry is seen more of an investment strategy these days than say a collection of passionate projects, creating an in-game economy that is more anti-consumer than not is…par for the course and justifiable.

This, and I mean their response, seems more like a cover than an explanation of why what happened or didn’t happen became an issue. I’m sure we will disagree here and that’s fine, but I don’t necessarily buy this. Considering Gaijin doesn’t have a stellar track record for transparency, I’m not exactly buying the idea that you are just now realizing the system you’ve relied on for eleven years now isn’t accurately tracking issues. I don’t think you need to be a developer to see that. A basic understanding of quality assurance seems more than enough. The system you use to track issues isn’t able to properly identify and sort new, old, and duplicate issues? Maybe 15 or 20 years ago, but not in 2023.

This is still a subjective issue. Who’s “good for the game” are we going with? Yours? Mine? The overall player-base? Or the developer’s? We all have different ideas on what we view is good for the game, as you have pointed out. What we think is a massive issue =/= a massive issue to the Dev.

I think repair costs are nothing more than a means to punish players when SL has a perfectly good outflow with that being vehicle and module purchasing. You may think they’re anything but. You may have been perfectly content with just the T-90M getting a spall liner but BillyBoBTTV may find that to be poorly balanced implementation. Maybe going forward, we can change how things are implemented then to ensure the most accepted changes are added.

Gaijin can select a variety of things they want to add, and put for a series of polls for the players to vote on what exactly gets implemented. If Gaijin decides it wants to increase RP costs, put it to the players with an explanation and a poll and see if it’s genuinely good for the game.

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224

So basically, T-90M will be ready from day 1, and all other vehicles will maybe be playable after a few weeks if they decide to make it playable.

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225

It would seem so.

Like I said prior, all top tier tanks should get it, or none should get it.

The community is already pretty angry about the new abrahms and the “challenger 3” which is nothing of the sort. This just adds fuel to the fire. This update is already going down like a cup of cold sick and this just makes it worse.

Gaijin need to backtrack and re-think this. It is unacceptable for a single nation to be given such a huge boost in survivability, especially on a tank which seems to have rather… generous intrepretations of it’s armour specs.

If they can’t find the specs for the spall liners on tanks from say, the chieftain up, then they need to make it up.

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