Results of my survey on RP rewards

Game Discussion General Discussion
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Hello everyone, I’ve recently put out a survey to question folks regarding their opinions on the RP rewards in War Thunder. I’ve gotten a respectable 74 responses so far, and while it may not be a large enough sample that can fairly represent the community as a whole, I felt sharing the findings thus far may help Gaijin improve the game, or even conduct their own larger reaching survey.

  1. Game Mode of Respondants
    Game mode
    Looking at the chart, the breakdown of the 74 respondents shows the majority of the sample plays Ground RB, with the second biggest playerbase being Air RB.

  2. Premium Time
    Premium
    This chart breaks down total responses by the ownership of premium time and what respondents play. This will be of importance later.

  3. Breakdown of premium content owned
    Premium pie
    Above is the breakdown of the status of premium content owned by respondents.

  4. RP earned by respondents in above average performace games
    image
    This is the breakdown of the % of respondents based off of how much RP they earned in games with above average mission score. Thanks to this breakdown of average mission scores by Bruce_R1. I’ve determined a satisfactory mission result to consider for Reward RPs would be 1800+ for all gamemodes.

  5. Respondents opinions on the rewards
    image
    As you can see, the grand majority of ground players surveyed overwhelmingly agree with the fact the RP rewards for ground battles are generally not enough. Those who answered maybe, have generally expressed a need for a retweak of one part of the economy more than an overhaul i.e. increased SL, decreasing RP specifically for higher tiers, etc.

What can be done?

Overall the most repeated request for Gaijin is increasing the RP gained at base (the base vehicle or mode multiplier), and decreasing the RP costs for modifications and mid-high tier vehicles in nations. Current RP mechanics for Ground RB calculate rewards off of lifetime and mission score actions (capturing the point, and kills mainly) in a gamemode where high tiers tend to be short lived. For helicopters, it’s exponentially worse. Helicopter EC rewards are practically non-existent without a premium vehicle and time, and you’re often better off researching helicopters with your ground vehicles, and that is difficult to do as is.

At request, I’m more than happy to provide any moderators or Gaijin staff a csv of the survey responses in order to view some of the suggestions written in by players surveyed, if they read this!

Thanks so much for your time folks!

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I feel it would be highly prudent to split ARB/AAB and air sim. The way air sim calculates rewards is very different from everything else, and the match length also makes the average mission score to be a non-factor (you can earn 3000 score by some miracle in 15 minutes and get the same reward as if you got 1050 score, while getting 400 score every 15 minutes for 45 (1200 score) minutes will earn you significantly more than the 3000 score you got in 15 minutes.) Now add the “you get 80% reward unless you land”; the way dying resets the UA counter and… yeah.

And the per battle conception needs replaced with “Per 15 minute segment” because earning 10 000 RP per game sounds amazing… until you realize it took 2 entire hours while you’d get ~8 000 RP in 20 minutes in ARB.

Air sim and air arcade/air realistic cannot be treated as a singular data point without seriously impacting the usability of data.

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I understand for the most part, the presumption for the way I went about it is the RP rewards in both game modes in largely the same on every vehicle. I’m also a one person operation sorry

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It’s hard to play ground realistic battles on SA because players don’t seem to speak any language, nor do they ping the map. My research gains are so small I frequently just quit the match. Other times I try to play until the bitter end, even when my team mates don’t try to break through or do anything useful. Premium time or a premium vehicle isn’t worth it at my rank, it still takes forever. I might as well just buy the upgrades.

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They need to remove useful action mechanic from SB, period.
Reduce SB earnings by 30 % for all I care, but don´t give me this BS 15 minute cap.
After getting 30 kills in 2 hours playing and winning the game only to get the equivalent rewards of 3 average 5 minute AIR RB games? People without premium account actually being forced to play GRB / ARB in order to farm enough SL to continue playing SB. It´s almost 2025, not 2015 Gaijin. Hello?

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While understandable that you are one person, the presumption itself is not applicable due to the aforementioned reasons (useful action system).

I’d personally rather discard air sim data than mix it with air RB if lacking resources to treat it separately because although only a few of us responded with air sim, given the small number of responses it likely significantly impacts and thus sullies ARB/AAB data.

Here’s a direct comparison of the same plane in the 2 modes:

17 minute game in the F3H-2 in air RB

image
image1229×842 153 KB

Nearly 2 hour long game in F3H-2 in air sim

image

Useful actions:
image

Notice for 15 minute cycles, it never exceeds ~3000 RP. At 800 score, you’ve obtained 90% of the reward, doing any better would only increase the reward by 2%!

200 points = 54% reward
400 points = 75% reward
600 points = 86% reward
800 points = 90% reward
1050+ points = 92% reward

Now, the Useful actions only show 80% of the 90% and so forth, we need landings. I landed irregularly, but here is the landing rewards:

image

tl:dr - performing at maximum possible reward score in air sim for a 15 minute cycle rewards ~3800 RP for the F3H-2.

Performing at top 1 of my team in a 17 minute game rewards ~9000 RP (there’s a booster, but IIRC it was barely 10% given I got data of getting 8000 RP without boosters using the F84B in a worse game)

As visible, the systems that calculate rewards and maximum potential for a 15 minute cycle are nowhere comparable.

Also, this isn’t even something I care about much (RP gain).

SL gains OTOH are utterly broken in a bad way with 1 spawn costing 15k and maximum earnings being capped, leading to anti-competetive behaviours to avoid going broke, or as said: play GRB/ARB to earn enough SL to respawn your plane.

here’s a spreadsheet collecting a lot of RP gain/UA cycle across different planes and different performance/score for a premium player:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1elUK6q-ujEgfb-QYwt4II1u3z-leh_8LqeJdHgWttGU/edit?gid=0#gid=0

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I think you need to take into account that it’s mostly people that play the game a lot (and thus have premium vehicles and time) that are most likely to answer this survey. I believe that your results might be heavily skewed in that direction considering the percentage of none premium that answered here

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I would like to share here my 2 cents, since I havent participated in the survey

AirRB

Recently I’ve been playing with A-4E (8.7) Premium plane with premium time active. Grinding the lineup from zero to F-16D Barak II

The way I used to measure the Success rate of the battles was simple: Research point per Minute
(I know it is reealtive, but I did my accounts with at least 25 matches before deciding going to AirRB)

Below, the screenshot of my RB:
image

As you see in the above Screenshot, I could do an average of 1444 RP per minute with A4, this increased overtime changing strategy and as much I was liking the plane, I stayed longes in the sessions.
image

At very end, in matches while I was proper “grinding”, I could do an average 2000 RP/min. However I spent some more time horsing around to help the team Win. It is possible to do an average of 2500 RP/min in battles if you do your stuff and quit immediatly, but I think this is not fair with the teammates.

AirSIM
At start, I did some tests by playing the Simulator battles, since I some years ago flew the A-4’s in the US Tree, so I kinda new how to handle the plane in Sim/RB.

The results for the 25 simulator battles where awful to say less.

Bomb
In matchs where I could proper Bomb free without being killed much, I could do an average of 600 RP/min in 45min to 1 hour.

PvP
Since the A-4 is not built to PvP, in the 25 matchs I played as Hunter, I got barelly 200 RP/Min. The design and avionics of the A-4 dont help much on combat, since it has only 2 AIM-9Bs, and turns like a brick.

  • I also have a lots of issue with the camera in this mode, when I was holding C to look around and when I released, the camera resets to the front of the plane but looking at the sky. Died a few times because of this.

PvE Farm
This was a bit more fun to play with this plane to be honest. Killing the bombers and CAS with the Walleyes, I was able to sustain an average of 800 RP/min. But got 1.5 hours on average to end the matchs here. Mostly because of the teammates quitting. (got unlucky MM)

As a matter of fact, I deleted all the Simulator battles later from the sheet cause the results where at least 50% lower than the RB. Also, I tought I would never need to share it with anybody…

While I do know that there is more skilled A-4 players than me out there, for my skills and available time, the AirRB was way more profitable/fun to play. 8.7-9.7 Sim battles are not “Active” enough to be fun to play.

To finish the grind, I bought the Kfir Canard to make the 400k RP for the F-16, since the 60% RP punishment from the A-4E was not managable in a time maner.

TL:DR

Sim battles only worth if :

  • you are familiar with the plane
  • the plane has a decent loadout
  • you get nice teammates
  • you get enemys enought

If the goal is to grind: AirRB → Loadout to kill a base and some A-A Missiles to play
If the goal is to enjoy the plane: Sim battles → You can also listen a podcast…

3 Likes
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The best way to play SB is with a podcast or creepypasta haha.

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AAB also needs to be split off imo, as its rewards differ vastly from RBs. In ground its less of an issue, though still major, but in air it is far more prominent.

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I think we should talk about this more, 10.0+ is too tiring to grind. With Premium time and tanks you get almost nothing since most of the rp is time based and most matches are over in less than 10 minutes. You can have 10 kills in a match but if its less than 10 minutes you will mostly get 10k rp.
This could be fixed or by lowering the research for the vehicles or by higher the rp gain. One thing that could help at least for 5 matches would be the research bonus not being base rp

1 Like
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Yes sire.

In fact, while I do agre that some vehicles should worth more than other, it is not viable for someone to grind High ranks in one human life.

This is my sheet, which Im calculating how mych RPs I need to be able to play with the Italian Gripen:
image

Highlights

Let’s simplify things a bit. Instead of looking at how many vehicles are in each rank, let’s focus only on the total amount of experience (XP) needed for each rank. When we do this, we end up with a picture that looks something like this:
image

So, if you leave Rank VIII out of the picture, you basically need an average of 130% of the RP from one rank to unlock the next one.

More maths

Considering you do an average 8.000 RP ber battle, no matter the plane or Premium Account, just speaking numbers out loud:
image

With these numbers, you’ll need 13 hours or 127 battles with this average to unlock the planes from rank VII and VIII. That’s equivalent to watching the entire ‘Lord of the Rings’ extended trilogy 1.5 times, or cooking about 780 packets of instant ramen.

In total, the line takes 25 hours to complete the whole lineup till the Gripen – that’s in-game time, mind you. That’s about as long as it takes a sloth to travel 1 mile.

I’m not getting any money from Gaijin to say this

but if you want to play the game without spending extra cash on a Premium Account or Premium Vehicle, here’s what you can expect:

  • Considering -200% without a premium account.

  • Also taking note that you are not using the Gibli with Talisman bonus + Premium vehicle bonus.

  • Also considering that you will need to learn from scracth a new plane at least at each rank.

  • Also cosnidering that you play consistently on AirRB

  • Since you dont bought Ghibli nor the F104S, you also forgot the Romanian plane… So you need 3.605.000 RPs

Im taking account for the below previsions, that you do an Average of 4.000 RP per battle of 5 minutes.

To grind the Rank IV:

6 hours with 62 battles to unlock everything on this rank. Enough battles to fill a school bus with frustrated gamers

To grind the Rank V:

You’re looking at 99 battles in 10 hours.

  • Enough battles to make a dalmatian puppy coat, if Cruella de Vil was into gaming instead of fashion

To grind the Rank VI:

16 hours to unlock those, 157 battles. It is interestingly the time it would take a sloth to travel about 1 mile (if it didn’t take any naps)

####To grind the Rank VII:
Brace yourself for a shocking 26 hours, or 265 battles. Thats the amount of time it takes bamboo to grow about 26 feet taller

Or

To conquer everything from the mighty rank IV to the legendary Gripen, you’re embarking on an epic quest of truly mythic proportions:

Behold, a staggering 75 hours of intense battle action awaits you! That’s 4,500 minutes of pure, unadulterated combat! You’ll clash in approximately 750 earth-shattering battles, each one a test of your skill, will, and sanity.

If you commit 2 hours a day to this. you’re looking at a 40-day journey. That’s longer than the Great Flood.

  • And yes, I factored in two days for you to break bread with your beloved mother, because even gaming legends need to eat!

TL:DR

From rank IV to Gripen:

With Premium plane and Premium Account: Shouldn’t take more than 30 hours with nearly 250. Considering a 8000 RP reward per battle.

No money invested: 75 Hours, on average of 750 battles - can be less if you do more thank 4k RP per battle.

All the info and statistics are in the post.

What I have learned with all of this is that:

  • Based on cost/benefit of the series the best alternative is to have the Premium Account. (plz never convert GE in RP or SL)

  • Free to play players suffer

  • Best alternative is to just buy a premium vehicle and play with it. Even so, to unlock a high tier moder vehicle takes nearly 2 months. Time enought to train a new puppy for basic obbedience.

  • A man can cry looking at Google Sheets

@+

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