Rank is a red herring when it comes to these discussions, imho. Rank only exists in the game as a research mechanic, nothing more. Gaijin moves vehicles into ranks based on economic/player progression considerations. The Pz IV J is Rank II, but its command version is Rank III, for example…
Could we repurpose ranks to do something else? Yes. But there are too few of them to facilitate decompression.
Would Gaijin consider doing it? No. So in conclusion, there’s no point bothering with ranks at all.
Let’s talk about what actually matters: performance.
I’ll stick to ground examples because I’ve only dipped my toes in air, but… the problem is that the average player doesn’t want to play against the odds, or feel like they’re overcoming the challenge of facing a meta vehicle. The average player would like to be in the meta vehicle.
You can see this by looking at any competitive MMO… whenever there is one side that is clearly stronger than the other, people flock to it and don’t bother to play anything else. It’s what is creating so many problems for Enlisted on certain maps/campaigns, for example, and it’s also what nuked the last season of World War, when everyone wanted to play the German side for obvious reasons.
Nobody likes to get punched in the face.
As such, the method of balancing by performance is very sound, and doesn’t really need anything else. In a perfect world, every vehicle in WT would have exactly a 50% win rate, and while we obviously can’t achieve perfection, balance by performance can get us close to those numbers.
But…
When there are BR issues, it’s not because the chosen method (performance) is wrong. It’s because of implementation issues. For example there being too few BRs to allow you to spread out vehicles properly. And there is another issue, which is the one you correctly identify, some vehicles are difficult to balance.
The reason they’re difficult to balance, is because think about it for a second - when we say we’re balancing by performance, that is performance in what?
We have 2000 vehicles in the game, but an extremely limited amount of mission types. As always with MMO and game design, Gaijin is striving for a “universal formula” of map and mission type that satisfies the vast majority of players, rather than go with variety and have people complain. But when you lack variety of objectives and maps, you are inherently creating meta vs non meta vehicles. Some vehicles will be really good in very specific ways and really bad in other ways, which will make it super difficult to find them a home in a “one size fit all” kind of competitive environment.
These are all issues Gaijin could solve if they wanted to, technically speaking they’re pretty easy to figure out, but they just don’t want to unless they’re completely sure it will not harm their other priorities.
