Stacked Sides in War Thunder Naval: How Squadron Stacking Works and Why We Need Competitive EC Modes
I’m not writing this as some outsider pointing fingers at everyone else. I’ve been around Naval EC for a long time, I built EC Crew back when it existed, and I’ve absolutely been on the “strong” side of lopsided games. I know how the system behaves because I’ve used it, and I’m not pretending to be innocent here.
What I want to talk about is pretty simple: how heavy stacking actually happens in naval, why it’s bad for the long-term health of the mode, and why proper competitive EC options would be a much better place for that kind of sweaty, coordinated play.
Right now the game lets you squad up with friends, which is great. The problem isn’t “people playing together” – that’s one of the best parts of War Thunder. The problem is what happens when you’ve got several squads who all know each other, share a Discord, run meta line-ups and queue around the same time. The matchmaker sees a bunch of normal four-man squads with mixed tags. It doesn’t see the social connections behind them, so it sometimes drops most or all of those squads on the same team. On the scoreboard it looks like a few random squads. In practice, it’s one big coordinated group.
On the other side you’ll often have a lot of solo players, newer players, or people who aren’t talking to anyone. The game technically did its job – everyone got a match – but the balance is already tilted before the first shell leaves the barrel. I’m not saying anyone is cheating or exploiting; this is all within the rules. It’s just what naturally happens when organised groups queue into a system that doesn’t really care about group strength.
From the weaker side, those matches all start to feel the same. The organised team grabs early map control, wins the cap fight, focuses down anything that strays too far from cover, and the tickets start melting. You see your team disappear, the same tags climb the scoreboard, and you realise you were basically loaded into a loss. After enough games like that, people just stop queueing naval or bail out as soon as they recognise what’s going on.
It’s not even perfect for the “strong” side either. Once a team is clearly dominant, the real competition often turns inward. You get the usual stuff: people arguing over who’s carrying, who’s feeding, who stole whose kill, who’s top of the board, whose K/D matters more. The actual enemy team stops feeling like a threat and the mood can still get sour, even while you’re winning 10–0 on caps.
New players obviously get hit the hardest by all of this. Naval is already a lot to learn – shell types, angling, positioning, BR spreads, maps. If their first games are into these kinds of stacked lobbies, what they experience is spawning in, dying fast to focused fire, watching the scoreboard fill with the same tags, and having no idea what they did wrong. That’s not a great way to convince anyone to stick with the mode.
Over time, that kind of environment hollows naval out. Casual players drift away, new players bounce off, and even long-time players burn out on steamrolls. It turns into a playground for people who like running heavy coordination in casual queues, and that’s not healthy for a mode that already has a smaller population than ground or air.
I don’t think the solution is to kill squads or stop friends from playing together. I’d rather see a clearer separation between casual spaces and competitive spaces. Casual naval and casual EC should be the place where randoms and newer players can get reasonably fair matches, still with squads, but without one side quietly having half a tournament team in it. Competitive spaces – proper Squadron EC or some sort of league EC – should be where big stacks, serious comms, and long tactical games live.
EC is actually where a lot of my best naval games have happened: longer battles, more emphasis on positioning and team play, and room for proper coordination to matter. If there were official EC formats built around squadrons or alliances, set up so large organised groups were matched against each other on purpose, that would give people who enjoy that style of play a real arena. You could tune the rules, rewards and maybe even rankings around that, instead of having all of that energy dumped into random lobbies.
On the normal matchmaking side, there are things that could help without banning anyone from playing together. Matching big squads on both sides when possible, not dropping a pile of socially connected squads all on the same team if there’s an obvious way to split them a bit more, maybe having some soft limits on how many people from the same group can land on one side in purely casual modes. Gaijin already uses data to balance BRs and vehicles; they could do something similar to spot really extreme patterns in group stacking and adjust the rules over time.
I want to be really clear that this isn’t meant as a witch hunt. EC Crew is gone; I’m not trying to resurrect old drama or point at any living squadron and say “these are the villains.” A lot of us understand how stacking works precisely because we’ve been part of it. For me this is more about holding my hands up and saying: “Yeah, we’ve done this, we’ve seen how it feels from both sides, and maybe the game would be better if the system didn’t push so hard in this direction.”
If we talk about it in those terms – focusing on how the matchmaking and mode design behave, backing it up with replays and examples instead of just anger, and always pairing criticism with suggestions – it’s much easier for the devs to look at it seriously without feeling like they’re being dragged into squad drama.
In the end I’m arguing for more room for everyone. I want casual and new players to feel like they have a real chance most games, and I want organised groups to have proper competitive EC tools so they can go all-out without wrecking the experience for everyone else. If Gaijin can apply the same “look at the data, adjust the rules” mindset to group balance that they already use for BRs, naval would be in a much healthier place.