The problem is they do, they very much do harm the game, and the issue only gets worse the more copy paste you bloat trees with. It’s especially a problem with iconic vehicles, as those are the vehicles people grind out trees for. There isn’t any point in grinding out a nation if you can just throw some cash at Gaijin and play your desired vehicle in your favored tree. This may not sound like an issue, until you consider that a big reason why the ‘minor’ nations are neglected as they are is that people don’t play them anywhere near as much. Copy paste aircraft only exacerbate this issue on top of everything else, especially when it happens as frequently as it does in-game.
So you you like it because it is premium then. Last I recall, after you hit rank 3, every vehicle counts towards event progress and BP challenges. You could have grinded out the events/challenges with a normal Spitfire instead, the only difference would be SL gain. There is no reason it has to be in the Italian tree, it would be better if the Italian Spit were removed from sale, replaced with a comparable Italian aircraft with a premium Spit slotted into the same BR over in Britain.
I don’t think you understand my issue here. The issue at hand isn’t that someone paid Gaijin money to ease the grind, it’s that in order to ‘efficiently’ grind out the tree, the best option is a foreign aircraft. You bring up me not having an issue with a premium domestic 3.7 fighter as if its some kind of ‘own’ when I wouldn’t have an issue with it, and would vastly prefer it to the alternative of foreign copy paste. There isn’t even an option period for any sort of rank 3 Italian premium, they are all foreign aircraft. If I want to play Italy, I want to play Italian aircraft, and I’d imagine that’s true for most of the playerbase.
A justified inclusion and being low tier filler are two things that are very much mutually exclusive when it comes to copy paste aircraft, regardless of being premium or TT. If it’s filler, it is unneeded, and therefore unjustifiable. If it is justified, then there isn’t anything else that can fill in a gap, so it is needed.
As for ’transitioning to energy fighters’, you know what would be great for that? A premium version of an indigenous fighter, with the benefit of teaching a new player how to effectively fly American planes.
You repeatedly saying that does not make it true, you do realize that, right? Britain has an entire tech tree right there, one choked full of Spitfires. You aren’t locked into one tree. Believe it or not, you can play multiple trees, and for practical purposes you are going to get everything this slop can offer by playing the Spitfires in their actual tree. The only thing this can provide is a relatively cheap way to get a premium Spit, but if that’s the justification you want to use, it would be better for Britain to get their own premium spitfire in a tree then giving the US a copy paste aircraft that they don’t need in any regard.
They do, they very much do. As for other modes, they aren’t particularly relevant to my counterpoint as we are talking about SIM, not RB or AB. As for how AB and RB are affected, both suffer from the issue of making other trees less appealing, in this case the British TT as you can just get the most iconic fighter of Britain in the US tree. That aside, RB is also negatively affected as it makes matchmaking more and more of a molass of aircraft, and what nations you are playing with and/or against less and less relevant. What point is there when there are so many captured and lendleased planes when almost any plane can come from almost any nation? Would this happen as soon as the US gets bloated with an unnecessary Spitfire? No, but it isn’t just the single aircraft that is the issue, it’s the philosophy behind it’s inclusion that is. Mindless inclusions being based off simple ownership that slowly destroy the identity of trees over time. It’s one thing to implement a copy-paste aircraft because there aren’t any indigenous options, it’s quite another to do it just because.