They advertise this game as having thousands of unique vehicles. Sure, but the average player will never experience a vast majority of those vehicles. It’s essentially false advertising. I have hundreds of (wasted) hours playing this game, and my highest tech tree vehicle is still 9.0–only 3/4 of the way done with a single tech tree (I’ve branched out over multiple tech trees though), not even that since rp costs grow exponentially.
The Grind is way, way too long. For the average free to play player investing -1h per day in this game, reaching top tier will literally take years of dedicated research, in only one country, in only one of ground, air or naval. 410k research points for a single top tier tank alone will take literally months. Those vehicles are only there for decoration, or to make you pay for them. Unless your favorite vehicles are low tier, you will have to work hard and suffer through months of useless vehicles to get to something you want. You can’t even test drive most vehicles, so you could spend months researching a vehicle that looks good on paper only to find out it’s terrible. War Thunder seems to want to train its players into nihilists.
Half the vehicles that must be researched aren’t actually vehicles you want or need, they are just a roadblock to something you want, deliberately put there to make you impatient and pay the game. Investing months into these useless vehicles is needless waste.
A lot of vehicles are locked behind a pay wall. Premiums sell off of uniqueness, how unbalanced they are, where in the nations/tech tree they are located. This keeps lots of historically interesting vehicles out of the hands of the vast majority of the player base. For free to play players, they might as well not exist. Paying $70 for a virtual tank is insane, especially considering they have a negligible cost of production and that money is pure profit.
They add new vehicles faster than most players can research them. Nothing like grinding for months on a vehicle, only to have them throw a new vehicle in the way, wasting all your previous research and throwing an extra few months on before you obtain the vehicle you actually want. At this point I’ve given up on reaching top tier.
Once you get a vehicle you want, you haven’t even gotten the full experience, you still need to unlock modifications. They make you pay again for what you’ve already bought. Often the unmodified version of a vehicle is much worse than the spaded vehicle, even to the point of it being useless without a certain modification that you have to suffer through more tier based grinding to achieve.
The grind is essentially a needless waste of time based on the game’s greed. Here are some suggestions to improve:
-
Reduce length of grind by 2-3x. No reason why completing a nation should be a multi-year endeavor. Players can know that hard work pays off, and not hard work multiplied by years of suffering might give you something slightly better.
-
Remove progressive research: You can research whatever you like of all the vehicles in game. Some might say progressive research is to teach players how new vehicles work and ease them into the game, but considering the length of the grind, this is absurd. Players do not need months of playing to ease them into some vehicle essentially identical to the previous one at a battle rating 0.3 higher. Currently you can buy a top tier tank even if you’re brand new, they clearly don’t care about easing players in if they give money. Allowing lvl 100s with more hours in game than in real life into the same battles as brand new players is definitely teaching new players about the game too–to uninstall it. Multiple players I’ve known have given up on the game once they find out they will not be getting their dream vehicles within a few months or even a year. Open research would probably keep new players interested in the game. To ease new players into the game, the game could be divided into section: a WW2 section (which would also provide the historical accuracy many downloaded this game expecting), a Cold War section, and a modern section, each with its own reserves and top tier, incapable of fighting each other (not sure how balancing stuff like IS-3, jagdtiger would work though). WW2 and Cold War are essentially two different games with vastly different playing styles, and I imagine Cold War and Modern would be too, but I wouldn’t know since the grind has kept me from experiencing the modern part of gameplay that many download expecting to play. Free research also gets rid of newly added vehicles messing up the grind.
-
Remove modifications system: have vehicles come with all modifications, but still have them be able to be uninstalled to simulate historical accuracy or provide an extra challenge.
-
Only require research once for copy and paste tanks: no one wants to research the exact same tank multiple times, so require only one of the copy-paste vehicles to be researched and allow the other copy paste vehicles to be obtained immediately, or with a slight rp cost if there’s a different roof mg or other slight difference.
-
Make premiums obtainable by research, like squadron vehicles. Pay to play is stupid. Culture should not be only for those with enough money to waste on a game. If your favorite tank happens to be a premium, you should still have another means of obtaining it. The war bond shop already does this to some extent, but not enough. Yeah sure, they have to make money somehow, but there are so many premiums that could form entire new tech trees themselves, they have enough to survive on. Each sale is 100% profit for them, one has to wonder where all that money goes.
One would think that after spending so much time modelling vehicles, they would want a sizeable portion of the players to experience what they worked so hard on, but odds are most players are not getting to experience even 50% of the vehicles in the game. The long grind is what directly causes this, and since it is entirely arbitrary, there is no reason other than greed that they won’t reduce it.
