The grind on this game is still too much

Game Discussion General Discussion
12

Arguably, a lot of people buy premium account/vehicles not because they don’t want to spend time on the game, but because they want their time to have more value, and those people will keep buying premiums.
I doubt there will be a lot of players who stop spending money because they can research stuff quicker. And even those players will be replaced by new/returning players who will now actually want to play the game because it would be more enjoyable for them and less stale.

Spending dozens of hours playing the same vehicles over and over again is never fun, and you it most of the time while grinding

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13

Also, war thunder is not the type of game that will survive on pay to play model. It’s constantly developing and is basically a live service. It won’t survive without some sort of microtransactions, donations etc

14

because we have a grind, so you don’t acces a grinded vehicle.

yes, this is how Gaijin makes money and why the grind is as horrible as it is.

it is, if it would be designed to be fun. Like you don’t grind weapons in CS or only cosmetics in stuff like Fortnite.
So it is an additional thing, not the main gameplay.

if you have a f2p model you attract people for this, if you have a p2p modell you attract people for that.
And with how fast the average player enters and leaves the game in f2p games, this change wouldn’t be slow.
As bad as the monetization of iRacing is, it is the best, therefore people pay the subscription and for every track etc.
DCS would be the closer thing, where you pay for the campains, maps and vehicles, but have artificial grind.
Just you wanting to become better, do missions that are fun for you etc

15

This is a normal way for F2P games to make money - to either make the content, that you need to grind, available instantly for money or to speed up getting this content for money. And it’s fine, as long as it is accessible to the regular non-paying player in a reasonable amount of time. And that’s the big issue here - top tier vehicles are not available in a reasonable amount of time. You literally need to spend hundreds of hours just for a single tree (TREE, not even a COUNTRY). And even then you probably take shortcuts by, for example, not researching one of the branches.

The difference here is that in CS and Fortnine you have everything that is important to gameplay available for everyone equally. And the main selling point of those games is different. One of War Thunder main selling point is a huge number of realistic-ish vehicles. And guess what, you won’t be able to experience most of those vehicles EVEN IF you buy premiums. And when you have a lot of potential options on what you “can” play, and meanwhile you spend dozens of hours in the same vehicles, it becomes boring and repetitive.
Also, returning to your examples - you don’t need to pay anything to play Fortnine. And yet people still spend LOTS of money just on cosmetics. Same goes for CS (apart from buying the game itself). That’s what happens when the game is actually fun and enjoyable for most players most of the time, which war thunder honestly lacks.

In order to make war thunder work with pay to play model, you need to significantly change how the game works. Probably to the point where it won’t be the same game anymore. Grind is not always bad, but it needs to be done right

16

Make no mistake - War Thunder and by virtue - Gaijin, do grind right. Grind is why we’re addicted to this game and not off playing Battlefield and having every vehicle handed to us with no effort. There is a whole psychology behind grind-based games and this isn’t new. People may think they hate the grind, but they actually love it even if its at a subconscious-level.

17

Therefore I prefere a pay to play with no grind, instead of the f2p with grind.

And War Thunder should be the same. It should be about having fun in game, not reaching a vehicle.

and this makes it even worse.

Yes, and Gaijin does the same and yet we still have the horrible grind.

Yes, the main issue. They are making the game this way, so people have to pay money to achive something, not have fun and want to pay money to be extra cool.

I know. We would need a War Thunder 2 (which is basically a thing we need either way)

18

No we do not and the whole pay to play model would be a disaster. One of the best things about War Thunder is that they have continued to grow and evolve this game for over a decade - the game is a whole lot different both gameplay and graphics wise since back in 2012. Why do we need War Thunder 2?

19

I only partially agree.
We have parts in this game that are 10+ years old and it is starting to show.
Yes, they upgrade their engine and add new stuff, like the custom loadout feature, and this is great.
The thing is, you notice as a player that looks deeper than this, that some stuff didn’t change.
That this game isn’t on a 2020’s standard, but partially 2010’s standard.
Like no steering nose wheels, the MEC, the collision physics (and limits of those (so variable sweep wings, don’t change their hitbox, bc their one slot is tied up by the extracting gear), which they argue is from their engine, that they build and can change but this is another story), the map fidelity in air battles (just look at the ground textures, trees, houses etc, even with all the texture packs) and more.
Yes, lots of things got renewed (like they are finally working on DX 12) but also some important bits didn’t.

see above:
Because the game changed and adding stuff to an existing code base etc, while having compatibility to other things is way harder than writing it new.
This is why we have CS2, Planet Coaster 2, or completely new architectures, like GCN vs RDNA, not just upgrades from RDNA 1 to 2 to 3 etc
Because there comes a point where you have to rewrite everything to advance significantly.

To be clear, we haven’t reach this point, but you can see, that we get closer.

PS: also regarding implementing new vehicles, we are approaching a limit of kinda unique ones etc, which isn’t an issue now, but you can see, that we are approaching this issue, where there is now more copy pasta vehicles, leand and lease vehicles, and way less vehicles that are/were in service etc, that aren’t implemented.
Yes we have the South Korean (sub-)tree with unique vehicles, and Turkey etc, but adding Argentina with mostly British stuff is a thing, that hasn’t the attractiveness as adding the Italian vehicles had.

20

If gaijin wants war thunder to exist for 20 more years, then sure, at some point they will need to make a complete new game with treatmant like CS 2, and that has a lot of other issues itself. But just making a new game is not enough to make people play the game.
Gaijin has a lot (and I meant it, A LOT) of ways to improve the current state of the game without the need to even think about completely different game. In fact, a lot of changes can be done in a very short period of time, assuming they commit to them.
The main issue we have is that devs are, simply put, ignorant about a lot of obvious issues (or they are told to not care, who knows). If they are not willing to fix what clearly needs fixing, they shouldn’t make another game, because it will just end up in the same state

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21

the game is the grind. If you have nothing to grind then you most often than not dont play as much.

22

They should split the grind up into Generations of aircraft. So If you’re not interested in 1st, 2nd, or 3rd, generation aircraft, you can start grinding 4th gen fighters immediately.

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23

nahh that would be just cheating taking into account that the end goal in this game is top tier

24

That’s because you suffer from the misconception that there is actually a grind and that the end goal is top tier. Both are actually not true. It’s a game, and its purpose is for you to have fun and be entertained.

Playing for the sole purpose of researching new vehicles is a sure recipe for burning out and not having fun.

As soon as you learn that there is no grind and simply play for fun either alone or with others, your War Thunder experience will improve dramatically.

Besides, top tier isn’t particularly fun to play, so having that as an end goal is a bit silly.

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25

It can also be nice to have a goal if you are not absolutely obsessed with getting something.
At least for me it’s nice i know i make progress towards something.
I have nearly every tank witj russia,brits and israel and i enjoy playing them, but its not the same.

26

When the game has some sort of progression, the end of that progression becomes the natural end goal (in case of war thunder, there are just multiple end goals, like nations and vehicle types). Sure, you can have your own goals, and in fact, you should have at least additional goals for yourself. But the game is built in a way that makes reaching top tier one of the “true” end goals, and whatever you do in parallel is just your own thing, and that’s fine.

The issue is that it’s hard to enjoy that progression when the games actively tries to make it hard (in this case - time consuming) to progress towards the end of the progression itself.

27

I think Air RB is ok (except the stock grind), it is the other gamemodes that are too grindy

28

In terms of grind - I’d say Air RB is much better than ground (at least when playing with premiums). It would still be better if rewards could be brought up (or research cost brought down) there as well, but if they bring ground battles to the level of air in terms of grind, it would already be so much better. There is no reason for that difference

29

Unfortunately they won’t change this no matter what. They’re adding vehicles faster than I can actually research the tech trees and I play quite a bit. I use both premium account and premium vehicles, have probably spent over 2k easily on this game. I’ve given up completely reaching top tier in multiple nations. I just focus on US and Russia now. I have never experienced any other game that requires this much time to grind new items, especially the modifications once you’ve unlocked that vehicle.

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30

The only thing that sucks about air RB is that if you’re killed right away there’s no respawn like ground RB so you have to start a whole new match again and it can get very annoying. Plus if you’re just base bombing you better hope you have the faster plane otherwise you’re screwed.

31

Good. Why would this be a bad thing?

Every other free to play game in history, including Navyfield and World of Tanks.