There are two types of realistic air battles when you have an active XP bonus:
It’s bloody ridiculous, if Gaijin doesn’t wants us to use XP bonus, why do they keep handing them out?
Normally, after activating a large XP booster I first queue a naval arcade battle, cancel, then a naval realistic battle, cancel, then queue into an air realistic match. This fools the game into thinking I don’t really want to use my XP bonus and I get significantly better results than just queueing air realistic from the start.
You assume you are the only player who has an xp bonus?
If not, where are the others? All in your team?
Spread 50:50?
Not unlikely, given how often XP bonus lead to bad teams and outcomes like 1200 XP out of a 75% bonus at 10.7
On average, XP bonus should get wasted 50% of the time, not 90%.
And in case you wonder, at one point Gaijin admitted that XP bonus act as a player quality uplift, as in, the matchmaker tries to team up players with similar performance and split outliers 50/50, unless you have an active XP bonus in which case the matchmaker will “tone you down” for “being too good”.
Same goes for winning strikes, earn too much money/XP in too little time and the matchmaker will hand you several sealclubbings to stop you cold in your feet, unless you sabotage your perfomance by abandoning 10 matches in a row, so many 0 XP/ 0 SLs will lower your daily performance and hand out “normal” difficulty matches. Occasionally, a particularly long losing strike might provide a “easy” game so you don’t become too frustrated, but the matchmaker is more focused to prevent the players from advancing so fast that they don’t need to pay for the game, on top of not allowing players outpace developers when adding new stuff.
Play 30,000+ matches for 7,000+ hours and you will begin noticing patterns.
Like how absurdly difficult is to get a normal (not terrible, nor good, just normal) battle with a large XP bonus.
Or how 10-15% bonuses usually lower your total earnings because of the player quality adjustement (i.e., being teamed with “worse than usual” players versus better than usual players) so you die sooner, or lose more often, or otherwise the bonus skews your averages to the worse, say 10% bonus but end earning -20% XP/SL than average because battle upon battle is worse than usual.
My condolences.
Yes, it’s the worst game I’ve played for longer, I’m a sucker for basic gameplay loops and WT’s just kind of ticks enough boxes, specially since I started diversifying tiers, mixing matches in modern era with WW2/cold war era for variety.
Not unlikely what?
I would not wish my XP bonus to get wasted 50% of the time, let alone 90% of the time.
But the logic says, that XP bonus should be less effective than SL bonus. As long as you use XP bonus with unspaded vehicles, you would expect less performance than average. And they are most helpful with unspaded vehicles.
I noticed a pattern indeed: If something goes wrong, I only get upset about it when I have a large booster. And if I get upset, I remember it better. That is the pattern I note.
I also noted that I have not lost a game with a large SL-Booster (100% up) since last xmas. But with those I don’t use unspaded stuff but carefully pick the setting to cash them to the max. On average, I get 800SL for every 1 percent of the booster. A 100% SL booster will give me 80.000 SL on average. That is a very stable pattern.
What I find irritating is the difference in judgement what is good and what is bad. The worst way the game can screw you is to put you on a glorious team with the idiots on the other side. Before you know it, the game is won. And you survive with 0 score. Bye booster.