This Match Reminded Me Why I Still Play War Thunder

Game Discussion Realistic Battle
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I don’t usually post replays but this one deserves attention:

https://warthunder.com/en/tournament/replay/499412745570882144

Both teams had dedicated players who committed to the match from start to finish. Half of the players didn’t quit after dying once or twice. The result was an entertaining, back-and-forth battle that felt like a proper Battlefield 4 Conquest match: persistent, immersive, and genuinely competitive until the last moment.

At one point I considered leaving. The match looked like it was heading toward the usual outcome of early quitters draining the team. But then I noticed that the remaining players kept respawning, kept fighting, kept contributing. I decided to stay and help them for their effort. That decision made the difference.

What made it exceptional: teammates were actively responding to map pings and tactical suggestions. Players coordinated flanks, warned about enemy positions, and adapted to the situation in real time. This is the teamplay War Thunder’s Ground Realistic Battles markets itself on but rarely delivers.

I haven’t experienced a match like this in a long time. Friends I’ve played with for 10+ years gave up on the game because of how rare this has become. Not because of the grind, not because of premium vehicles, but because the community feel that made this game special in 2014 slowly disappeared.

This is what War Thunder used to feel like regularly. Players committed to matches, learned from dying, and contributed regardless of outcome. That culture built this game’s community.

Interestingly, this kind of dedication is more common at lower BRs where new players are still discovering the game. They haven’t yet been conditioned to quit early or chase top tier. They play because they’re genuinely curious and engaged. That’s the spirit War Thunder was built on and exactly why protecting that learning experience matters.

Gaijin should actively promote and reward this kind of gameplay: staying until the end, playing multiple vehicles, contributing to the team effort. The community that built this game still exists. This replay proves it. The question is whether Gaijin remembers what made them successful in the first place.

2 Likes
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Gajin wants us to do this, BVVD mention that in Nuclear Escaltion, were players should do teamwork to supress enemy airdefences. But how, we do not have voice chat to communicate effectifly.

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Exactly. Gaijin designs game modes around teamwork but doesn’t provide the tools to make it happen effectively. A month ago I submitted a suggestion called “Proximity-Targeted Communication System for Ground Realistic Battles” that could address this directly: compass-bearing callouts, proximity-based messages, and quick tactical communication without requiring voice chat.

Ideally, voice chat would be the best solution. However, as every online Free2Play game demonstrates, voice chat inevitably gets spammed and abused. The only viable implementation I’ve seen is Rockstar Games’ approach in GTA Online, where AI moderation automatically flags players for spamming, profanity, and harassment. Without a similar system, War Thunder voice chat would become another source of toxicity rather than a communication tool, imo

The proximity-based text system is a realistic middle ground that avoids these issues entirely.

It’s still pending moderator approval for posting. Hopefully it gets reviewed soon as it addresses exactly this problem

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Yeah, I tried to point that out to BVVD in his nuclear escalation post, there is really no way to effectively coordinate with your team and the game actively punishes cooperation, if multiple players fire at the same SAM site, only 1 gets any reward and it’s imposable to coordinate well enough to have teammates exploit the hole you make in the air defences.
It also doesn’t help that there are all these youtubers that constantly promote fighting your team.

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But there is a nother problem: Most of us do not know how to command and give orders. It will be a chaos.

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Planetside had a system to deal with this (although war thunder is probably too small scale to duplicate it), if you formed and lead a squad then as your squad completed objectives you would gain command ranks, each rank would unlock more tactical abilities, starting of with being able to designate global targets and set waypoints up to being able to calling in strategic orbital strikes.
So to get those abilities in any reasonable time frame you had to learn how to command a platoon of 3 or 4 squads (I don’t recall what the max number was) successfully. That way you did not have every tard in the game running around drawing dicks on the map or negligently discharging orbit to surface weapons.
It seemed to work pretty well.

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Had similiar feeling from ARB match, where i turned 1v2 into ace with last kill happening 10 seconds before the match timer ran out.

Did i need to land and rearm like six times because Kfir C10 has only 4 missiles? Yes.

Was I sweating the everliving hell out of that game? Sure.

Was i screaming in frustration at one point where the two remaning players pushed me as i was taking off from rearming but they were actually smart enough to not push the airfield defenses and instead tried to hound me like i was an animal? Absolutely.

But thats the reason i will remember this game for a long long time.

Had to actually apply my knowledge of the game mechanics, straight up calculating how far i can push the last guy and still be safe from his missiles, deducing that from effective range of my missiles at current alt/speed.

Its shame really, to get glimpse of such awesome games only to be thrown back into the usual mud wrestling a pig type of gameplay we normally get.