My point to play the game is becoming better at air combat, and you can do that even with reserve planes, so I don’t have the forever grind curse regular players have.
I do understand the suffering of players that are only interested in modern tech. They should either play a game that starts out with it and is the sole focus of the game, or try community made WT missions involving that tech.
I don’t mind BR disbalance (in air) because it gives me extra challenges to overcome.
I enjoyed the body pillows and am salty about Japan getting exclusive animey stuff
t. weaboo
And her my fellow players is the proof, THEY DON’T CARE, there are more players where you come from! If you leave so what they will have players behind you to replace you AND get there money! They don’t care if the game is good or not! They don’t care if you stay or not!
Damn, gaijin isnt going to bend to your will. They must really not care…
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Don’t drink the kool aid!
Honestly, I don’t think WT will die anytime soon. Currently, there is no competition for WT, and there likely won’t be any in the near future. Moreover, I believe that after 10 years of playing (no other game in my history have I actively played for so long), the game feels now best to me, even though I’m starting to feel a certain repetitiveness in the same game modes, which is understandable after 10 years. Compared to the state 5 years ago, the game now offers much more, whether it’s the vehicles, new game mechanics, or new game modes (although this category still requires significant improvement).
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I think game play wise is dead already unless you are new to the game and excited by it.
How long that will last is anybodies guess.
It’s pretty dead for anybody who came for WW2 and life in the first 6 BRs because WW2 does not exists anymore.Its spammed with much later artillery being used how artillery is not even used.Hardly makes for realism.
Mid BR is a Cold War mess of late WW2 and 50s 60s even 80s ,all with conflicting levels of tech and from what everybody is saying and what I am seeing top tier is an unplayable mess where Gaijins supposed biggest market the US can’t win a game with the best military tech on the planet supposedly being replicated.
So the game is good until you come to the point that you actually play a game then it goes wrong big time. The game plays out like a Tank museum open day and it’s the same game they have been pushing for 12 years.Grab the point ,over run the enemy Spawn as quick as you can and that’s it,repeated ad infinitum.
They keep telling us it’s combined arms but cant make CAS work in higher BRs ,tanks are fish in a barrel as they would be in real life.
That is a big problem when you go all out to replicate real life and find real life is instant death to tanks in a tank game. Doh!!!
Yeah it’s dead,the numbers are there(supposedly) but lots of people playing a boring game and spending until the penny drops as to just how bad it has all gotten.The forum is filled with goodbye letters from long standing veterans.
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I read this twice…THIS^^ is the actual problem.
There is no way in hell, no balance, no numbers, no proof that will make the “player base” be happy :)
Someone will always think TANK A should be better and someone else will think the opposite.
I am guessing the vehicle you believe to be too strong will have people think it is not strong enough (or won’t be if they change it as you want)…or the other way around.
(it is also possible i agree with you…but someone will claim the “player base” does not)
BTW…IRL performance and balance often conflict with each other… :)
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They NEED to bring back historical battles.
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First played War Thunder in 2012, stopped and went off to play other games, then played again in 2014 when ground forces were added - stopped and went off to play other games. Got an email in 2018 going on about them adding T-64 to War Thunder, and I was like ‘ohhh yeah, I remember that game’. Have played religiously ever since that point in 2018, and the game has grown so much, changed so much - for the better. It’s not perfect, but to say it’s going anywhere any year soon - no. It’s like when all the whiners tried forming that union to boycott the game and leave negative Steam reviews. It all amounted to little. Players actually increased during the boycott which was fun. You’ll be playing this game in 5 years, just watch.
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The game still has a long way to go. Most people are already bored with World War II.
The game has serious problems, but it has no direct competition. BR compression problems, high level premiuns, horrible MM with continuous uptiers, copies of copies of vehicles and a long list that bores me to replicate.
It has been 13 years and sincerely it would be very difficult for something to face it.
The amount of possibilities that the game allows is overwhelming… I’ve been playing tanks and I’ve been testing planes for several months.
Starting with biplanes, then first jets and ending with modern jets seeing how the mechanics / weapons / performance change. In short it is literally several games in one.
It could be much better but they are in no hurry, they have more people than ever and the direct competition is getting further and further away. This is not good.
Looks at the year
2025.
Sir, that happened 8 years ago when people realized War Thunder had a better ground experience.
The playerbase today are largely people new to the genre. World of Tanks wished it was ever this popular.
Some people don’t like the genre so they leave, others like it so they stay. Simple as that.
Currently there are about a dozen games directly competing in the same genre, and obviously the thousands competing for general attention.
War Thunder just surpassed all the competitors in features, new-user friendliness, and content.
@aLiVe
Copy vehicles are still less than a tenth of the game.
Matchmaker doesn’t force uptiers on you, it’s your decision if you want to play popular BRs or not.
BR compression is a significantly smaller issue than it was in 2022 thankfully.
Also you can’t say: “Gaijin is faster than all other devs.” and “They are in no hurry” those are opposite statements.
I personally have been playing the game since December 2014, and I disagree with you on many points. It’s true that many WWII vehicles are mixed with post-war vehicles, but saying that this is far from realistic is absolute nonsense. Many WWII vehicle types continued to see combat long after WWII ended in various regional conflicts, where they encountered more modern vehicles. Moreover, from a balancing perspective, it’s impossible to completely separate WWII vehicles from post-war ones. But number of post-war vehicles in WWII can be potentionally decreased by introducing additional mechanics, such as RPG/MANPAD squads for IFVs, to raise their BR, for example. If you’re looking for a purely WWII battlefield, perhaps this game isn’t right for you, at the moment. Personally, I joined the game for the more modern vehicles (back then, it was the T-54), and now I mostly play Tier 5 and above. I play Arcade for tanks and Simulator for aviation.
Saying that the U.S. can’t win a single match in top-tier battles is also nonsense. I don’t know about RB (I dont play it), but in ASB, that’s definitely not true. The last time I checked, they were winning about 80% of matches.
As for veteran players, expecting them to play the same game forever is absurd. Some old players leave, some come back after a while, new players join, and some veterans stick around.
The issue I see with the game is its repetitiveness and the outdated design of battles on maps that are too small. This really needs improvement.
Overall I think its now much better like it was for example before 5 years.
It was pretty damn popular back in 2011, but nothing on this scale, indeed. By 2014, many in the WoT community were feeling fatigue at the direction the game was heading and WT sealed the deal with the introduction of ground forces. I played the heck out of WoT, had entire lines completed shortly after the game went retail - I spent a lot of $$$, I preordered all 3 of the preorder packages. All of that. But I haven’t touched that game since WT added ground forces, it’s as simple as that. Gaijin showed Wargaming how to make a free-to-play game that can stand the test of time.
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I don’t know where I said it’s faster? Don’t start inventing. They have more content but they are in no hurry to correct things due to lack of competition.
The 10% of copy paste seems to me very prudent on your part but I will not argue, in any case the target vehicles are less and less and if you get out of them you suffer more. The MM does not force you but INVITES you to play with less variety.
The issue of ease of use is very questionable.
What dozen games are similar? Armored Warfare and Wot.
Not by a long shot they took away the entire WOT base 8 years ago. Maybe 4 years ago at most. Wot is in a severe slump. But make no mistake this game has not reached the prime that WOT had.
The competitive system was simply sublime. The clan events and Clan Wars were a masterpiece. It engaged everyone, unlike this one where the clans are practically dead. In my clan we played with 3 simultaneous teams of 14 people to defend or attack territories. The theme of the roles of the tanks with their different visibility, armor, speed, penetration etc… It had a spectacular tactical component. You could play a slow approach to the game, wearing down with artillery or a rush with fast loader tanks.
@aLiVe
War Thunder has a lot of competition, and they have introduced DOZENS of new features that flat out didn’t exist 4 years ago necessary for a smoother game.
The matchmaker doesn’t invite you to play with less variety at all, that’s not what matchmakers do and you’d know this if you studied video games.
DCS, IL-2, World of Tanks, the failure that is GHPC [they refuse to add realistic turret movement], so on and so forth. Just cause you refuse to look doesn’t mean they don’t exist.
Speed has never been the meta BTW, speed increases BRs and the BRs keep them balanced, which makes speed not meta. The things with speed have major flaws in other aspects.
Just to add my own personal experience to the discussion: I have been playing this game for several years now, and I exclusively play low-to-mid tier air battles because this is what I enjoy most. I have researched 8 different nations up to at least rank III. War Thunder will allways be a ww2-themed game to me. Also, I understand, both from reading the forums, and by extrapolating from the issues seen at low level, that top level gameplay is bad due to bad design choices made by the developpers and this is why I am not in a hurry to reach top level in any tech tree. Ironically, the fact that the developpers are now so focused on modern vehicles and neglect older ones is a blessing in disguise because their bad decisions disproportionately affect top level players. When it comes to the gamemodes that I enjoy, the game (while it can be frustrating at times) is still fun most of the time, and while I agree that top level gameplay is probably bad, if I ever quit playing WT it will not be for this reason.
The MM does force you when certain vehicles suffer more than others in uptier. It is not necessary to explain to you that people do not want to suffer continuously.
If you want to put in the same league all those games go ahead… it’s like saying that Projetc cars and Iracing are direct competition.
You made some valid points but if i may use your 5 year example i see it different. I talk here about Air RB and especially prop BRs.
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What i see is that you have way more vehicle options to play, but the game play regarding game objectives in itself is basically the same, the only major change happened in May 2020 when gaijin rendered bombers useless by rolling out respawning bases.
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The game play suffers heavily from c+p spamming of certain models like P-51s or 109s which killed together with adding totally irrelevant nations like Sweden or Israel any immersion factor within the game. The fact that most WW 2 props in the Chinese tree were available only after WW 2 fits perfect.
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The PvP interactions saw various changes by nerfing or buffing certain nations either direct via weapon “adjustments” and BR changes or indirect with nation allocations and adding countless prototypes. Watch some 5 year old DEFYN vids of USSR aircraft and compare the power of 20 mm ShVaks…
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So whilst the game play and immersion went south gaijin created newer maps without the passion they showed like on Norway, Stalingrad or Operation Iskra. The newer maps are clearly optimized to accelerate engagement and limit options for tactical/strategic game play substantially.
So i don’t see any improvement for me regarding the game.
What changed significantly is the average player skill and the importance of individual game impact. So if you are not a dedicated fighter player your chances to win or lose are reduced to a random event.
16 vs 16, clouds, ground targets in straight lines, premium spam (Wyvern & XP-50) and imho (not often mentioned) the MM decides the majority of matches just by the set-up.
5 years ago turnarounds 1 vs 3 or 4 were mostly hard earned wins in 1 hour matches - these days they happen quite often, even when experienced players are involved.
I won yesterday 1 vs 6 without any efforts, 3 guys crashed, 2 other guys flew into my guns and the last enemy in a 4.0 Yak-3 did basically everything wrong, despite having ~700:~200 kills in it.
So from me a clear no, the game got worse.
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Steam growth in 2024 was basically zero, WT’s worst year on that platform since 2021.
Yes, there are other market segments (consoles, direct-use-of-client), but they’ve been around about as long so it’s likely curves are similar unless someone can point at a specific reason why they wouldn’t be. (The obvious depressing factor that could have pushed people off Steam faster than they came on this year was likely the CIS offshoring starting in July, but note it had already been a flat curve for several months prior to that given the lack of any April event boost.)
That doesn’t mean that the game is doing badly, just people should recognize that it basically hit a plateau in early 2024 on at least one primary platform after two full years of strong growth, and is still holding that position now. That can be because there’s just a finite limit to the number of players this kind of game is going to appeal to as is. If that’s the case, and there’s no competition, it can stay at that plateau for quite a while. It’s still a remarkable industry accomplishment for a 12 year old game to get a second lease on life the way this one has. It was really very niche until the covid year of 2020 doubled player numbers (again, in this one segment only for certain), and then they doubled again in 2022:
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