In Warthunder, you can purchase crew skills.
Crew skills take an enormous amount of time to unlock.
Getting maxed G/Stamina is 500K RP in RB/ASB. Keen vision and Awareness - things you’d assume to be irrelevant to ASB but apparently they determine render distances and cause planes to phase out of existence while hunting or even dogfighting - takes another 500K to max.
After maxing these and experting your crew (which might require more grinding as my rank VII plane takes a Crew level of 30 to expert, you can then begin working on acing it it. This takes…
F4U-4: 280K RP
F3H-2: 890K RP
F8E: 1,080K RP.
Now, by the time you unlock your first jet you likely have maxed your G/stamina, but that still leaves the acing (and the enormous SL cost of experting).
Take P-51-D5s. Rank 3 aircraft.
One is flown by a new player (or a veteran player starting america) ground either with premium acc or normal acc normally.
One is flown by someone who flew the P-51-D-5 for hundreds of battles (at minimum, using ASB rates and assuming it gives similar reward as Bf109F4 given similar RP modifier - 10% difference - ~2200 RP per 15 minute with landing - 320K/2.2k*15 /60= 36 hours)
One is flown by a new player who spent a bunch of golden eagles on crew XP and instant acing.
The second player’s 36 hours is equivalent to the third player who immediately bought it.
Taking the P-51-D5 and making a split S at 580 km/h TAS at 4 KM barometric altitude inflicts around 6-7 Gs from my WTRTI testing with “load factor” displayed.
The first guy flying the P-51D-5 has a “Peak G” of 4.5 without crew skills trained. I’ve a “veteran starting new nation” plane in form of my bf109F4 that has some crew skills trained. My Bf109F4 can sustain 4.8Gs unexpected, 5.4 with expert. This is level 2 G/Stamina. This is equivalent to ~70K RP. Notice how this is nowhere near the 500K total we need for the rest. Level 2.5G/stamina will cost 40K RP, level 3.0 (including the level 2.5 step) will cost 98K RP. Do you see the issue?
Now, my experted & maxed crew can sustain 5.9G. This took me 500K RP to get PLUS a pretty hefty SL tax (I can’t even afford to expert my F3H-2, F8U-2 and F8E because experting the F3H-2 costs 450K SL.).
With Ace, it goes up to 6.2 if I ever get it. For my F4U-4, it will be 280K RP and… ±10% RP as Bf109F4 which has data for me on hand, that’s going to be 280k/2.2k*15/60 = 31 hours. Of Flying nothing but the corsair and always getting at least 600 score and making it back to my runway and landing and thus never ever dying.
Now, is “0.3 G” a significant amount? On its own, no. With Stamina? Very much yes. Stamina makes a big difference for your maneuver when you exceed your max G. It gives you a lot of leeway to over-G and not pass out immediately.
Now back to the P-51-D5.
Our first guy engages another player, gets on their tail in a dive and their target inverts and makes a split S to lose them. Our first guy follows, since they are familiar with this maneuver and have zero issues following enemy aircraft doing this in their main nation (in my example: P-51 cannonstang being the plane I never had over-G issues doing split S chases as I can sustain 5.9G with a lot of stamina, while my Bf109F-4 can only sustain 5.4G). Our first guy passes out (but even before passing out, the screen turning black makes tracking their opponent much harder, if not borderline impossible. I don’t get vignettes at all in my experted max crew doing it in a G-suitless plane at the same Gs and time under G). Passing out, they proceed to fly straight and be helpless to fight back as their target loops around and either shoots them down, or simply finds a blindspot the first guy cannot find them in.
Second/third player: They execute the same maneuver and have zero hint of vignette and maintain control of their aircraft throughout the whole high-G turn using the exact same aircraft against the exact same opponent in the exact same circumstances.
Now, you might say “Well, second player never paid a dime!” and that’s true.
However, for the first player to be on par with the second player in terms of how their unit behaves in a pvp game, they must play that unit for… 500K/2.2K*15/60 = 56 hours, where each next step of improving the unit takes longer and longer. Getting to level 2 G/stamina only took 71K RP, getting to level 3 takes 98K RP on top of that. And we havn’t talked about the rendering being tied to this broken system at all yet! See previous calculations for how long that takes (it comes out around 9K/hour with generous up-rounding).
I’ve had a very recent match where crew skill came up. Was diving with an XP-50 at 600 km/H and the XP-50 suddenly pulled up and I pulled with them. My lvl 2 stam/g-force unexperted bf109F4 promptly blacked out while the XP-50 flew around unbothered.
In no respectable PvP game do you ever get this level of disparity.
My problem isn’t the blacking out. It’s that one player blacks out, the other doesn’t solely due to their account status outside a match (there’s no G-suit modification in this matchup to complicate things either)
MMOs are going out of their way to take the grind out of their PvP arenas and give characters participating either equal stats, or pre-made builds with pre-made equipment.
LoL got rid of its rune pages. It still retains premium access to roster which is fine as long as done properly.
AoE2:DE has premium rosters that perform the same regardless of who uses it the same way. MWO (at least in 2016) simply had premium rosters - same mech & loadout performed the same no matter who drove it.
TF2/Overwatch/Dota2/America’s Army variants/ have zero disparity beyond cosmetics.
Movie Battles 2 is Purchase to play and has zero “Out of match” impact on how you play in-match. Same for RO2, Insurgency. I’m bringing these up because you brought up CoD.
Darker and Darker has no out-of-match premium status affecting in-match performance.
