I think the crew level system is rubbish, but the comparisons are really not very relevant.
The first ones you mentioned don’t have the MMO component, which obviously changes things quite a bit.
The MMO component is mainly there to make the player pay more. Well, in WT there isn’t really a persistent world, except for the hangar with the crews and their levels.
It’s a bit of an excuse, and we could do without it.
And the comparison with competitive games doesn’t make sense to me.
WT isn’t a competitive game, even though there’s an esports scene; the game and its structure aren’t designed for it at all. Simply organizing tournaments isn’t enough to make a game competitive at its core.
On top of that, games that are perfectly balanced, including the ones you mentioned, are, in my opinion, incredibly boring to play for fun. Everything is balanced, smoothed out, there’s no excitement or anything.
I much prefer Rising Storm Vietnam, where there’s no balance between the two sides, but which is a thousand times more enjoyable to play than any CS match.
Generally speaking, I find that the competitive scene only brings bad things to games. After all, it’s just a way to make money, where players are just products and “fans” are just customers to whom manufactured “stars” are sold. Great system, ultra-healthy, ultra-respectful, in short, in my opinion, it embodies all the essential values (ironic, of course).
CS, I’d add, is the perfect example.
We went from a game with tons of private servers, crazy atmospheres, connections you made, servers that were pretty try-hard during the week and fun on the weekend, to a game where the only contact is insults. Everyone’s try-harding, nobody communicates anymore.
Before, you’d download your skins on FPS Banana and share them with friends; now it’s become a huge money-making scheme with all the abuses it’s caused and will continue to cause.
Gone are the days of 1.5 when I played LANs with friends, or later on Source, the zombie or surfing nights.
And the game is so balanced that since 1.2, we’re playing AK/M4 on maps that have barely changed because the slightest change is criticized by the community. Just look at how open they were in the last update, lol.
And I could cite competitive games that are pay-to-win, like Magic: The Gathering, Kards, and all card games in general. Which doesn’t make them bad games, far from it.
