[What aspect(s) do you think Gaijin needs to focus on the most? you can answer with multiple options.]
Radar system seems bugged
Missiles seeker system seems bugged
Aircraft HUDs, many of them are bugged
“Switch mission bombing target” key give you targets that not exist
This game need a huge QoL update.
My answer for what they need to work on :
Helicopters, and specifically their very poor implementation.
Fix the lidircm and just as importantly fix the helicopter blades not giving a Doppler radar return.
A lidircm helicopter can just hover in place wit impunity to any spaa that isn’t saclos. It’s absurd and needs fixing urgently.
What I enjoy:
Air simulator Enduring confrontation 3.0-5.7, particularly when it feels like my actions have a direct impact on the battle flow be it protecting ground-strikes going to town on frontlines or trying to stop the enemy ground strikers doing the same. Additionally, impromptu teamwork without VC.
I cannot emphasize the lack of VC enough. The big way Warthunder wins out over Il2:Great Battles for me is my ability to just boot up the game, take off and fly and experience legitimate teamwork without a single word spoken through the auto-chat (Follow me! Cover me! Attention to Gridsquare! Leading for Landing). Half the reason I dont play Il2 as much as I otherwise would is frustration with being soft-forced into using SRS and voice comms.
I also enjoy the fact that I can fly unusual and non ETO-oriented aircraft in sim.
I also enjoy the generally jovial community around most brackets.
What I don’t enjoy: 6.0 being full of Ju-288 ruining lobbies, making it take excessive effort to find a lobby with adequate opposition that isn’t just zombing or being the only person on my team in a fighter (germany does truly suffer at this BR…).
What I don’t enjoy: 4.0-5.0 being probably the most toxic bracket for SB EC at WW2 tiers. Whenever I see people being jerks to each other in chat, it’s almost predominantly in this bracket. Additionally, this bracket seems to generally draw out unsportsman-like behaviours. I blame it on Spitfire Lf Mk IX and Ki-84.
What I don’t enjoy: Packetloss in official TSS tournaments. These are not on my side - my opponent also experiences these! Please make them actually stable and reliable.
What I don’t enjoy: TSS tournaments not having a monthly schedule making it difficult to plan for the weekends when it’s planes I enjoy flying as 1 week of warning is quite short.
What I don’t enjoy: The myriad bugs affecting SB EC that have been ignored for years at this time. I won’t link them but they’re there on the issues page so gaijin is aware.
What I don’t enjoy: Useful Actions system’s anti-synergy with SB EC spawn costs. My favourite example: Ho 229 costs 17.3K to spawn. Maximum possible earning (1050+ score, survive 15 minutes, land) is 19.8k. Ergo, anything less than perfect play will lose you SL. Its consequences are readily observable at the early jet/korean war BRs.
What I don’t enjoy: Sim EC being excluded from battlepass tasks. If the task is PvP then let me do it in SB EC (last time around there was a thing about getting kills with an event vehicle. We had the mossie. I wanted to fly it. I couldn’t because kills don’t count if done in SB EC.)
What I don’t enjoy: Flight models becoming corrupted for sake of easier Instructor implementation leading to unrealistic behaviour.
What I don’t enjoy: CAS in GRB is way too easy to spawn. Legit, earlier I’d spawned a M18 Hellcat, captured C point, died without doing anything. I could then go on and spawn a F4U-4B with 2x1000 lbers as reward for doing nothing. Make it make sense
What I don’t enjoy: CoD-ification of GRB maps. Too small, too many red crayons, too directed. Too much emphasis on quick and rapid action as if GRB was just Ground Arcade (no markers) rather than legitimately Ground Realistic.
What I don’t enjoy: GSB being effectively unplayable without a completed and finished ground tree by virtue of the lineup system that doesn’t actually achieve anything (you’d think lineups mean historical match-ups, right? Wrong! Enjoy the millions of premium german Kv-1s, the italian shermans and the… in a mode without markers and friendly fire. Fun for the whole family!)
On Russian Bias:
Personally I think Russian Bias does exist and is a HUGE issue at toptier Ground, their MBTs are solid Mi28NM with its magic forcefield can only be countered by either Tracker and Prox HE or a SACLOS SPAA and guess who has those? right Russia themselves… so amazing balance right there. Add on to that, that the Pantsir got its magic mach 6 missile while also having the option to carry the smaller ones at the same time, this shouldn’t be at 12.7 much less in the game at all since no nation has anything remotely comparable. As for why the bias is mainly found in their most modern vehicles… I’ll let you figure that one out.
The Bug Reporting and sourcing bias also is very frustrating. A lot of reports get accepted for certain nations on the most vague and dubious sources imaginable while well sourced researched reports get denied for others, one might think there’s an agenda or system behind it…
As for copy paste and the senrai maidens stuff:
Personally I am somewhat of a fan of it, the senrai packs being healthy for toptier since it gives premium players a second spawn for their lineups. As for copy paste premiums in generall, imo premiums should always be 1:1 TT copies of vehicles to not lock anything behind a paywall, especially not when it is literally a better version of the TT variant at the exact same BR (Al-Khalid, F4S, Netz (Mod), etc.). My hope is that they should now put it the minimum effort to properly model actual TT vehicles… like there’s no way a new 80 Euro premium has to be released for the related TT vehicle to get its fixes that have been sitting for years.
On game modes:
Yeah 16v16 Deathmatch on the smallest maps imaginable… There’s 0 gameplay variety, all you can do is PvP, there’s no other viable options. It is designed that way to make you spend GE on mods to have a fighting chance (no chaff at toptier, HEAT FS stock without LRF at like 11.7 just to name a few)
Decompression:
Yeah it’s horrid. Nothing much to say here, Air should be around 16.0 by now (at the very least) and ground probably 14.0.
I would also mention here the maps for ground battles, which I also consider very important and very poorly designed in recent years (naval maps are also bad, but I don’t play naval anymore)
We have a lot urban maps. Their rotation and frequency of repetition is generally very bad, especially for light vehicles. Maps that allow flanking are extremely rare. Everything somehow goes so that the games last a short time in a fast pace.
Whether I will enter the game or not now depends a lot on the map that the game offers in addition to the uptiers that we have constantly. I have more nations to play and that is now my “line up”. Sometimes I don’t manage to find a good game even after 6 attempts, but at least the wait for a new attempt is shorter.
Sometimes I play WW ll exclusively for the maps, the good old ones, which I miss so much nowadays
I mostly play BR 9.3 - 12.0 and sometimes WWII
The ‘Don’t play’ option is missing. The grind option should be split into three, because the grind is different in the three modes
Amazing Poll Thank you for making it!!! <3
This poll is great and all- and the numbers are not at all surprising.
Community sentiment has been simmering for years at this point.
Feels like the only people truly happy with the game are the ones willfilly ignoring the myriad problems.
But we all know gaijin will simply ignore this, once again…
This is a steam review I wrote in which I describe my frustrations with the games recent developments.
As someone who has loved this game for the past 7 years and have over 10000h on record I am very disappointed with war thunders recent developments.
It used to offer unique vehicles regularly in events, the different tech trees had differing playstyles and traits, the battles were complex and impactful. But over the years most of the cool, historical, more tactical maps like the pacific battles, Norway, … were removed from rotation, now every game is just a capture the point or deathmatch, the game time caps were lowered leading to shorter less interesting engagements, encouraging lazy un-fun gameplay, making some slower pace vehicles completely redundant. The tech trees were slop-afied and so filled with copy-paste vehicles that everything feels the same, historical vehicle encounters became the exception and no longer the rule, making way for waves of uninspired boring loops of slop.
More over in recent history a greater and greater portion of vehicles added in each update are premiums locked under laughably high pay walls, the famous F-14D Super Tomcat, BMPT or variant of the Leopard 2 will set you back 80$, an amount for which you could otherwise buy multiple full price high quality games. Furthermore, lots of the older more unique event vehicles such as the IS-7, E-100, PaK Puma, Porsche Tiger, AGS now cost hundreds if not thousands of dollars, offering unfair advantages and one-of-a-kind gameplay experiences to veterans and whales.
Lastly the devs in the past removed multiple indigenously developed and beloved vehicles such as the Flakpanther, Panther II or the R2Y2 series of attack jets, against the community’s wishes for being historically inaccurate and replacing them with already existing copy-paste vehicles from other nations, while at the same time adding even more blatantly made up vehicles especially to the naval mode such as the soviet ships Stalingrad and Sovietsky Soyuz or the never completed modification of the battleship Gneisenau investing hundreds of thousands in to a dead game mode very few play and furthering the games inconsistencies while lowering diversity and replacing it with slop.
To conclude a once great game has slowly descended in to uninspired slop and a blatant cash grab, which I doubt the devs will fix.
copy paste better than paper vehicles
its not like either a similar vehicle or a vehicle with a similar playstyle isnt available in the tech tree for those examples, at least say something like the t58, turm 3 or 2s38, premium things that dont have tech tree parallels at all
developed is a strong word for vehicles that gaijin either made up or vehicles that never even got made into actual prototype
boats play by different rules because otherwise the soviets basically just wouldnt get top tier naval
pretty sure most of those maps are actually still in rotation, just quite rare and only available at specific BRs
uhhh it kinda always has been
copy paste vehicles people were asking for
i mean have you seen a modern day civil war, this is basically historical,
plus the idea of historical matchmaking that everyone thinks of was never going to work long term, just look at gamemodes like nuclear thunder where queue times for the US team were like 1 hour and USSR teams kinda just got decimated till gaijin banned the iriaf, and even then the queue times didnt get better for the US team
which gaijin already do
is it really though? Why would you rather take low effort content that plays exactly like something you already have over high effort content that actually offers something new?
why not both, i personally kinda support the addition of some level of paper vehicle, but i also dont think ‘copypaste’ vehicles are explicitly a problem (though something should be done about having to grind the same variant of a single vehicle across multiple trees though)
Thats going to be a F-14A from VX-4 “The Evaluators” … They did many weapon tests, and not all weapon systems go into operational service, many are rejected and or used on other aircraft
yes because its realistic
Czechoslovakia can easily start at 1.0, compared to say Poland as example, it has much more unique low tier and much more vehicles. (My list has over 520 vehicles for Czechoslovakia ground only)
I am tired of the constant crying on these forums. The complaints here make absolutely no sense. The community here is just a tiny echo chamber that wants the game stuck in 2014.
First, you complain that updates are just “lazy copy-paste slop.” But when Gaijin adds unique stuff like the BMPT, the T-58, or new game modes, you scream that it is “overpowered” and “ruining the game.” You complain if a vehicle is too unique, and you complain if it is too similar.
Second, stop whining about the grind and calling it a “deception trap.” This is a free-to-play game. Progression is the entire point. Without a grind, there is nothing to look forward to. If you are burnt out after 10 years, that is your own problem.
Third, your “Russian Bias” conspiracy is fake. Russia gets more vehicle variants because their historical blueprints are public and easy to get. NATO vehicles require a nightmare of corporate licensing from companies like Boeing. Gaijin is a business. They are going to model the vehicles that do not require a mountain of legal paperwork.
Lastly, stop gatekeeping the fun. Not everyone wants to fly Spitfires for 500 hours. Most new players join because they want flashy 4th-gen jets and radar missiles. Vehicles like the new premium F-14D Tomcat let people skip the boring parts and play what they want.
The skyrocketing player numbers prove the game is growing and healthy. The silent majority is having fun playing the game. The only real “skill issue” here is the veterans who refuse to adjust to the modern meta. Downvote me all you want!
‘Unique’ and ‘overpowered’ are not interchangable. People complain about the T-58 and BMPT, not because they’re unique, but only because they’re overpowered. And yes, a copied vehicle that is only different because of ai generated imagery and voicelines that you have to pay 70 bucks for definitely falls under the catagory “lazy copy-paste slop”
I honestly personally don’t have that big of a problem with the grind, although I do have both premium time AND the end-of-the-line bonus. Still, not everyone can get those, so it should be decreased at least somewhat.
Russia literally gets fake ammunition and extra internal armor that doesn’t spall, all the while NATO stuff gets progressively worse. I honestly agree that it is often somewhat overstated, but I think it’s there to at least some dagree.
This point I don’t really get, no one is preventing you from having fun? Decreasing the grind would only allow new players to get to top tier jets more quickly.
If you are having fun, than that’s great for you, most of us are likely jelous. That doesn’t mean that all critique is automatically discarded because some people do have fun. You also can’t be down voted on the forums.
Interesting to get a different perspective though, thank you for your input!
First, negative comments are the forum version of downvoting, so let’s be real.
Second, you completely missed my point about the T-58. If a powerful vehicle is free in the tech tree, everyone spams it, and 8.7 gets completely ruined by numbers. Keeping it premium limits how many are in a match. That is basic balance.
Third, telling new players to buy premium time is an awful option. Premium time is a ticking clock that burns away when you aren’t playing, and it doesn’t buy skill. It just rushes a bad player to high tiers faster so they can get deleted. A premium vehicle lasts forever, doesn’t expire, and lets them learn the modern meta at their own pace.
Fourth, the AI art isn’t even that bad. Using AI for loading screens and profile icons means Gaijin saves time and money on background stuff. That lets them spend their real budget on useful things like highly detailed 3D vehicle models, coding advanced flight systems, and updating servers. RST camera, and upgraded missiles on the dev server. It plays completely differently than the B model.
Lastly, the internal armor and spalling stuff on Russian tanks isn’t a conspiracy. It is just how Gaijin coded the carousel autoloader plates based on public data. You are still just repeating the same old forum myths