What is going on with War Thunder? I’m a somewhat new player (~150 hours and am at rank 4 in the U.S. tech tree ) and I am hitting a huge stump with this game. The only new content added is for top-tier jets, which at this rate, will take me years to even reach. There is 0 appeal to putting so much effort into something just to be able to find new content. I constantly try to play Air RB, but am met only with people who are incredibly high ranks and are much more skilled than me. It is insanely rare that I find anybody who is the same skill level as me, which makes the game nearly unplayable. I cannot get better because I’m only fighting people with thousands of hours in the game. There’s no skill-based matchmaking other than BR, which barely matters as you can easily go to a low BR with thousands of hours of experience. New players are met with a few bot games, followed by being destroyed by the people who have spent years playing the game, with nothing but a tutorial on how to move your vehicle. I mainly play air battles, and the skill cap is too much for a player like me. I don’t want to waste all of my free time to get to the top tier only to get to the actual new content. The marketing shows you these modern fighter jets, which make you want to play those. You download the game and are met with biplanes and a quick early grind, filling you with hope to get to those top-tier jets. Soon, at around rank 3, the grind becomes exponentially harder and continues on this spiral up to the new jets. It goes from getting 1 plane a day to maybe 1 a week if you are a casual player. The only way to make this grind slower is by spending money on a game that prides itself as “free to play” or spending months of game time perfecting the broken mechanics that give you research and silver lions.
Well they do have to make money somehow to continue enabling new content.
If you truly want to play a jet, you’ll need to either continue the grind, buy a premium, or join a squadron and research one of the many squadron only vehicles available including some higher tier jets.
Personally I only use Air RB if I’m spading a plane as the gameplay isn’t my style and repetitive.
That is the game ,take it or leave it. I came to play ARB and arcade the same as you .Found ARB to be crap and decided to give tanks a go .I have played GRB ever since. Personally I think you missed the golden era of Warthunder if there ever was one.
You can see how many games I have done but I played one game tonight and after that I was just bored.
You get good and the WT Company just screw about and change everything so your effort is worthless.Got no real trust in the game makers at present. Hoping it will settle but not optimistic.
No there is no match making ,no real teams ,no historical immersion and the BR issue is a mess.
Wait until you face Jets in your prop plane.
Nothing is going to change.
I wish Gaijin was less focused on new modern vehicles, and more focused on the overall game, and the mechanics. Constantly getting content updates that only affect a small portion of the game isn’t enjoyable if you don’t play high tier.
Learn from the good players. Look at what they have done, and try and see where you have made mistakes. SBMM will never work in war thunder due to the variety of vehicles and gamemodes one can play. War thunder is very lacking in tutorials, and I hope new and better ones are added.
trust me, don’t bother playin the U.S TECH tree. The russians that own this game don’t care about depicting U.S Equipment or tech like it should, everything can 1 shot the abrams, even ww2 tanks, fake TOW 2Bs dont do what the yshould, None of the SEPs have D.U Hulls none of the American top tier MBTs have their spall liners, none of the U.S Heli’s have their IRL real missiles , meanwhile everyone else is firing fire&forget missiles Direct attack missiles or some other O P B.S that ignore your smoke and still 1 taps you from a S.U 25 KH missile. Its not worth the pain. Then you have a bunch of idiotic russians who say " U.S IS FINE L2P " even though these are the biggest whiners in this games player base.
My problem with the premium is that it’s not just a small booster. It’s either buy a premium account or a premium plane, or go through the grind without any help and spend more than twice the time to get to the same objective. There should really be some sort of skill based match making on top of the BR system so that you cant be against a team filled with experienced players while still in a biplane with a solid hour of gameplay, and the lack of one makes the grind even more difficult.
I find it funny how you made this entirely about top tier USA, when the OP is saying that it takes forever to reach.
There is more to WT than top tier, many players and Gaijin need to realize that.
The US tree is incredibly good, it has the best air tree by far, and a solid ground tree up until high tier.
Those Russians!
You write funny things.
The author fell for marketing, went into a free to play game and is surprised that after enticing the player on the first 3 ranks, it crushes all his hopes for advancement through the ranks without donation. More precisely, I can advance, but you have to sacrifice time.
Of course, you will be destroyed by more skillful players. It’s still a competitive game, albeit without matching the skill level of the player. You can either accept reality and start playing by the rules of the game and learn to play, or just close the game and never come back to it (my advice).
It shouldn’t be. First of all, it is impossible to make it, because in addition to the skill rating you will have to take into account the combat ratings of tanks and planes. This can lead to the fact that some setups, at a certain level of skill of the player, just empty and the fight you will never find
Secondly, it’s a very complicated thing. And players, especially casual players, will always be dissatisfied. However, we are always dissatisfied with developers.
Premium time is worth it if you want to stick with the game. You get more RP and SL it may not seem like a lot upfront but it pays its self off in the long run of things.
Dont be in a hurry to get to top tier because there is a lot of fun to be had in air rb at lower ranks. You also learn a lot that will apply in the higher br’s
WT is not a hurry up and get to the end kind of game. You have multiple tress to go through that have a lot of great vehicles to use.
I really just wish that the game had the “rules” you mentioned as a part it teaches you. I’m getting decent at Boom & Zoom fighting, but I can still be destroyed by other players with more knowledge. I, at the beginning of the game, had to source my knowledge from places not even related to war thunder. The UI is cluttered, so finding these forums was only possible through google. War Thunder itself even uses third party applications like youtube to teach you how to play. They make learning how to play extraordinarily difficult, so on top of a large grind, you have a large learning curve as well that can prevent you from progressing.
In terms of closing the skill gap between you and higher level players, I do recommend that you find someone in the game you can befriend and maybe teach you the ropes. You might not get better immediately but having a friend have your back or help bait the enemy to get you to land your shots is pretty good. Like I’ve been doing that every now and then to get people to teach me how to energy fight cause I keep falling into the habit of turnfighting dammit!
Oh, and general advice is don’t play for the grind, that gets you burnt out. Enjoy what you have! (if you can, some BR truly have vehicles that shouldn’t be there)
Game teaches you the basics. You don’t need much more than that. If You want to learn, look for information. There are plenty of youtubers and other sources that will tell you what to do and how to do it. There’s nothing extraordinarily difficult about it. If it is difficult for you, then you should give up the game altogether, because it will get worse and the game will not bring you pleasant feelings.
P.s forums are useless. Only if for fun and a drop of communication
And I agree, the interface is done abysmally for the most part
Play arcade games at first, is fun, random and skill doesn’t matter, also the grind is faster at low/mid br. Leave air realistic until when you know what are you doing, how to aim a gun etc. After playing a few hundred games in arcade games you will know to preaim and RBs will not be as scary as you see it now. TBH sometimes I like more arcade than air rb. I remember in 2015 on my other acc I grinded all the US tree with the p51 planes+talismans in arcade games and was fun also, realistic mode sometimes feeels like waste of time.
Maybe joining a squadron is the way.closest you will get to having warthunder lessons
Oh for sure, although that usually comes with knowing the squad members first so I think it’d be easier overall to just go in chat and hopefully run into someone friendly (which I find to be fairly easy in the lower BRs)
The one benefit with Premium account is that you don’t go negative in SL. Buy that Premium account when it’s on sale (which is what I do) makes it fairly cheap.
That being said, if you stick it out the game will become more enjoyable as you gain experience. Again i don’t play Air RB and if I do, I generally just conduct ground strikes and try and avoid the whole mindless Team Death Match that usually occurs.
If you really want to take advantage of air, then I suggest maybe switch to the ground mode. Now you’ll hear all kinds of moaning and groaning from those that hate CAS, but at least in Ground RB, there are no markers so attacking planes/helos makes it much more interesting and to be honest, many Ground RB players once in the air become very focused on usually just getting a revenge bombing in, which makes them less aware of threats from the air.
Try other nations and other game modes. Trying something new can be a refreshing experience.
I also think that Gajijn should introduce rankings. That would be better for beginners and for an old hand like me, rankings would be a challenge again.
It depends on your willingness to invest time or money.
The sole purpose of the game is to earn money - from minors with access to credit cards. So your whole post describes the average experience of new players quite accurately.
The main question is always:
What you are going to do when you are able to understand how this game works?
A last advice:
Try to study this data:
You can easily identify which nations are strong at which BRs. Playing US props is and was always a pain - the planes are good, but the teams…