as of today I logged onto war thunder with 193k SL and after a few hours of gameplay I ended up with 153k SL because of repair costs. I’m a rank 4 American air player and what I noticed with the P-51D-30 was that I had to get 3 kills every match just to keep up with the repair cost of 6k SL. I see no purpose of keeping repair costs in the game as they provide no value to the experience of War Thunder. Having repair costs in the game only hurts the player base as this mechanic will lead to more people quitting the game because they simply can’t get enough SL to have any vehicles. Its utterly stupid that they still keep this in the game and the community should take action to get this crap removed.
The repair cost does to some degree hinder players from doing suicide attacks and reckless advances as keeping your vehicle alive actually matters for the economic gain. I think it might be a way for Gaijin to simulate that a crew wouldn’t be as careless as players sometimes are. It might also be a way to balance out the SL gain of some vehicles, a economic balancer if you will to try to avoid having SL farming vehicles that everyone plays because they on average earn more SL. Not sure though.
Some agree with that point while others think it makes no difference. I don’t think i have personally thought about it enough to state either way yet.
In general, if you struggle with SL and feel like grinding some you can switch to arcade for a while as arcade tends to Gain you more net SL but less RP while Realistic is the other way around. Going for ground AI is an easy way to farm SL as well together with wagers and orders activated for destroying ground units.
I have personally used the wagers that has the “Thunderer” achievement as a condition as those are semi reliable to actually max out and VERY seldom lose you the SL you bet. Those wagers together with the “Anti mech” order is one of the ways i personally farm SL if i need to. (I admittedly have premium time on and a 20% booster but with the F-15E and the GBU-39 i just had a match that totaled me 162k+ SL for a 15 min match in realistic mode).