I understand this could be due to greed or a lack of care. But I’m not here to speculate; instead, to ask why.
When you look at the changes to the game, you see a constant trend of trying to minimize rewards as much as possible without people noticing/getting upset about, for example, severe damage, and then with these changes often comes brand-spanking new premium or a little sale on premiums/premium accounts, and that’s fine. Except this has been going on for years now. That’s why it’s getting frustrating when we have yet another update that adds vehicles without any idea what they will do to balance. The economic changes usually keep things the same or are very minor in what they change. Then, once we finally get “balance changes,” they generally make something that was already good stronger and then something that was already weak even worse. As I said, this is what I typically notice them doing, and it is not always the case, as sometimes we get a miracle, and they improve things. So my question is, WHY??
Since Gaijin as a company should hopefully have people they pay to use their brains to look at what works in marketing and game development, why haven’t they looked at CSGO/CS2, which has been a F2P game for six years now, for inspiration to change how they incentivize spending money on the game? Valve pretty much wholly funds that game on their cosmetics and Esports—both things War Thunder isn’t afraid of having in their games AND is trying to get this game into an Esports scene—but for some unknown reason, they dont see that the reason why CSGO was successful after moving to a F2P platform and made more money after switching to F2P was because of not having predatory gameplay, the fact of the matter is that they have consistent gameplay that has a low skill floor and high skill ceiling not because of trying to satisfy people that dont have skill with larger and larger teams and broken premiums. If Gaijin stopped trying to treat this game like some shitty mobile game, stopped development on adding things that the game isn’t ready for, and focused and ironing out the gameplay NOW, not four years down the line, this game could maybe have an Esports scene and keep player retention. However, honestly, they took inspiration from CSGO/Valve. Just look at the Gaijin market, for instance. Unfortunately, they then developed War Thunder as if they were developing mobile games while they have a literal niche in the gaming industry because of War Thunder.
I do have to say, though, that the most embarrassing thing about Gaijin’s development strategy is that their marketing continues to joke about the game being “esports ready” but have an extremely high player turnover rate because they mistreat both the players and the gameplay of War Thunder and dont take the game seriously.
Gaijin decided to develop a game under the free to play incentive profit structure so they are forced to implement hardship on players to incentivize spending.
Severe damage nets more additional kills than the measily 1K SL that you lose when someone else finishes it off. This is compounded by RP bonuses counting for said finished off kills.
They are still quite lenient actually, they can actually choose to go all out by adding some pay2win features lol maybe add another VIP package where players are allowed to choose the type of matchmaking, example only participate in a full downtier, or the ability to pick which teams on your side etc.
Severe damage does not work how you say it does and usually just causes people who get severed damage to spend more SL on repair costs as well as usually resulting in you loosing more SL when you severe damage a plane instead of it just counting as a destroyed aircraft as before.
Blockquote has a play incentive profit structure, so they are forced to implement hardship on players to incentivize spending.
This is wrong. While I don’t spend money on cosmetics and think they are negative, they are 100% better than bull shit mobile game gameplay, where they make the game unbalanced/braindead difficult for no reason other than incentivizing spending money. Fortnite, Apex, CSGO, The Finals, and many other F2P games don’t incentivize spending on the game through making the gameplay actually shit, and the only ones I do see do that are games made by Gaijin or like Gaijin and mobile games companies. Gaijin already has the framework to move away from incentivizing spending on the game through gameplay and cosmetics. Also not once did I suggest removing premium accounts or premium vehicles as plenty of players enjoy those vehicles and the rewards, all I am saying is they shouldn’t make spending on those things predatory as that is going to cause more players to stop playing.
4 free to play games that don’t incentivize spending money through gameplay mechanics
notice that difference in player counts and that’s not considering the other platforms that are playing on Apex
Wolfpack, Vidar, TURMS, 2S38, T80UD, list goes on and thats not including lower brs and air
Not to mention this also has nothing to do with them being premiums and more to do with the fact that the game does little in the terms of balance.
@VenomThanos as I post here, these are games that focus on balanced gameplay (even if they mess up from time to time) and don’t incentivise spending money through “grind”
Honestly I’ve stopped playing since a long time, it’s been several months without touching the game and tbh I feel better. Gaijin’s not gonna change anything, cause they keep earning profit somehow.
Also, like I already said, I dont think premiums are inherently bad as they can let you flush out a line-up or let you collect things in the game, but when you make your entire game play around trying to make people spend money on something that is either poorly balanced/gives better rewards that is predatory and ruins player retention. That’s why mobile games fail, and most F2P games that do that also fail. The only reason War Thunder isn’t dying because of their predatory behaviors is because they have a niche in the game industry.
TURMS and Wolfpack in the list, really? The T-80 hybrid at 10.0 is the better T-72 variants I can somewhat agreed because the two T-72B is just inferior in comparison, and I don’t know what’s the hoohaas of 2S38, that thing is incredibly easy to kill when I was playing Abrams or Leopard 2A4, I would rather see the 2S38 than any T-72s/T-80s showing up, at least I don’t have waste time pointing at a particular spot of 2S38 especially from the front.
You know what I think has ruined the game too? Premiums are either extremely unbalanced or a simple copy paste. Not like in the past when you were offered somewhat balanced, original vehicles.
Well I missed the boat, only started playing when it’s already 10.0, TURMs is not user friendly at all, Leopard 2A4 on the other hand is brilliant, i think it has a lot to do with playstyle, you gonna find certain vehicles a lot harder to deal with base on your playstyle, I’m a more passive players who usually sit around and don’t move much unless I absolutely has to, 2S38 is mostly a victim of my stealth kill because you just center mass that thing to delete it, then things like T-80 you have a higher probability of missing the credit card size weakspot, so you often receive return fire.
Esports won’t take WT seriously because of rng. Example: you are driving a tank around a corner. You shoot first in a weak spot, but rng decide that the shell will ricochets. You do everything right but you die. This is not esports!
