Welcome to MMOs. Please enjoy your stay.
Games like these are built on ugly compromises. To simplify this in the extreme, the chain of logic goes something like this:
This is a game that you can’t play on your own. So people need to be around at all times. How do you keep them around at all times?
Because players have an expectation that if you press “to battle” you will start playing immediately, the most important feature for an MMO is a zero-second matchmaker. It will be the first step in keeping people around at all times (there are others of course but not relevant to this discussion).
This means you should try to make as many vehicles face each other as possible, even vehicles that are slightly worse or slightly better. Because this way, matches are assembled faster.
But you can’t overdo it, because people don’t like feeling like a punching bag. People who feel like punching bags quit the game eventually. Or at least the match.
You want to keep them around, which means you want everyone to ideally hover around 50% odds of doing well when they go into a match.
So you end up balancing vehicles by performance, which also allows you to have thousands of vehicles in the game and trust that they will “self-balance”, which is good for the devs because constant expansion is one of the ways an MMO stays alive.
The BR system is the solution to both these priorities. The 1BR spread makes you see more vehicles than you would if you just played “at your BR”, so shorter queue times, and it also brackets things by performance, so you don’t get clubbed on too often.
But there’s a problem, a +1BR match can be absolutely hellish if nearly everybody in the match is 1BR above you. How do we avoid that? Through quantitative matchmaking, so the match in theory never gets too lopsided.
Unintended side effect #1: most matches will be uptiers.
Unintended side effect #2: heavies are more BR-sensitive than other vehicles, so in an environment where most matches are uptiers, heavies will suffer and draw the short end of the stick.
That’s a shame. Trust me, I speak from personal experience, my favourite vehicles in this game are snipers, turretless tank destroyers, heavies. I am doomed to be non-meta.
Will it change? No, because it would mess with the priority that were at the start of the logical chain: player retention.
A single-player game would not suffer from this limitation, and would give you a more cohesive experience. But it also wouldn’t have 2000 vehicles, because the price point to justify that sort of development would not be sustainable. So, is the trade-off worth it? Is it worth to take the MMO negatives of War Thunder, to get all this stuff in exchange?
Only you can make this determination for yourself, because it’s a subjective preference thing.
Yes. That is a compression problem. It has a higherr chance of being fixed over time, at least, whereas quantitative matchmaking is extremely unlikely to change.
Sure. I play WT for fun, though, so that also takes care of itself. Sometimes, I have great evenings, sometimes I have a string of terrible matches and decide I’m not having fun, and so I stop playing it and go play something else instead.
Literally no reason to play WT other than have fun.
Could I wish the game was something else? Sure. But it won’t happen, because MMOs function a certain way. So I’ll take the positives and have fun, and when the negatives get too much, I just stop and play something else for a while. Problem solved.