That’s by design, they just sneaked it in there with all the other changes, but it’s clearly done to prevent you from using lower BR lineups and instead are forced to grind out higher BRs for a newer player or use event vehicles.
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It’s also less enjoyable, somehow. I really like some of the tier2 stuff (WW2). It’s a great shame that they blocked that off. It’s also a shame that beginners can’t take part that easily.
regards
crabpot
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Beginners cannot partake as easily and they’re used as bait for the veteran players, yet people still pretend it’s to protect them.
The reason it was BR base for the first one is due to it happening after Naval TT were completely reworked.
The Rank system has lost all meaning a long time ago. Now it is just a rough indicator of reward scaling.
You can find the same vehicles at totally different Ranks depending on nation, you can have Rank 3 at 2.7 or lower in one nation while another has Rank 3 only above 4.0.
We got new Ranks fater then vehilces to fill them and faster then we got any form of real decompression. We could still live in a 5Rank world and it would make next to 0 difference outside of the 10.0 to top grind. In most cases it woudl actually make the grind better in the early parts as you would not ned to grind out 4 out of 4 planes at Rank IV to get to rank V as Rank four would have twice as many or more planes in it.
Rank increases happaned so fast because they extend the grind by giving the falase impression that slighly higher reward multiplyers negate massively increased RP costs. The new Ranks simply neatly hid the point that between Rank 4 and 7 RP prices increase by almost 300% while rewards increase by less than 200%. between rank 2and 5 it was almost a 1 to 1 ratio for the longest time.
In my opinion they should set the “beginner” area between reserve and 3.3. 3.0 and 2.7 have some really “bad” seal clubber vehicles while not featuring that many iconoc vehicles to compensate. Starting at 3.3 you get to what most players know and play. Panzer III and IV, T34s Shermans and so on are all between 3.3 and 4.3 yet almost none of them are Rank III. So you are stuck playing with late war stuff to grind events even tho 60% of WWII vehicles are below 4.3 and these 60% just so happen to be among the most iconic WW II vehicles for tanks and aircraft. Ofc T 34-85 and Tiger I as well as II and the IS series is still there, but there is little variation. You either have Panthers and Tigers VS ISs and T34-85s with some shermans in between or no match at 5.7. There is next to nothing else.
But for 3.3 to 4.3 you have Panzer IIIs, IVs, Stugs as well as many T34 variants, KV 1 variants SU variants the same for the US again.
3.3 to 4.3 features far more interesting stuff people know about and came to play then 4.3 to 6.0. There you have some super famous vehicles but the rest is either obscure prototypes or plainly bad vehicles.
I play props only - and i see your point.
Btw: From a technical pov your statement is not correct, you are not forced to play higher tiers, you are forced to use other planes at the same rank.
Nevertheless the rank setting by gaijin is mostly part of their attempt to balance vehicles - or to say it clear: Make highly undertiered planes less attractive to play or to support sales of premiums.
Examples? The highly undertiered US TT P-51 C is now rank II, the Japanese prem version is still at rank III. Or the US B-25s are now all rank II, but the Russian B-25s are still at rank III.
So i actually appreciated those “downrankings” as it affected mostly undertiered planes - but the main goal of gaijin to earn money is clearly visible.
Besides that some changes are really positive: J2M2 and XP-55 were at BR 4.3 in Air RB but rank II for years - and now they are rank III. Both planes were useless for tasks requiring rank III.
Last thought:
Opening tasks to rank II is just suited to support those tryhards flying with hundreds of days experience in undertiered planes like the P-39 N-0 at BR 2.7 and try to seal club - mainly as they have a lot of downtiers and mostly new players around them - or they are simply not good enough for rank III or higher.
For experienced players there is beside some tasks (pages of history) simply no excuse to play rank I and II.
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Not sure about that, @Miragen . I’ve seen lvl 15-20 in T3/4 battles, and they are pretty good. I don’t see that as ‘bait’. And top tier isn’t something I care for (I like WW2, not cold war). Don’t forget that lvl means little. I only started flying this year (previously ground only for years) and my performance could charitably be described as sub-optimal. You can look at my aircraft stats for proof!
Looking at the research tab, it seems the XF5F at 2.3 (premium, from the market) is the lowest T3. The second Mosquito (with the big cannon) in the Brit tree is at 3.0. So there are two planes (one regular) that could be used for a low BR line. Not sure how effective they would be mind…
The other nations seem to start around 3.3/3.7 or if you are unlucky, 4+.
regards
crabpot
Agreed. The placement of some aircraft do not make sense. Gaijin has put the A6M2 at 3.7 and rank 2, but the A6M3 at 4.0 and rank 3. The Japanese H8K3 is 4.0 and rank 2.
The M4A2 Sherman was moved down from rank 3 at 4.0 to rank 2. Meanwhile the Japanese have a rank 3 Chaffee, but the US and Chinese ones remain rank 2. Why? Yes, I can see that the the M4A2 was foldered, and its appreciated, but the move tends to disproportionately affect tanks more than aircraft.
There are a lot of planes that are very low in BR (as low as 2.3-3.0) that remain at rank 3, but most tanks below 3.7 are rank 2. The XF5F and Poryshkin’s P-39 (2.3/3.0) are great examples of this.
They’re bait in the sense that event vehicles allow veteran players to play tier 1-2 against the newest players for easy points.
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WT players have always been allowed to play any vehicle(s) they own, regardless of rank/tier, BR or player “level”. Once you reach a certain level you are by no means required to play higher BRs simply because of your level. And as mentioned, level has little meaning, especially as related to “skill”. While some more advanced players do enjoy & frequent the lower tiers/BRs for game play, it is not against the Rules in any way, and not all of them are there to “seal club”, stat pad or even hoard SL’s . . even tho it is clear there are those that do that. I have on occasion dropped down below the usual 4.3 - 5.3 BR range that I usually play to try to get some camos or achievements or what have you for lower BR vehicles. And having been at lvl 100 for 9 years or so, I can tell you this, regardless of level, the red guys will yeet you in the blink of an eye, regardless or you level and/or skill . . . lol, without hesitation. I was regularly plunked in maxed crew/spaded planes by lvl 8’s - 10’s because the game is designed in a way that it is fairly easy to get kills . . . and at any player level or BR . . . just how it is. Not all players here are evil, ill-tempted or just mean . . . but it is a war game and destroying other’s stuff is the nature of the beast . . . but you can still be a good sport about it . . . if you so choose . . .
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My point is though that for events, battlepasses, challenges, dailies and everything else you cannot play without tier lll vehicles, and with the game devolving into a permanent grindfest this means all year round.
Event vehicles are the exception as tier 1-2 event vehicles qualify with the same modifiers are tier lll vehicles.
Which means they are especially enticing to be abused to farm new players during events by not only offering easy prey, but also avoiding all the other abusive gameplay taking place at higher BRs.
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No offense mate - i like your comments, but tbh these walls of texts are usually a pain to read - please consider to use paragraphs.
Have a good one!
We’re on the internet, you don’t need ellipses friend
God forbid if a player wants to do something useful like working on a new tech tree while completing BP tasks… How dare they multitask in a grind based game! 🙄
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Exactly - some months ago i tried to use some rp boosters and started the Chinese TT - I ran in my second match in a guy with 35.000 player kills in rare rank I and II event planes - “fantastic” guy, spraying my rookie team down with aced ai gunners scorung 7 kills in this MBR flying boat.
Or when i started to build up crew points with the 2.0 Ju 88-A1. I lost in 120+ matches just 2 planes - 1 to mid-map AAA and the other to a guy abusing the 2.3 BR with the Jap 109 E-7 (took them ages to put it back to 3.0) and 177 days of fighter experience and thousands of kills in it.
Or the guy with the cannon P-51 and 12.000 kills vs 600 deaths…
Oh I understand, and I agree in large with what you have said, but I don’t think that many players abuse the lower ranks as what seems to be the consensus by many. But something that cannot be verified one way or the other. It is clear that the game does not want players using specific vehicles, and I have to assume that this is based of the “data” that they use, which is clearly skewed in much part as we can tell by the way the move things around and change BRs. Here’s an example; friend of mine, who doesn’t normally play Sim air, does the 75,000 points for the daily max in this event in TWO games . . . 2, another plays RB naval and does it in 6 games. I play the same usual 4.3 fighter line up in AB Air and can literally play 12 - 16 hours and not make it to 75k. Why? . . this “multiplier” system that is so out of touch with the game and how the majority of players play every day simply penalizes the vast majority of players. Newer players basically can’t participate, unless of course the buy premiums or already have low tier event vehicles . . . which is much harder since they are . . . new. And moving certain vehicle down to tier II is merely to stop players from being able to use them in events(where they are penalized anyway) and completely remove them from doing BP tasks. It seems to be by design and is kind of sad . . . hand hold the few, penalize the rest . . . oh well, I just play what I enjoy, I don’t “grind” too much anymore and just do BP stuff, which I can do with tier III & IV stuff easy enough and still have fun . . and that’s all I do now . . . play for fun. The grind is a bit too tough for me, being old and all . . . lol. And I don’t really play the high tier stuff much anyway, so all good . . . just a little disappointing . . . especially with this “Roadmap” and supposedly trying to make things a little easier . . . hard to see sometimes.
Gaijin just read psychology 101, everything about the game is just textbook manipulation, all these changes they make are to get you to behave the way they want you to, which in this case is pushing you further and further up the tree and removing the ability to play lower BR stuff.
They constantly move things around that ruin your lineups, changing tiers and BRs to break up effective ones and force you to play different things, same BR vehicles in different tiers seems innocent at first until you want to start researching the next tier and you’re crippled, better buy a premium tank there.
The crew lock system also exists for only control, it limits your progress to the speed they want, especially when they paired it with the rewards not scaling beyond 10 minutes, so you could only get so much per 10 minutes, and if you left you got a crew lock and your only option is to play a different nation which halfs your progress by splitting it over multiple trees.
2 Likes
lol . . I don’t think it’s any kind of “sinister conspiracy”, even tho I don’t agree with every little thing or some of the moves. We just get to play the game we are given as best we can. So I won’t be getting my pitchfork & tiki torch out . . . lol. And as for crew lock, it in no way was implemented to “slow progress” as you have stated. 1 reason, because players kept leaving games at the start of the match leaving their teams “handicapped” and making the games unbalanced from the start. Now this was for a wide variety of reasons, and the players have even managed to come up with more reasons now and the 1 death leavers, so . . . A few players bring a lot of this stuff down on us all, by their actions . . . just how it is . . .
I don’t think I implied it’s a sinister thing, but I’m saying they do it for a reason and it’s not just random or for our benefit, there are many obvious signs of the psychological manipulation that is common in a lot of videogames, especially mobile games.
Players leaving at the start of the game don’t exactly progress fast if they have a 7 minute crew lock, how does that not slow their progress?
The time after which rewards were capped and the time crew lock last are similar, meaning your progress is controlled per 10 minutes.
You do know if you only have one vehicle equipped in GF, you don’t get crew locked.