5 people found this review helpful
Not Recommended
0.0 hrs last two weeks / 3,230.4 hrs on record (1,790.0 hrs at review time)
Posted: 30 Jun, 2017 @ 6:10pm
Updated: 29 Mar, 2018 @ 10:58am

I started to play War Thunder around october 2016 amd it has several problems wich are not addressed at all

Spawnkilling is a huge problem. In the beginning there was no protection at all, you could find enemies beside you or even behind you when you spawned and you have just 20s of invincibility (unless you move forward, then your invincibility is gone).
Later the devs tried to fix the issue putting a red stripe along the spawns, when you go inside this red zone you have 30s to exit or otherwise you blew up.
But after a few minor patch reduced these red zones to a little circle around the spawn, so you can get spawnkilled again from BEHIND. Maps design doesn't protect you from spawnkill, because in most of the maps your spawn is a in basin.
In every match you will find players trying to go to spawnkill instead of trying to capture the objectives. Spawnkill is ongoing since i started playing and Gaijin has failed to address this issue.
The community will defend this pratice claiming that it's fair and you should avoid playing when spawnkilling happens and will try to derail thread about people complaining about this problem.

Ground battles have a problem with planes spam, you'll get constantly bombed and strafed by low skill players. I'm saying low skill because these are the kind of people who will try to strafe SPAA (self propelled anti aircraft) and there's no skill in dropping a 500/1000 kg bomb on a ground target moving at 20km/h or standing still.
You play this so called "ground battle" to see 6 or 7 planes blasting your team with no way to fight back. SPAA are difficult to use especially in RB. In AB is even worse because you can spawn a plane just by making points, then crash on a open tank killing it, without paying repair cost.

Bugs in the physic: Shells bouncing on flat surfaces even at close distance or simply not penetrating when they should, buggy hitboxes of the scenery.
Sloppy behavior from developers and their community staff, it took them 6 weeks to fix a broken tank and when i complained about it, i was told that it was just a "minor graphic bug" from a steam moderator.

Pay to play: every vehicle has a repair cost, plus you'll pay the non-stock ammo. In the beginning the repair cost are low so you won't notice but after you pass BR 5.7 you'll find that the rewards from the battles are the same you get at 3.3 while the repair cost and the ammo cost skyrocket.
Without a premium account you simply can't play from 6.3 onward, otherwise you'll get in negative even if you win the match. Just check the repair cost of 6.7/7.0 UK tanks, unless you play a perfect match you'll go in negative, but if you are lucky you can get some reward like 3000 SL.

Pay to win: just buy certain premium tanks and your win rate will skyrocket (you can check the win rate of every vehicle here[www.thunderskill.com]). For example, the german t34 have a win rate of 72% while all the other t34 with the 76mm have a win rate less than 50%. Same with the german kv1, kv2 and chuchill.
There are several unbalanced premium vehicles at the wrong BR, like the t44-122 at 6.3, while the t44-100 (non premium) is 7.0. Certain premium tanks are somehow invulnerable like the KV220 at 5.7.
Now they added a marketplace where you can buy premium camouflage made by other users, so you can hide better just by paying more.

Unbalanced matchmaking: no separation between ww2 and cold war in ground forces. It's not acceptable that you have to fight cold war tanks with your ww2 tanks. There's the possibility to have a mixed fight with jets and non-jets, it happened during ww2, but this is a game and it's unbalanced.
Too much paper vehicles (projects that were never built) and prototypes, how can you balance a vehicle that never existed or existed in the form of a prototype?
Modern tanks like the abrams, the challenger and the 64 wich are still classified, how can you balance a tank with a classified armour?

Maps design is terrible, why would someone think that it's a good idea being killed when you just get out from the spawn?
Spawns are often in a basin or simply without covers, so enemies have the upper ground while they spawnkill.
Maps rotations is broken too, you get to repeat always the same few maps, it's so boring repeating abandoned factory, eastern europe or poland 4 times in a row. Why is so hard to fix?
The new graphic engine allows a wide range of weather effects, but you'll only play sunny day with maybe some mist. Night map are even rarer

No change in battle modes
Tanks have always the same three battle modes: domination, conquest and battle. For the 1.71 they added a new mode called break, it wasn't so good, but it could be developed in something better. Now insted with the 1.77 they simply remove this mode.
Planes have seen no change at all in the battle mode, especially in RB where the only mode you play is a semi-deatmatch with always the same 4/5 maps repeating, infact air RB is dying in favor of the plane spam in ground RB, because air RB is simply boring.

Too much grind without a premium account: you can see the trailers with modern tanks and jets, but to reach them you need to start from interwar tanks and planes. Without a premium account it will take 2 or 3 years of costantly playing everyday.
Do you want to gain enough money to buy your 9.0 tank? You need to play for weeks at 3.3.
You need to research and buy even the most basic components for your tank. A stock tank doesn't have repair kits and extinguishers, so don't get hit until your research that repair kits and FPE.

Poor comunication from Gaijin: most of the changelog are "Client stability has been improved.", sometimes they add some bugfix. Nerf and buff are written only in major release and not every of them. Poor explanations of new features, people still keep asking, after months of its launch, how the "new" warbond shop works because it isn't properly explained anywhere. Now they launched the marketplace without even announcing it!

Poor integration with steam, what's the point of the steam login if you can't log in the forum, marketplace, shop and other relaed service?

Reminder that you cannot change your email to avoid the sale of the accounts (like it's difficult to create an email and sell the email account along the war thunder account), but you can create as many fake accounts with temporary email to farm GE (wich is against the rules, but Gaijin doesn't enforce that rule).

Marketplace is a new way to milk the players. It adds microtransactions, lootboxes and a new currency called gaijin coins (GJN). Basically is a rip off of the steam market. It allows players to sell skins, decals they made, they get the 30% of the price in GJN, wich naturally can only be spent in the marketplace.
You can even buy a p2w tank like the kv220 (btw it's already sold out).
No explainations on if and how you can convert GJN in GE or viceversa. 1GJN = 1$, so have fun if the currency of your country is worthless compared to american dollars and euros.

Worse than everything, the game allows cheating, you can lower your graphic settings to the infamous ultra low quality, so you can see better through vegetations without being bothered by sunlight, lens flare and other fancy things. You can remove the grass from your aim sight regardless your graphic settings and you can disable the sound of the engine of your tanks so you can hear the enemy better.
I would'nt mind if this kind of things are allowed in AB, because you can see the enemy regardless, but in RB and SB ruin everything. If you have to play like this RB/SB are not for you, or simply choose a game that your hardware support.
Night map? No problem just change the night in day from postFX settings!
Too much smoke? Just lower the particle density!
There isn't even a proper anti-cheat, you can only report the suspected cheater.
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