peter hoose

I am making another review for this game because Gaijin has removed Steam affiliation from their website. This seems to be an attempt to keep new players from seeing the very relevant comments of the War Thunder player community. This game used to be fun when I started playing in July of 2015. There were a manageable number of vehicles in each nation and the rewards for battle were enough that you could make real progress in unlocking new tech. This in no longer the case. The current state of War Thunder forces players to spend months (if not a year+) grinding to get high tier vehicles. If you commit to the grind for those high tier vehicles, you can't play them without premium or you'll go broke in the game economy and be forced back down to lower tiers to make money. Updates for the last few years have been focused on making the economy more grindy by cutting player rewards and adding more top tier and premiums to squeeze the whales (top tier players are basically required to spend money on premium and top tier matches are majority premium vehicles). For players that are just starting, all the added vehicles act as dead weight to keep you in the grind cycle longer before you can get to the next tier. It is obvious by their actions that the focus for Gaijin is adding content that they can charge for and making it unbearable to play the game without the use of a Premium account. The developers have said they are going to address the issues but there are bugs in the game that have been there for years (ghost shells) and map design has been a point of contention that the devs will not address (spawn camping is rampant in many of the games maps). This tone deaf approach has persisted for years and finally the community has had enough. Gaijin's response was that we should all just shut up and that we didn't understand how a F2P game works. We know how this works Gaijin, you need us and our time. If they care about the community they'll make substantive changes to get us back, or we will move on and find a better use for our free time and money.