Recent reviews by gigabit-

i still don't know how the fleet works

No bugs, only anomalies.

surf

battlefield, but better

Apart from bad balancing, idiotic decisions, annoying political stuff, questionable updates and a lot more, this game is just Overwatch 1 with less content.

ptsd simulator

Call Of Duty ended with Black Ops II

я украл диван

50,000 people used to live there. Now it's a ghost town.

War Thunder is a great game... at least in its idea and core elements. But this is no more, Gaijin entertainment IS the sole reason this game is not universally loved by everyone.

Some will say "what did you expect from F2P project?", and they are not wrong, but everything is known in comparison, War Thunder 6 years ago and War Thunder now are extremely different, and most of the progress made in those 6 years didn't improve the gameplay of the game, but only made it worse.

WT is not a game about realism, it's not a simulator it wants to be so hard. The fact that y'all have thousands of vehicles doesn't make any ****ing difference when the gameplay degrades more and more with each update. Every other patch they are trying to make the gameplay easier for newer player, not by producing high quality guides, not by simplifying grindy mechanics of this game, not by actually embracing improvements of players skill... but by increasing the sheer randomness of this game. They are actively nerfing anything that can produce one shot kills, constantly changing and worsening good maps, so people never know any timings, adding other batch of "fields of fields" type maps, where everyone camps in a bush, adding and never fixing random broken mechanics like volumetric shells and such.

Many people, mostly from CIS countries, started playing this game because of it's differences from World of Tanks, with their camp-fest like gameplay and HP bar. I still remember this ad on every other site, smth like: "Bored of HP bar? Try out War Thunder!" when they released their tanks. Hardcore-esque gameplay and low TTK made this game viable, it was the primary idea of the ground forces battles. And now? Gameplay is extremely random, very far from hardcore-ness of early WT, amount of oneshots you get is reduced significantly, map knowledge is useless when they are constantly adding bad maps and changing good ones to be worse. Since the Pandemic, amount of english-speaking players grew extremely, it strangely correlates with the extreme growth of bad changes from Gaijin. I strongly believe all of these (changes) are made to appeal to console and casual players from the west (and beer-warriors from the east). (im not saying everyone over there is a casual, there are plenty of good players who would agree with me on most things).

There was a poll recently, Gaijin wanted to test out new "enhancements" (another nerf backed by "realism blahg blah blah") for the APHE shells. I, and many other didn't even want devs to spend their time cooking up another idiotic nerf to the only viable shell in the game (buff others ones, ffs, y'all are the one who nerfed them). Initially, votes were split in favor for the test (was like 5-10% lead for the "yes" option), but after CIS yourubers and other content creators started agitating to vote against such test, it finally setteled in the favor of not conducting such experiment. 48/52
Gaijin ignored the results of their poll and saying "when did those 2000 votes started mattering" conducted it anyways. And from now on, it's not about this ****ing test and their new idiotic mechanic. It's about the fact, they don't care about what their most active players want and will only listen to the majority of newbies who make them money by buying every single ♥♥♥♥♥♥ premium they release, effectively killing the game in the process.

There are many problems in War Thunder, but they are fixable... all of them, but one... you can't fix Gaijin's inability to adequately maintain the game. Greedy and foolish, and this greed will ruin their product.
They think popularity of the game is the result of their actions, but in reality, it's the result of Pandemic (which boosted every game) and ongoing w4r in ukraine, which is the best AD for war thunder they could even hope for.

If you are reading this, please, don't give them any money, even if you disagree with my takes on balance in the game, if you think changes they are making rn are fine, remember, they don't care about what you think is good or bad. Until they start conducting fair and transparent polls for every major change they make, and until they start to actually listen to ALL of their playerbase, not only the ones who spend the most money on their game, y'all should remind them that there is no game without people playing the game.

Cheers, gigabit-