Friends!
Ten days ago we asked you to share your key suggestions and complaints about the game in a special survey. As a result, we received 14,562 player submitted entries - many of them being very constructive. It is a very impressive number! Some submissions made a few pages of well organised bullet points. We are very grateful for such active support for the project and a desire to help us make War Thunder better!
It is very difficult to process such a great amount of information. But we managed to isolate most of the repeating points and are already working hard on them.
Economy and progression
More than 90% of feedback entries touched issues with economy and progression. The majority of them were: repair costs and the ability to pay for it by being active in battles and performing specific actions. Including rewards for assisting enemy kills, kill-to-death ratio, point capturing in a team, repair and other help to teammates plus many others. A separate layer of concern was expressed about the time needed by new players to progress all the way up to the top-tiers.
About one third of players are concerned with the current BR distribution and methods of assigning BR to a vehicle. As well as about the BR ranges of vehicles in battle.
At least 4% of players also paid special attention to such topics as the need to purchase modules, the possibility to have free - perhaps lengthy but free - repairs, and many suggestions in not modifying or significantly rebalancing premium vehicles.
All in all, we understand these concerns and will try to encompass ideas on most of them in the upcoming economy roadmap we promised to publish by June 14th.
Gameplay
About 10% of players also took time to share their ideas and observations about various gameplay issues in War Thunder. We are still assembling the full picture of those thousands of points, but have already focused in some of the most repeated ones:
Locations. Especially their size and how susceptible they are to being shot-through in Ground battles. It is a very important topic. We have tried to study our maps over a long time, creating special tools like ‘heatmaps’ of deadly shots together with the player system of likes and bans. With the game growing and many new vehicles added many maps demonstrated either new issues, or older ones became too significant.
We are already engaged in reviewing and ‘polishing’ all locations - and it is sure to be part of the upcoming game improvements.
Many of you spoke about the inconvenience of night battles. Though we already tried to make some improvements there - like lowering their appearance probability, addition of illuminating shells,- it turned out not to be enough. We will also look into new solutions here.
Some other given complaints were about aviation streaks in Arcade Ground battles, ideas how to improve voting mechanics for favourite maps, and ways to improve the survivability of stock vehicles both in ground and air battles.
The was a separate pool of ideas related to PvE modes and ways to improve their gameplay and attraction.
Naturally we received literally thousands of ideas on specific vehicle models, modules, weapons and features. It is impossible even to list them all here. Which is actually good - since War Thunder is a game about military vehicles, so it is expected they are in the focus. We are carefully studying all feedback and will try to look at it from a fresh point of view.
As mentioned, we are still in the process of analysing all of the survey entries and picking up more and more points from these worth examining and doing some extra to work on them. Currently the survey form is closed, but we will continue to make similar general broad feedback polls on the game in the future again. We will also continue to actively listen to your feedback on the forums. Our plan is to conduct such intensive ‘general questions and suggestions’ sessions at least once every 3 months.
Some of your suggestions can be put in the game quite quickly - and War Thunder game design and development teams are already working on them. Some will require a more complex approach, and we will plan for them in our roadmap. We will also cover more about these in the news for the game. So since we are planning to release a large economy and progression changes roadmap by June the 14th, we hope to meet many of your wishes on abovementioned issues there.
By the way, we have just published a detailed Q&A for video content creators, you might find the answers interesting and relevant to some of your points in them (link).
Conclusion
Once again, thank you for taking the time and effort to share your thoughts! We have always tried to pay attention to your feedback, but getting such a massive pool of information from players all over the world - is a limitless source of inspiration and motivation for us. Do not be upset if you don’t find your exact points in the summary above - it comprises the most repetitive ideas, but we do and are studying them all. We will work diligently to look at issues from various viewpoints and try to improve as much as possible to allow you to continue to enjoy War Thunder for many years to come.