War Thunder, The free-to-play MMO military game featuring aviation, armoured vehicles and naval craft has recently been review bombed on Steam down to Mostly Negative scores.
War Thunder Review Bombed
I’ve played War Thunder a couple of times once to try it and then secondly to try it in VR, both times were ok but the free-to-play experience just isn’t for me as it requires you to either sink your hard-earned money into micro-transactions or an ungodly amount of hours to unlock new things. Recently the game has been hit with a review bomb on Steam dropping its recent review score to mostly negative, a stark difference from the game’s Mostly Positive all-time score. So what has caused the sudden anger in the community?
Predatory Economy
From my understanding of the recent reviews, it seems players are not happy with the predatory economy and micro-transactions system. I get why they don’t like it but at the same time that is the nature of free-to-play games and it’s odd to me that they’re suddenly now angry about it. It seems that most of the anger has stemmed from the recent “how progression and economy is built in F2P games and War Thunder in particular” article that was posted on warthunder.com. The general problem that people are having appears to be that progression is way too grinding and certain gameplay mechanics are designed to force new F2P players to spend money on premium vehicles to have a chance at having fun.
All in all, it seems that players are mad that a F2P game has a business model that forces you to spend money at some point and for some reason, it is surprising to them. It is fairly obvious that a free-to-play game needs to make money somehow, find me a free-to-play game that doesn’t have predatory monetisation.
Let us know your thoughts in the comments.
Tell me you know nothing about how bad the economy is without telling me you know how bad it is.
You clearly didn’t even spend an hour researching this otherwise you’d come across the years of slashed rewards leading up to a statement several days ago that premium vehicles are profitable unlike tech tree vehicles.
Or how they took away custom avatars on the forums and after people protested told them to just buy some of the ones they offer.
It’s been a long time coming, of worsening rewards, ignored complaints and this was finally the straw that broke the camels back but no clearly 20K people and counting are just pitching a unreasonable fit.
thank you, you are completely right this person didn’t research into it. people with 5k-6k hours are the ones involved in this and they just think its people getting salty and not having the best immediately
“it’s odd to me that they’re suddenly now angry about it. ”
No it is not, they just made it much worse.
lol
You said it yourself that you didnt play the game for long. If you did you’d know that this didnt started with the recent update, this has been going on for years now: players complain and gaijin ignore.
And, since you asked for a free game without predatory monetization, you should try Path of Exile. Cheers
Plenty of F2P games DO NOT have “predatory” monetization. Also do yourself a favour and don’t write articles on topics you know little to nothing about.
game journalists try not to have a stupid and insensitive take challenge
lel
Never seen a more clueless article in my life. No, that “how progression and economy is built in F2P games and War Thunder in particular” article is not what caused player anger. That article was a response to player anger, about gaijin overtuning their predatory practices.
What did they do? they recently took those predatory mechanics, and amde them tougher, squeezing players for even more money. It’s not the existence of the mechanics that caused this, its that gaijin, despite their game being wildly successful, many models made by fans, and not needing much money to get large returns on their game, sought to exploit the players for far more anyways.
Gaijin make lots of money off their game. But they have repeatedly made changes that exploit players far more than reasonable, and have made it require hundreds or thousands of dollars to experience individual vehicles, or to grind fastly past an entire tech tree. It’s not the free players that are angry, but even the paying players, who spend exorbitant amounts on the game, who also feel pressure from these mechanics
There is a “Premium Account” mechanic, marketed to relieve the in game pressure from “repair cost”, a mechanic where for every death you pay a hefty toll. In the past, this was reasonable. having a “Premium Account” made the cost negligible, you barely noticed it. But now, with the last changes that directly caused this outrage, even players who pay this monthly or annual real dollar cost for a premium account now cannot afford to die in the game. No, now they also need to buy the main currency as well, in addition to paying for a premium account, just to afford deaths in their expensive vehicles.
Gaijin took that “repair cost” mechanic, and made the repairs much higher, while lowering the main currency rewards on individual vehicles. Even worse, there are specific vehicles called “Premium Vehicles”, which are supposed to be low in repair cost but high in reward gains. This last update tried to worsen repair and rewards in those 60 dollar, 70 dollar, etc vehicles, thus being a massive middle finger to the paying customers!
Do your research before you ever write another article. You are out of touch, not realizing this issue has paying customers up in arms too.
Don’t write about topics you don’t understand. The players who are “whining” (as you so childishly put it) have actually put time and effort into this game and want it to be the best it can be. You don’t seem to understand how Gaijin has absolutely broken the economy of their game and continues to ignore player input. Every update introduces new vehicles which make powercreep even worse, and most can be bought without ever having actually played the game before, making for an impossibly terrible experience. They favor certain nations over others, and some are ignored almost completely. The economy gets worse with every update, and complaints by users are ignored. They bill themselves as “historically accurate” but routinely get things wrong and ignore when they are pointed out. The game is in a death spiral, and they have brought this upon themselves. Please don’t spread misinformation about a situation you don’t understand for a game you’ve never played.
The dev article is not the source of anger, it’s the response to the review bomb that started before it. Clear lack of understanding from you. Delete the article or edit it as you surely aren’t qualified to write it
‘it seems that players are mad that a F2P game has a business model that forces you to spend money at some point and for some reason, it is surprising to them’
Bro didn’t even got to War Thunder launcher
I can clearly see you haven’t played War Thunder enough, the situation in that game is the worst I’ve ever seen in a F2P
Want an example of a better game? It’s competitor, World of Tanks. In WoT you are rewarded every day with a bonus multiplier on every tank you possess. When you loose there’s no stupid formula that makes you lose “moneys”. With the “recent” economy changes made in War Thuner, it doesn’t mattee if you were one of the best players among the squad, if you loose, you either earn a stupid amount of money or you will lose them.
Repair costs in WoT are balanced, they do not influence too much the income of a match. On the contrary in War Thuner they are very very high, they “adjusted” them many times but it’s never enough. So, second rule in War Thunder (the first is try to win at all costs), if you see your team is about to loose, don’t spawn any more, you will just risk getting killed, wich means more and more repair costs. In short try not to die or you’ll regret it.
Wanna play with your new shining modern tank? Haha too bad, modern tanks have absurd repair costs, you WILL lose money. So I always wonder, what’s the point in buying modern tanks if the game doesn’t allow me to enjoy them.
In the end I just want to say one more thing. Games, in every form, should be made to be enjoyable and entertaining, like it was at the very beginning. There’s no place in such industry for greedy companies (see all the hate on EA). Also, F2P doesn’t necessarily mean “predatory monetisation”. See Overwatch 1 for example (I haven’t played the 2, don’t know what changed), the game got very famous very fast surely for its formula, but also for its economy model. Skins were just for aesthetics, the gameplay was untouched, people simply had fun playing
Am I missing something here or is a game being review bombed by players who feel entitled to game for free? But it’s not for free is it, it’s at other people’s expense. *SMH* The state of gaming today
no, that is incorrect. The game used to be fair, everything could be reached in a reasonable time. That was 8 years ago. now the content has expanded exponentially, xp for the highest tier vehicles has been increased ridiculously all the while the rewards for playing have been slowly worsened to the point where even players who regularly spend money can’t progress reasonably well
I pay a lot in the game and my time is not respected at all by the developer, even paying players get fucked bigtime. It has nothing to do with if you spend or not, it’s how much you have to spend. To get a similar rate of progress as like battlefield or something, it could cost you thosuands a year.
which dumbass wrote that article.
The author has clearly never played War Thunder.
The person that wrote the article, either have never played War Thunder, or games in general. If the writer of said article had actually digged a bit, instead of reading the first 2 reviews, the writer would have understood that there is much deeper issues at play, and this is the accumulation of several years of issues that they have swept under the rug, and now people have had enough.
The part about: “I get why they don’t like it but at the same time that is the nature of free-to-play games and it’s odd to me that they’re suddenly now angry about it” is right of Gajin’s own post, the tone-deaf post about how the economy works.
We the players, aren’t 12, we understand they need to make money like any other developer, the issue at hand is that they are squeezing every single drop out of that cow. Many F2P games have models that work, but Gajin with War Thunder is doing everything in their power to make their player base play for ungodly amounts of hours, or be forced to get a premium account and premium vehicle in high tier.
And again with: “All in all, it seems that players are mad that a F2P game has a business model that forces you to spend money at some point and for some reason, it is surprising to them.”
Again, it isn’t, don’t be condescending towards the readers of the article/player base of the game itself. It is like the idea of F2P games are a brand new concept and you have to explain to people how it works.
Also, like to remind people, there are games that are F2P that don’t _FORCE_ people to spend money, most games let you have fun, and if you like a skin or something else in the game, you get it, because you like the game and want to support it, this is how many games operate, and they earn truck loads of cash with this model. Forcing people to pay is just bad way in every sense, and even though you can get new blood in, this is not always the case, and many of your original fans/supporters/old time players might leave.
Cod mw2 is probably the most popular right now.
While micro transactions are an option, you’re in no way required to pay a penny to have fun. Weapons are in abundance and honestly there’s a lot of free skins & you can earn your way to a battle pass if you try enough.
Sure it’s different in terms of scale when it’s a triple A title (which is what allows that business model) but you asked for an example at the end so there it is.
45,000+ reviews of US BEING FUCKING TIRED OF BEING FUCKED OVER BY GAIJIN FOR YEARS and you take none of us into account, accusing us of being oversensitive gamers. Please actually do research before writing an article. You’re a journalist, or so it should be said, and your articles affect people’s views.
We are not just mentally deficient folk, most of us are 5+ year veterans of War Thunder. We’ve put for years with a terrible economy and a profit-driven development team, others could definitely say more.
War Thunder is not a Free To Play game. It’s Free To Download. However if you want to progress in the game, it has become almost entirely Pay To Progress, lest you wish to spend your entire life grinding for meager rewards. Even to those who have PAID to Progress in the game, my past self included, have gotten to progress but still at a painful pace.
Those who have played War Thunder before, which I don’t doubt you about, join us in the strategic review bombardment. Turn new and/or prospective players away from the game. Gaijin has said that the game could be shut down if we do not stop and then ridiculed us for “not knowing how free to play games work.” I consider myself perhaps more radical than most, given my regrets on spending quite a pretty penny on War Thunder.
Give us victory, or give us death, Gaijin. Give War Thunder’s development back to the players, or kill your best cash cow.
I have 3k hours in War Thunder, almost all of it on premium time, and I have premium vehicles. I’d love to see this genius with a premium account and some premium vehicles and see if he thinks it’s acceptable for even paying users to be squeezed as hard as we are, it’s not just the F2P players. Gaijin is gutting every single player.
It’s also not a review bomb, they are negative reviews, mostly by players with a lot of hours. Steam has not tagged it as a review bomb either, so you should change the title of your article.
Fortnite, Warzone, WoT, WoWS, DOTA, Path of Exile, League of Legends, Rocket League, Overwatch 2, Destiny 2, Apex Legends. Just a few “examples” for you.
I didn’t pay for this game. Fortunately. To slow, boring and for campers. Some tanks are just overranked. Air support has too much advantage and that’s ruining the tank game. Maps are dumb and are not favorable to strategy. The conquest mode is just an horrible sh*t saying “go in the middle of the map and kill yourself”. This game is not funny and it is a pure sh*t to me.
I didn’t pay for this game. Fortunately. To slow, boring and for campers. Some tanks are just overranked. Air support has too much advantage and that’s ruining the tank game. Maps are dumb and are not favorable to strategy. The conquest mode is just an horrible sh*t saying “go in the middle of the map and kill yourself”. This game is not funny and it is a pure sh*t to me.