A beginner’s guide to War Thunder Air Arcade Battles.

Last update: June 23^rd , 2018

Reference patch version: 1.79

You can easily notice that this page hasn’t been updated since some time ago.
The reason is quite simple: I’ve suspended playing WT.
I stopped playing for a few weeks and after that I realized (with my surprise) that I don’t miss the game.

A couple of time I checked WT Forum, just to discover that the game is likely worsening (again!), with new bad behaviours having the usual uncertainty about being them new features or bugs.
All in all, the likely truth is that I definitively got tired of endless Gaijin’s “inventions”, arrogance and lack of care for players.
So I’m not motivated to put further effort and time in a game that (more or less) seems planned to fool players.

I don’t rule out at all I could restart playing in the future, at least to check if things got better, until then these pages will remain the way they are now.

ALERT LEVEL

The current alert level is:

ALERT REASON:

War Thunder Air Forces Arcade Battles game is currently and progressively worsening, for Pay-to-Win (P2W), cheaters, worse client performances, unfixed bugs and bad mechanics.

ADVISED ACTIONS:

Play WT Air Forces AB just if you are prepared to P2W and never fixed mechanics (such as spawn camping).
You could still have some fun (at least for some time) if you accept that and stay playing not higher than Tier III.

WHAT’S NEW.

Some words about the latest patch, 1.79, regarding Air Forces:

· This patch is even WORSE than 1.77!
Although undeclared, Gaijin have likely changed mouse control, now being more sluggish and “calm” but without having gained any advantage about aim and fire precision.
And stuttering with low-level graphics cards is worse than with previous patches (which were already bad).

Moreover, it seems even more P2W than the previous patches (planes defying not only reality but even declared FM data, head-ons decided by players’ level etc.).
Those morons have nerfed Vitality too, so now it’s more easy to be instantly killed by bomber gunners even with crews at level 30 (which is not really high but not too bad neither).
Even the effect of low G-Tolerance seems to me having been increased.
All this means, of course, that non-paying players, having low or medium level crews, are even more disadvantaged respect to experienced/paying players.
Pay-To-Win at work, as usual.

Only possible good change is that they could have somewhat reduced the reward for destroying ground targets (some players state they cut rewards in half), rebalancing in part fighters and bombers’ importance (which was ridiculously unbalanced towards bombers since patch 1.59, two years ago!)..
Since, as usual, Gaijin gave no info about that, it’s basically a guess based on players observations.

In practice, apart few new vehicles and maps it seems that the IDIOTS in Gaijin wasted their developing effort by remodelling … sounds! Another thing never requested by players …
AF is going downhill at an alarming speed.

Introduction.

WHY THESE PAGES?

My Guides for Gaijin’s War Thunder beginners in Arcade Battles are composed of two web pages:

· “A beginner’s guide to War Thunder Air Arcade Battles“ ( http://www.clocloz.altervista.org/wt/War_Thunder_Air_Battles_Beginners_Guide.html ), regarding War Thunder Air Forces (battles with airplanes)

· “A beginner’s guide to War Thunder Ground Arcade Battles” ( http://www.clocloz.altervista.org/wt/War_Thunder_Ground_Battles_Beginners_Guide.html ), regarding War Thunder Ground Forces (battles with tanks).

The difference in gaming between the two kind of battles fully requires a separate dissertation (although several similarities do exist).

Why I decided to write these pages?
Basically, because after some years of gaming I definitively realized that on the net (WT Forum, YouTube etc.) there are very few good advices for beginners.

Many reputed YouTube tutorials are too much theoretical, devoted to specific (and not always really useful) techniques and not giving the Arcade Battles beginner a wide scope view of the battle.

Many techniques and tactics, although frequently suggested to beginners, are unsuitable for newbies, because they need stronger and more skilled crews (which beginners could have just if they start paying since day one) besides player’s own skill (which beginners have had no time to develop yet), Boom-and-Zoom is a primary example of that.

Some tactics, if followed by a newbie would put them directly against much more expert, skilled and strong players (where “strong” in WT often means “paying”), so immediately becoming “cannon fodder”. An example for that is the advice to stupidly “always climb, climb, climb!”, which in Air Arcade Battles usually means to meet the most experienced “professional” players which stay at high alts to “protect” their kill/death ratio stats and surely means drifting away from battle core, where a beginner has to stay if he want to score the needed points.

Some other tactics and strategy, which on the contrary would in part mitigate the obvious beginners inferiority and limitations, are almost never mentioned, the need to increase crews Vitality as soon as possible is one fundamental example.

Techniques and tactics apart, you’ll almost never find on the net, and in particular not on the WT Forum, any really useful overall picture of what this game really is.

I had to say even more: in too many cases WT Forum is misleading, especially (but not only) for newbies.
It’s largely a playground for very experienced players, usually paying players, which are amongst the most active participants. This means that a newbie asking for advice will likely be answered by this kind of “aces”, which is quite clear to me they have a very different game experience from newbies and non-paying players.
I could estimate that three-fourths of advices to beginners given by them are wrong or, in the best cases, useless.

In other words, on WT Forum you’ll find a lot of users giving bad advices, without giving good ones and talking as the game would be a “fair” game ruled by players’ skill.
Which is NOT.

War Thunder is a game developed by a business company, not by amateurs, and any feature of it is obviously designed with the primary goal to support and increase company’s income.

This in itself doesn’t deserves any criticism, although licit criticism can be expressed regarding the way it’s done.
But I have no doubt that War Thunder IS a Pay-to-Win (P2W) game, devoted to advantaging paying players well before any other, in some declared ways and very likely in many undisclosed ways too.
Because without paying gamers the game itself, which is a business enterprise, would not sustain itself.

This is what clearly emerges both from observation and reasoning.

Being P2W has an expected result: the possibilities of success for paying and non-paying players, and to a good extent even the effectiveness of chosen tactics, are markedly different.
And this is the first thing a beginner should understand, after that he can make his well-informed choices and decide how he wants to experience the game.

If he didn’t realizes these basic facts, it will never understand the reasons for a lot of things in game that seem (and often are) really absurd if not idiotic.
If he didn’t realizes these basic facts, it will risk to believe to a lot of bullshit, daily spread on the net by dumb or naïve people and, in part, by Gaijin itself too.

Unfortunately, in WT Forum that simple and obvious concept (“WT is P2W”) is opposed by a lot of a lot of players (several of them being, frankly speaking, quite stupid), likely in good faith for the most of them (but not anyone), which usually are very experienced and paying gamers.
Being very experienced, even more when being a paying player, is often an obstacle for them in giving good advices to newbies, because in WT experienced/paying players live in a world apart from beginners (and even from more experienced non-paying players).
They live in a (greatly artificially built) “world of aces” whereas beginners and non-paying players are more or less put in the “cannon fodder world”, largely regardless their personal skill.
This is likely a partial explanation why so few good advices are given in Forum from experienced players to beginner’s benefit.

As time went by, I began being tired to debate these things on WT Forum, where it’s quite clear to me too many players has been brainwashed by the smart Gaijin’s mechanism that advantages addicted/paying players well beyond their skill, but cleverly hiding it.
So a lot of them turned “aces”, in my opinion, largely for external reasons (advantages from the game) but convinced themselves it was just for their skill improvement. I’ve found that some of them, even players with more than 10000 battles fought, are smart and honest enough to acknowledge that, the most part usually not.
In truth, not all of them are arrogant and stupid, some of them try to find a “rational” explanation to the many strange things in WT, candidly thinking the game “has” to be fair. Sometimes they are right, some “strange things” are just apparent and happens because the player has made mistakes or don’t know the rules.
But writing, as I read on Forum, that there are “just perceived problems” and that “the biggest problem is people not knowing the rules or some of the mechanics” is, first of all, a proof of stupidity.
Really, a lot amongst the most assiduous participants in Forum are people making a fool of themselves.

Apart regular Forum participants, there are players that just occasionally read and write on Forum. Some of them told to me that they, after some time spent playing the game, “took the hint” i.e. understood how this game works, realized it’s basically P2W and no more believe in the usefulness of the Forum (even less in game fairness, of course).
I wonder how many player are around that made the same i.e. understood that the game is just like the most of other MMORPG, i.e. P2W, and use the Forum just from time to time.
I think there are many of them, but on Forum you’ll usually find a lot of hard-core gamers, the player writing on it almost every day, and some newbies hopefully asking for advices.
A whole world of WT players is likely invisible if looked at from WT Forum.

Since in WT Forum is daily at work a watchful Gaijin’s censorship that stops, hides and deletes any hint to any issue or question that could raise doubts about WT being or not “Pay-to-Win”, the Forum itself, apart being a place into which seeking for news and asking for technical details, is more a playground for dull or brown-lickers players than a really useful place, at least to the goal to understand game’s nature.

These pages of mine have been written with the main objectives to give beginners the instruments to understand the nature of the game and, having realized that, applying the best choices and tactics to survive, progress (as much as they can, especially when not paying) and, above all, having fun.

Of course, being addressed to beginners, these pages are mainly devoted to non-paying players and likely less useful for paying gamers, although I’m sure that the most of things here written are useful for anyone and not just for newbies, certainly can be useful even for average-skilled non-paying players (like me).
They could be less useful for paying players since they largely live in “a WT gaming world apart” from non-paying beginners.

Since a lot of concepts here expressed are rarely seen on WT Forum, and usually quickly censored, these pages could be also seen as a “NON-politically-correct view on War Thunder”.

And I’m proud of that.

CloCloZ

War Thunder by Gaijin Entertainment (the acronym is WT) is a massively multiplayer online game (MMOG) about WW2 air and tank battles, developed starting from 2009, which is achieving good success these years.

Having played for some years with IL-2 Sturmovik simulator by 1C:Maddox Games, mainly off-line and with a joystick, I looked for some newer online-oriented WW2 air combat game, to be played with a mouse, and found essentially two: World of Warplanes (WoW) by Wargaming Public Co. Ltd. and War Thunder (WT) by Gaijin Entertainment.

I started checking World of Warplanes, the sibling of World of Tanks (WoT, tank battles, which AFAIK is by far the most popular on-line WW2 war “simulator” in terms of number of players).
Since the first beginners’ air training battles my impression was quite bad, coming from a real simulator like IL-2 Sturmovik: I found cartoon-like graphics especially on terrain, not really pleasant mouse control, fully “arcadish” flying model. The feeling to having come back to a childish game.
What’s worse, I also tried tank battles in World of Tanks, just to find the same silly arcade-cartoonish feeling but with some other extremely stupid choices done by its programmer, such as just one tank for any battle: they have a fully-arcade game with a feature, just one crew to expend, that is good just for realistic simulation! An arcade without the best of arcade, i.e. long-lasting fun!

I was astonished by all that stupidity.

Then, after having finally stopped laughing at WoW and WoT, I tried War Thunder and, once used to its “hangar” interface and understood Tiers (or Ranks) and Battle Rating, found it vastly superior to WoW (and to WoT for tank battles).
Even in Arcade Mode the Flying Models (FM) and Damage Models (DM) seemed to me much more “realistic”, a quite good compromise between simulation and easy and amusing control.

So I started playing War Thunder, in Arcade Mode (the other modes are boring for me!) and mainly with airplanes.

Again, tank battles are more boring for me, much more coarse, even idiotic at times, more rough tactics, much less skill-rewarding and meritocratic since they seem depending too much by mere length of playing experience and money possibly spent in the game than by true personal ability, IMHO.
Nevertheless, I play tanks too and it’s worthwhile for me to initially spend some words about WT Ground Forces, also because they take on an extreme level some faults existing in Air Forces too, so examining them could be of interest even for planes-only players.

WAR THUNDER: AN “ARTIFICIAL GAME” FOR “ARTIFICIAL PERFORMANCES”, DEAL WITH IT.

Let me be clear: War Thunder has a lot of lacks too and Gaijin’s development politics often seems absurd and self-destructive, even when remembering it’s a business company having obvious and licit business goals.
So my complaints mainly regards the ways Gaijin often choose to pursue their licit goals.

First thing to know, and a very important one, is: War Thunder is an highly “artificial” game, where player’s performance largely depends by skill and power of crews and vehicles the gamer uses, at least as much as his personal skill.
And that mechanism is purposely exploited by Gaijin to steer players toward choices being advantageous for the company.

You could think at this like a form of (legal, although annoying) “doping” given by Gaijin to some kind of players, namely paying players (and, to a lesser extent, players with long-time experience even if not paying).

Just like a doped athlete can be defeated by a non-doped but better competitor, a good WT player can defeat a paying player which has much less skill, but the “doped” paying player will always have several advantages anyway.
A mediocre player can reach a good level of performance just by “paying to win”. They fight better not (or not just) for their improved personal skill but, likely much more important, for having “bought” at once the skill of their crews and having maximized at once their vehicles.
While “normal” players go on for many months or years using semi-stock vehicles and average-performing crews, paying players could have the best performing setup since the first weeks and, on average, they finish battles ahead of the most of non-paying gamers.

All these things usually become clear after several months of playing WT, anyone going on in denying that truth after one or two years of gaming has no observation skills (maybe because he started paying almost at the beginning of his career in WT, so has a fully falsified view of the game!) or is trying to deceive others player or, finally, is self-deceiving.

In other words, WT is NOT a “fair” game, i.e. players’ results highly depend from their vehicles strength and crews experience and those things depend by the fact gamers have played for a long time and, even more (especially at higher Tiers), they have spent money to quickly improve vehicles and crews. Of course, Gaijin has any right to set up their game to make them gaining as much as money they can, all comes down to understanding if they are really doing the most convenient thing for themselves since a lot of potential paying players dislike a game not respecting skill.

This is especially true for WT Ground Forces (tank battles) but largely true for WT Air Forces (planes battles) too.

This is especially true at high Tiers (high performance/high cost/late war vehicles) but for GF is true at the lowest levels too.

In practice, in WT the only acceptable playing field, regarding game fairness and true respect for players’ skill, is Air Forces until Tier III / early Tier IV. This is good, because those Tiers are ample and as much fun as later ones, if not better.

Even a not-paying player has a lot of opportunities to enjoy WT Air Forces, if he increases crews skills and fully spade planes, even if he has to know that he will always be disadvantaged respect to paying players.
Understanding that is essential to realize what this game is and what any player can expect from it.

Unfortunately, Ground Forces are unfair and skill-disregarding since the beginning, even at Tier I: there is no moment in a WT GF player’s career when his skill is more respected than a paid tank or a high experienced crew (and “automatic” experience improving in GF, just for having played, is so slow that in practice gamers have to pay for reaching really good level).
When facing an expert and/or paying player, who has stronger tanks and crews, a GF beginner (but not only) has an extremely high chance to be quickly destroyed even when the newbie hits first the enemy (this in not usually true in WT AF).
Adding a lot of stupid things existing in GF, I sadly have to say that I never saw in my life of IT developer so many idiotic choices as Gaijin did for GF.

GF is a fully unfair and money-dependent game, whereas AF is, luckily, really unfair and money-dependent just at higher tiers.

This doesn’t mean that mechanisms at work for P2W in GF haven’t been implemented for AF: I’m pretty sure they have.

A quite evident case is “head-ons” (air combats where the opponents open fire while flying on a colliding course), which is the less player-skill-dependent aerial tactic and the most dependent by crew “skill” and by guns’ effectiveness, in other words it’s the most similar to tank battle fights: almost always the winner is the most experienced/paying pilot and he doesn’t even need a particular tactic or a particular good aim. It’s his crew that (in part) “aims” for him, it’s his crew that is able to endure harder hits than enemy’s one.

But head-ons are a very peculiar case, in general Air battles are in themselves much more dynamic and complicated that Ground battles (where the usual happening is simple: two tanks start firing one to the other and the tank+crew that has more resilience is the winner, even if it has been hit first), so any P2W is less effective with planes and player’s own skill (in manoeuvring, in aiming, in choosing the tactic) can partly compensate a P2W mechanism that tries to put the gamer on the losing side.

All in all, WT is a Pay-to-Win (P2W) game in both areas (planes and tanks), just much better implemented in AF than GF and tolerable with planes at lower tiers.
On the contrary, P2W nature of GF is outrageous and starts since the lowest tier.





WAR THUNDER A P2W GAME? HERESY!

You’ll find the most tireless opponent to this concepts in part amongst “naïve” unexperienced gamers (which still have understood very little of the game) but especially amongst the most experienced players, those having 7000, 8000 or 10000 battles and being content in thinking that their in-game-skill is for the most part dependent by their “natural” skill.

People so insincere (or, well … so stupid) to say that if they are usually able to kill with one shot is largely given just by their personal ability.
It’s not easy to find someone amongst them being so honest (first of all towards himself) to admit that a very large part of their ability is based just on his crews and vehicles.
Any good enough observer can see that it’s true. But many choose not to be good observers, just not to admit that or … not to lose their illusions.

Some players think that Gaijin has no plans to control of the game and to advantage certain kind of players or certain behaviours, and there is just a number of faults, mistakes or unwanted side effects.
Although there are for sure faults, mistakes and unwanted side effects, some shortcomings are so huge and some game characteristics are so peculiar and clear that didn’t happen by mistake or by chance.
How could one think that Gaijin didn’t notice that in Tank Battles the reward for assists is big and disproportionate respect to kills?
How could one think that Gaijin made an unwanted choice when they decided to give score points to vehicles being hit (!), for the simple fact of having been hit?
How could one think that it’s fortuitous that the Vitality crew parameter, the most critical one at low game level both for AF and GF and hugely critical even at medium level for GF, is the only parameter that Gaijin allow to increase a very little at a time?

How could one think that Gaijin don’t realize that after 1.59 patch bombers are incredibly advantaged against fighters in AF and that choice has been done by chance?

How could one think that Gaijin can’t easily fix the kamikaze planes issue in GF?

How could one think that Gaijin can’t easily improve the hangar incrementing the number of free presets (here, as in many other cases, the key word is likely “free” …)?
Etc. etc.

Yes, I perfectly know: there is a lot of real idiots amongst Gaijin’s designers and developers. And I’m not speaking about “normal” idiots but “first prize” idiots.
Whereas AF seems to be designed by “smart enough people” (but even AF are becoming worse and worse at any new patch!), GF designers are for me the example of true stupidity, I don’t know another team that managed to put so many idiocies in just a single software product (and I work in IT since 35 years, with fifteen years as a designer and developer).
This is a thing sure like death and taxes and especially true about Ground Forces, although unfortunately not all their stupidity has been dedicated to tanks only.

But many of these idiocies seems “too much” to think there are no other reasons behind them, also because they constantly receive good advices by players about fixing them.
So, notwithstanding my deep disesteem for a large part of WT game mechanics designers, I think that 90% of WT absurdities are made for one reason: trying to make more money, to the detriment of game fairness and even the loyalty of a large part of the gamers.

In a sense, is just another form of stupidity: instead of enlarging a base of enthusiast gamers and founding on that their business, with an hard-core part of happy paying people, they are managing to periodically sicken large part of gamers (at first bomber pilots, then fighter pilots etc.) by introducing bad game choices to their own interest and pushing away possible new paying players.


THINGS TO UNDERSTAND SINCE THE BEGINNING: THE BUSINESS METHOD RULING WT.

If a newbie can’t understand that, he will make serious mistakes in game and a lot of things will remain “mysterious”.
On the contrary, if he do understand that, the reasons behind many things in game mechanics, performance, score etc. will became clear.
For example, he will be aware not only of so many idiotic issues but also of the likely reason why these issues exist and why Gaijin seems refusing to fix them.

There is a “scientifically” arranged method, regarding crews improvement, vehicle improvement etc. to induce players to do what they want gamers do (in short: go on gaming and possibly spend some money).
Some of the methods used by Gaijin are just supposed (even if likely, looking at stats), such as periodically drawing players in weaker teams to lower the win ratio of beginners.

On the contrary, others are so evident (and can’t be concealed!) that can’t be denied, such as the control they have by highly delaying Vitality parameters increase in crews. Vitality (crew’s capability to survive to enemy hits) is likely the most important, really crucial crew parameter at lower levels, with tanks even more than with planes.
By controlling it, allowing its increment just very a little at a time (unlike all other parameters!), Gaijin effectively prevents a too fast rise of newbies effectiveness, with two advantages for them: newbies are induced to go on gaming to improve their pitiful situation whereas expert and loyal gamers are pleased to have much weaker beginners to slaughter.

In fact, just players really naïve, very bad observers or in bad faith can deny that.
Unfortunately, it seems that there are many WT players belonging to any of those three categories, more or less.

This game peculiarity is a quite understandable (and licit) thing, since Gaijin is a business company, its revenues depend on paying players and players are induced to pay to quickly improve their vehicles and crews.

To Gaijin’s credit, even a non-paying player can get almost all those improvements as well, although much more slowly and with some limitations (e.g. no “Premium” vehicles, reserved to paying gamer). This is understandable too, because Gaijin also needs non-paying players, which make a much larger community of gamers, fill the ranks (allowing shorter waiting times before the battles) and support the game.
If just paying players were allowed in game or if just paying players would have reasonable chance to win battles (the infamous P2W, “Pay-to-Win”, taken to the extreme), this game would likely die in short time.

Moreover the huge importance of crews and vehicles “abilities” and the fact they improve by gaming it’s not necessarily a bad thing on the whole.
Many players (me included) like improving both vehicles (planes or tanks) and crews, they like the feeling of the progressive benefits got by hard fighting and their change from an “ugly duckling” to a lethal weapon.

On the other hand, any player being a good observer has soon an unpleasant feeling, given by realizing that he will never be on equal terms with paying gamers willing to spend real money for crews and vehicles. He could be better than many of them, even most of them, and enjoy the game but will ever be at a big or huge disadvantage against them and likely being unable to defeat the most successful ones independently of their relative skills.

Just an example: I’ve seen very expert (> 5000 battles, even > 20000) and paying players getting ALL of the 27 planes initially released on the new Italian tree, likely fully spading a lot of them, in just two weeks after the release of Regia Aeronautica in patch 1.69!
If you are a WT gamer you perfectly know that you have to pay to do that (unless you play 24/24 without eating and sleeping and even in that case you can’t have Premium vehicles). So, how could you think you are able, as a non-payer, to be evenly matched with them, which are ready to spend real money to immediately spading vehicles and maximizing crews strength?
You can’t, simply, unless you are a (virtually) reborn Erich Hartmann or Michael Wittmann (in this case, my congrats!).

In the end, War Thunder is “programmed” to GREATLY advantage PAYING players, especially promptly giving them fully spaded vehicles and (maybe more important) fully experienced crews just by paying them.
That’s why you can see “aces” being able, in an almost “supernatural” way, to instantly kill tanks running fast with just one shot or being almost invulnerable to enemy tank shots or winning any head-on with planes or making their planes turning much better than the declared turning time etc.

Non-paying players, on the contrary, will need many months or years in gaming to reach (maybe) the same levels, in the meantime they will be like welterweight against heavyweight.

But not only that: as the player progresses toward higher rank vehicles, the cost of those (both for purchase and for repair) nose up. This means that a non-paying player, being moreover disadvantaged by a not always fair game mechanic, will start to lose “virtual money” (Silver Lions) much easily than earning. Having less virtual money means being unable to frequently buy new high-tier vehicles, even amongst the “normal” (non-Premium) ones. So, if he want to be competitive after a certain rank level and to renew his hangar he must start paying.




WAR THUNDER HASN’T A “RUSSIAN BIAS” OR A “GERMAN BIAS” OR “SOMETHING ELSE BIAS”.
WAR THUNDER HAS A “WALLET BIAS”!


There is, amongst WT players, a never-ending debate about a supposed “bias” of the game for Russian vehicles or German vehicles or some other kind of bias.
All that could be true or false, but the real think to be understood is that War Thunder has a sure bias for PAYING!

The true “heroes” in WT are “wallet heroes”. The sooner you realize that, the sooner all will become clear to you.


War Thunder is an inveterate Pay-to-Win game, that allow you to rise from the “cannon fodder” level just to put you in front of an insurmountable wall at higher Tiers.
If you don’t PAY you are practically forced to stay at lower Tiers or to deplete your whole SL patrimony at higher Tiers (so stopping any progress in the game)
Moreover, and even more important, if you don’t pay you’ll ever be HUGELY DISADVANTAGED compared to paying player, which can buy the “skill” of their crews and instantly develop their vehicles by paying.

Not just disadvantaged: HUGELY disadvantaged!

Beware: paying doesn’t necessarily mean having a Premium account. A Premium account speeds grinding but one can get even greater advantages by paying without having a Premium account, just buying crew “experience” or spading at once vehicles, reaching instantly the same level of “artificial performance” (i.e. artificial “skill”) and vehicle level that a non-paying gamer can get some years later, playing for free.

The turning point is about the beginning of Tier IV for planes and earlier for tanks (for Ground Forces it’s already true at the most advanced level of Tier III). Until Tier III a good enough player (let’s say, a player having an average position in team at 50%-55%) is usually able to earn more virtual money than losing it. When entering Tier IV, things change quite drastically. Add to that the frequent happening of “lose streaks” (explained elsewhere in this Guide) and the thought of Gaijin controlling players’ virtual money earning become a very plausible possibility.

Gaijin has raised a “monetary virtual wall” for non-paying player at Tier IV / late III, quite difficult to climb over having satisfaction in game.
Honestly, having the first three Tiers being both enjoyable and affordable even for non-paying gamers is a very good thing and we have to be grateful to Gaijin for that. Of course, they are not philanthropists! They know that non-paying players are essential for having a critical mass of players, to the enjoyment of paying gamers too!
Nevertheless we should thank God that, at least about that, Gaijin hasn’t been so greedy to become plain stupid as they did for other features in the game.

So, WT nature derives from a comprehensible balance between Gaijin’s needs and players’ wishes.
Unluckily, in some cases the balance is compromised by Gaijin’s choices.

The real issue is that there are even some true idiocies, sometimes beyond imagination, in game mechanics, FM and DM.


THE REAL SORE POINT IN WT: GROUND FORCES.

In Tank Battles (i.e. War Thunder Ground Forces) the “idiocy issue” is even more true than in Air Battles (War Thunder Air Forces), especially with undeveloped tanks with inexperienced crews that are fully cannon fodder irrespective of the opponents battle rating and theoretical characteristics of the vehicles (declared by Gaijin).

It’s worthwhile to spend some words about the quite ridiculous state of Ground Forces, especially from a newbie’s point of view.
In fact, there are more differences than one could think between Air and Ground battles and knowing them is important for a plane pilot wanting to try tanks too.

Some of those peculiarities, such as the weakness of newbies’ planes and crews, are present in Air Battles too and in large part are fully justifiable depending on the planned game mechanism. No rants about that regarding Air Battles, even if features as crew Vitality are fully artificial and made just to encourage gamers to play.
But in Tank Battles true shortcomings are heightened and without any rational explanation (apart “Gaijin decided to program it that way”).

When I started gaming in Tank Battles I thought that they were similar enough to Air Battles, which all in all are fair enough in recognizing player’s skill.
For sure even in AF crew experience and development of planes are very important but if you play well you have chances to kill even more experienced gamers with better crews and planes or, at least, not to be instantly killed by them.
Things are very different for Tank Battles and just in part for the different game mechanics. In GF player’s skill is much less important and it seems that Gaijin did nothing to mitigate that.

In very short, in Tank Battles crew experience (especially Vitality) and BR difference are even more important and decisive than in Air Battles.

Moreover, GF have an huge number of serious (and sometimes even ridiculous) shortcomings, much more than AF.

If you will know GF, you’ll easily repeat with me: AF is a good game, GF is a shame.

I think it’s a good idea to examine Ground Forces issues in some detail, before passing to Air Forces.

So I put my considerations about WT Ground Forces, i.e. “The Big Idiocy”, in this page:

http://clocloz.altervista.org/wt/War_Thunder_Ground_Battles_Beginners_Guide.html

You can see that my complaints about WT Ground Forces are almost as much copious as the incredibly number of shortcomings and absurdities WT GF contains …

What about WT Air Forces?

Nevertheless several shortcomings do exist in Air Battles too.

And I sadly have to say that AF is worsening year after year, month after month, becoming more and more similar to the demented GF.
In practice, it’s becoming more and more Pay-to-Win, unbalanced battles are very frequent, head-ons are even more a sure defeat for “cannon fodder” designated players, there are less info for players (e.g. no BR list for players after battles’ end), the mechanisms of badly-conceived missions such as Air Domination were never fixed, bombers are made of steel and their gunners are still snipers better than Vasyly Zaytsev, bombing and low-skill behaviours still rules in rewarding, of course spawn camping is still there, declared performances have little connection with game’s reality (e.g. P-39 turning like Zeros, especially if flown by a “wallet ace”), mouse control commands have been reduced and plane control is still almost as bad as it was starting from the filthy 1.59 patch etc.

In NO area the AF game is now better than it was in 1.57 release (the better in AF history, IMHO), in several important aspects is worse, in some of them MUCH worse.

No surprise for me: when a game is developed by a bunch of MEDIOCRE PEOPLE you can’t expect anything different than HUGE MEDIOCRITY.
It’s very unlikely that IDIOTS could give something better than IDIOCY.
It has been a MIRACLE they could have designed and implemented a game, AF, that until a couple of years ago was, all in all, a good game!
At present, AF is still better than GF but I don’t know how long it could last …

Very often complained issues are Gaijin’s choices about some planes performance and guns performance, described by gamers as anti-historical.
The usual Gaijin’s answer in Forum (when they answer) is “give us historical documentation about performance you state is right”. But, on the other hand, usually they don’t declare which are the documents they used to determine performances in game, planes strength etc. So you have planes, like P-47s, that are historically strong and strong in game, whereas others, such as Typhoons, that are historically strong and structurally weak in game.

There are many complaints about game mechanics and battle rules, too.
For example, Air Domination mode was introduced sometimes ago with such serious and so many faults that a lot of players started to quit immediately, any time, after the beginning of that kind of battle. After less than one year, instead of correcting faults Gaijin simply choose to vastly reduce the frequency of the draw!
They got a lot of suggestions on the Forum but followed none, keeping AD battles just as they were, doing nothing but reducing their frequency.

And this seems to belong to “Gaijin’s style”: “things are good just the way we arranged”.

And there are many things judged useless by the most of players, such as “Orders” in battle, which very few gamers use.

For sure, whereas some of the developers seems good (e.g. graphics developers), game mechanic and interface guys are likely of very different quality amongst them and likely not all of them are really professional.
And for sure some of the thing you see in game seem developed in an “amateurish” way even about the aviation branch. Period.

Of course, periodically there are bugs, some minor others major (especially bugs affecting client stability), but this is quite common in any software under continuous development.
Some player have the feeling that Gaijin use them as “beta tester”, without having previously well-tested any new patch. It could be, but I think the real issues you can find in WT are several bad choices in game rules and mechanics, not software bugs.

In fact, in my opinion the most irritating things aren’t bugs or faults, you could find similar ones in any complex software, but the fact Gaijin too much often doesn’t answer to users’ suggestions, even for minor but useful changes that could be quickly and cheaply implemented.

For example:
- increasing maximum number of crew presets, which is now really insufficient especially for gamers with some years of experience and playing both planes and tanks
- put a timely indicator of XP points waiting to be assigned to crews (there was such a signal, but it usually appeared after days you started to gain applicable XP points!)
- allow players to set convergence individually for any kind of plane and, better, any kind on gun on a plane.
At present, if you choose a convergence value for a plane, it’s immediately copied to all the other planes in game!
Yes, to any other plane in game, for any nation! You could set 250mt appropriate for a Russian 7.7 mm, then change plane to English and you’ll have the same 250mt even for Hispano 20mm cannons!
At any time you have to remember to change convergence, if you want to take advantage of different guns characteristics!

These things are so easy to implement that’s it seems absurd they haven’t been so far.

So absurd that the hypothesis is purposely done is not unfounded.
Gaijin allows gamers to go beyond the eight preset but to do so they want you buy (or grind) Tier V vehicles. And, after all, if they would favour crew experience increase, in any way, then players would have less reasons for buying XP points.
This wouldn’t mean these choices would be sensible ones for business reasons, instead they would be stupid choices inducing many players walking away.

On the contrary, Gaijin too much often make changes never asked by players, to players’ annoyance.

Maybe in some cases the issue is lack of resources for development work but in many cases it seems they choose to develop useless or bad things and to ignore real needs.

Another quite incredible deficiency of WT is the very poor (or, sometimes, absent) documentation, especially serious when the lack regards game mechanisms (even basic info on missions’ rules).
Poor documentation in software is usually quite typical of: poor professionalism of the development team, insufficient resources in the company or software still being nearly “beta” (which is likely, you can understand that by the endless, and somewhat annoying, number of patches and tweaks!).
I don’t know which of those reasons could be at work here, anyway players have the most of time to resort to WT Forum or other documentation written by players themselves and usually publicized on the Forum.

My verdict.

Nevertheless, at the moment War Thunder it’s still the most amusing game in its category (I’m afraid also because the scarceness of competition!), with however good controls, good vehicle choice, smart enough Battle Rating calculation and acceptable (albeit imperfect) Matchmaking, very good graphic and a community of enthusiast players.

And, to Gaijin’s credit, the game is enjoyable even for non-paying players (at least at middle-low Tiers) and is been continually developed (it’s not a dying game, at least not for now and notwithstanding many players’ concerns about Gaijin’s often counter-productive choices).

So, is it worthwhile to play War Thunder?

My answer is still YES, especially for WWII planes enthusiasts (tank fans have likely less reasons to be happy), notwithstanding the many and deserved criticisms.

Let’s hope the game could improve in the many areas it really needs.

Alter a few years in gaming I think now I’m able to give some good advices to real beginners about air battles, having myself passed that stage.

War Thunder has a good enough Forum (https://forum.warthunder.com/index.php ) but too much often tips ad advices there given are inappropriate for newbies, in some case plainly wrong. Many players giving advices on that Forum seem unable to give really useful advices instead of preconceived ideas.

So I decided to write this little guide.

How to use this Guide.

My advices regard here Arcade Air Battles only, updated to the patch version indicated at top on this page, are especially committed to fighter pilots and especially related to the lowest “Tiers” (from I to III), which are the first game levels encountered by beginners.

Things become to change from Tier IV and above (more performing planes, even jets; more expensive planes; somewhat different tactics …) so these advices has to be in part adapted for upper tiers.
Also consider that players gaming at higher level are usually quite expert, their crews are really expert too and their planes are often fully spaded, so fighting them requires a lot of skill, better with more refined tactics and aerial combat manoeuvers, and equally good crews and planes. At Tier IV and above and beyond BR 4.0, these tips have likely to be integrated with some other advices, for example high altitude manoeuvers.

But if the player wants to have great success at Tier IV and V, being able to compete with the best gamers, not only needs to improve his skill but also to make some investment (likely with real money too) into his crews and planes, because a lot of his opponents playing there already did that.
Many of them are paying players, with the most developed planes and crews, and many of them belong to a squadron. Playing in a squadron has many advantages in battle performances and score, when their members fight together.
A typical high tiers player is a paying player that has been in the game for three or four years, has acquired high skill and (not less important) also the best machinery and the best crews, often belongs to a squadron (recognisable by the squadron acronym before the nickname) and uses Boom-and-Zoom and high altitude tactics much more than the average gamer, also because he wants to defend at any cost his “precious” stats (especially Kill / Death ratio) using the “safer” tactics.
A beginner has a long way to go to compete with them, maybe more for the gap in experience and investment in equipment than for the difference in natural ability.

Anyhow, Tiers II and III are quite popular and even a lot of experienced gamers play at those level, so these advices can be useful for more skilled players too (if regrettably they didn’t understand these things yet …).

Since I am a fighter player at 90%, the most of these advices are useful for fighters pilot.
Bomber-only players could find many of them not so much useful.

The most of the arguments here mentioned aren’t elaborated, both about game features (e.g. Battle Rating and Matchmaking), the kind of battles (e.g. Domination) and tactics and techniques (e.g. how to learn deflection shooting). The beginners can find a lot of specific good and up-to-date information on those issues in WT web site and Forum.

This guide doesn’t even want to cover all the mechanics in the game.
There are much more broad and all-including guide on internet, many of them very good (when kept updated) but often “too much” wide in scope and dispersive for a beginner.
I just tried to highlight the first and most important things to know for a newbie, IMHO.

In a few cases I’ll give some brief hints about Tank Battles too, especially to highlight a different behaviour in some aspects that at first glance could be considered identical to Air Battles.
Really, Air Battles are thought and programmed much better than (often disappointing) Tank Battles, especially about realism of damage models which heavily affects newbies’ performance, much more than with planes.

You’ll find here a lot of comments (and rants) about War Thunder Update 1.59 “Flaming Arrows” (in brief “patch 1.59”) made by Gaijin at June 8^th 2016.
This is not just because I dislike the alterations brought to the game by that patch (that’s fully true, anyway, I despise that changes) but because those modifications were so marked to make obsolete many considerations and opinions expressed on WT Forum and elsewhere before June 2016, for example about bombers, length of battle, average number of kills in a battle, effectiveness of guns etc.
Anytime an update enter into force it changes something in game but patch 1.59 changed things so deeply that it’s worthwhile or, better, it’s necessary to stress what and how it modified in WT, also to avoid that a newbie could be misdirected by obsolete advices he could read on internet.

I could bet that some of the advices here expressed are not agreed by other players (e.g. about Boom-and-Zoom and the importance of “not to die”).
This is not surprising, especially in a game having thousands of players, each one with his opinion, and, after all, I wrote them also because I found on the Forum many advices I consider wrong or at least inappropriate for a newbie!

I suggest anyone to do a reality check and judge using his own brain.

Watching replays and looking at the best players behaviour and style is a good tactic to speed up that realization, without depending too much on other people’s opinions.
In the first months of my “career” I replayed almost a couple of hundredths air battles I played, focusing my attention on the better players, and doing that was more useful to me, about combat tactics, than many advices heard and many videos watched.
I think that after three or four months in gaming, any player should be able to judge by himself which advices are good in general and which advices fit or don’t fit his current skill and playing style.

I here assume that the reader has at least a basic knowledge of the game and of the terminology of air combat and terms used in WT, so I usually won’t explain their meaning.

Tips and advices.

These are my tips for beginners fighter pilots (but not just them) in War Thunder air Arcade Battles (AB), tiers from I to III.

· FIRST OF ALL …

The first thing I have to say is: at the moment, I consider myself to be just an average player.

I entered the game about three years ago and I started to do well enough, i.e. to leave the lower third of battle ranks, after about four-six months of gaming and I needed other six-nine months to reach (on the average) the upper third, when my stats (for what it’s worth) started to show > 50% in battle victories and > 55% in rank position. At that time I started to reach first position in team (and sometimes in battle) now and then, but anyway much more frequently than I could have expected just some months before.
Nothing to write home about but enough to be satisfied, at least for myself.

If you are looking for “high level experts’ advices”, look elsewhere.
You should look for tips from Level 100 players, not mine.

So, why “I dare” to give advices to newbies?
The reason is simple: because I had first-hand experience that a lot of advices given by “real experts” don’t fit novices’ needs.
And that experiences are still “fresh” on my skin, so this is likely the best time to give a feedback.

Too much often veterans give to beginners tips that seems academic lessons give to schoolchildren.
No awareness of the learning curve (maybe they forgot their own beginnings!) and some endlessly restated ideas that have no much contact with reality, IMHO, at least the reality of a newbie. Some advices seems to be related much more with Realistic Battles than Arcade Battles too.
I wasted a certain amount of time trying to follow some advices, during my first months in game, being at first unable to understand why they didn’t work.

I started improving when I realized that no, the first things to learn in AB are neither Aerial Combat Manoeuvres nor tactics, but endlessly enhance planes and crews, be aware of BR, don’t rush to upper tiers, don’t be afraid to die, use deflection shooting, look at the best players in replays (trying to learn something) and fight where the battle is.

So, you are warned: there are a lot of different opinions among WT players and my opinions are very different from others’ viewpoint.
My advice is to hear any opinion, try by yourself and just after then choose your way.
That’s what I did.

· WAR THUNDER, AN EVOLVING GAME.

Be aware that WT is still a continuously evolving game (according to many is still just a little bit more than a "beta"!), so many things (flight models, damage models, aim modes etc.) can change at any new update, even markedly, hindering players that were accustomed to older version. And, unluckily, it seems that too often Gaijin follows the rule "if it's broken, don't fix it; if it's not broken, change it"!
For example, Gaijin did a really bad move with 1.59 update, that changed a lot of the game behaviour to the impairment of everyone except dedicated bomber pilots.
That also means that advices on planes (how to fly them, how to use them etc.) and even other game components, advices you could read on WT Forum or elsewhere, could become fully outdated or partially outdated after some new version releases, i.e. after one year or two.
This includes my advices, of course, so please check above in this page which is the most recent patch version applicable to my suggestions.

· REALLY IN A NUTSHELL …

I perfectly know that, in a Twitter-era, reading more than 50 lines of text is so unusual to be often hard.

So I’ll put at first the advices I judge the most important for a beginner, the suggestions he should begin to follow immediately IMHO, such as I were quickly answering to a tips’ request in a forum:

o First of all, forget the naïve idea that WT is a skill-based game: skill is NOT the more important thing to have success in this game. Not at all.
Only morons could think that WT is basically skill-based (you’ll find a lot of them on WT Forum). More below here.

o Since skill in WT is just limitedly rewarded, the best choice is trying to have fun anyway. And forgetting any “win obsession” if one doesn’t want to pay. More below here.

o try different nations and different vehicles, this will give you a wider perspective and will let you understand which planes best fit your style.

o fully "spade" your vehicles (i.e. add modifications to your vehicles using RP points earned in battles until they are fully developed, at least planes you like to fly). A fully spaded plane is much more performing than a stock one. Your performance will ever be heavily hampered by using stock vehicles.
If you want, you could buy the modifications. My advice is, on the contrary, to get them “for free”, just by playing, because the time needed is almost always acceptable (a few weeks of playing, usually).

o increase crews experience using XP points: it's not just you that's fighting in the battle, you fight thru your crews. Experienced crews are much more effective. Your performance will ever be heavily hampered by using unexperienced crews, even in things you couldn’t believe in, such as turning the plane at its best or aiming and shooting.
Of course, you could even buy that “experience” and you would have your crews maxed out in an instant instead of waiting for months or years (if you usually play with many different crews). This is a huge difference with vehicles’ spading because maxing out crews by playing it’s a much longer process and paying for that gives a very marked and immediate advantage to the player.

o don't rush to upper tiers (where you would find many players much more expert than you and higher repair costs). BTW, Tiers II and III are considered the most amusing ones by a lot of players, myself included, and being quite cheap in purchases and repairs are fully enjoyable even for unskilled players (which die a lot).

o be aware of BR (Battle Rating) of your planes, don't use one or two high BR planes mixed with low BRs otherwise you could be heavily disadvantaged in MM (Matchmaking).

o learn deflection shooting, usually much more effective than shooting from 6 o'clock.

o use zoom view when shooting, it helps aiming.

o remap controls on mouse and keyboard, if needed, to fit your preference and the most comfortable arrangement.

o use battle replays to examine behaviour and tactics of the top players in real battles. That way you’ll likely learn much more than reading advices on the WT Forum.

o If you really want to “win” in WT AF, with the same ease of those “aces” you admire in battle and even at Tiers beyond III, you should really consider start paying (if you like to “have success” that way). WT is a Pay-to-Win game, even if AF is well-enough balanced to be “almost” fair until Tier III, but paying players will ever have a marked advantage.
In practice, Gaijin set up a “virtual money wall” to prevent players going up easily in Tiers without paying. You can do it, without paying, but you’ll lose a lot so you’ll lose more SL than you earn an you won’t be able to make progress (buying vehicles with SL etc.).
Moreover, there are many signs suggesting that Gaijin is consciously advantaging paying players even well beyond the “money wall”, e.g. drawing them more frequently in the stronger team or using hidden parameters to enhance their chance to hit and survive.
In short, don’t even think to be able to reach the top without paying: “no payment” in WT means “be content to be an average successful player and have some fun, no more”.
Obviously, you should also consider if it’s really convenient to put real money in this game, since Gaijin uses to change things very frequently and often in a detrimental way.
Anyway you could feel comforted by knowing that until Tier III/early IV the AF game is fair and fun enough even for non-paying players, so you are not forced to pay to have a lot of amusement, just you have to renounce to upper levels. Unfortunately, in GF things are much, much worse and paying is almost mandatory to have real fun, because non-paying tank players are “cannon fodder” since the lowest tiers.

o last but not least: set your own goals, not caring of any “objective” you can’t reach (unless you pay, if you have just a minimum skill). I stopped worrying even about victory (!) when I had an incredibly losing streak of 55 defeats on 70 Ground Forces battles, absolutely inexplicable with “chance”, “bad luck” or “skill”. When you realize that your performances in game are largely (likely for the most part) ruled by unfairness of the game itself and not by your skill (this is even more true for Ground Forces), all suddenly becomes clear.
But, at that time, you have three choices: start paying, stop gaming or defining your own goals (e.g. spading all vehicles, trying to stay at least on the middle of the score ranks etc.). For my taste, the first one is not interesting (I’m not interested in becoming a “wallet warrior” or a “paying ace”, even less in giving money to a substantially unfair game), the second one is reasonable but deprives you from the good things the game has if lived just as a pastime, the third one allows you to have some fun even when treated by the game as “cannon fodder”. For now, the third one is my choice.

Now, I hope the reader won’t stop here and will go on reading even the rest, where all these arguments (and more) are better explained …

· ARCADE AND “REALISM”.

Just some words about “realism” and Arcade Battles.

A kind of people you can find on the Forum are those plainly saying that “WT is a simulation of life” (!).
Well, I’m quite worried by those guys, almost scared. Better to move on.

Many players are less radical and just complain about “not realistic” behaviours in AB or advice to do something because is “just as WWII pilots did”.

Well, one thing is sure: Arcade Battles are not “realistic” at all. Period.

There can be no disagreement on that, since in AB you start air battle without even taking off, can “die” many times, can reload your guns in flight, have an “Instructor” that helps you flying, have markers showing enemies and friends etc.

So, complaining about “poor realism” of AB game mechanics and players’ behaviour is quite silly and childish.
If you want to have (to some extent) “realism” you have to play Realistic Battles or, even better, Simulator Battles.

A valid complaint, on the contrary, is about FM, DM or plane equipment not corresponding to planes characteristics and features in real-life.
Although WT is not “real-life” and using planes in WT is not “flying” there is no reason to adopt wrong characteristics in simulation.

To be honest, even adopting the best simulations AB couldn’t be “realistic” yet.
Maps are small and even a fast plane couldn’t easily escape from chasing enemies, like they would do in real life. Whereas in real life high climb rate is usually preferable to high turn speed, in WT AB the choice is at least much more uncertain but, all in all, turn time is likely more important because fast climbing is, just like horizontal speed, not so much advantaged in Arcade Battle. And the cores of Arcade Battles, especially until Tier III, are low-altitude fights with a lot of turns (in particular horizontal turns), not climbing fights. In these battles, turn time is as much as important than horizontal speed and both are more important than climb speed.

The issue about “realism/not realism” makes this question arise: why do the most of people play AB instead of RB or SB?
I don’t think the answer is simply “because RB and SB are more difficult”. Even AB are difficult although in a different way (crowded, frantic, stressful …) and many RB/SB players seem to be uncomfortable to face such a tough fight, where they know that will likely “die” at least some times.

I think it’s mainly because Arcade Battles are more amusing.

One WWII fighter pilot once said that “pilot’s life is 5% of excitement and 95% of boredom”.
Arcade Battles try (and succeed) in inverting the percentage: much more excitement than boredom.
AB are so distant from “real-life” that they take off dullness and replace it with thrill.

So, players that don’t want to spend every time ten minutes taking off and climbing, sometime ending the battle very soon having been immediately shot down at the first encounter with an enemy, choose to play AB (where in ten minutes you can be shot down two times but at the same time getting six victories) instead of RB.
Things are even worse for RB and SB player because they have to add the initial time in queue waiting the battle start, that can be even ten or fifteen minutes, whereas in AB the wait time is rarely much above one minute (since there are much more players in AB). It’s a catch-22 situation for RB/SB.
I’m not surprised at all by the overwhelming popularity of AB.

Some people say that AB “instil bad habits” into players, damaging them when they want to shift to RB and SB.
It could be, but also the opposite is true: a RB player gets the habit of trying “not to die” at any cost, that seems good but it’s not always true in AB, where a player has at least three crews to use and should use them in the most convenient way, even “dying” some time if opportune to get more score.

So, consider the peculiarities of Arcade Battle and beware of those which try to sell you that “my tactic is good because it has been used in WWII” or “you are doing wrong because not fighting realistically”.
Could you imagine that some players still give tips, for WT AB, explicitly based on “Dicta Boelcke”, i.e. rules going back to the First World War?
“Real war” can surely teach a lot but you have to remember that WT is not war and Arcade Battle even less.

· COMBAT STYLE, PERSONAL GOALS AND MAKING PROGRESS.

First of all, in War Thunder (and especially in Arcade Battles) you can obviously play the style you want and pursuing your own goals (high kill/death ratio, "I don't want to die" goal, high score in battle, fighting any nation, fighting just with favourite nation, fighting with a lot of planes because you like to change, fighting just with your favourite and most performing planes etc.).
Some players (myself included) consider War Thunder just as a game, others think at it as a real “simulated war” and the difference explains many of the different ideas you find among players about tactics, goals etc.
Some players consider it just a pastime, for others is a sort of “second life”, some of them invest some money in game others happily plays for free and are content in doing so.

But there is an unavoidable objective: if you want to make progress in game you need to earn Silver Lions (SL), Research Points (RP) and Crew Experience Points (XP).

Silver Lions (SL) are points representing “virtual money”, just like Golden Eagles (GE). But whereas GE have to be get by spending real money (or winning them in rare GE Wagers, as explained in this guide), SL can be gained just by gaming (they could be also bought by converting GE though). Roughly speaking, the better you score in battle, the more SL you gain (and in WT AF battles this is well enough linked with skill, not so in Ground Forces).
You can use SL to get new vehicles, re-training a crew on a new vehicle etc. and also to repair vehicles, refill ammo etc

Research Points (RP) are needed to get new modifications (better guns, ammo, engine, strength etc.) on vehicle the player already owns and to unlock new vehicles (which the player will buy using SL). The process of improving vehicles with RP and unlocking new planes or tanks is called “grinding” in the usual WT players’ jargon. Just like SL these points can be gained by gaming.

Crew Experience Points (XP) are needed to improve crews’ effectiveness (better precision in shooting, better strength, etc.) which is an important thing too much often overlooked by players. Again, you earn them by playing (the better you play, more often you’ll be compensated with some XP points for crews you have used in battle).

Gaining all of these points is essential because they allow you to get better planes and to improve your crews.
To achieve that objectives you have two ways: the first is buying planes and crew experience using real money (thru Golden Eagles, GL, you can pay for them or rarely win them in GL wagers), otherwise you can earn "free" points obtaining good scores in battle and, at the same time, not "spending" too much for lost planes, repairs, refilling the ammunitions etc.

Even if you don’t pay, if you play well enough, kill and damage more than you “die”, in AF until Tier III you should easily earn more SL than you spend for repair. And you don’t need to be an “ace”, just an average player. If you constantly lose SL in AF until Tier III, even after having passed the newbie stage, you’ll are doing something wrong.
Things are different in AF from Tier IV and above, where repair costs often skyrocket, and very different in Ground Forces since Tier I (!), being GF a silly game with absurd scoring and no respect for skill. In GF a non-paying player could expect to have a tie or just a little bit better in the balance SL earned vs spent.
WT GF is (unfortunately) a quite stupid game made for paying players, point. If you like planes and prefer them to tanks, consider yourself lucky.

· TO PAY OR NOT TO PAY? PAYING PLAYERS, PREMIUM PLAYERS AND P2W.

At least until Tier IV, WT is (to date) really enjoyable even for non-paying players, although paying players have several advantages such as Premium planes and quickly obtaining plane improvements and crew skills by buying them.
Although usually Premium planes are not so superior to regular planes (with a few exception such as the American XP-55, quite OP, i.e. over-performing, at its level), being able to quickly spade your planes and buy experience for crews put the paying player to a not negligible advantage.

Is War Thunder a Pay-to-Win game?
My opinion is: YES, of course it is, both in Air Forces and Ground Forces, but not so much irritant at lower Tiers in Arcade Air battles.

From Tier I to Tier III a good enough player, having experienced enough crews and spaded planes, can fight with chance of success even paying players and can quite easily earn points and SL needed to buy planes, repair them and improve crews skill.

Notwithstanding the many criticism I could express about WT AF, it’s a fair enough game with regard to paying vs regular (non-paying) users in Air Battles.
I want to stress: I’m speaking about WT AIR Forces, because Ground Forces are surely a pay-to-win game since lower levels!
Like a lot of other issues, GF are much worse and much unfair than AF and GF is a pay-to-win game starting since the Tier I. Being a demented game disrespectful of personal skill, it highly respects money paid to quickly improve crews and tanks.
You could better understand why by reading my Ground Battles guide.

WT Air Forces it’s for sure a pay-to-be-GREATLY-advantaged game, really is a P2W game, but a good non-paying player can still get the upper hand against a less skilled paying gamer, this at least in the lower (and cheaper) Tiers.
Of course, paying player will ever be advantaged but not necessarily as much dominant as they are in Ground Forces and non-paying won’t be just “cannon fodder” (at least after having passed the first months as an absolute beginner).

But more a player proceeds in the game and more he realizes that it’s progressively more difficult to reach high level of performance, on a par with the better players, without paying.
And another obstacle for non-paying gamers from Tier IV on is the increasingly cost of repairs, making very difficult to compensate with good battle performance and resulting incomes.
On the contrary, if you pay you’ll quickly (even immediately) have the best planes and the best crews and this is much more important than a newbie could think. And having, thank to that, a high-level performance, you’ll be able to earn much more SL/RP/XP points and easily pay the repairs too.

For sure, a bad player won’t become a good player just by paying.
But a bad player at least will pull himself out of “cannon fodder” crowd and will start to win much more than his own skill would have deserved.
And an average player will likely become an “ace”, second only to paying players having also a good natural skill.

The more direct way to become a paying player is buying a Premium account but this is just one of many possibilities.

My advice is to spent several months playing as non-pay, improving yourself and your planes and crews for free (albeit slowly), and just after that consider if it's worthwhile to become a paying player (Premium or not).

Please take note: you could be a paying player without being a Premium player.
Being a Premium player is not the only way (and couldn’t be the best way) to spend money in WT.



So, which are the benefits of being a Premium player?

As many other things, Gaijin periodically changes game mechanisms giving us just the bare minimum information.

A few years ago the benefits given by a Premium account were declared as:
- 4 decal slots for each plane
- squad size of 2+ players
- increased limit of campaign mission that give rewards
- +50% SL for active battle actions in random battles
- +100% SL for battle time in random battles
- +50% SL reward in other game modes
- +100% XP in all game modes

but in 2017 they changed it removing the “+100% XP” declaration in their benefit statement:
- +100% RP in all game modes
- +50% SL for active battle actions in random battles
- +100% SL reward for battle time in Random Battles
- +50% SL reward in other game modes
- 4 decal slots

So at present isn’t explicitly declared if Premium accounts still gives double XP points as it did until 2016 at least.
Since the importance of crew skill, my opinion is that this obscurity isn’t by chance at all, as usual for Gaijin!

But if this is still true:
“The number of points accrued for flight crew experience depends on the research points obtained in a battle. In Realistic and Simulator battles you will receive approximately 1% of the research points earned for the aircraft the crew is flying in; in Arcade battles you gain 3%, but the experience is spread among multiple crews. So the average speed of leveling in all three modes is approximately equal. There is another way to develop the crew - buying experience points for Golden Eagles in the "Accelerated Training" menu” (http://wiki.warthunder.com/index.php?title=Category:Crew_skills )

then the +100% RP still means +100% XP.

As some players said, it should be just a rewording of Gaijin’s benefit statement.


So we can say that a Premium player has essentially one significant and direct advantage: it earns from +50% to +100% more SL/RP/XP points at any battle.

More than this, there is just 4 decals slots instead of 2 slots (the default), a mere aesthetic gratification (but that can give further money to Gaijin from pay decals!).
It’s for Gaijin also a way to persuade players to go on playing and reach upper levels, where costs are higher and need a lot of SL.
Since playing with better and quickly spaded vehicles and, even more, with highly skilled crews allow the player to win much more easily (even if their personal skill is not so high), this way those players become loyal to the game … usually thinking that their performances depends just by their skill!
You’ll find a lot of such players on the Forum.
Being happy for their performances, those gamers are more likely tempted to pay other money for things such as Premium vehicles, camouflages, decals, maxing out crews etc.

It’s a good business strategy for Gaijin, which is largely based on a fact: make player thinking that they are advantaged by paying but that this is secondary respect to their personal skill.
In other words, WT is a game that succeeded in effectively hide its P2W nature.
This explains why there are in WT so many naïve or self-deluded (or silly …) paying players (often Premium, other non-Premium) stubbornly refusing the reality, i.e. a paying player has an “artificial performance” largely (and probably mainly) depending on the money he spent (at least if he spent it in a smart enough way) and his success is for the most part based on a supply of “cannon fodder” non-paying players.

Some players say that becoming Premium is not worthwhile because it just gives some advantages (more virtual money earned at any battle) and Premium vehicles are usually not superior to regular ones.
This just in part could be true, for example Premium vehicles worthy a purchase are rare, but don’t’ care of silly players who say “hey, I’m Premium and I can tell you that it gives no advantages, so WT is NOT P2W”.

A Premium account essentially gives much more SL/RP/XP, so speeds grinding and repairs, allowing the gamer to play at higher levels, with better and quickly spaded vehicles, and this can give a great advantage. But if the players badly spend those points and virtual money (e.g. choosing bad vehicles) his “artificial performance” couldn’t be much better than a non-paying player.
Being a P2W game doesn’t mean that even a stupid player can win just for having paid!

But the biggest advantage is that a Premium account gave double (+100%) XP points too, so you could understand how big additional advantage it give to Premium players!
Again, if the Premium player is so silly to disregard this advantage, not assigning promptly those points or assigning them to the least useful parameters, it would waste large part of the advantage.
I can’t avoid to remember here an expert Premium and paying player on WT Forum, who said he didn’t value much crew skill parameters and in particular Vitality, at the same time saying “my Premium account doesn’t give me any advantage, it works just like my non-Premium account”!
I often wonder why “naivety” (just to be polite) is so widespread in the world and even in WT world …

Really, there is a further thing that a Premium player could (and likely should) do, i.e. using part of the so much more copiously earned SL to qualify crews.
Qualification of a crew to “Expert”, for a specific vehicle, just needs SL (no need of GE, differently to “Ace” qualification) and significantly increase any crew skill parameter.
So this is another big advantage of being a Premium player, because getting more SL means that he can also more easily increase crew skill and this adds to the benefit of getting double XP points.


Is being a Premium player the only way to take advantage of paying?
Not at all.

In fact, there are useful and effective features that you could buy even without being Premium, such as crews experience, likely the most relevant feature in game along with vehicle spading.

So my advice is: if you want to spend money, do it buying crews experience (by buying single increments and/or qualifying crews).
To do that, you don’t need a Premium account.

If, on the contrary, you decide to become a Premium player (at present, a Premium account for 180 days costs about 40 dollars), you’ll earn from one and half to the double more points at any battle.
For SL/RP there is just an indirect advantage for your “artificial skill” but for XP the advantage is direct and very significant. You should think about this much more than about SL/RP and even less for Premium vehicles (apart some of them clearly OT and, especially coupled to maxed out crews, being able to do a carnage in battle).
The huge advantage in using money in WT is increasing crews skill and doing that in a smart way (starting on the most important skill parameters).

For now, I’m not a paying player (nor Premium).

Not only I find that the game still has too many shortcomings to be happy to spend real money but, worse, I realized that it could drastically change overnight and spoil the fun, wasting large parts of any “investment” I could have done. Such a thing happened with patch 1.59 and could happen again.
Moreover, although I’m “grateful” to Gaijin to have done a game quite enjoyable even by non-paying players, I can’t feel “guilty” towards them: non-paying players are as much important as paying players, since the latter are for sure much less numerous that the former and without “free” player the game would be much less interesting for paying gamers (and with longer waiting battle queue too!).

So, even non-paying players are very important for Gaijin: they make the game not to die, promote WT, fill the teams in battles and, being often newbies or at least not veterans at all, are an easy and tasty meal (i.e. “cannon fodder”) for expert paying players, making them happy and inducing them to go on spending money!

· BEST NATION.

One of the most frequent questions is "which nation in WT has the best planes for beginners?".
Although I think that the importance of that is quite overrated, there are much more important things to know when being a newbie!, the question deserves an answer.
Here I'll give just my personal opinion in a nutshell (for AB, tiers I/II and Battle Rating <= 3.0), from the best to the weakest.

Best nations at low tiers:

1) USSR: no weakness in general, good guns (even strong cannons), many maneuverable planes and the less agile (such as Laggs) have a good armament. Likely the easiest to fly too, on the average. You can't get really wrong with Russians.

2) USA: sturdy planes, they have almost MGs only but they are effective when appropriately used, just remember they are not the best turners and you can kill a lot putting to use their large amount of ammo. Some planes, such as F2A-3, are amongst the best at these tiers, dangerous even for upper tiers enemies.

Good nations at low tiers:

3) Germany: even if not all German planes at this tiers are really effective, many of them are (e.g. BF 109-E and F when well flown). The player has to remember that not just FW 190s but also BF 109s are NOT turnfighters, in spite of some statement you can read here and there, they are energy/BnZ fighters (keep your speed high and you'll be able to turn well enough too!).
Old players can still have good Italian planes in their German tree, such as C.202, and even lower level Italian planes such as G 50 are surprisingly good when the player has learnt how to fly and shoot with them. Unluckily, Gaijin has nerfed Breda MGs and this hampered effectiveness of Italian planes in German tree too.

4) Great Britain: Hurricanes are sturdy, stable and with good MGs, older Spitfires are quite manoeuverable and good enough (even if nothing exceptional, in some aspect could be even disappointing). Beauforts, Blenheims and Sunderlands are quite effective in bombing. There are enough good planes to choose British, but learn to use their guns, a little bit more quirky than the first three nations in my rank.

Weakest nation at low tiers:

5) Italy: although it’s a mixed situation, much depending by single planes,, all in all is quite poor, almost pathetic in several cases. This is well represented by Re.2000: quite a nimble fighters but weak (it catches fire very easily) and with appalling ineffective MGs at BR 2.0-2.3. Breda MGs are a generally weak spot in the whole low-tiers Italian tree, apart a few surprising cases such as Ba.65 (but just if you stay under BR 2.0). Amongst reserve planes, no doubt Ba.65 is an effective and really funny (albeit really ugly!) attacker, very dangerous even for enemy fighters and likely undertiered, whereas the biplanes (Cr.32 and Cr.42) are what one could expect, good enough but not dominant.
G.50s and C.200s are good enough just if your battle rate stay well under BR 2.0 and, anyhow, are made quite ineffective by the disappointing Bredas. C.202 could be a good plane if not for its awful MGs, too.
All in all, Italians badly need to be fully spaded to exploit their good characteristics (when they have them) but some of them are really bad even when spaded. One example is S.81, a real “cannon-fodder bomber”, easily shot down by any enemy, or BR.20, another extremely weak bomber too. In fact, all Italian low-tiers bombers are pitiful in game, especially about lack of sturdiness.
Of course, Italian planes need strong enough crews, otherwise with those bad MGs you’ll make much, much more assists than kills and you crews will be regularly killed by any adversary.
If I would be asked to give a concise definitions of low-tiers Italian planes I could answer: “As weak as Japanese planes, but less fun to play”.
In fact, at present Italy at lower Tiers is the weakest nation. It was a good enough nation at low tiers (even with planes in German tree) until Gaijin, unfortunatey, badly nerfed Bredas.
The only acceptable BR level is maybe under 1.7: you should fight not beyond 1.7 (i.e. with Ba-65, C.42s, G.50s, C.200s, BR.20s etc) to encounter enemies being usually armed with relatively weak guns and that can still be destroyed with Bredas.

6) Japan: although quite manoeuvrable planes (as a lot of Japanese) are fun to fly, the Japaneses are historically the less robust and their guns are often so-so. If you fly Japanese planes you have to understand that, unless you are Saburo Sakai, you'll be disadvantaged. But having good performance with the weakest planes (and it's possible to do anyhow) is a reason for being proud!

Still unknown level nation at low tiers:

7) France: the Dewoitine reserve fighters (D.371, D.373 and D.500) are quite nimble but extremely fragile. So-so guns (much better when spaded) but with a limited ammo which usually end just when you would need it. If well used in dogfight they could be very effective but, all in all, their Russian Reserve counterparts I-15 are much better.
The more advanced D.501 and the Premium D.510 are good: their 20mm cannon, even if hampered by very limited ammo supply, can be devastating around their BR 1.3.
F.222.2 bomber is, like other low tiers French bombers, quite good (strong and resilient, great load and good enough defensive power), although sluggish and dead slow.
I’ll not make more comment about that until I’ll know French tree better.

My strong advice is: play all nations, know all nations, have fun with all nations and just after that decide if you have one or two favourite nation, if any.

· OVERPERFORMING / UNDERPERFORMING PLANES? OVERRATED / UNDERRATED PLANES?

The debate about which WT planes are over performing (“OP” in WT Forum jargon) or underperforming and which are overrated or underrated will never ends.
This also because the assignment of a certain BR level to a plane is essential for Matchmaking and an flying an over performing or underperforming plane for that level can make a whole world of difference.
Any player has his own opinions about that, often linked to personal fighting style that induces to have preference for some planes and to hate others.

In the next section you find some opinions of mine about a few of them, just to make you thinking and making considerations.
There would be a lot more planes to speak about, too many really, so I prefer to talk just about a few of them.

My suggestion is just: don’t blindly believe to other players’ opinions, test planes, fully spade them and just after that decide if they are good or bad, especially for your fighting style.

· JUST BECAUSE YOU ASKED FOR, THESE ARE MY JUDGEMENTS ABOUT SOME PLANES.


Bad Planes.

This is a list of planes which, according to my personal experience and opinions of others too, I consider quite bad (and sometimes really shitty), at least when used in AB Arcade.
In many cases you could even avoid spading them (unless you are a “spading fanatic” like me!).

Please note that the list is absolutely incomplete and judgements regard AB only and until Tier IV included (i.e. tiers involving beginners and just a little bit more experienced players).
Listed BR are those set by Gaijin at the moment I wrote these notes, always check them because they could have been revised.

I have to add a general remark: sad but true, as in almost any other thing in WT, you have always to take into account the “ace/cannon fodder factor” set up by Gaijin.
You will find in this Guide, and even more in the Ground Forces Guide, a lot of explanations about it and about WT being Pay-to-Win. Being P2W means that the effectiveness of a vehicle, e.g. a plane, also depends by his player having been put by game mechanism in the "Ace League" or in the "Cannon Fodder Rabble".

So, if you find that some planes I’m here calling "bad" seem to be much better than my judgement, please take into account that WT GF is a such "artificial" and P2W game that a player, if designated to be a “winner” or having bought his "skill", can do quite fine even with bad planes.
On the contrary, all the other players … has to suffer!

Another essential thing to take into account is that I’m talking about fully spaded planes.
This is important because at stock stage almost all planes are “bad”, some at an unbearable level, even those that will become “good” once fully developed.
The planes in this list are the ones I consider bad even when all modifications have been applied.





- I-153 M62 Chaika (USSR, BR 2.7):
In my opinion this is one of the most overrated planes in game (speaking about AB), with a BR 2.7 which is at least 0.7 more than it should have. It has just four 7.7 mm machine guns (even with high rate-of-fire) and in my experience is very ineffective especially against strong planes such as Hurricanes or P-39 it has to face. No reason to give it the same BR of the much more effective F2A-3 Buffalo (with four 12.7 mm lethal guns!) and its good climb speed and turn time can’t compensate the fact its bullets can do just low damage. I’ve spaded it and shelved after a while. Maybe its BR is due to the fact it can act as a bomber too but, being me quite uninterested in bombing, I dislike anything in that plane.
My only doubt is how much very experienced crews (i.e. level 40, 50, 60 …) could improve its performance. It could be, for example to improve aim and gun effectiveness, but with level 20 or 30 crews it’s not worthwhile, IMHO.




- Hawker Typhoon (GB, BR 2.7-4.7):
It was a strong and effective plane in real life (even as fighter, although not as much as the better Tempest) but in WT all versions are incredibly weak.
I stopped flying them where I realized that they are unable to fully exploit their speed in the small AB maps and a few bullets are damaging enough to make them flying as a brick ... if they didn’t catch fire at once!
I consider it one of the most overrated planes in WT Forum and usually I consider them just as “targets”, because a damaged Typhoon is likely a shot down Typhoon soon after. In other words, any time I have a chance to open fire towards a Typhoon I do: just a few hits could make it crashing.
Besides, the small AB maps mean that its speed is barely exploitable and, moreover, it’s a lazy plane. Of course, I’ve seen even a few Typhoon turning like a Zero but this is the usual fact that player’s “category” is much more important than technical data.




- S.81 (ITA, BR 1.3):
One of the weakest bombers in game, easily shredded by any enemy. For once, its description in WT Wiki s correct. Bad defensive firepower, slow, sluggish, no armour. Avoid.





- BR.20 DR (ITA, BR 1.7):
Another hopeless Italian bomber. Apart a very good bomb load, it has nothing else remarkable, being in fact almost as bad as S.81. WT Wiki says it’s strong: bullshit. Even when fully spaded it’s cannon fodder for any enemy fighter around BR 2.0, being easily destroyed. This also because the dorsal gunner is so easily killed that the plane is usually defenceless after 30 or 40 seconds the first encounter with an enemy. Just two options: hovering at very high altitude hoping that enemy fighters don’t want to waste time climbing so much, but this means it’s difficult to hit ground targets; otherwise, a quite steep dive (it easily speed up in dive) onto the target, dropping bombs and running away. This second option means that you could have a good hit but any enemy fighter around likely will kill you in a minute, so it’s difficult to have a second run.
I can’t advice using it.





- SM.79 Sparviero, serie I and serie 8 (ITA, BR from 2.0 to 2.3):
Alas! I have to talk about another poor Italian bomber. And it’s the most famous of all, the “Sparviero”! Even if it’s better than S.81 and BR.20 (it’s quite nimble and fast for a bomber of the lower tiers, being able to carry big 250kg bombs too) it has the usual drawback of the Regia Aeronautica’s bombers of early tiers: it’s very easily destroyed even by weak fighters, like CR.32 (a reserve plane)! Encounter a Lagg-3, a Bf 109 or an A-36 and you are dead at first sight.
It’s structurally weak and it’s defensive equipment is not great (even if in real-life it gained the respect of enemy fighter pilots), in part likely because of Bredas’ nerfing done by Gaijin, so its fate is sealed at almost any encounter with an enemy.
If you are left alone by enemies (it happens very rarely), flying and bombing with it can be really fun because it’s a pleasant plane to ride, but usually anything ends after your first ground pounding run with a frustrating, quick death in a shredded three-engine bird.
What a shame!






- Breda Ba.88 (P.XI) (ITA, BR 2.0):
An Italian attacker as much bad in game as it was in real life. It’s only good characteristic is the appearance: a slender and beautiful plane, that’s actually a real flying pig. Using it as an heavy fighter means to be easily killed, even by other much nimbler attackers (such as Su-2). Just in some cases it’s possible to use it effectively against small and medium bombers, provided that pilot is not quickly knocked out (a typical event with this plane) by enemy gunners. Using it as an attacker means having to bomb without a bomb sight (!) or trying to do some damage to ground targets with the three nose-mounted lousy 12.5mm Bredas.
I’ve heard a player saying that it’s “even too much good!”. I hope he was, maybe, talking about RB, otherwise I have to think he is just a moron: in AB it’s a really pathetic plane.
It’s predecessor Ba.65 is a very good attacker for its BR and can quite effectively used as a heavy fighter too. On the contrary, Ba.88 is a disaster for any use.
Avoid.





- Vought V-156-F (FRA, BR 1.3):
You could be easily mislead by its nice-enough look and its fascinating air brakes: really, it’s a very disappointing dive bomber/attacker.
Slow, with ineffective guns, both offensive and defensive, and a limited bomb load for its BR (2 50kg bombs at the beginning, after that max 2 100kg bombs), you won’t go far with it. It’s quite fragile too.
Giving it a BR 1.3 is inexplicable, it should be a Reserve plane (BR 1.0).
In practice, using it is a waste of time and SL (for repairs): if you are lucky you could destroy a couple of ground targets with the poor couple of bombs you have (you also need great precision too, otherwise the bombs won’t do a great damage!), after that you’ll be easily destroyed by any passing enemy, even by a Reserve fighter such as a Nimrod or He-51.
Do you like ending at the bottom of you team’s battle rank? If yes, this is one of your best choices!
Really, it’s not a French-made plane, it’s the version that the Americans sold to France. The original USA version is Vought SB2U Vindicator, which in real-life was already considered obsolete in 1940, so much that American pilots disparaged it with the nickname of “Wind indicators”.
You could use it in game to fully understand why …



(to be continued …)




Good Planes.

This is a personal and incomplete list, like the “bad planes” one, of some planes that on the contrary I found to be good, sometimes beyond my expectation.
In this case, too, I’m considering fully spaded planes.





- F2A-3 Buffalo (USA, BR 2.7):
One of my favourite planes in WT Arcade Battles.
It’s one of the ugliest planes ever, but it’s surprisingly effective in WT. I don’t know if it’s really over performing in game but likely it is.
If you think that U.S. pilots named it “flying coffin” you can easily understand that it wasn’t a great plane IRL! But, for sure, after having flown it in game I started wondering if it weren’t so bad: after all, Finnish pilots hold the record numbers for kill-death ratio, 32-1 against the Soviets !!!, using the even weaker F2A-1 (in its de-navalized B-239 version). Of course, pilots’ skill and experience counted really much but …
My advice is to try it, fully spade it and then decide if you like the Buffalo. I think you should be surprised by its effectiveness.





- Breda Ba.65 (K14) L (ITA, Reserve):
For sure one of the best Reserve plane in game. It’s not only a good attacker, both with bombs and guns, but it can even effectively used as an heavy-fighter!
In fact, it has a quite impressive offensive armament for its BR (2x12.7mm + 2x7.7mm) and can quickly dispatch enemy fighters (and even light bombers) as much as armoured cars and other ground light targets.
Its turn time is not very good but I’ve found it agile enough to efficiently fight while manoeuvring, being quite good in deflection shooting and often lethal in head-ons (but, especially if your pilot has a low Vitality, making an head-on is a risky affair even for you because the plane has no pilot protection).
The rear gunner is quite effective and often gives you kills and it seems to me less prone to be easily damaged than is said in Gaijin’s WT Wiki.

All this is true if you don’t rise up in BR: you should keep your preset not higher than BR 1.7 and you would have a lethal weapon in your hand, very good both against ground targets and planes up to BR 2.0 (a not bad achievement for a Reserve plane!) .
From BR 2.0 and up, which means you could face enemies up to BR 3.0 and stronger ground targets(such as pillboxes), its weapons and performances start to be insufficient, so avoid being uptiered.


(to be continued …)

· BATTLE MODES.

In AB the player can be drawn in one of the following battle modes, each one having its specific rules.
The constant amongst them is the ticket depleting mechanism, depicted by the blue/red bars in the upper zone of the GUI: the first team which loses all its tickets, loses the battle too.

Ground Strike: the goal is to destroy ground targets (armoured cars, tanks, AAA etc.), bomb enemy bases and destroy enemy aircrafts. It once was a quite balanced game mode, where both bombers and fighters were important, then Gaijin decided to favour bombers and, at least to win the battle, now bombers and attackers are more important than fighters. Destroying ground targets rewards a lot, then destroying aircrafts and, quite less, bombing bases.
It’s by far the most frequent kind of battle.

Domination: the goal is conquering one, two or three airfields (depending on the specific map), landing on them and then preventing enemies to land. At the same time, points are scored destroying air and ground targets. Bombers can be used both for ground pounding and to capture airfields. Although the conquering mechanism could be considered “strange” (however requiring a lot of skill and strategy), in my opinion it’s the best game mode, rewarding both shooting and bombing skill, flying ability and strategic view by the players.
Unfortunately, it’s not frequently drawn.

Air Domination: the goal is to “conquer” an aerial zone, expelling all enemy planes from that zone, or killing enemies, both achievements deplete enemy tickets. Gaijin never explained the details of the mechanism, at first were players to “discover” what was needed to win! Since just one (!) enemy plane into the zone prevents (or deletes) a conquer, a permanent capture can be achieved just in the final part of the battle, when just few players still has available planes. However, many Air Domination fights end just because one team destroy all the enemy planes, without achieving a constant capture. There are no ground targets, so bombers are practically useless. The usual happening in such a battle is a huge stupid furball near the ground, where killing or being killed is much more a matter of luck than of skill. Near the end of the battle, the most of players climb to the zone trying to capture it.
It’s not frequently drawn and that’s good, IMHO, because it’s the most stupid mode in game, the only “furball-only/no-skill mode” in Air Forces. Its rules are so stupid and unrealistic that it raised harsh and widespread criticism since the day it has been introduced into the game. Many players gave suggestions to improve it but, on the contrary, to “answer” to these complaints, Gaijin choose … to reduce its frequency!
I consider AD battles such an idiocy that I usually skip them, quitting the battle immediately if I’ve been drawn into that crap. And I know I’m not the only one.

· BATTLE SCORES AND BATTLE RANK.

Battle scores are displayed after any battle, for both teams, and your position in battle rank depends on your performance (kills, kill assists, ground units destroyed, being in the best squad, killing planes of higher rank, being the best killer in the battle etc.). To earn those precious SL/RP/XP points, you have to get as much high score as you can.

But please remember that there is no clear and univocal relationship between score and rewarded SL/RP/XP: as for too many other things in WT, Gaijin usually don't publicize details about how many Score Points/SL/RP/XP are earned doing a particular action, the numbers you find on the Forum often are just estimations or "discoveries" made by players. You can see some values given during the battle and for some rewards (e.g. "Terror of the Sky") immediately after exiting the battle but not after the battle nor in economics stats (where you find just totals). Moreover, these kind of things could easily be changed by Gaijin patch after patch, so it's not easy to keep track of them. 

Anyhow, the advice remains the same: try to get the highest score you can, this will also improve your stats about "Average relative position in your team", which in my personal opinion is one of the most significant regarding personal skill level in AB, much more than other stats such as "Victories/Battles ratio" (when the outcome largely depends by the skill of the other players in your team) or "Kills/Deaths ratio" (in AB it's not really important "not to die" but "kill as much as you can to earn many rewards, but better to die if this allows you to earn a lot by well-spending your planes").

A true newbie usually ends in the lower part of the rank, often without having any kill. As his skill (and planes performance and crews skill) improves, he'll progress toward the upper part of the rank. Best players usually ends within the first three or four positions, maybe with 8-10 kills, but this could more likely happen after 1+ year of gaming. A medium level player should get 5-6 kills, reaching position about 6th-7th in rank, when playing good performing planes he knows well. For a beginner is common to have just a couple of kills and an average position in rank about 10th-13th on 16 players in team.

N.B.: the above scenario was realistic until 1.57 game version but after 1.59 patch, that nerfed guns, buffed bombers strength, changed mouse aim sensitivity making more difficult to aim and shoot down enemies and advantaged bombers so much to make GS battle duration shorter, in general the number of kills in any battle dropped with respect to 1.57 (my estimation is at least 30-40% less).

Moreover, and much more serious, now bombers and attackers are greatly advantaged in score respect to fighters, so you'll easily find final ranks where the first players in both teams are bombers pilots who dropped a lot of bombs but without a single kill. At the moment game winners are the "spacebar heroes" so you can say farewell to fair skill recognition in battle ranks.

For example, in one battle I had five kills, score: 1364. One of my comrades had just 1 kills and 1 assist and 8 ground targets destroyed, score: 1277, just a little bit lower. In the same battle, an enemy with 1 kill, 2 assists and 14 GT earned a score of 1455, higher than mine.
In another battle the best player in my team had 6 kills and 4 assist, I had 5 kills and 1 assist. In 1.57 I’ve been likely finished second or third in rank but in 1.59 I finished seventh because five other players scored more than me having much less kills (a couple) but some ground units destroyed too. And another player, with just two kills, one assist and five ground units scored just 100 points less than me.
These haven’t been particular episodes, it’s the norm after 1.59. Until 1.57 I used to end the vast majority of my AF Arcade battles in the upper third of battle rank whereas after 1.59 I usually finish in the upper half, losing three, four or five positions just to “spacebar warriors” i.e. bomber pilots.
And this, more or less, happened to any WT AB fighter pilot.

Am I saying that bombing requires no skill? No, I’m saying that it requires much less skill than fighting, at least using spaded bombers (stock bombers are as much poor and weak as stock fighters, even more when having unexperienced crews). And I know that having fought as a bomber pilots: low skill needed, a bore for me.
Bomber pilots have been advantaged in 1.59 in four ways: 1) strengthening of bomber planes 2) weakening of fighters’ guns 3) higher spawn altitude for bombers 3) much more rewards for destroying ground targets.
There was no need to give them also advantage #4, having all the other benefits to technically balance battles with fighters and having bomber gunners as much lethal as ever, if not even more.

Shooting down enemy aircrafts, which is the most difficult achievement in Air Battles, is now very poorly rewarded in comparison to bombing.

Before 1.59 you had score to reward individual skill (including some teamwork recognition too) and team victory to highly reward individual commitment to teamwork, the two thing in some cases (for some players and some battles) coincided in other not but they were rightly distinct.
After 1.59 you have both score and team victory rewarded just with bombing i.e. without true skill: quite a backward step!.

It's much less clear if that bombers advantage happens even with rewards (SL/RP/XP) or just with score (Gaijin didn't give details), adding a huge uncertainty issue to an already disastrous patch. In other words, it's sure that after 1.59 is convenient to fly bombers/attackers (instead of fighters) to get high scores destroying ground targets (so reaching upper places in ranks) and to help team to win the battle. It’s just not so sure if it's the same more convenient for individual earnings in SL/RP/XP, with respect to flying fighters and killing other planes.

· BATTLE SCORE, INDIVIDUAL REWARDS, TEAM PLAYING AND SQUADRONS.

Be ready to know that your score and point earnings are heavily dependent on your choices in the battle and that being of great benefit to your team doesn't necessarily mean you'll be well rewarded.

For example, if you decide to ride a bomber killer (such as Hurricane Mk.IV), climb at the beginning to go intercepting bombers and go on that way during the whole battle, even if you managed to shot down three or four bombers, possibly preventing the enemies to win the battle, at the end you'll likely find that some comrade, killing seven or eight fighters into the melee, had reached a much higher score and reward whereas you finished at middle or bottom rank!
And this in part is because score calculation favours fighting into the melee in itself ("battle activity") and in part because fighting where the most of the action is allows much more opportunities to make kills.

Things are alike in Tank Battles, BTW. You could put your tank in a good place on a hill, preventing enemies to move just for the strategic position you choose and effectively defending a capture point or covering your comrades attacking the point and, even shooting a few and killing less, you could be more decisive for the victory than many others in your teams.
But at the end of the battle they will be fourth, sixth or eighth in rank and you will be fourteenth or fifteenth, with few hits and a low (!) battle activity!
Gaijin did quite a good job to consider and reward also players’ activism but, obviously, the automated mechanism can’t have the intelligence to understand the importance of player behaviour (beyond kills, assists and captures) to make his team winning in the battle!

Similarly, if you warn your comrades in chat to move to another area, defend or attack points or airfields, be aware of enemies coming etc. you could give a decisive contribution to victory without being rewarded at all.

Anyhow, even if players have in-battle chat to coordinate their actions, is quite uncommon that they are really able (and especially want!) to do that.
AB battles are fought by players acting as solo-player at 80-90% (with tanks even more than with planes).

if you really want to play as a team member you should join a squadron.
A squadron is, according to Gaijin’s own definition, an “in-game association of War Thunder players united under the same squadron name and tag. Similar to clans and guilds in other online games or MMOs, squadrons offer co-operative gameplay to teamplay oriented players, e.g. in the form of training, random games in squads, squadron battles and tournaments”.
Creating a squadron and doing some kind of improvement on it costs a certain amount of Golden Eagles and the best squadrons are made up of very expert players, a lot of them Level 100, payers and Premium.
On the other hand, "every month, the three highest rated squadrons in Arcade and Realistic Battles are rewarded, depending on their rank, with 10.000, 5.000 or 2.500 Golden Eagles split between the 20 highest rated members of the squadron" (from Gaijin’s info).
A player can send to a squadron a membership application, which could be accepted or rejected. Since stats about players are public, it’s not easy to be accepted by a good squadron if the player appears to be just an average gamer.

Please remember that there are a lot of reasons to think that Gaijin favours squadron players fighting together, as you can easily see looking at how many unbalanced battles are set up, with three or four players of the same squadron just in one team, the other being composed by solo-players and almost always losing at the end of the battle.

This is a typical example of such a battle, that was quite quickly won by my team, in part for some mistakes of the red team (such as not defending any of their bases) but all in all they had no hope to win against a full four-players squadron (all Level 100!), whereas they were all solo-players (with just one Level 100 and a couple of other experienced players).
It’s a perfect example of the fact that Gaijin doesn’t’ care at all about battle balancing. This time it advantaged my team, a lot of other times I was put on the “cannon fodder team” and I had no chance to win the battle.



So, belonging to a squadron is convenient but, personally, I’m temperamentally a lone wolf so I think I’d never join a squadron even if I were an above-the-average pilot (which I’m not).
However, many other players like that.

· STATS.

Frankly speaking, this is an issue being, in itself, of so little interest for me and so distracting that I would be tempted to spend no words about it but …
At the end of this section we’ll see that even stats can be useful to understand important things, even if not in the way many people would think.

I never mind really much about stats, even less after having well understood that performance in WT is given by personal skill for no more than 50%, the rest being ruled by crews, planes, time and money spent in game. This is terribly true in Ground Forces, beyond any imagination, but is largely true even in Air Forces.
Why worry about stats when your performance is heavily dependent by the fact you are flying a Yak 1 or a Ki-44-II hei, just 0.3 in BR difference but a whole world apart in terms of being able to destroy enemies?
Why worry when you can easily see that if you fly spaded planes and crews beyond level 30 in experience you can easily have a performance three times better than with half-spaded planes and crews around level 20?
Why worry when you know since the beginning that if you like regularly spading planes or flying Japanese your battle results will be much poorer than with “sure” choices (fully spaded planes, Russians, money invested in improving crews etc.)?

And why worrying about stats instead of worrying about having fun, even when this means to fly weak crews in weak planes?

I frankly think than people giving really a lot of importance to their personal stats are quite dumb, having not understand what this game is and being worried by the opinion of other players … that don’t understand the game too!

Stats are the obsession of some players, indeed, especially high level players whose main goal seems to be “not wrecking their stats” instead of having fun. They value really much the opinions of other players which look at their stats and (hopefully) exclaim: “What an ace!”.
Since I respect any way of playing WT, it’s OK for me even if I think it’s a silly way to live in WT.
A thing to remember is that from this obsession usually derives the “not to die” dictate, that is fully reasonable in Realistic Battles (just one plane to spend!) but not at all in Arcade Battles.

Stats is also the reason of a really silly behaviour of many players in WT Forum: looking at interlocutor’s stats when answering to his statements, even when the issue is not related to players’ skill.
It seems that for them an argument is worth of consideration just if it’s raised by a top player and they can despise statements made by average players just for that reason and not by effectively rebutting the argument in itself.
A really childish behaviour.


Stats are determined by a lot of things, not just (or particularly) by personal skill.

For example, this is what a good and experienced player wrote on WT Forum:
"Yesterday I got really smoked by an enemy player. It was pretty embarrassing, and so, after the match, I had a look at this person's stats. He had a crazy good k/d ratio with plenty of kills per battle too. But when I looked more closely at his service record, it turned out that he had only ever flown about a dozen different planes, and they were all known OP clubbers. So this guy flies exclusively the best twelve planes and gets thousands of kills in each one".

Have you acknowledged the message?

Stats can be checked on the game interface (on player’s profile data and on Leaderboards menu item) and this is by far the best way.

Otherwise you can check player’s results on WT web site interface, on which you can also find obscure and never explained values, as usual for Gaijin!, such as “Battle Performance”.
Beware: as in many other thing, even in their own stats Gaijin is able to do mistakes and present wrong data! For example, in my player web profile they calculated a “battle performance” index for Realistic and Simulator Battles too, even if I never played any RB or SB and the fact I never played any of them is evident from their own detailed stats!
How they could fabricate that index? It could be a silly bug in their mass-calculation stat system, I suppose. And I wonder how many other not-so-evident bug are in their application.
Are you surprised by that? Don’t. It’s Gaijin, folks …

I advise you to use Leaderboards (or your player’s profile) in WT GUI, not the much worse and unreliable WT web site stats.

Until mid-2016 WT GUI stats were foolishly cumulative both of AB Air Battles and Ground Battles so if you started playing, for example, Ground Battles after some years of Air Battles, being suddenly a newbie with tanks your added results would have “wrecked” your previously better stats. Being WT GF a quite unfair game overall, stats coming from tanks could have “permanently” ruined your stats (unless you would have start paying to become a “tank Ace” …).
Luckily, now stats can be viewed both in an aggregate way (“AB”) and in a distinct way (“Air AB” or “Tank AB”), which is fine.

Finally, you could check player’s “rating” in Thunderskill web site but this is by far the worst and absolutely inadvisable way.
Thunderskill is a demented site evidently managed by stupid people (to be trusted by stupid people), often very inaccurate, pathetically outdated and using its own (unknown) algorithm to “declare” the skill of a player.
A newbie is very likely to be called “terrible player”, just for the fact he is a beginner having the usual beginner’s performance.
Some says that the site relies too much on the win ratio, others that they didn’t take into account BR of planes used. They are right: using just stats to determine skill of a player is simply stupid. This is true for Thunderskill as much as for players lurking other players’ stats. Stats don’t take into account BRs, if the vehicles used were spaded or not and the level of experience of crews.
Being fifth in battle rank using mainly mediocre and/or unspaded planes and unskilled crews could be more noteworthy than being first with the best planes and experienced crews.
The usual win-fanatic that spades the best planes and uses just them and just maximized crews (maybe having upgraded them by paying) will always have a huge advantage over players wanting to change planes and crews without worrying too much about “winning”. And this will reflect on stats too but has nothing to do with “sklil”.

In practice, stats don’t take into account a lot of decisive factors and this is the same reasons why using stats linking them to player’s skill is silly.
Really, nobody knows how that idiocy works but almost nobody care about it. The best and most concise definition I’ve found on WT Forum is: “Thunderskill sucks”.
However, you’ll find in WT Forum some morons using Thunderskill to make deductions on other players’ skill and even trying to make guesses on their tactics.
My advice is: don’t care at all about this idiotic site, ignore it and any discussion based on it.

About stats, some things are worth remembering:
- in game interface stats can be displayed regarding just last month or from the beginning of player’s “career”. In my opinion just the former has some sense, since it shows what is player performance at the moment (somewhat linked with his current skill) whereas “historical” stats have really no usefulness.
- if you are a “spading addicted”, i.e. a players who like spading any vehicle and therefore often fight with stock or semi-stock planes, you’ll be at a huge disadvantage and your stats will suffer.
- if your crews are unexperienced, you’ll be at a great disadvantage and your stats will suffer.
- if you use weak planes, such as many Japanese, you’ll be at a certain disadvantage and your stats will suffer. On the contrary, using just strong planes will raise your stats.

In practice, if you would like to have not only high scores and rewards but “stellar stats” too, you should use just spaded and strong planes (or tanks), with just experienced crews, otherwise you would be hugely disadvantaged and you should give up on really good stats.
And if you want to reach this state as soon as possible, you should really pay for that (spaded planes and experienced crews).
Of course, having a good innate skill is crucial to have good stats but you could have that skill and nevertheless you will obtain so-so stats (or even bad stats) if you fight with weak planes and crews.

Are you so worried by stats to do that or, like me, prefer don’t worry at all about stats and try to have fun, with a lot of planes, even the weaker ones and better free of charge?
You can answer for yourself.


Ok, understood: stats are just in part related to skill. However, of all stats, which are the most significant?

In my opinion the most significant stat about player’s skill is “average relative player position” in team (ARPT), which is given by WT stats info in game interface.
This gives the average rank place of the gamer in his teams, in the considered set of battles (“last month” or anytime), transformed in a percentage (higher is better).

This in my opinion is much more significant than WR (Win Rate i.e. victories/defeats ratio of player’s team) because, on average, team victory depends by team performance on the whole much more than by a single player’s performance (even if a couple of real top players in a team, not opposed by comparable “aces”, can be decisive).

It’s much more significant than KDR (kill/death ratio) too: this is a stats not really relevant in AB, where many planes (or tanks in GF) are “expendable” and should be expended if opportune to have a better score; moreover, a player could have a good KDR with a very prudent behaviour (i.e. hiding or staying in the cold) and being of little usefulness for his team.

It’s even more significant, IMHO, than NKB (number of kills per battle), because in Air AB it also depends by the number of crews available to the players (a player having 7 crews, so being able to stay in battle for long even after several “deaths”, have a much greater chance to kill a lot of enemies than a player having just 3).

On the contrary, if well implemented the average relative position in team can tell to the player if he is doing well or bad respect to the others, since on average (in the long-term) he should be drawn in teams with comrades of equally distributed skill, so on average his relative position is significant respect to the whole multitude of WT gamers (or, at least, to comrade players).

A player having an ARPT about 30% isn’t playing well, usually ending in the lower third of the scoreboard (but please remember: it could be also because he is using just stock vehicles and unexperienced crews!), whereas a player having 60% is doing much better.

Unfortunately some Gaijin choices, such as excessive importance of bombing in AF and illogical rewarding for “kills vs assists” in GF, made this stat much less significant than it was in previous years.


But … wait! Many people have WR much better than 50%, e.g. 65% or even more. How can it be possible if not by their skill?

There is a quite common argument in WT Forum, stating that since teams are drawn randomly, if a player wins much more than 50% that means it’s because of his skill, which advantages his whole team.
In other words, according to that opinion an above average player could be not just decisive for team victory but it could do that on average, i.e. in the long run.
In a specular way, players winning less than 50% of their battles would do that just for their mediocre skill.
Some players express this opinion saying: “If you have a long losing battle streak or a long winning streak, there is always one common factor: you. So, blame yourself if you have a less-than-average (i.e. < 50%) WR. If, on the contrary, you were a really good player, you could have a 60% WR”.
This is a very superficial (i.e. WRONG) argument.

And the reason is clear: IF teams were drawn randomly, on the average “very good players” would be equally shared on both teams (as much as “very bad players”), so in the long run ANY player would have a WR around 50%!
Of course, a very good player should always have a much better ARPT (average relative player position in his team) than a bad or average player. But his teams shouldn’t be, on average, better than the enemy teams, so the WR (win rate) should be around 50% for him just as for any other player, good or bad.



Now, please, pay attention!

The ONLY explanation to the existence of players having much more than 50% WR and others having much less than 50% (and having that permanently, on the long run) is that teams are NOT drawn randomly.

In other words, the ONLY explanation is that some “privileged” players are on average drawn on “ace teams” whereas “non-privileged” players are on average drawn on “cannon fodder” teams.

You could think at this as the best players being more frequently packed together in the same team, opposed by a team of weak players, or players that Gaijin however wants to make them win being more frequently drawn in a stronger team facing a weaker team.
Say it in the way you want, use the variant you prefer, but the gist of this issue is that teams are not drawn randomly, some players are more frequently drawn in good team and others in bad teams.

Ok, let’s examine this objection: “you are not taking into account that very good players are in a much smaller number than poor/average players. This means that an ‘exceptionally good player’ will have to face, the most of times, red teams not including any other ‘exceptional’ player, just for statistical reasons. Since even a single exceptional player can win a battle just by his own skill, it also means that he will win (being not opposed by similar players for the most of times) the most of battles he will fight. So, you are wrong: ‘exceptional players’ will win much more than 50% of their battles just because of their skill. And stats prove that!”.
It seems a reasonable objection, doesn’t it?
It’s NOT.

It’s a wrong reasoning (again) because it doesn’t take into account that there are many players having much lower than 50% WR too (me, for example, having at the moment 43% WR, after a lot of battles fought and several losing streaks, some of them really incredible and not explainable with “bad luck”).
If teams would really assembled in a random way, weak players would be equally assigned to strong teams (maybe because having those ‘exceptional players’ in it) and weak teams and their WT would be, in the long run (several hundreds or thousands battle), about 50%.

There is NO REASON, both statistical and related to player’s skill, to justify a WR markedly lower than 50%.
A single player CAN’T have such a permanent bad impact for his team (supposing they were randomly drawn) and talking about hundreds or thousands battles it can’t be a matter of “bad luck”.

For simplicity, let’s imagine that the whole set of WT players is composed by 32 gamers only, just one of them being an ‘exceptionally skilled player’ (this simulates the fact that “very good players are in a much smaller number”).
Any player will be drawn, at any battle, in one 16-members team or into the other. In practice, the “superman” player’s team will win almost any battle, because his “superhuman skill” will allow him to massacre enemies and win the battle just by himself. He will have a WR much higher than 50%.
But, at the same time, any other player, including the weaker ones, would have the same chance to be drawn in the winning team (usually the team including the “superman”) or the losing team, so having at the end a WR around 50%.
All this based on the hypothesis that teams are drawn randomly!

Since that doesn’t happen, i.e. there are players having a WR much lower than 50% and have it permanently over hundreds or thousands battles, it means that teams are NOT drawn in a random way.
This is neither an hypothesis nor a “conspiracy theory”: it’s math.

So, the mere existence of so many players having WR << 50% and many others having WR >> 50% demonstrates that the statement “there is always one common factor: you” is NOT the reason.
It proves that there is another common factor (the true one!): the fact of being drawn, on average, on “weak teams” instead of “strong teams” (and vice versa).
This, BTW, also explains why WR stat is NOT well linked to players’ individual skill.

I also have a personal and very clear example of that: when in AB GF I had the (bad) idea of spading all low-tiers French “tanks”, I had the worst losing streak of my career so far, 80% of team defeats on about 70 GF battles (!!!).
It was such an incredibly catastrophic streak (12.5% WR!) that it CAN’T be explained by a random happening: something caused that, even if I don’t know why. For sure, French low-tier tanks are ridiculous weak tin-cans but in those battles I saw a lot of these weak tanks even in red teams.
I wasn’t surprised that streak lowered dramatically my ARPT, I anticipated it. But there is no reason why my teams, if randomly drawn, should have lost 87.5% of those battles!
Moreover, after having stopped playing French and shifted to Tier II Russians, I immediately re-started to win about 50% of my battles, so the question was not "why Gaijin had something against me" but "why playing low-tiers French seemed to facilitate so much me the fact I’ve been drawn in cannon-fodder teams".
I have no answer to that question, I could just guess that Gaijin could have thought that the weakness of French tanks could have “hidden” the fact I’ve been so frequently put in “cannon fodders teams” and took profit of it.

So it seems there are players which are likely drawn to make them designated “cannon fodder”, being (more than on average) included in the weaker team, to be used as easy “victims” for “superman players” (i.e. gamers usually able to kill from 10 up enemies at any battle), likely drawn (more than on average) in stronger teams.

And the most reasonable hypothesis about that split into two player classes, “patricians” and “pariah”, is related to the Pay-To-Win intrinsic design of this game.
Are you still surprised by that?

· SCIENCE, TRUTH, “PROOFS” AND THE INFAMOUS RNG.

After having examined stats and shown how they are not really much significant, we can ask ourselves if it’s possible to “study” WT following a “scientific” method.
In other words, is it possible to discover how WT inner mechanisms work just observing data Gaijin allows us to know?
For example, is it possible to determine if MM do a fair job or not, collecting statistical data of the composition of teams in battles?
I don’t think so.

There are many decisive parameters, such as crew levels of the players, and very likely important parameters, such as gamers being paying players or not, that Gaijin doesn’t make known.
Without those data, any in-depth “scientific” study is of very limited usefulness and a substantial waste of time, IMHO.

I’ve seen examples of “statistical studies” made by players, admirable for the effort but almost useless, trying to get “proofs” by collecting a lot of partial data but without having all the needed data to draw a conclusion.
Gaijin is not only tight-lipped about many features in game but gives just a part of data and sometimes it impedes even to easily get those that are shown.
For example, on the final battle rank is no more possible to know vehicles used by players and they BR (a feature that existed but incomprehensibly, or maybe understandably!, disappeared). You can know them just during the battle, not after that, so complicating any statistical research.

One thing should be clear: only Gaijin knows the inner workings of the game and since they don’t divulge all the data, nobody can have a “proof” of something or a “proof” of its contrary hypothesis.
We can just try to do our best.

So, the usual counter-argument to complaints, i.e. objection made by brown-nosed players, which is “if you can’t give us a proof of what you are saying, your claims have no value”, is silly.
Some of those ass-lickers venture in peremptory statements such as “what you are showing is mostly personal experience, pre-filtered by distrust prejudices and (falsely) advertised as "facts" in order to furtherly fuel such distrust”.
Of course, those players have no intention to try any comprehension: those assertions are just the divide between those who want to understand and those who don’t.

Since they don’t want to know how things work in WT (and likely they don’t want other players do, in many cases because they are Gaijin’s dogged defenders beyond any evidence), they exploit the fact that it’s almost impossible to have “proof” to show, just good observations and reasonable hypothesis. By asking for impossible “proof” they just try to undermine those hypothesis.
And when you show them some quite “inexplicable” fact (such as a long losing streaks which keep your victories as low as 20% in 70 battles), things that thy are not able to deny, they resort to the “coincidence explanation” or, especially in GF, to an effect of the RNG.

RNG, “random number generator”, is a mechanism that in GF is said to determine if a shot penetrates an armour or not.
It could exists even for other happenings and even in AF, for example for shot accuracy, bomb damage or vehicle chance to catch fire.
In practice, if RNG exists it could be used for anything in WT mechanic, especially for shot effectiveness but not only.
In fact, it could be easily tweaked and used to advantage or disadvantage players too, if Gaijin would do that. And it’s likely they want to, IMHO.

AFAIK, there is no official statement by Gaijin about RNG, just hearsays about “developers have said there are some random elements in the damage models” and the like.
In spite of that, nobody talking about RNG is usually asked to “give proofs” of its existence in WT!
WT Forum is full of players reflecting on RNG without being accused to be “tinfoil hatters”.

Why? Because using the RNG arguments is handy for sycophants to rebut the so called “conspiracy theories”.
“Well, it seems strange but is just a matter of chances, likely the RNG put you in bad luck for a while but, no, it can’t be anything planned!”.
They have no proof of RNG existence but … it doesn’t matter to them! They ask interlocutors to give evidence of their statements, but are prepared to use a rebuttal argument without having any proof of that.
Just to say how much intellectual honesty have them usually.

So, if no “science” and no “proof” are feasible, IMHO the only thing that is possible to do is:
1) to compare what happens in battle with declared data (such as armour/penetration data for tanks) and discover incongruities if any.
2) use the reason to draw conclusions from observations, couple them with reflections about the nature of the game and decide how much likely is these conclusions are true.

This is exactly what I did.

· GRACE PERIOD(S).

A beginner in WT is gratified by a grace period, i.e. a "protection time" where he has the facilitation to face just other newbies OR not-so-skilled players OR ...
That period lasts until he has fought a few dozen battles OR unlocked a vehicle with a certain BR OR ...

Do you think I'm saying too much uncertain statements?
You are right.

Fact is that "grace period" (or "protection period" or "protection zone" or ...) almost for sure exists but (as usual) there is no official statement by Gaijin about that.
So, nobody knows exactly how it works, how long it lasts and why it ends.

Roughly speaking, it seems that the beginners' grace period lasts at most a couple dozens of battle (maybe just one dozen) and ends after that number or after the player has unlocked a BR 1.0 vehicle.
But, remember: nobody really knows it, these are just guesses (albeit plausible) done by players on WT Forum!

However, as a true beginner you'll enjoy of a short, happy period, when fighting will be easier and you shouldn't constantly be cannon fodder. Although it's not clear how Gaijin set-up things to allow that: careful choice of your opponents (quite unskilled, other beginners, no "aces")? Temporary modifications in (improved) strength of your crews? Changes in Random Number Generator? Nobody knows for certain.
It seems that something similar do exists in World of Warplanes and World of Tanks.
And it's for sure a good idea, to permit players a "soft" induction to game, while the newbie has to learn to play.

So, a warning: after a very limited number of relatively easy battles a beginner suddenly has to face much more tough fights.
If you are starting playing WT, don’t be surprised by that (like many newbies do).

While this kind of "grace period" is quite known amongst players, in my opinion there is another one (the same undeclared too).

I discovered it when I resumed playing WT (Air Forces) after having stopped for about six months. When I resumed I expected to do very poorly, being out of form. On the contrary, I started having right away a performance markedly better than when I previously left the game! And this lasted at least a couple of weeks, probably 100-150 battles, before settling more or less on my previous standard.

The same, even less marked, happened when I returned to Ground Forces after just a few weeks stop. When I went back I immediately did very well for the first four or five battles, much better than my previous average and with surprising streaks of "One Shots". Soon after, my performance returned to the previous mediocrity, with the same typical pathetic idiocy of WT GF (decisive crews vitality etc.), even using the same tanks and crews.

So it really seems to me that it should exists an "assisted path for returning player", to please them and encourage them to restart gaming.

The most interesting implication of "grace periods" (even more for the "assisted path for returning player") is that they, if really exist (and I have very few doubts they do), demonstrate that players' battle results, at least on average, can be effectively controlled and induced by Gaijin.

Obvious, this has HUGE implications on how we should look at this game.

· EXPENSES.

The economics of the game subtracts the expenses (repairs/replacing damaged and losed planes, ammo refills) to the earned SL. So is important to lose as few expensive planes as you can. But in practice there are no problems until you start using Tier IV (i.e. Rank IV) planes, some of them being really expensive. At least until Tier III any average pilot, having just satisfactory performances, should't worry really much of the expenses given by plane repairs.

· DEACTIVATING AUTOMATIC PLANE REPAIR?

An often given advice is to deactivate automatic plane repairs, because an unused plane is repaired by the system itself, usually within some hours or some days depending on plane type and Tier, without spending any SL. You could do that and change planes, waiting for the "free" repair before coming back to the damaged plane.

I don't support that advice, at least below Tier IV: it forces you to a clumsy behaviour, plane change for "economic" reasons, without any pressing economic reason!
In fact, any average (and even beginner) pilot shouldn't have any SL shortage playing until Tier III at least, so no reason to use a feature that dictates a plane change even for just some dozens of minutes. If you are in a serious shortage of SL playing in the first three Tiers, you are doing something really wrong.

When you go up in Tiers, planes become much more expensive (sometimes in a crazy way) so playing at Tier IV and above any trick good for saving SL is welcomed, including to deactivate automatic plane repair.
Of course you can start doing that from the beginning, even in Tier I, but there is no compelling reason. Beyond Tier III, on the contrary, it can be useful.

If you are forced to change planes because of repair, I suggest you to put it to use changing nation for a while too, since playing all nations is useful both for your skill, your crews and, I suppose, also for your fun.

· SCARED TO DIE?

If you want to have high scores in AB, you have to be ready to be killed several times in a battle, notwithstanding the opposite opinions you can find on the Forum.
“Not dying” is NOT the most important thing to do in AB. On the contrary, being too much scared by "death" and trying not to "die" as an imperative goal is counter-productive.
In AB it's better (more score, more RP, more lions, better battle ranking) to kill three times losing four planes than killing one without losing any plane. This is true until Tier III and start changing just at Tier IV and above, where repair costs became often astronomical (and not rationally justifiable).

· TACTICS?

If you read WT Forum you’ll find a lot of advices praising some tactics, such as Boom-and-Zoom, as the only real thing or the absolutely more important thing a beginner have to learn to make progress in Arcade Battles.
Often, reading those tips, it seems that learning tactics and ACMs (Aerial Combat Manoeuvres) is the first thing a beginner should do.
That’s not true.

Some tactics, such as Boom-and-Zoom, are hard for a beginner and not much rewarding in Arcade Battle, as one can easily check viewing the most successful players in battle replays. Too much often players advising BnZ seem to forget that beginners are beginners (so with still limited skill both in flying and in shooting and often still unspaded planes), that in AB “not to die” is not so important and that in AB you have to “fight where the battle is”, i.e. staying near the medium-low altitude furballs.

A beginner should not think he has to immediately learn specific tactics apart following this factual consideration: at least in the first three tiers, the most successful AB players (speaking about those using fighters) usually traverse the map at medium-low altitude, crossing the furball in search of unaware enemies, shot down them and change area, keeping high plane energy and speed and always trying not to attract too much attention on themselves.

Anyone can check that viewing battle replays.


The following is likely the most useful, reasonable and honest opinion I’ve read on WT Forum, given by trout0r, a Level 100 player:

“The great thing about WT is that you can play basically any style (as long as you play it at an above average level) and have good success. In AB you even see people do the 'wrong' thing with planes and still do well. As long as your skills are good, and you understand the limitations of your planes (and their adversaries) you will be fine. For example you can do a turn or two in something like a P47 and as long as you managed your energy before that point you can probably still escape at worst. Likewise you could climb to 6KM in a zero and BNZ. Both of these things do not utilise the planes maximum potential but they can work.
It's only really necessary to learn BNZ/Energy management in AB once you reach ~4.3-5.3 BR or roughly ERA IV, after that point MOST successful players do to some degree or another".

https://forum.warthunder.com/index.php?/topic/243063-boom-and-zoom-planes-during-level-flight/#comment-4676694

It’s a general advice, regarding not just BnZ but tactics in general, and I really do suggest that newbies meditate on it.

· ARE ALTITUDE AND BOOM-AND-ZOOM THE HOLY GRAIL IN ARCADE?

Altitude is important but it's not the Holy Grail in Arcade Battles, especially in the first three Tiers, neither is BnZ (Boom and Zoom), just always try to preserve speed and energy.

How to reach high speed?
First, using engine power, including WEP, War Emergency Power, which in AB is a very forgiving feature, i.e. it doesn’t overheat and damage the engine, it simply disconnect after a while. It should be used often in AB.
Second, diving and so exchanging altitude for speed. If you have to dive, of course you need some altitude but in AB climbing really high is neither necessary nor convenient. Just climb enough to have a good view of battle zone and gain some energy to trade for speed when needed.

How to preserve high speed?
Avoiding abrupt manoeuvers, such as too tight turns, or silly moves such as dangerously climbing in a zone in presence of enemies or using too few engine power or … forgetting flaps extended!

So, climb “just enough” and keep a check on your speed.

Hovering at high alts in AB has little sense in general (especially at lower tiers) and no sense at all for a beginner (usually unable to exploit the advantages, he and his unspaded planes/crews).
Save high alts and BnZ tactics for the moment when you'll be more skilled and you planes/crews more spaded/experienced, but please, at that moment don't make as many do, i.e. passing off spawn camping for BnZ: they are just dishonest spawn campers trying to "make noble" their bad behaviour.

Even if BnZ is a viable tactic for a really expert player with high level planes and crews, my opinion is that such an ace could be even more effective (in score, points and usefulness for the team) fighting at lower altitudes, near to the battle’s core, killing more even if suffering some kills himself.
But a lot of dedicated BnZoomers don’t accept that just because they are “afraid to die” (BnZ is safer because the player stays the most of time far from enemies) and want to preserve their Kills/Deaths stats. Of course they have full right to do that but remember that is this reason (and not good tactic justifications) to be often behind the generalized “do BnZ” advice too.
Going up in levels (from Tier IV and up) “not to die” starts to be important about repair costs so things change about this.

Another important reason why BnZ is NOT the Holy Grail in Arcade is that maps are small and planes’ performances are quite equalized in AB. So, for example, a BnZooming Typhoon will have troubles to escape after the dive since it won’t exploit it’s speed in a small map and at map’s edge it will be forced to turn, becoming exposed to enemy shots.

Unfortunately, BnZ is a tactic so constantly, highly and uncritically praised by many WT Forum users that beginners too much often think it’s a really viable option for them, if not the only good option.
I’ve even seen a naïve newbie, with less than 250 battles fought (!), asking for advices to “improve his BnZ”.
As expected, nobody clearly and thoroughly told him the truth, i.e. he had a lot of other things to learn before venturing in BnZ and that the difficulties he had were perfectly explicable by an unavoidable combination of immature personal skill, weak crews, weak planes and a tactic not at all convenient for a newbie, especially in AB.
Just someone gave him some good (albeit very partial) advice, the others scholarly talked at length about dive angles, altitude, kind of ammo and better planes for BnZ. All things useful, if any, for a more experienced player but almost useless (or, worse, damaging) for a beginner.
I’ve been tempted to participate but the thread was going on since several days and, unfortunately, the naïve newbie seemed already totally taken with that kind of “advices” from “admirable” expert players. So I gave up, even to avoid worsening things, since it was clear to me that the newbie had grown quite strong, although wrong!, ideas and bursting his bubble would have just aggravate them.
Time and experience will teach him a lot, if he has enough perspicuity. If not, any good advice would have been wasted anyway.
Another case of a beginner ruined by WT Forum, I’m afraid …

TRAINING VIDEOS AND AIR COMBAT MANOEUVERS.

On WT Forum and on YouTube you can find a lot of advices and videos about combat manoeuvers and tactics. A beginner should check them but has to understand that the most of these players are long-time experts that perfectly ride their fully spaded planes (and put on video just their successful manoeuvers, not the wrongly executed ones!).
So a beginner shouldn’t be depressed and mortified if he can’t replicate those perfect manoeuvers!

My personal opinion is that the usefulness of those video tutorials is quite overrated, even the best ones, especially for a beginner (although they are usually addressed precisely to newbies!) but other players surely have a different opinion.

If you really want to learn some ACM (Air Combat Manoeuvers), my advice to a newbie is to start with “High Yo-Yo”, which is likely the manoeuver you could find more useful when fighting at medium-low altitude an it’s not too complicated.
And you should follow tutorials explaining really useful things, generally more useful than ACMs, such as deflection shooting and guns convergence.

Don’t waste your time, at least for now, trying to learn “spectacular” but much more difficult (and doubtfully useful) ACMs such as “Hammerhead” (stall turn, in itself dangerous even if well executed, as much dangerous in game as it really was in WWII, so much so that it was advised against since last years of WW First!).

So, a beginner having blind and unconditional faith in those videos could easily choose bad tactics and useless, if not bad and dangerous, manoeuvres.

In many cases I think that those tutorials really help just their authors’ ego, not other players and even less frequently beginners.





SELF-TRAINING WITH OFF-LINE MISSIONS.

One of the first needs of newbies is usually to know if there is a way to exercise off-line before entering in a true and “dangerous” on-line battle.
Well, until some time ago my quick answer was: none that’s really worthwhile, apart maybe some good single missions.
Luckily, some times after that things slightly changed in better.

Basically, in WT you can fly off-line in these ways:

· Test Flights: the basic use is that for any plane you own, you can fly it on a training map and strike some ground unit (no other planes). Good just to get practice with a new plane (flying, taking off, landing, shooting tests etc.).
More interesting is using the Mission Editor in Test Flights to set up a battle against enemy bot planes (i.e. planes played by the game itself). Unfortunately:1) WT AI is very poor, so not much challenging 2) Flying Model of planes seems to be somewhat different from FM you have online, so further lessening the usefulness of these battles.

· Custom Battles: this is what changed in time and is now much better than a few years ago. You used to be able to set up a battle just against slow, dumb and harmless bot planes, usually biplanes, chosen by the game itself. They were fully useless for self-training, being both the planes and the AI enemies too much weak.
After that, Gaijin really surprised (and pleased) me and started to allow to select bots plane rank. That way you can select AI enemies flying planes there are stronger than yours, belonging to upper Tiers, and this in little part compensates the low skill of AI pilots (which in addition improved a little, maybe). Even if the main danger are the lethal bomber gunners and a careful human player usually can survive quite easily against fighters, now Custom Battles against AI are no more just an endless bots’ carnage but a decent battle simulation which could be of some fun (when you want a fight more relaxed than on-line) and a little learning too. No comparison with a real battle against human players but now with a little challenge at least.
Since Custom Battles have been thought to be played mainly by human players, if you want to create a full-bots fight (apart you) set it up with a difficult password so no human on-line can join the battle.

· Single Missions: in WT there is a number of off-line missions, created by Gaijin, that are progressively unlocked by the system, useful enough to try different planes and different kinds of task. They also rely on WT AI vehicles (planes and sometime ground units), with the above mentioned shortcomings. Some of them are fun and sometimes quite difficult to successfully complete (e.g. to shot down all enemy bombers before they reach their objectives). Likely the only off-line missions that can be of some usefulness.

· User Missions: just like Single Missions but they have been created by users and can be downloaded by WT site. I rarely found some of them being really compelling.

Taking stock of this, there is no really effective way to get off-line practice, although Custom Battles and Single Missions can be of some (limited) usefulness.
Anyway, kudos to Gajin for having improved Custom Battles at least, notwithstanding they usually shown a clear (and understandable) lack of interest for off-line.

So my advice to newbies is: briefly try off-line, especially Custom Battles and Single Missions, and then go on-line as soon as possible.
Of course you’ll be killed a lot at first but you’ll learn much more doing that than flying the (too much often useless and boring) WT off-line missions.

· WHERE TO BATTLE, HIGH OR LOW?

Remember that in AB, at least at Tier III-IV and below, the core of the battle is at medium-low altitude and you practically have to fight there (with a fighter or an attacker) if you want to have an high score and earn points and lions (at least until you'll become a real master in BnZ, “Boom and Zoom”, and your planes/crews will be at the same "expert" level).
Many players despise the so-called “furball” (some of them likely because feel unsafe there …), stating that just poor-skilled pilots choose to fight there. That’s not true.
Many players complaint about people “going to fight at the deck” instead of staying high and call that “bad tactic”. That’s not true.
These are likely the most widespread and the most incorrect opinions you can find in the “WT community”.

The key to have success, at least in low and middle tiers’ Arcade Battles, is “FIGHT WHERE THE BATTLE IS”.
And in Arcade the core of the battle is usually under 2000 mt / 6600 ft, very often well under 1000 mt / 3300 ft.

If you can’t believe that, I suggest you to replay your battles and check which tactics the best players use.
Direct knowledge is always much better than believing to people saying things just because … they believed to others! That’s just what you can usually find on WT Forum.

This is not strange at all, on the contrary is quite obvious, because of ground targets in Ground Strike battles and airfields in Domination battles (airfield capture battles).
Gaijin likely invented the new Air Domination battle also to induce players to stay high but its mechanics and rules are so silly that almost nobody worries about staying high until the last minutes in the battle, when the survivors try to cap the air zone.

There are other reasons why so many players fly at low altitude:

o climbing high requires a lot of time, so wasting battle time (and lowering “battle activity” score).

o staying high has some significant advantages respect to the lower altitude planes (exchanging altitude for speed, visual control) but also means to be well visible by everyone and be a potential target for everyone (and, BTW, exposed even to attacks from below and the belly of some planes is their weakest part). On the contrary, when flying at low level is much more easy to blend into the crowd, both for the crowded area itself, for the terrain and in some maps for the mountains. And many of the most successful fighter pilots in AB are players that attract little attention on themselves.

o a player can really take advantage of speed reached in a dive just if he is skilled enough to kill an enemy with a short burst in a single passage (“Boom-and-Zooming”), which is not easy, not just for a beginner but also for a more expert player. Arcade FMs are agile enough that in many cases the victim, being engaged by other enemies at low level, changes abruptly direction, even if unaware of the BnZooming “hawk” pouncing on him from 1500 mt above!, so making the attack fail.

o staying high can be useful to survive, in fact many of the supporter of staying at high altitude follow the precept “I have not to die”, having in many cases “precious” Kill/Death Ratio stats to defend. But Arcade is not Realistic, in Arcade “not to die” is not so important, more important is to fight “where the battle is”.

So, be aware of the too many advices categorically stating that you have to “Climb, climb, climb! Then Boom-and-Zoom!”.
If you think just to climb, without having the needed skill both in air combat manoeuvers and in BnZ, you’ll likely do it poorly, having used a lot of time to climb just to be quickly killed at high alts by more expert players (some of them usually sitting there because afraid of the furball, “dangerous” for their stats) and without having had any real opportunity to shot down even a single enemy plane, since the action is elsewhere!

The really important thing in AB is to keep your speed high enough and this can be done even without climbing obsessively.

If you fly a bomber, tactics are obviously different and one of them is staying so high to discourage enemy fighters. Sometimes it works, other times not.

Staying really high requires very good precision in bombing, so other bomber players prefer to make dive attacks even with medium bombers (e.g. B-25), using their speed when trying to put on enemy bases or ground targets a full load of bombs before being intercepted by enemy fighters. These usually suicide attacks have been in game since the first days but become even more frequent (and more effective for winning the battle) after the quite infamous “bombers buff” which came with 1.59 patch (discussed elsewhere in this guide).

· BE AGGRESSIVE!

In AB air battles you have to fight quite aggressively (which doesn't mean being thoughtless!), at least if you are a fighter pilot. For example it's usually better to shoot even without being in the better position than losing time trying to have the "perfect" positions. Many good kills are made "by instinct", especially when you are into the furball.
Be aggressive and don't be too much afraid to "die": take your risks when opportune. Planes in AB are "expendable" and the best way to maximize their use is by taking risks to get an high score and many points.
On the contrary, bomber pilots can choose if to be aggressive (e.g. diving on the ground targets in an area full of enemies) or to be cautious (e.g. circling at high altitude to bomb bases, trying to be far apart from enemy fighters). Both tactics have pros and cons and, in the end, outcomes for a bomber pilot is due more by game mechanics, damage model and accuracy of AI gunners than by player’s skill.

FYI, the matter is much muddier in AB ground battles. With tanks is more a matter of hiding, perseverance and patience (that's why tanks battles are much more boring, I suppose ...) and aggressiveness can easily turn into foolishness and push a player to make mistakes. But you also have to take in account that in tank domination battles capturing zones before the enemy is of great importance and you have to "aggressively" throw yourself (along with comrades) to the conquest. So a part of pugnacity (and risk-taking) is needed with tanks too. But here we are dealing just with AB Air battles so I'll stop immediately the off-topic!

· FIGHTING INTO THE FURBALL?

Although you have to fight where the battle is, don't throw yourself right in the middle of a furball: it’s a Russian Roulette for everyone, even more for a beginner.
Fly around and above the furball to locate easier targets and take less risks.
If you are induced or forced to enter the furball, try to quickly hit the enemies, come out as soon as possible, regain distance, speed and some altitude and check the situation before repeating the attack.

But there are other considerations to do about “furballs”.

“Furball” is a term used with sarcasm and contempt by many expert players thinking to themselves as “elitist high-altitude aces” opposed to “dumb players stupidly fighting in the stupid furball” but, to be honest, in my opinion at present there is just ONE TRUE BIG AND REAL (and stupid) furball situation in AF: Air Domination.
In Ground Strike and any other kind of Air Battle the fight is almost invariably split in several groups of planes trying to shoot down each other or destroying ground targets whereas in Air Domination there is usually one big main furious battle near the ground, i.e. “the Furball”, lasting for all the battle duration. Since in Air Domination there are no ground targets, anyone go against other planes and since AD rules are so stupid almost anyone waits for the last five minutes for trying to cap the air zone (since bombers are irrelevant, AD are at present the only battles that can last even twenty minutes!).
Hence the giant furball, where the question is not “will I be killed?” but “when?” and “will I be able to kill much more than my deaths?”. One could avoid that furball but, as usual, this would mean to have much less chances to kill enemies so the most players go there. But this makes the fight depending primarily on luck, because when you are in a small area filled by a dozen enemies you can do almost nothing to defend yourself (apart keeping your fingers crossed).
Contrary to the statement of some, Air Domination is the less skill-rewarding kind of battle because being killed (or not) is much more a matter of luck than of skill. And that’s the reason why I usually skip them, along with the bored feeling of a no-tactics kind of battle. I consider AD one of the few features in Air Forces almost as stupid as the endless series of idiocies you can easily find in Ground Forces.

In all the other type of AF battles, small furballs arise and finish continuously and action is much more varied, interesting, less boring and based on skill much more than on luck. And, BTW, all that at medium-low altitude (take that, “elitist high-altitude ace”!).

· WHEN THROWING YOURSELF INTO THE BATTLE?

This is an interesting question: when is the best time to enter the battle?
You can wait for some time before throwing yourself into the fight. It is better to start at once or to wait for some time?

In general, and especially before 1.59 patch, my advice would be “wait for some time”.

If you immediately enter the battle you’ll find all the enemy at the maximum of their attention, with their crews, planes and guns at the max too, and you have potentially to face five or six of them at the same time (all of them flying in the area in front of you). While you are trying to identify a target, the best amongst them could kill you at the first shot.

On the contrary, if you wait about 40-50 seconds you’ll enter the battle when many of them have already pinpointed their targets and you could more easily catch some of them by surprise.
After some seconds you are waiting, a 30 sec countdown automatically starts but you can restart it just by changing vehicle selection, so you can really delay your entering in the battle at your will.
And while waiting the convenient amount of time, you can check the in-battle statistics table to look at enemy team composition, trying to understand if you should look after bombers or fighters.

Of course, you could enter immediately in the battle AND wait some time, moving to a quiet area near the border on the map and, better, climbing a little before going back toward the centre of the fight.
But doing that you could be eyed up by enemies since the beginning and they could just wait for your return. Second, you could be easily tempted to attack an enemy right away, trashing the tactic. As much as important, doing that your crew will use some precious Stamina whereas if you enter in battle later you will have a really fresh crew against already tired enemy crews.
The two situations are not equivalent and I advise you to wait for some time in the pre-battle screen instead of entering at once and withdrawing for some time at the beginning.

Unfortunately, 1.59 badly changed things about that too. After that disastrous patch, air battles are on average much shorter, being now decided by bombers, and wasting 40-50 seconds in a battle that can last just 5 minutes reduces your chances to get a good score.

So my advice is the same but it could be better to reduce waiting time, e.g. no more than 30 seconds.

· WHAT TO DO JUST AFTER HAVING ENTERED INTO THE BATTLE?

For a true newbie the first 40-50 seconds after having started the battle are often a nightmare.

I remember battle starts when I was a newbie, with me bravely heading my fighter plane against one of the nearest enemies that were advancing in front of me, just to be killed at its first burst in an head-on or destroyed by an unseen enemy while I was concentrated on the other!
Or suffering the same fate while diligently trying to “gain altitude” (having listened to the “altitude mantra” so widespread in the WT Forum even about AB), being slaughtered by expert enemies with spaded planes much more capable to gain altitude quickly (and usually being already higher than me) and skilled enough to shot down a plane with a few shots (even more when having an altitude advantage).

Other times, having learned those lessons, I tried to stay away from “dangers” and moved to quieter peripheral map zones but soon learned that I invariably ended at the very bottom of battle rank, without getting any kill or even assist. And some time I even didn’t survive because an enemy chased and shot down me just the same.

It’s not possible to give a finished procedure to face the first minute of battle, in any situation, but it’s possible to say at least what’s NOT to do.

In my opinion a newbie, at battle beginning, should never:

o Seek or accept head-ons: it’s likely that the enemy is more experienced and would win easily. Head-ons should be accepted just if it’s no more possible to avoid the enemy frontal attack (since there are techniques to improve effectiveness and survival chances in head-ons, the beginner should look for them on WT Forum and YouTube).

o Gain altitude when facing the enemies, i.e. flying in the direction of enemies: he would be an easy target, even more when facing more than one enemy aircraft.

o Even less, trying to gain altitude in face of enemy already higher than him (e.g. spawn campers but not only).

o Throwing himself thoughtlessly in the furball.

On the contrary, he should:

o Start flying aside the centre of the map, keeping himself quite away from enemies until he has examined the battle zone.

o Check its own surroundings to ensure there are no immediate dangers. If there are attacking enemies, he should dive to gain speed and move toward friends to be helped.

o If there are no dangers, gain some altitude (it’s not necessary to climb a lot!) while observing position and moves of enemy planes.

o Identify an enemy plane as a good target (e.g. flying below, flying alone in straight line or already engaged in a fight or in strafing and likely distracted).
Please take note: any plane flying well above the newbie is usually a bad target! An attack from below is possible but requires much more experience, flying skill and shooting skill than a newbie usually has. And any enemy plane which has a couple of comrades (or more) near him is a dangerous target, because he has friends that could counter-attack.

o Attack the enemy, diving and so gaining speed. The best attacks are usually done with deflection shots.
Please take note: attacking the enemy just after a respawn is a smart move, because it’s the moment where crew’s Stamina is at its maximum value and accuracy and mouse aiming are significantly better, especially if Stamina parameter is high enough. This is therefore the ideal moment to attack enemies bombing or strafing your bases, near your spawn point, so don’t miss the chance.

o After the attack, he should disengage if it failed, exploiting his speed, after that climbing a little and going in search of another target. If the attack succeeded, he should search another immediate target in the nearby, if there is none climb a little and then cross the map at good speed, looking for victims.
It’s not a true Boom-and-Zoom, since in AB there is little reason to climb a lot. It’s energy fighting, flying more horizontally than in vertical, keeping speed high (also using WEP, War Emergency Power), looking for unaware enemies to surprise and shot down, usually with deflection bursts, staying the most of time at medium-low altitude.

o Being now in the battle, the newbie should also follow the other advices here given (e.g. no target fixation, no long flying in straight line, preserve speed etc.).

Even doing so it’s likely the newbie will be often shot down, nevertheless that way he should speed up his rise through the ranks and start having some fun instead of just frustration!

· DON’T FLY IN A STRAIGHT LINE FOR A LONG TIME!

Don't fly in a straight line for more than thirty seconds into or near the furball, otherwise you likely become an easy and tempting prey for enemy. This is a common mistake by beginners.
For the same reason, don't fly in a straight line to attack ground units without checking for possible enemies that could too much easily intercept you.  Shooting down unaware beginners pointing towards ground targets, flying quite slowly at low altitude and without checking for incoming enemies, is one of the most common and easy kill situations even for just mid-experienced adversaries. A straight GS low-alt attack can be done but requires high speed, usually achieved by diving, and a preventive check of EAs position (even then it's often a suicide attack, anyway, but can allow dropping at least one load of bombs).

· NO TARGET FIXATION, PLEASE!

Don't be "fixated" to your target ( i.e. if you can't kill it within a few dozens of seconds then change target), otherwise you likely become a prey for an enemy. This is another common mistake by beginners.

· BRAVELY ATTACKING ALONE A BUNCH OF ENEMIES? VERY BAD IDEA!

Don't throw yourself alone into a group of enemy aircrafts composed by more than two plane, otherwise you'll likely be shot down without any chance to defend. This is another common mistake by beginners. If you see a comrade pursued by four, five or more EAs, he is usually doomed unless two or three of your team rush to his aid: but always assess the situation to judge if he can still be saved without a too big risk for the rescuers.

· JOINING YOUR COMRADES’ WOLF PACK AGAINST ONE? USUALLY NOT WORTHWHILE.

Don't join a bunch of your comrades chasing closely the same single enemy aircraft, he is already doomed. If you are lucky, you could likely end with an assist, not a full kill, in many cases not even that. Save your ammos and position to choose another target. Only exception is chasing an enemy bomber closing to your base or ground target, if you are afraid it won't be shot down before dropping bombs.

There is another strong reason to advice against joining a bunch of planes shooting at the same enemy: the risk to involuntarily kill a friend or be killed by a friend.
Such a situation is likely the more frequent in causing involuntary teamkilling.

· HELP! I’VE A BANDIT AT 6 O’CLOCK!

Especially at the beginning, one of the most worrying situations is to have an enemy plane behind you, chasing you at close distance. The unavoidable question is: how can I survive in such a scaring circumstance?

First of all: the “definitive” answer “don’t allow an enemy to surprise you and to position at your 6 o’clock!” is good and bad at the same time.
It’s (of course) true that spatial and situational awareness is of primary importance and that giving enemy very few occasions to attack from behind is really important BUT … sooner or later even the best and watchful players find there is an enemy attacking them at 6 o’clock.
AB maps are small and full of players, even a gamer wisely avoiding to enter straight in the furball will ever give enemies some chances for an attack from behind. This because in AB you have to take risks and fight close to enemies if you want to score high.
To avoid those “risks”, BnZ, high speed and high altitude playing could be the best tactics but, as I’ve said, not only is a tactics very difficult for a newbie (and even for experts) but in AB it could easily lead to become estranged from the battle, so gaining a low score.

So, is there no alternative to continuous and obsessive awareness and/or BnZ to make 6 o’clock attacks less likely? Not really, some useful behaviours does exist and can be followed. If you look at the battle replays of many successful AF AB players you’ll find that there is a “strange” and recurring circumstance: they are quite rarely attacked, even when fighting at medium-low altitude near the battle core. How they manage to do that? Just a matter of luck? I don’t think so. They avoid the most risky situation (and avoid becoming a tempting target) by apparently disengaging from the battle for a while and flying in an “unpredictable” way. So they don’t put themselves right in the furball but fly around the furball, attack and disengage, change battle zone and targets, no target fixation etc.
Doing that make less likely they are noticed by many enemies as an obvious target and when that happens the frequent change in direction not only hinders the attacks but often convince the enemy to look for an easier target. This doesn’t happen any time but for sure helps a lot to reduce risks.

That said, HOW to survive to a 6 o’clock attack? The honest answer is: it’s not easy to do, even for long-time players, if the attacker is an experienced AF gamer. Even worse if the attackers are more than one bandit. Since AB maps are small and FM are not so different between planes in Arcade, it’s quite difficult to take an enemy off from your tail, even when your plane is faster and turns better than the enemy’s plane. A good player chasing an opponent at close distance can usually control the situation and take the suitable countermeasures. Just very nimble turn-fighters such as Ki-43 or I-16 have a good chance to evade the chase by turning whereas even fast planes such as Typhoons usually can’t accumulate speed enough to quickly outdistance the pursuer.
There is a thing that can be tried, but is quite risky and usually works just if the bandit is a unexperienced player: suddenly throttling down and possibly extending flaps, to force an overtake and reverse the situation. You could try that if the bandit has low calibre guns and you could survive to some very-close-range shots.
The best opportunity to survive is, by far, being helped by friends.

My advices:
- move randomly when attacked from behind, even better in “unrealistic” ways. Don’t be too much worried to strictly follow the “classical” escape actions used in real-life, AB is NOT realistic flying and Split-S and such manoeuvers are usually not so effective in WT Arcade! But moving in unpredictable ways makes more difficult enemy aiming, less shots on your plane, more shot wasted and the possibility the bandit has to make a pause for reloading guns.
- you could use flaps to ease evasive manoeuvers but be careful: flaps deplete your plane’s energy and a slow plane without energy is usually dead. Combat flaps, used at not so-low speed, are usually more advisable than full flaps and even those should be used just if the players knows well how his plane reacts.
- in the end, if you want to try escaping by turning you have to know very well how both your and enemy plane fly. For example, in some cases it’s useful even to slow your plane to be able to turn better, but you have to know how much slower you can go before becoming a defenceless flying brick. And, in any case, you’ll never escape a Zero by turning with a P-47, unless the Zero pilot is incompetent or his plane is damaged. Also remember that in game many planes (e.g. Hurricanes) turn better than you could think from specs declared by Gaijin in (not so reliable) plane technical cards, so you could be taken by surprise.
- call for help on the battle chat.
- at the same time, point towards the nearby area where friendly planes are battling, especially fighters. A comrade shooting at your chasing enemy is often enough to distract him and save your ass.
- alternatively, point towards a friendly base having AAA batteries, those could shot down the enemy.
- while trying to avoid being shot down, don’t lose any occasion to shot (and possibly shot down) at any enemy crossing your way (you could have a lot of opportunities into or near a furball). That way, even if you will be shot down at the end, you could even the score.

· MY PLANE IS DAMAGED BUT STILL FLIES, WHAT I HAVE TO DO?

If you have an heavily damaged but still flying plane, insisting in flying it instead of jumping off and losing it will likely result in a much smaller final score than changing to a new and intact plane, since the damaged plane won't allow you to do much. There are partial exceptions, however: in some cases planes flying with just half of a wing, often almost turned upside down!, are still able to manoeuver and shoot, even shooting down enemies. Check your damaged plane's capability before bailing out, in some cases you'll be able to hit or shot down EAs before losing it, so put it to use (even in "suicide" attacks, you could shot down or crash EAs before being definitively killed).
If you can’t really go on with your plane, check if you can still control it good enough to do a landing on a country field or at least a belly landing, if you manage to do that you’ll earn some points.
In fact, if your plane is heavily damaged, you can also try to land on your airfield (in missions that have one available) to repair the plane. But you have to understand that doing so: 1) you will be fully exposed to enemy attacks on the same airfield and 2) likely you will waste a lot of time (return to airfield, repair time, take-off, regain altitude and speed) while the battle goes on. In many cases is more convenient (about score results) to bail out, lose the plane and respawn with a new one.

Also consider that when you respawn in a fighter you are near your airfield and bases and likely near or above ground attacking enemies (attackers or diving bombers) and could have really good occasions to kill (also thanks to a fresh crew, full of Stamina and at the top of its shooting skills, and perfectly working, full of ammo and not yet overheated guns).

As always in WT, staying for long time out of the battle or at the edge of the battle is a losing tactic and the same is for "trying not to die (i.e. not to lose a plane) at all costs".
Of course, if the plane is a very expensive one in repair costs (e.g. a Tempest V) trying to land could be a reasonable action to avoid losing too much virtual money.

· HEY! WHAT HAPPENED TO THIS GAME? IT’S CHANGED!

War Thunder is a continuously changing game. Even too much.

So don’t be surprised if you find changes in game, not only at major patches but even at minor patches. Moreover, whereas at major releases the most relevant changes are usually declared by Gaijin and are carefully scrutinized by players’ community, this is not always true for minor patches.
Some changes aren’t declared neither at big releases nor at small ones.

This can be due by unwanted changes generated by bugs or side-effects after a software modification. Otherwise, it can be a deliberate change that Gaijin doesn’t want to point out (likely not to raise criticism by players).
In fact, during your experience as a WT player you’ll likely find a lot of those stealthily introduced changes. Nerfing of bombs or guns, small changes in GUI (often to decrease info given to players …) and even game control changes/removing are modifications in War Thunder that are frequently undeclared.
A very annoying behaviour, in my opinion, but … this is War Thunder too!

· HEY! WHAT HAPPENED TO MY PLANE? IT USED TO BE A MARVEL, NOW IS SH..!!!

Well, if you find that your beloved plane, previously so enjoying to fly and effective in shooting, maybe even quite strong, has become a flying pig and/or a peashooter “fighter” and/or a flying coffin easily destroyed by enemies, there is an high chance that Gaijin changed something in a recent patch.

Changes should be declared and listed in patch changelog but you would be really naïve in thinking that no hidden change could be applied too.
Gaijin is not a transparent company (it has no obligation to be!) and it’s evident that in many cases, likely in almost any major patch, there are some undeclared modifications, especially about not-so-evident things, to Gaijin’s advantage (from fixing not yet publicly known bugs to changes made to favour or penalize categories of players, for business reasons).
FMs, DMs, guns effectiveness, hit detection and such a things, being not immediately noticeable as much as changes in game rules or mechanics, could be easily changed by Gaijin without any warning if they would do that.
There is at least one case I remember in WT Forum where a well-informed player shut up a moderator, who swore that no change had been done about a particular issue, by publishing part of a configuration file extracted from the more recent pack!

In many cases changes in plane (or tanks, in GF) characteristics are agreed and welcomed by the majority of players, in other cases not.
In many cases those changes are plausibly justified by historical and technical documents, in other cases things are much more uncertain and raises discussions in player’s base.
Anyhow, remember that changes could be applied by Gaijin even without any declaration. Search and follow threads in WT Forum to understand if other players detected undeclared changes.

When unwanted changes has been done, a player could try to “mitigate the damage” by changing mouse sensitivity (if it was a widespread FM change) or shortening convergence (if it was a case of guns nerfing).
But usually a player can do very little (and nothing in case of DM changes). If the modification applied just to one or few planes, changing general parameters such as mouse sensitivity or convergence would be harmful or impractical.
Just like anything in WT, players has to hope that Gaijin don’t makes too many bad choices, then decide if it’s worthwhile going on gaming.

· HEY! WHAT THE **** IS THIS PLANE? IT SHOULD BE SH.., ON THE CONTRARY IS A MARVEL!!!

One peculiarity of Arcade Battles is that many planes fly, shoot and perform in a very different way they did in real life, in WWII.
This isn’t due just to poor simulation in game but, more important ad more justifiable, to the inherent characteristics of Arcade Battles.
Small maps and “arcadish” FMs (often more similar between them than in real life) make a great difference. Great and powerful planes, such as Typhoons and Tempests, don’t find in AB their more convenient playground. On the contrary, planes there were quite poor in WWII, such as the F2A-3 Buffalo and the LaGG-3, are surprisingly effective in WT AB (at least if Gaijin don’t make the usual changes to “nerf”, i.e. weaken, them!).
Another thing that you should take into consideration is that some characteristics of planes are not simulated in WT, so planes that in WWII had a bad reputation and poor combat score for their engine weakness, for example, don’t have the same shortcomings in WT.
So, please, don’t think that a particular plane surely has to be strong or weak in game because it was strong or weak in WWII! Although on average there is a good amount of similarity, there are many exceptions too.
Only ways to know which planes are really good or bad in WT Arcade Air Battles are reading other player’s opinion and, of course, trying by yourself (since effectiveness of a plane for any player also depends by the personal flying and combat style of the gamer).

· THE INFAMOUS “TEAMKILLING” ISSUE.

Teamkilling, i.e. being shot down by a dumb vandal belonging to your team, is an often complained issue, but it's not so common. In many cases it's involuntary. If you accidentally shot down a comrade, send a "sorry" on the chat.
If you find you have been voluntarily killed by a teammate, use the "report" function in battle on that player, Gaijin should check the complaint and take measures against it (especially if he is an inveterate teamkiller and has collected many reports from his victims).

· THE INFAMOUS “SPAWN CAMPING” ISSUE.

Spawn camping is another issue (in my opinion much more relevant and serious than teamkilling, even if it’s possible to live with it).

At least in the first tiers is not much frequent, then you'll start encountering arrogant middle-level gamers that found in camping a way for easier kills. Unluckily even a disheartening number of expert players at upper tiers use it saying it's a "licit" tactic, also making some philosophising about that as a justification and self-justification, like passing off that as an "air superiority tactic", and often resorting to a ratty L2P argument against their critics.
In fact, a lot of spawn campers seems to be veterans, also Level 100, payers and Premium and often belonging to a squadron, that changed fair high altitude tactics in a much less justifiable thing.

Actually, spawn campers occupy an area usually left empty by the other players (more honest and more objective focused) and have no need to fight for it: they just place themselves there, at the beginning of the battle, whereas their enemies sensibly go for targets (air and ground, both usually at much lower altitudes in AB).
In fact, AB players are usually not much interested in fighting at high alts, for several good reasons here explained, and there is really no big battle for conquering that zone.

So, no skill here, no “high altitude zone bravely conquered”, but cowardly waiting the enemies just out of the “hole” the enemies are forced to pass through after the spawn.
And there are accounts about spawn campers quickly running away when even inferior planes approached them at the same altitude, so much for the vaunted "hard earned air superiority".

it's a tactic that gives them an advantage by using the fact the most of players have no real convenience in hindering it, since AB objectives are usually in conflict with spawn campers hunting.
Spawn camping it's just a parasitic tactic which exploits a very rough spawn mechanism, the convenience for the game maker to allow that behaviour (that’s why Gaijin doesn’t fix it) and benefits of the fact most of players have very different goals in battle.
Maybe even spawn campers feel there is something "wrong" in that so they have to idealize that tactics babbling about "skill", "hard-earned air superiority" etc.
Some of them even declare themselves, on the Forum, "proud to be a spawn camper"!

In practice they use it as an unfair BnZ over the enemy spawn zone to get very easy kills, both on fighters and bombers, and improve (or at least protect) their "precious" Kill/Death stats.
There are a few tactics to defend from spawn campers, essentially the first thing to do is to run away immediately from these dishonest players (even if this leave unprotected your team's bombers, which usual route is bottlenecked by spawn campers).
A player attacked by a spawn campers should never turn immediately towards him because the attacker has a better position and higher speed, even more if the defender lose speed by turning. The player should immediately and resolutely dive, to gain speed and hopefully distance from the attacker.

After that, players have two choices: the first is going for targets and forget campers; the second is facing the dishonesty, climb after having safely moved away and carefully and try to attack the campers.
Campers count on players making the second choice (and, in fact, this is the dishonest advice they give on the Forum!) because they know that the most of other players are at inferiority, both for skill/experience/crews/planes and for the lower height at the start. So don’t follow that tactic, which is suicide for a newbie.
Moreover, climbing to face them is usually much more time-consuming than attacking planes and ground targets below and with no added individual reward. Usually experienced enough players head towards the battle (which in AB is at medium-low altitude) ignoring spawn campers, this in AB is by far the best advice.

Unfortunately, newbies and intermediate gamers often decide to challenge the spawn campers flying above them and are regularly killed: the present spawn mechanism give spawn campers a too great advantage and when considering that they are usually very experienced paying players, with high-skill crews and fully spaded planes, often fighting as a squad so reciprocally protecting, you realize why a newbie (but not only) is cannon fodder against them.
From time to time some disgusted, very experienced and skilled player decide to skilfully climb (far away from them) and teach them a lesson, sacrificing his personal profit.

For newbies and intermediate level players the best tactic is: ignore spawn campers, immediately dive, head toward the battle, which in AB is at medium-low altitude, and stay fighting there.

That way, they’ll have just a few seconds chance at the beginning, if they are lucky enough that you spawned near them and in a good (for them) position, after that they’ll lose the occasion.
If they still want to kill you, they'll have to follow you and face the dreaded low-altitude "furball", if they dare.

Just in the image above, spawn campers wait for “mice” exiting from the spawn-hole and attack them.
Usually they don’t attack planes immediately diving (because doing so they would give up their advantageous position) but any plane staying at the same altitude or starting climbing (which usually is a good tactic before diving into the melee) is at great risk.
And if a spawning plane turns toward them (often even without pointing the guns up against them but just approaching their zone while staying lower!) they consider it a “threat” and exploiting the altitude easily kill the victim (often scornfully defined by the camper as “an idiot who come straight up for me”), telling themselves to be “skilled” and “smart”.

So, these “heroes” have found an advantageous way to get kills minimizing risks, just exploiting the game mechanism (fixed spawn points) and the advantage for honest players (in terms of rewards) to fight at lower levels and far from spawn zone, so not being a risk for them.
In practice, they usually make seal-clubbing of less experienced players naively climbing to face them (it happened to me, too), taking no real risk.

This issue could be easily mitigated by Gaijin by changing the spawn mechanism, as it has been suggested to them since long time (for example setting multiple random spawn points at different places and altitudes) but don't hold your breath, that's very unlikely to happen: doing that would damage several high level “camping” gamers, the same which obviously state the "fairness" of spawn camping, many of them likely being paying players.
And Gaijin is a business company that, primarily and legitimately, has to make happy paying players.
Since the “victims” of spawn camping are usually much less skilled players flying at lower altitude, and being less expert are less likely paying, keeping things as they are now advantages paying players.
And since a lot of the them "defend" in Forum that tactic, Gaijin perfectly knows what to do to please them: nothing.
Just leaving things as they are.

One of those “proud spawn campers” I said above has written “I'll do it until Gaijin penalizes people when they do it” (which is also an admission that spawn camping is not a “natural” behaviour, it’s not a thing that comes “naturally” while “fighting for altitude”!).
It’s very likely that Gaijin will NEVER do anything against him and his “proud” fellows, so they’ll go on with their exploit of a fault of game mechanics.

On December 15, 2016, Gaijin itself started on WT Forum a thread called “Spawn Camping - Views and Opinions - Keep it nice”.
A lot of players gave opinions and suggestions (me included), after more than one year (at the moment I’m writing this) and more than 50 pages in the thread Gaijin had done ABSOLUTELY NOTHING about spawn camping in AF and put just some protected zones in some GF maps (where, that’s the true irony, spawn camping issue is almost non-existent!).
I followed that thread for about six month, after that I decided to stop allowing Gaijin fooling me and started to ignore it.
It’s even more clear they don’t want take any actions against spawn campers, at least in AF.

So, have you to be much worried about spawn campers?
Not in my opinion. Follow the advice above given, i.e. ignore spawn campers, and fight your own battle.

The worst and more annoying thing about spawn campers is the mocking arrogance of the most of them, as they fully demonstrate on forums, not their impact on the game.

Just one example of their attitude: some time ago a player belonging to the PRO100 [100] squadron started in WT Forum a thread named “The biggest problem”, where he complained that “no one ever asks [me] for help or guidance” notwithstanding it was “pretty damn obvious” that he was “a far better pilot than most of the community”.
Well, presumptuousness apart (I think it’s however likely he is a pilot much better than the average player) what really annoys here is depicting this as a capital problem.
Another player sarcastically answered him: “So basically the 'Biggest problem' of this game is that players do not acknowledge that you are a great player and don't ask for you to share your knowledge? Get over yourself, it's a game ...”.
Well, now you have just to know that the infamous PRO100 squadron, composed by very experienced players, systematically adopt spawn camping, defending it as a “licit” and “fair” tactic, and you’ll have more clear how much cocky and arrogant is this kind of people.

I’m happy to say that in that thread several other expert gamers had negative reactions towards the original poster, similar to the above mentioned one. Some even underlined that belonging to a squadron committed to spawn camping isn’t neither the best starting point to be heard with sympathy nor the best CV for a possible teacher!

An extremely experienced and wise player summarized the spawn camping issue this way:
“The problem arises initially due the map/Spawn design that was chosen.
Secondary due an Community defending it (Pro 100 etc. pp. Squadrons) as an legit philosophy in life.
Third by an community not pressing enough on the hard point to force a change of the chosen design”.

He is fully right, IMHO.

BTW, some cases of spawn camping can be also observed in Tank Battles. Luckily this is less frequently than in Air Battles, IMHO. The less frequency is likely done by the greater danger in camping into an enemy ground spawning area with a much slower and clumsy vehicle such as a tank.

· THE (ALMOST) INFAMOUS "KILL STEALING" ISSUE.

"Kill stealing", i.e. "stealing" a kill to another player, shooting down an enemy the other player was chasing and maybe has already hit, is a much complained issue by beginners.
It's understandable that newbies are angry about that, since a beginner has so many difficulties and few occasions to make kills, but in my opinion it's not a really relevant issue, in general.
Let me explain.

If two or more players start attacking, at the same time, the same enemy aircraft, they have equal "rights". No kill stealing here, in any way. The first who kills it, deserves the victory.

On the contrary, if just one single player is chasing and shooting an enemy aircraft, he should be able to shot down it quite quickly.
If he isn't able to do that within a few dozens of seconds, it's not only licit but even beneficial to the team that another player do it.

This is evident with enemy bombers: a damaged bomber should be shot down as soon as possible, before it can unload the bombs on friendly ground targets.

But in many cases there are reasons to do that even with fighters: often in a furball it’s not easily possible to determine which player started the attack first not even determine that an enemy plane is so “doomed” that can be safely left to the current chasers (in a crowded furball even a damaged enemy plane can kill our friends).
So shooting in a furball an enemy plane that quickly crosses your gunsight could be fully licit and good for the team, even if it’s already been chased by some friends of yours.

When there is a possible true "theft"?
When a player has heavily hit the enemy, is about to give it just the finishing blow and another gamer comes out of nowhere and suddenly destroy it instead of waiting a few seconds to check if the kill is accomplished by the first player.

In one case, the first player could be credited with no score (not even an assist) but this means he really hadn't hit the enemy in serious way before!, so the second gamer deserves the victory.

Otherwise, both players could earn an assist, because both damaged the enemy (the first player too).
In this last case, and only in that, the first one has the right to complain, IMHO, because just some more seconds and a few more shots after he would surely have get a kill.

How much frequent is this last case (an enemy really damaged in such a serious way that is just waiting the final blow, but still flying, killed by another player fully unrelated to the fight)?
I think it's not really frequent.

Purposely "steal" a kill is a deceitful and annoying behaviour but it doesn't happen so much often, according to my experience.

In the most of cases, they aren't "theft" but the conclusion of the licit concurrence of two or more attacks or the second attacker taking matters into his own hands because the first player shown to be unable to shot down the enemy in a decent timespan.

· Obviously, no gamer is happy to see a seemingly doomed enemy suddenly destroyed by another player, while he was already foretasting (for good reasons or just for hope) the victory!, but in many cases the other player has the same rights of the first.
Not every time, but quite often.

So, my 2 cents is: if you think that someone “stole” your kill, no bad blood for that, the issue is not serious and by gaining experience and skill you will start to realize that.
And, anyway, before complaining always think if you had really good reasons to claim that kill just for yourself.

On the other side, if an enemy plane seems to be doomed (smoking etc.) and has a comrade right on its tail, check it for some seconds before shooting at it and intervene just if it doesn’t go down quickly and risks to became dangerous for the team.
Doing that you’ll leave the kill to the player that deserves it and won’t make an enemy of him.

· THE (SURELY) INFAMOUS "CHEATING" ISSUE.

One of the most recurring issue discussed in WT Forum is the cheating one.
Many players are rightfully worried about the possibility other dishonest gamers gain a fully unfair advantage by applying modifications to the game in order to make things forbidden to the others (e.g. being invulnerable, turning better or flying faster than plane specs, being able to see at “infinite” distance on the map, regardless clouds and even mountains etc.).
You can find on Forum many accusations of possible cheating by players that noticed adversaries behaving in some “unnatural” way (e.g. suddenly stopping on the air, turning on a dime with a B-17 or being apparently invulnerable). In many cases these situations are explainable with network troubles, bad latency and lag, but for sure any WT player has seen in his career some very “strange” things especially in Air Forces.

Gaijin on its web site says:
"Q: Is it possible to use cheats in War Thunder (like speed-hack, invulnerability and other unfair advantages)?
A: All movements and player interactions like collisions, damage etc. are calculated on the server side. It means that even if corresponding parameters are modified on the client side, the cheater will not actually gain any advantages like invulnerability, increased damage or anything similar. Anyone pretending to distribute software that gives such advantages is probably a fraudster looking to steal your money or compromise your personal data".

So, the “official” Gaijin’s response is the same has ever been: serious cheats can’t exist because all the movements are calculated server side.

But on the first months of 2017 the same Gaijin on Forum communicated that more than five hundreds cheaters have been banned forever, having used forbidden modifications, just from January to March 2017. Gaijin says they detected (using some algorithm) “the difference in behaviour between normal players (using real visibility from the client) and a player who also has server-side information on his monitor (this information contains more data)”.

So it seems that at least one kind of cheating does exist, i.e. getting from the server (in an unknown way, on which Gaijin is properly tight-lipped) more information than info available to honest players. This would give them a sure advantage, even it’s not easy to assess how much.
Likely, the advantage could easily be very significant in RB and SB battles, where honest players are given very few information by the game.
But it could be relevant even in AB.

This could be related to the hypothesis of “server-based aimbots”, paid functionalities (illegally created by business-oriented hackers) which could exploit features really existing on Gaijin’s servers, being usually restricted for developers access.
If these features exist (and they could, to allow developers a better testing environment even being just mediocre players) and there is a way to upgrade normal WT accounts to developers capabilities, those players could have big advantages.
Gaijin’s own admission seems to be a first-hand confirmation of that.

If you google-search on the net with “war thunder aimbot” you could find several Youtube movies showing supposed or declared aimbot-aided fights in WT AF (such as https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xf4KSf-E_O8 or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2GsOYVQECwc ), with some visual peculiarities such as frames around enemies and additional info for the player.
In GF the videos of suspected cheating are even more impressive (see for example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjRLdz4-tY8 ) and it’s inevitable to wonder if those exceptional achievements could be given by aimbots or some other cheat instead of just paying, since it’s quite incredible it could be given just by player’s skill.

I hope Gaijin go on both fighting cheaters and strengthening the security of their servers.
At the same time, cheating issue should be considered more than players, reassured by Gaijin, usually do.

For other info see my “Ground Battles Beginners’ Guide” in Chapter “The Dark Side of P2W?”.

· WHO IS REALLY “FIGHTING” IN WAR THUNDER?
THE IMPORTANCE OF SPADING PLANES AND MAXIMIZING CREWS EXPERIENCE.

This is a so much important topic that I’ve been tempted to put it here on top of the arguments’ list.

In general, you have to understand that WT works in a much more "indirect" way than you could think at the beginning.


A crew is a very effective “broker” between you and the game. And it counts A LOT for your performance.

It's not you the one that is fighting, controlling the plane and shooting: your crews are fighting, controlling and shooting!
I mean that, of course, it's you that "fly" and "shoot" but all is heavily "mediated" through your crews. And crew skill is of a really great importance for your performance. Think at your planes as drones you control, but with some very important intrinsic skills too (the crew).

Are you wondering why you shoot and shoot an shoot … and just a few bullets hit the enemy? Well, if you have a low level crew that’s by far the most likely reason.
Are you wondering why an enemy plane, on paper less nimble than yours, is able to out-turn you? Well, if you have a low level crew and the enemy has a high level crew, that is the explanation.
Are you wondering why the enemies regularly shoot down you in a head-on whereas you can’t do the same? Likely it’s the same explanation.


Planes’ performances grow a lot when developed and allow you to have a much better performance.

At the same time, your plane is not just the plane you unlocked or buy: it's an evolving (simulated) machine, that go on improving until fully developed (i.e. spaded, it stems this adjective from the Ace of Spades shown on fully developed planes icons in WT hangar).
And plane's developing state is of a really great importance for your performance too.


Back talking about crews: what is “crew level”?

Crew level is a number indicating how much a crew has developed parameters (Vitality, Stamina etc.), i.e. how much great is crew’s “skill”.

It’s displayed on the lower part of any crew’s icon. In this example the crew level, which is now using that LaGG plane, is 31.
Crew level is linked to the crew, not to the vehicle (apart the possible Qualification to Expert, which is an additional “skill” linked to a particular vehicle too).
So, if that crew changes vehicle, for example passing to a Yak, its level remains the same.

The number is the sum of the single parameters of the crew.
Since from some years the player can no more freely choose which are the parameter s to increase, it’s Gaijin that from time to time unlocks some parameter while keeping the others temporarily locked, trying to keep the increases balanced on all parameters, the level is a quite significant indication of the general “skill” of the crew.
So, don’t be surprised if I write that “a level 5 crew has a lower Vitality skill than a level 15”: de facto, even without knowing the specific value of Vitality for pilots and gunners of the two crews, you could bet that the level 5 has a lower Vitality (e.g. 0.5-1.0) and the level 15 is better (e.g. 2.0-2.5).
So when I say “crew level” I usually talk about the general “skill level” of the crew, represented by that number: it works well to understand effectiveness of crews, even to transfer reasoning to single parameters.

Crews starts from zero level and go up depending by two things:
1) the player fights and earns XP points
and/or
2) the player pays to buy XP points (i.e. pays for getting “skill”).

Max available level is 75 for Air Forces (planes) crews and 140 for Ground Forces (tanks) crews:
However, if the player pays to raise a crew to Expert it adds 39 points more (81 more points for Qualified crews for tanks).

So an AF player can reach 75 level if non-paying and 114 if paying whereas a GF player can reach 140 (non-paying) or 221 (paying).

Please take note that Gaijin could change these values (which are, as usual, an incredibly difficult data to get, I got it from WT Forum!), however this is the present state and it seems constant.

Difference in combat effectiveness is HUGE even from Level 10 to Level 40, you can easily imagine the advantage of a paying player having an AF Expert level 114 crew against a level 40 crew!


Why the “aces” are aces? Not just for what you are probably thinking.

For example, aim is decided primarily by your skill but also by the Stamina level of the crew (a parameter greatly influencing crew’s fatigue and effectiveness, can be increased getting experience points), by the Weapon Maintenance of your guns (another XP dependent parameter) and by the improving Modifications applied to the guns themselves (by spading the plane).
You could shoot to an enemy airplane the same way and destroy it or miss it depending just by the above parameters’ level.

Another parameter which has a great impact on plane control is G-Tolerance: it’s not just the fact of having or not a blackened vision at high Gs, it’s also a matter of being able to control the plane at best.
Gaijin itself says that G-Tolerance “affects control accuracy of the aircraft”, so influencing all the dogfight abilities including aiming.

Are you admiring an outstanding ace in WT, one that kills 12-15 enemy aircrafts at every AB battle, one that invariably wins any head-on (doing nothing else that heading straight on you and opening fire, that’s all the “skill” used in 90% of winning head-ons) , kills with just a few well-placed shots and manoeuvers his plane like Hans-Joachim Marseille, turning a Bf-109 better than a Zero? Well, he likely has some talent but you could bet that not only he is a player with a lot of experience but also that he has almost all spaded planes and maximized experienced crews.
Better guns, more performing engines, stronger planes, better crew's aim, better crew's stamina so better plane control etc. Some get that high level planes and crews by paying money, others just by playing a lot and gaining SL, RP and XP points.

One of the things that more clearly reveal the average mediocrity of advices given in WT Forum is that a lot of times I read there about “stock syndrome” about unspaded vehicles but never about “unexperienced crew syndrome”!
Really, crew experience is almost as much important as spaded vehicles, also because an unexperienced crew will never be able to exploit a vehicle at its best.

According to my experience, crew level 20 seems to be a sort of mild “turning point” in crews effectiveness in AB Arcade. Crew level is a number shown on hangar below any crew icon.
I found that after level 20 (approximately) crews of both planes and tanks begin to have a more “acceptable” behaviour, i.e. no more seem retarded people and designated victims all the time, and sometimes even surprise me. To achieve that the player should increment parameters according to advices here given and especially incrementing Vitality parameter anytime he can (a very important parameters with planes, of huge importance with tanks!).
Maybe there is a previous little step at level 10, but nothing remarkable. Under 10, well … you are usually cannon fodder and unlikely being able to have good results.
So the first goal for a beginner should be to exceed level 20 as soon as possible, after that things should become better at least with spaded vehicles.

Anyhow, you have to understand that 20 it’s just the minimum level to have a barely resistant and efficient crew and this just in not too unfavourable conditions: don’t think you have a really strong crew once reached level 20!
In fact, even at level 30 crews are not really efficient and is easy to have the crew killed by a few shots, if not a single shot. The improvement is your crew will less frequently destroyed by a simple low-calibre glancing shot.
Some players says that even at the maximum level the crew can be killed by shots and this is true and logically (and historically) right. No plane pilot can survive to a 20 mm direct hit and no tank crew can survive to a well-placed 75 mm explosive shot.
But at low level the crew is so weak that can be killed even by the weakest enemy hit and this is, on the contrary, illogical.

One has also to know that after (but even immediately before) Level 20 the rate of crew level increase slows down markedly, to a pathetic slow-paced degree, even if the player has fought well, getting good scores. You could spend just one month to pass from zero level to 20 for three crews, and many months to pass from 20 to 30.
Likely Gaijin doesn’t want players reach too early high crew levels and hopes that many players want to speed up training by spending real money (“Accelerated training”).
So, take advantage of the initial great speed in crews improving process and try to reach level 20 as soon as you can.

There is one example, quite easily verifiable, that well explains the power of experienced crews and spaded planes: some of the quickest kill a player could have are done just after spawn, when “you aim” seems to be incredibly accurate and is able to shot down an enemy aircraft at the first short burst. Repeat the same action just a few minutes after and the outcome is usually much more uncertain.
Well, it’s not that your aim has worsened so much after three minutes, is your crew’s aim that has worsened, because of fatigue (which is much dependent by the suffered G-force too). Fatigue is mitigated by Stamina and G-Tolerance, which are parameters you can improve with XP points.
Moreover, after some minutes shooting your guns overheat and become less precise. Gun precision can be improved with a better version of the gun (spading the plane), better ammo (spading the plane, too) and crew’s Weapon Maintenance parameter (which can be increased with XP).
Add these three factors, the effect of Stamina, of G-Tolerance and the effect of more efficient guns, and you can understand why it’s so much easier to shot down enemies just after spawn.

Now, let’s imagine how much improvement you could have by maximizing both planes and crews in all parameters: better aim because more enduring crews, faster, stronger and better turning planes, with more powerful ammo etc.
And imagine which advantages have players that has played some years more than you and have crews at level 75 (or 140 for tanks!) instead of 20 or 30 (maybe having also paid to increase their experience in a faster way).
Are you still convinced that all those “aces” are so much effective just by their personal merits? If so, think again.

The real fact is that Air Forces greatly advantages players with high experience crews whereas the demented Ground Forces do the same at a worse, ridiculous and fully outrageous level.

An extremely expert player (with more than 21.000 battles!) described, with great honesty, the effectiveness of his maxed out (Aced) tank crew in this way:
“It means that I kill 3 guys in quick succession before all their missed shots can reload. Being able to flip my tank around and put my front armour angled against a guy who shot at me from the rear vs turning to the side and giving their next shot a side shot means that crew matters. Getting a one shot kill at 3500 metres, means that crew matters”.

You should consider that with planes, things work the same way (even less idiotic than GF, thanks to the fact that AF are a much more fair game).


What’s more important, spading planes or training crews?

It seems to me there is a general consensus about the importance of spading planes whereas about crews experience many say “it’s useful but not so much decisive”.
All in all, I could agree with spading being more important but I’m convinced that the relevance of training crews is usually largely underrated.
You can also find experienced players minimizing that importance. Likely many of them want to tell themselves that all that good performance is just for merit of their improved skill!

There can be also more understandable reasons for that.
Whereas the beneficial effect of spading planes is detectable after just one week of continuous playing and systematic applying of modifications, training crews to a perceptible improvement requires more time (let’s say four weeks to increase crew level from 0 to 20, playing a dozen of battle every day?).
Besides that, whereas practically any modification applied to planes or tanks (guns, strength, engine, ammo …) has an immediately perceptible benefit, advantages in slowly increasing crew experience are less evident, there is no “leap”.
Lastly, some parameters in crews are less important than others and increasing them has a not so great impact. Since when Gaijin decided to pre-allocate the possible choices to assign XP points, players are “forced” to assign XP points even to these parameters and this further slows down the actual improvement rate of the crew.

The overall result of this is that a player could have the wrong impression that benefits in training crews are small.

Well, even if I admit that those crew benefits are less evident than spading planes, they should nevertheless perceived by any player having just a minimum of observational skills.
Unfortunately, a lot of depressing statements written in WT Forum proof that a large part of players fully lack those skills.


An anecdote.

Here is a significant anecdote.

Sometimes ago, just after Gaijin introduced Italian planes, I quickly and fully spaded the couple of Fiat G50 (Serie 2 and AS Serie 7) in the Italian tree.
I had fought before with those planes in Germans, because they were placed there before the coming of Italians (and still are there for players who unlocked it prior to Update 1.69).
I immediately realized that my plane control and aiming was much worse with the (fully spaded) Italians than with the identical planes (equally fully spaded) in German tree (those G50 are exactly the same in both trees, same technical specs).

It was a very evident difference.
Italian G50s turned much worse. German G50s were nimble, a threat for any enemy plane in turning fight, even biplanes!, and pleasant to fly. On the contrary, Italian G50s were clumsy and easily out-turned.
Italian G50s were much less effective in shooting, too. I remembered that when using German G50s I was able to shot down enemies with relative ease, now with the Italians I shoot, shoot, shoot without destroying enemy planes except in some lucky cases. With German G50s I had a satisfying amount of kills whereas with Italians I had much more assists than kills. With Italians, I had much less frequent hits, in many cases the most part of my bullets seemed to get lost in the air, even when it seemed to me my aim was accurate. And all this with the same ammo (stealth , my favourites).
Moreover, pilots of Italian G50s were much more easily killed than Germans one and almost anytime they were dead at head-ons.

How could that be possible? Planes were identical! Same planes, both fully spaded (so same guns, same ammo, same engine etc.). And even BR was the same (about 2.0, In both cases I also used a MC202 that raised it to BR 2.3).
Were there some non-identical factor?
Yes, there were one thing (and just one thing): crew experience was quite different.

With Germans the crew I used had level 20 and 30, with Italians crews were less than level 10.
This was the only difference.

So, it was a really effective proof that:
- crew experience counts A LOT for player’s performance
- it counts a lot even with a relatively MODERATE level difference of 10-20, it doesn’t need 40 or 50 points of difference
- crew experience has A BIG IMPACT also on characteristics that you wrongly could think unrelated or just barely related, such as plane turning time and plane control.

In short, crew experience largely determines player’s success or failure.
Why? Because it’s not “the player” that fights: it’s his crew, directed by the player!

At that time, it happened to me to have a discussion on WT Forum.
I wrote there what happened with G50s, after that the usual sycophant (a typical deniers of crew importance) sarcastically answered me (after having checked my stats) that just a few battles with Italian G50s had no statistical significance. He also added that my statements were incredible to hear, a sign I was unable to give proofs of what I say, and concluded his speech saying “I had been warned of your tactics in debates but I didn’t believe it was true!”.
I replied that the difference was so evident, even after just a few battles, that only a player with NO observation skills (just like him, likely …) could have had some doubt.

Well, after some time I made a further test, playing some more battles with Italian G50 and then with the equivalent Germans.
Even then, after several dozens of battle fought with the Italians and Italian crews level about 10-11, the outcome was the same: fighting with German crews, at level 20 or 30, was much more effective than with Italians.
Whereas with Italians I quite constantly had mediocre results (from 6^th place to 12^th in team, usually around10^th), just a few kills and more assists than kills, with Germans my final positions were from 2^nd to 5^th!
Whereas with Italians I was very lucky to make a single kill out of two G50s, with Germans I usually had a couple of kills for any of the two planes, i.e. 4-5 kills instead of one!
I also checked my stats with those planes: with Italians their kill/death ratio was about 1:1 with both planes, with Germans was about 1.5:1 and 2:1!

And, of course, the feeling I had with those planes was in full agreement with performances: badly controllable Italian planes having weak crews = quite bad performances; well controllable German planes with stronger crews = very good performances.

So, no doubt: I were right both after “just a few battles” and a after “a statistically significant amount of battles”.

It was a matter of observational skills: I have them, some strange ducks haven’t.

Thinking that a well-trained crew has a great importance for performance is nothing strange or unlikely, on the contrary it's quite in agreement with Gaijin's business logic.
The need for training crews is in Gaijin's interest as much as the need for spading planes or tanks, both require time and can induce players to spend some money to speed up things.

So I think that spading is more important but training is not much less decisive.
And crews’ training is important also because is a permanent benefit that applies to all vehicles assigned to a crew (Qualification parameter apart), so partly mitigating the bad performances of stock planes (or stock tanks).

Any player should do both, “endlessly”.


So, what you have to do?

You shouldn’t have any doubt about the great importance of spading planes and training crews.

Only thing you should really ask yourself is: have I to spend real money to max out my crews and planes in a quick way or could I accept the prospect to play a lot as non-pay to slowly improve crews and planes?
Give yourself the answer you want but there is no doubt that expert crews and spaded planes matters A LOT and this is at least as much important as personal skill.

Is it possible to reach the highest levels in player’s performance, at top Tiers, in an acceptable timespan, without paying any money for spading planes and training crews?
I don’t think so, but at least in the first three Tiers you can reach very good levels just by playing and increasing planes’ performances and crew skills for free, although slowly.

There is nothing really wrong in that, Gaijin has programmed WT just to induce players to stay in the game for long time spading planes and training crews. To do that they also selected parameters which has no logic and correspondence in real life, such as Vitality (a trained pilot that become “stronger” against bullets!) or Keen Vision (a progressive improvement of eyesight!). But, yes, WT is a game.
And it’s a fully understandable choice from a business company, although this has nothing to do with players’ skills and often causes events of incredible stupidity in game.
Beginners (and even mid-experienced players) have to realize that and try to reduce that gap if they hope to compete with veterans. Otherwise, they would be usually doomed in battle.

How much decisive is having spaded vehicles and maximized crews regarding player’s performance, regarding victory or defeat?
It’s not easy to answer to that question.

For sure is very important even at the first three Tiers, where many players with very different experience and planes evolution coexist.
I’ve read an opinion saying that spading planes and improving crews in not very important in first tiers: what a fully wrong and misleading belief!
It’s very important just from the lowest tiers, not less than in higher levels.

And at the beginning is even easier to verify that: on the long-term the improvement of personal skill can easily blend with improved crews “skill” (and improved planes too) and it’s not simple to distinguish the two.
But on much shorter terms, such as the first month or two of the player’s career, discerning that it’s quite straightforward, since in a few weeks things such as aim or vehicle control can improve but not drastically but, on the contrary, the improvement in performance usually is at the same time remarkable (if crews and planes have been improved).
This leave just crews and vehicle improvements to explain the better performances.

A beginner should immediately start improving his vehicles and crews and should worry about this above any other thing (such as tactics, ACM, playing in a squadron, buying Premium planes etc.).

Things are even more marked in Tank Battles, where not even hitting first is usually so much important if you are a beginner with a good tank against an expert player with an average tank, you’ll likely lose anyway.
If I had to make a rough evaluation I would say that the combined effect of spaded vehicles + experienced crews counts for about 35-45% in air battles and for 65-75% in tank battles, at least in the lower tiers.

Whatever the evaluation is about importance of crews and planes, more or less optimistic, the difference is very significant anyway.

For my part, I usually expect that my performance using markedly unspaded planes cuts about in half, even with the same crews / crews level. In other words, if with spaded planes I could get 4 or 5 kills and the 4^th or 5^th place in battle, with unspaded ones (same crews) I could have no more than a couple of kills, maybe a few assists and 9^th or 10^th place in battle rank. And when all planes are stock, I know that I could finish even beyond position 10 in rank.
If, in addition, my crews are unexperienced, well, I know in advance that I’ll finish at the bottom places in rank and likely with almost no kill. And this even if other battles, fought with mid-experienced crews and spaded planes, prove that my skill (or my usual combination skill+crews+planes, as is for any player) is not so bad.
Same is true for tanks (In just one month of continuous use of stock tanks only, slowly spading them, and unexperienced crews, slowly training them until level 20, my “average relative position” stats plummeted from 55% to 33%!).
If you plays with stock vehicles and untrained crews, your performance (and stats) will suffer. Point.

I had to accept it since nothing can be done to change that, playing with very undeveloped planes and untrained crews put the gamer to a great disadvantage, but you have to do that if you want to spade them (unless you want to pay).
I just avoid to fight with unspaded planes when I’ve started an important wager or booster. In any other case, I fight with the primary goal of spading and training crews and at the end of the battle I’m happy enough if I’ve been able to do that.

· HEY, I’M DOING BETTER NOW! AM I BECOMING A FLYING ACE?


In WT AF (and in GF too), player’s performance improves with the passing of time. If that doesn’t happen, it’s likely the player is doing something really wrong or … it’s not a game appropriate for him!

Apart some improving of skill and tactics, crew and plane improvement counts A LOT.
So, if you find you really got better, I suggest you to make some honest soul-searching: why you improved? What changed? I could bet that you started to play with much better crews and always spaded planes.

Yes, likely you fight in a better way now, being able to better judge situations and circumstances, flying better, shooting better, choosing the right ammo etc.
But even this personal improvements could not explain why your average position in battle raised from 11th to 5th.

I examined my personal story and found that the turning point was when I started to play with strong and spaded (or almost spaded) planes and with crews having level > 25.
Sure, I improved tactics and skills, but doing roughly the same things I would have been likely killed a lot when I was a beginner, often for one-shotted “crew knocked out”.
And, in fact, going back to unspaded or weaker planes and/or weaker crews my average position usually drops again, even if not at the same lowest level I had at my beginnings.

So, be rightly happy for “your” improvements. After all, you are enjoying now what the game deprived you of when you were a newbie!
But remember that it’s not just you, it’s the combination player+crew+plane and you are not the most decisive element of the trio, unless you are a real Ivan Kozhedub … or, on the contrary, a hopeless player in this game!

You (as a “human player”) were not “so bad” when, at your beginnings, you were regularly quickly killed by expert enemies, you are not “so good” now that you kill often less experienced players with weaker crews and planes.

I’ve seen some very experienced players forgetting that (or, worse, not understanding that).

· GETTING BETTER BY SPADING PLANES, TRAINING CREWS AND GAINING EXPERIENCE: IS THAT ALL? LIKELY NOT.

The beneficial effect in spading planes and training crews is quite evident and explainable with new modifications added and increased values of experience parameters but you could also expect that there are some "hidden" parameters that make you and your equipment becoming better more and more you play and the more you pay (and, inversely, commit to keeping you weak when being a newbie and/or non-paying player).

This is more suspicious with tanks, which really need to be spaded to become strong enough and gun effective (ammo being equal), although there is almost no "better structural strength" modification and no "better gun modifications", but could be the same for planes, although not publicly declared.

A reasonable guess is that Gaijin has designed WT to induce players to spent more and more hours on the game, rewarding them with better performances even beyond the “natural” increase of their skill, crews’ experience growth and the mere increase of the technical characteristics of their vehicles.
And the suspicion that paying has the same or a more marked effect is really strong, too.

This at least could explain some incredible behaviours in tank battles, where a simple AAA with a 20 mm (or even a couple of .050!), driven by an expert, can fully survive a 76 mm well placed shot of a newbie medium tank at 40 mt, being able to respond to fire and destroy the tank at the first shot.
Such a choice could discourage beginners, which are cannon fodders for some time, but make happy more expert players (the hard core gamers) and paying players (essential for Gaijin’s revenues) and increase their fidelity.

If true, this would mean that WT is a “play-to-win” game even beyond its publicly declared rules and characteristics.
A vastly “artificial” game where just a limited role is attributed to personal skill and just until some low-medium gaming level.
After some years in playing and observing the game, both in AF than in GF, and I’m a quite good observer!, I’m more and more convinced that this is TRUE.

Of course you’ll find the most strong opponents to this idea amongst the most expert players (Level 100 and around) and/or paying players, which put their trust in the illusion that just their personal skill’s growth is responsible of the marked improvement of their performances.
They usually charge players of spreading “conspiracy theories” if they express doubt about the fairness of WT mechanisms.

One of them on Forum accused me of being a “troll” having “tin foil hat” and having went on talking about how much WT is P2W “for ages”.
Well, I forget about the first two charges but the third is quite exaggerated because, after a long time during which I collected events and thoughts (especially on GF), I had started talking about P2W no more than 8 months before!

Don’t worry too much about them, they (in the best case) live in a world apart.

A strong suspect is that Gaijin could directly intervene to favour or impede players at any battle, so to “control” their win level.
I’ve read several opinions on WT Forum whose meaning was: Gaijin doesn’t allow you to win much more than 50% of all battles. And those expressing such opinions didn’t seem to me anti-Gaijin angry players.
If this would be true, it would mean that Gaijin actively arranges battles and maybe even single player’s effectiveness in battle to decide who has to win and who to lose.

Those are just guesses but for sure Gaijin don't tell players everything they done (on any issue)!
And likely that obscurity it’s not by chance.

In fact, a player who has been in the game for some time could notice some strange things.

For example, I stopped playing Air Forces for about six months and when I resumed I expected to do very poorly, being out of form. No prediction could have been more wrong!
Really, I started having right away a performance markedly better than when I previously left the game. And this lasted at least a couple of weeks, probably 100-150 battles, before settling more or less on my previous standard.
Happened that just by chance or has Gaijin “programmed” an “assisted path” for returning player (just as there is, and this is quite certain, a short “grace period” for newbies), to please them and encourage them to restart gaming?
My guess is it wasn’t a coincidence.

This “grace period for returning players”, if it really exists, could be given even for much less: in Ground Forces I had one week stop, after three months of many daily battles. When I went back I immediately did very well for the first four or five battles, much better than my previous average and with surprising streaks of “One Shots”. Soon after, my performance returned to the previous mediocrity, with the same typical pathetic idiocy of WT GF (decisive crews vitality etc.), even using the same tanks and crews.

Too evident and too recurrent “strange things” to abstain thinking that in many ways WT is a game where players’ performance is often heavily “guided” by its creators.

Another often discussed issue are the “losing streaks” a player have to deal with from time to time.

An average player (and even more a below-average player) depends on his teams to be able to win the battle. One could think that game mechanism is made to put the player into teams being on average nor weaker than the enemy team neither stronger.
This way, on average a mid- or low-expert player should win about 50% of battle and lose the other 50%.
A losing streak is a long series of defeats for the player’s teams, statistically not compensated by a similar series of battle victories. For example, such a sequence could count even ten or twelve defeats in a row (it happened to me!), a couple of victories, then other seven defeats, one victory, four defeats, two victories, five defeats etc. And at the end of the day the player could have lose 30 battles and won just 10. Really far from the expected average.
Some player state that those strange streaks often happens just after the gamer has started a Golden Eagle wager, fully wrecking the bet!
I don’t know if this is true, but for sure some almost endless losing streaks are suspect, especially when you check that your team of solo-player is repeatedly opposed to teams with four expert players belonging to a squadron (which at 95% will win the battle, there’s no match)!

But the issue is more general than eye-catching losing streaks.
The embarrassing question stems from this consideration: a newbie can do practically nothing to make its team win.
He has not enough skill, no planes (or tanks), no crews. He usually ends beyond 10^th place in rank, very often beyond 13^th place. The battle is usually won by those six, eight or ten players with much experience, good crews and spaded vehicles. Newbies have just to hope to be drawn in the winning team.

If the draw would be impartial and driven by randomness, a newbie should win about 50% of battle and lose the other 50%, as already said, being drawn in the winning team as much often as in a losing team (on average).
So, the question is: why a newbie usually (not just in the losing streaks) win less than 50% of his battles (because this is what happens, AFAIK and according to my experience, let’s say about 40%)?

Another quite strong feeling I have is that Gaijin controls and “tune” the growth of crews experience, slowing down it by don’t allowing players to frequently allocate XP points to the most important parameters, such as Vitality which is critical in the beginnings of player’s career.
In too many cases I’ve noticed that, for example in tanks frequently having possible allocation of XP points in practically all parameters except Vitality and Tank Commander Leadership (which increases other crew’s skills).
And a low Vitality crew, typical of a newbie’s crew, is an easy prey.
Of course, it’s not by chance that Gaijin some months ago changed the XP points assignment mechanism reserving the right to decide which parameters the player can increase!


I want to speak clearly: I have no stats about these things, apart my personal experience and things read on Forum, but I’m quite convinced that it’s for real.
So, is there some mechanism to keep newbies’ victories lower, likely to facilitate and please experts and paying players?
In addition, is there some mechanism to encourage returning players to grow fond of WT again, granting them a brief but clear “winning return”?

If Gaijin’s will would be to “control” players’ performances, for example to avoid that a non-paying player has “too much good” results and stats (and, even more important, to avoid he earns too many free SL/RP/XP!), raffling off those players into weaker teams would be a very effective mechanism.
Maybe there isn’t such a secret mechanism but the suspicion is really substantial, even considering that opposite “winning streaks” seem to be much more infrequent, unbalance due to one-sided squadrons is a common event and it usually needs some months for a newbie to surpass 50% in battle wins.

If you play WT AF AB you could easily see a lot of “strange” things, for example planes of the same kind of your plane but turning incredibly better than your, even if fully spaded (just enemy’s skill? Just his better mouse sensitivity setup? It could be, but …) or the same plane enduring a frontal wing-to-wing collision with yours: you are destroyed, the wing torn up, whereas he shows some damage but go on flying without any problem!
Then you look at his stat card and find he is a level 80 or 90! Ok (maybe) about the skill, but about plane strength?

Gaijin denied that players’ level is taken into account in the draw, just BR, but after all there are skill-related parameters even more important and effective than level, i.e. crews level and spaded planes.
And there are many undeclared and strange behaviours, when it seems the game takes care of promoting high-class players opposite to pariah players …
So the case is still open and you would be incredibly naïve in believing that the game is for sure “fair” to the core. Even more considering that GF are evidently unfair, so why excluding the possibility it could happen, even if to a lesser extent, for AF?

Anyhow, being a newbie you are so easily killed that it seems almost incredible it could happen that way.
Then the more you play and the more you get better, even if sometimes you don’t know why.

A final consideration: until patch 1.69 Gaijin published a post battle summary, giving interesting information such as vehicles used by any player. Then, suddenly, they removed that info, which was used by some players to easily make statistics (about BR spread etc.).
Why they did this? Why they deleted an already working feature? Nobody knows but I could easily suppose that they purposely did that to take away info “dangerous” for them, because could have allowed players to easily discover non-declared mechanisms in battle set up or development. Or they could think they’ll implement in the very next future some new mechanisms that it will be better to keep concealed to players.
Even if there are other ways to collect some of those info while the battle is underway, doing that is much more difficult than reading a post-battle detailed log.
In other words, even if they can’t completely remove those info, they are likely defending and hiding mechanisms that could raise complains by the players’ community.

Don’t you have the impression that Gaijin has some little dirty secrets to hide?
I do.


Now you have some food for thought to meditate on …

· IS PERSONAL SKILL DISREGARDED IN WT?

A further consideration, in many ways related to the “Gaijin’s control of players’ performance” hypothesis, should be done about the somewhat lack of respect for personal skill in WT, which seems increasingly evident after patch 1.59 (especially for Air Forces, whereas regarding Ground Forces it always was so).

Patch 1.59 has been an unfortunate turning point in WT AF: patch 1.57 was almost perfect in AF .Good BR balancing, good plane control, good score calculation etc., it needed just some tweaks and the long-awaited fix of some silly faults (such as Air Domination rules) . Patch 1.59, on the contrary, has been a catastrophe under a lot of aspects.
And GF, already a stupidly designed game even before, further suffered after that patch.

If we examine the situation after 1.59 patch, things seems to be even worse than many players immediately feared when that disaster was released.
If one consider things such as "bombers' buff" in AF (bombers are greatly advantaged after 1.59, so bye-bye skill) and the fact that assists are favoured respect to kills in GF (even being hit a lot, in itself, is well rewarded!) it's difficult to avoid the thought that the whole state of WT is set up not only for greatly facilitating long-time gamers but for facilitating the less skilled amongst them.

Gaijin is favouring LESS SKILLED players in a game that in itself (and that can't be denied) favours EXPERIENCED players (having better crews and better vehicles), so the conclusion is: they are advantaging the less skilled amongst the experienced players.

This means facilitating GF players being not really able in killing, better just to assist. Players not much able to hide but with so strong crews they can sustain several hits, heal the crews in a short time, turn the turret and kill the unlucky beginner that managed to hit him with a good, well-placed but almost useless shot.
Another weird mechanism in GF, whose detrimental effects is evident in battle ranks nowadays, is to being awarded with not negligible score points for having being hit (!) by enemy tanks. This favour expert but poor players using heavy tanks and strong crews, which can earn a lot of points just adopting a passive behaviour in battle.

This also means to facilitate AF players that are not really skilled in fighting, flying and aiming and now with bombers have their great chance to earn a lot of points and SL and reach the top of ranks.

Why they possibly did that? Well, to increase and consolidate those long-time players loyalty, of course.

A long-time player is likely a paying player too or it could become paying soon to improve his sluggish rate of improvement. And a not-so-good experienced player likely needs some “support” to go on playing by having fun.
And, to have fun, what’s better than being discreetly helped to win?

Don’t you think Gaijin has good business reasons to take care of them?

· SPADING PLANES.

Start spading planes (i.e. develop them with modifications until their max) and go on until they are fully spaded, the difference in performance and gun effectiveness is usually big, sometimes huge.
Stock planes (i.e. poor performing unspaded planes) are often so disgusting that there is an "illness" known on WT forum as "stock syndrome"!
Of course, since difference in performance is big, if you spend a whole battle just with unspaded or partially spaded planes your final score will be somewhat impaired (even greatly sometimes), so be careful when you activate wagers requiring high battle score results.
Playing with unspaded planes puts you (and, indirectly, your team) to a marked disadvantage.
If you aren’t a paying player you have to accept that since playing with them is just the only way to improve the vehicles. Otherwise, you can become a paying player and “buy experience” for your crews.
A crumb of comfort could be that stock tanks are even more pathetic than unspaded planes, often at an unbelievable level!
If you don’t want to be too much penalized use just one still spading plane in any battle. Otherwise you could use more than one, have a worse performance but speed the whole spading process through concurrence.

· INCREASING CREWS EXPERIENCE.

Increase crew experience, giving priority to Vitality at low tiers to reduce the chance of being killed by a single 7.7 mm bullet. Crew experience could make as much difference as your individual skill, especially at the beginning.

Experience points (XP) effect is deeper than a lot of players could believe.
Since parameters as Stamina and G-Tolerance affect aim and plane control, a really low level crew is a likely reason why a beginner seems almost unable to hit enemies or why his plane turns worse than enemy planes having, on paper, higher turn times.
Of course, that could be given by beginner’s still low skill and unspaded planes too, but in my experience crew experience is at least as much important.
I checked this, for example, when (being already an expert player) started playing from zero with Italian planes of the new Regia Aeronautica tree: even finally spaded planes had some evident difficulty to hit and turn, until they had crews as low as level 2 or 3!
Always remember: it’s not just you to fly and shoot, it’s your crew that manoeuvres the plane, aim and shoot to enemies. If your crew is weak, anything you’ll do in battle will be weaker than it could be.

Until a few versions ago, XP point could be distributed between pilot, gunners and ground service at player’s will. It was fine, because the player was able to add experience points giving priority to the most important parameters (e.g. Vitality and Stamina).
Then Gaijin (hindering players) changed things and started to subdivide and pre-allocate earned points to any of these categories, even if player still can make some choose in attribution to parameters (stamina etc. for pilot, fire accuracy etc. for gunners, repair speed etc. for ground service …).
But even those choices depend from Gaijin pre-allocation, e.g. after the battle Gaijin could allow you to assign earned XP points for the pilot just to Awareness and Keen Vision and not to the remaining thee pilot’s parameters. After further battles, Gaijin pre-allocation will change.

This means that if you feel the need of having a pilot with more Vitality, for example, you had to wait until Gaijin will grant you to do that, i.e. will give you that parameter amongst the possible assignations.
You could easily check, for example, how long Gaijin stops Vitality increase (and just it) after the first 0.5 notch in tank crews! And Vitality is crucial for the survival capability of tank crews at the beginning, i.e. for player performance, even more than for planes.
This new mechanism induces to a more balanced XP points distribution but prevents players to “shape” his crews the way he feels better just according to his priority and, above all, real players’ need.

And my very strong feeling is that happens not by chance: this allows Gaijin to control the growth of players’ capabilities, so they can keep newbies in “cannon fodder” state for longer, induce them to pay for increasing crew skills and, at the same time, make expert (and often paying) players happy being able to easily butcher newbies.

Please take note: rarely Gaijin do changes to player’s benefit, they usually (and legitimately) change things in game to their own benefit.
This is just one example.

For planes, crew experience level goes from zero to 75 points maximum when increased in the standard way (whereas for tanks goes from zero to 140) but if the player buys a Qualification to Expert it adds 39 points more (81 more points for Qualified crews for tanks).
In my opinion, a first quite noticeable boost in crew performance can be detected when reaching about level 20, although of course any increase in XP points brings an improvement, even if barely detectable at once when the increase is small.

How to attribute points to parameters? Which are the more convenient to increase, when you have to choose from several one (decided by Gaijin, at present)?

These are my advices about the attribution priority, for airplane crews, from the most convenient to the least convenient.

For Pilot: most important is Vitality, then Stamina, G-Tolerance, Awareness, Keen Vision (strangely, exactly the reverse of their order shown on display).
The explanation for that: Vitality is really important, especially for a beginner, to be not too easily killed. Please don’t believe to foolish players that say is not important: it is. A high Vitality pilot will never be invulnerable, of course, but a low Vitality pilot is easily killed even by a 7.7 mm single shot.
Starting from one sub-patch of 1.77 patch, the “Crew knocked out” message, which clearly indicated the importance of Vitality was “secretly” removed, but reappeared after one month and half. This message is very important especially for beginners, that are made aware of that, so I hope it had come back to stay.
Stamina and G-Tolerance are important for the efficiency of your pilot after some time (including good aim and plane control). Awareness and Keen Vision are not so important because Awareness (side and behind enemy detection) relies on the on-screen small radar (which is not much efficient) whereas looking around using “C” (and/or using WT Tactical Map app) is much more effective and Keen Vision (direct vision) in AB is good enough even at the minimum value (an opportune caveat for tank players, just to avoid misunderstandings: with tanks Keen Vision, for all crew members, is much more important than with planes and should be promptly incremented!).

For Gunners: Fire Accuracy, Fire Precision, Vitality, Stamina, G-Tolerance.
The explanation for that: gunners fire efficiency is one of the most important thing for bomber’s survival, so the first two parameters are the most important, IMHO.
But a caveat is needed here: in single-seat planes, XP point assigned to gunners are obviously useless! So, if you think to always use that crew just for single-seat planes (typically fighters, without any gunner) avoid assigning XP points to gunners. On the contrary, if you expect to use it also for bombers it’s much better to increase gunners’ experience too.

For Ground Service: Weapon Maintenance, Reload Speed, Repair Speed, Repair Rank.
The explanation for that: high Weapon Maintenance helps the efficiency of weapons (e.g. less overheating which means less loss of precision) and Reload Speed is important in battle, Repair Speed and Repair Rank are important just for the speed of plane repairing in hangar (which requires de-checking the automatic repair after the battle whereas, on the contrary, my advice is to leave it turned on).

These are the priorities to give when you can choose between two or more parameters, in my opinion. But try anyway to keep the distribution of XP points balanced enough between parameters (the new mechanism helps to do that, with some pre-allocation chosen by Gaijin).

A few notes:
- approaching crew level 20 the rate of experience increase become incredibly and annoying slow compared to the way it was before. It’s obviously a Gaijin’s choice that demonstrates its will to keep crew level low for a long time, to induce gamers to keep playing for improving crews or spending some money to do that much more quickly..
- after the first times, when Gaijin allowed to assign XP points almost evenly to all parameters, approaching level 20 there are some parameters, such as Vitality, whose increase become much more rarely permitted (and this is true, or even worse, for tank crews too). It’s obviously a Gaijin’s choice that demonstrates the importance of those parameters for player’s performance and the will to indirectly control player’s effectiveness growth.
- if you are a fighter-only pilot and never or almost never fly bombers, you could be tempted to increase XP just for pilot and not for gunners. It could seems a reasonable choice but I suggest you to ask yourself if really you will never ride a bomber or an attacker with gunner: at present, bombers are more important than fighters to win a battle and it would be improvident, IMHO, to exclude the use of some bombers or to accept to fly them with weak gunners (which are an usually formidable defence in WT).

There is another crew parameter category, “Qualification”. You could spend some SL to further increase the skill (for any parameter) of a specific crew for a particular kind of vehicle. Please remember that this works just if the couple crew-vehicle remains the same in future and at the beginning it’s easy and sometime handy to exchange crews and vehicles (even if these exchanges costs some SL). My advice to a beginner is to leave Qualification apart until he will be much more expert and could have some sense to permanently couple a spaded plane to an experienced crew.

A last word: if you accumulate A LOT of experience points on a crew, a marker appears on crew icon in hangar, to remind you that you should attribute XP points to the crew itself. Unfortunately Gaijin programmers seem often unable to understand even the simplest concepts, such as that the marker should instead appear immediately, even with just 1 (one) XP to attribute, because crew experience is really important and XP points should be assigned as soon as possible. This means that if you want to do that, to be able to fight the very next battles with a little bit more expert crew, you have to manually open the interface of any crew you have recently used, after any battle, often to discover that you didn’t earned any XP points for that crew. A very silly waste of time but … that’s Gaijin too!

· ARE YOU LOOKING FOR REACHING UPPER TIERS? THINK AGAIN!

Don't rush to upper tiers: as a beginner, you'll usually find there many players much more expert than you, that will kill you more easily than less experienced players usually gaming at lower tiers.
Moreover, at upper levels repair expenses are much higher than in the first tiers and being easily killed will also mean losing a lot of “money”.

Being eager to reach an upper tier to play with a long-time favourite plane is one of the most common mistakes done by newbies.

A lot of them (including myself some years ago!) research just one national tree (American, British etc.) with the only goal to unlock the most desired plane as soon as possible.
It’s quite understandable that one is much easily lured by the perspective to fight with a beloved P-51D instead of a F2A Buffalo but the fact is that after just a few months a beginner almost never has the skill to fight at that level, neither to exploit its performance nor to contrast much more expert opponents.
The usual outcome is he starts losing battles and planes much more than winning and since high tiers planes are much more expensive to repair he also begins to lose Silver Lions instead of earning them.
The “therapy” here is easy: going back to lower tiers and restart to proceed gradually.
One can’t race in Formula One without having first competed some time in lower categories.

· BEWARE OF BATTLE RATING!

Be aware of BR (Battle Rating). Into this guide I often talk about Tiers, because it’s an easy way to identify environment encountered by beginners, but the really distinguishing thing between planes performances is just Battle Rating.
BR measures the effectiveness of vehicles (planes, tanks) in battle. A plane of Tier II could be more effective (and having an higher BR) than a Tier III plane.

BR should periodically calculated and re-calculated by Gaijin especially according to their average performance in battles really fought by players.
If really and correctly implemented (there are several doubt about that!) it would be a quite smart solution to help Matchmaking (MM) of vehicles in the battles.
Really, rants about incorrect BRs are amongst the most common in WT players community.
Anyhow, BRs changes often, particularly for newly introduced planes which BR is revised after some months of gaming, so keep checking these values.

Don't use one or two high BR planes mixed with low BRs otherwise you could be disadvantaged in MM.
Search into the Forum the updated info on MM rules, they change from time to time when a new patch is released.

At present, MM rules can be found here: https://wiki.warthunder.com/index.php?title=Matchmaker and you can see that a player can encounter, in AB Air Arcade battles, enemies having planes whose BR goes at most from -1.3 to +1.3 respect to player’s highest BR plane (since AB aviation uses the “Matchmaking by average BR” strategy).
A difference of 1.3 with planes is small enough to make a fight difficult but not impossible to win for the weaker opponent (thing could be much worse for tanks).

Another thing to know is that BR indicated by Gaijin is significant just for spaded vehicles: a stock plane (or tank), with just few modification applied, is much less effective than its BR could lead to think. So, don’t be surprised if you’ll do bad with your BR 2.7 stock vehicle against 2.0 opponents!

· MATCHMAKING? WHICH MATCHMAKING? THIS ONE??!!

Matchmaking (MM) is declaredly based mainly on BR (Battle Rating) of vehicles, both in AF and GF. The mechanism used to choose which players to put in a certain battle, according with the BR of their vehicles, is different from AF and GF and can be different from AB, RB and SB (https://wiki.warthunder.com/index.php?title=Matchmaker ).

Battle Rating (BR) for any vehicle is periodically revised by Gaijin according to their average performance in battle or, at least, so Gaijin says.
This, on paper, is a smart mechanism that moreover fixes bad or unrealistic modelling of vehicles, putting them on separate classes respectful of their real strength in game.

I have written “on paper” because there is a significant number of vehicles that players know having BR not compatible with the reality of game battles.
Some of them appears to be overtiered, i.e. put at a BR much higher than they should deserve, so being at disadvantage.
Inversely, others are untertiered, with BR much lower than they should have, and are the terror of lower levels battles where MM put them.
So, how well Gaijin do that revision work is debatable.

According to a frequently statement made by Gaijin on Forum by moderators, no other parameter, such as player’s previous performances, is taken in account in MM.
I’m really skeptical about that statement since I see in game a lot of signs hinting that paying players are systematically favoured, even beyond the obvious advantages they have in earning points and buying vehicles and crews skill.
So they could easily be favoured by Gaijin even in MM, in a fully secret way. And very likely they are.

Really, the “official statement” by Gaijin on MM should be this one: https://forum.warthunder.com/index.php?/topic/370824-discussion-balance-bias-matchmaking-and-battle-ratings/
According to this, three parameters are taken into account: 1) historical matchup 2) performance matchup 3) player performance.
But there is no indication about the relative weight of those parameters. As almost for any other thing in WT, the inner rules of the game are secret.
In case of MM the only publicly explained rule is about BR, any other factor is not.

And if you carefully read the objection made to a purely player-performance-based MM by the top Administrator who wrote this post, you should (like me) scratch your head:
“Player performance - if we based match-ups on this, although some would welcome it, probably many thinking about, people like me or sim guys would really get annoyed with it. I consider myself a team player rather than a high scorer. So I would in effect be put into games where the teams are less goal orientated (random flying or driving about shooting at seagulls)”.
What does it mean?
He admits that it could be the favourite choice for a lot of players but says it’s not the right choice because “sim guys” (i.e. a marked minority in game!) could be “annoyed” by that!
What’s the sense? They could easily set up different MM for AB, RB and SB. If they really think that’s a good objection (it isn’t, in my opinion), they could solve the “issue” by using different MM rules for SB and/or RB.

Really, any time I see someone making quite nonsensical statement and objections I ask myself “Are they dumb or are they hiding something?”.
Since it doesn’t seem to me that Administrator is dumb, he is likely hiding something.

Probably Gaijin DO use player performance in MM but not to the goal of having a balanced MM but to be able to control players’ performance in itself, i.e. to favour winning of losing of players according to parameters convenient for Gaijin, in short: hampering the chance of success for non-paying players, favouring the chances for paying players.

You could read my “WT Ground Battles Beginner’s Guide” for more considerations about these issues.

Anyway, the fact is that you'll find that Matchmaking is far from perfect and quite frequently it sets up unbalanced battles.

This is often given by the presence just in one team of 3 or 4 squadron players of the same squad. If one team includes more than two squadron players (of the same squadron) and the other not, the latter almost always lose the battle.
Squadron players are usually very experienced and fight in a coordinated way, like a wolf pack, so they usually win against solo players.
Gaijin for sure know that but remember that squadron players are likely paying players, so you can imagine that Gaijin holds these paying players in high regard and do not much to impede their supremacy.

· KNOW YOUR ENEMIES (AND FRIEND PLAYERS TOO).

Use at your advantage the statistics table (Tab key): you can check players' names, levels (with Player Card button) and their planes even before the battle and their scores during the battle. In this way you can know, for example, how many bombers are in the air and if you should use a "bomber killer" plane or it's better to use a plane better suited to fight single-engine planes. You can also made a rough guess of other players skill using their level shown in player's card and check if there are squadrons' players.

DANGEROUS PEOPLE IN THE SKY TODAY!

Be aware of some kind of players.

Players’ levels: are they meaningful?

In battle stats you can right-click on a player’s name to see his player card. One information contained in the card is player’s level (gradually increased by player’s experience, from 1 to 100).
Although player’s level hasn't a direct link with skill (level increases in time just by playing, moreover there are skilled people using more than a nickname and the newer nicks could have a level much lower than their real ability), it's very likely (better: it’s sure!) that a Level 100 player or close has both a great experience and a lot of spaded planes and maximized crews skill, so it's very dangerous (especially for a beginner!).
You'll find some statement on Forum saying "Level 100 means nothing!": Such a statement it's pure bullshit, because it's an unavoidable fact that a high level player has many objective advantages against a beginner, even when his innate skill is not so high.
Only caveat is that level is calculated both on air and tank battle, so in theory you could find a Level 100 very expert player with tanks but much less with planes. But don't count too much on this, likely he is expert enough on both modes to be able to eat a newbie in one bite.

This is an example of a quite unbalanced battle where my team lose at the end against a team including two Level 100 and one Level 85 whereas we had just one Level 63 (myself) and a Level 67 (all the rest of players, in both teams, were of much lower levels)..
Their Level 100s and the 85 made the most of the difference, apart a Level 8 that had much more kills than you could expect from a beginner (see “The Mystery of Low Level Aces” below).

Those Level 100 enemies were, all in all, “normal players”.
On the contrary, the following is likely the most effective player I’ve encountered to date.
He is a Level 100 with an absolutely incredible “average position in team”: 98%!
In practice, for him the exception is NOT ending in first position in team, the rule being finishing first.
And his position in the WHOLE world players base ranking, with regard to this parameter, is 43-th! That means that IN THE WHOLE WORLD (with several dozen of thousands WT gamers) just 42 players have a better ranking in average position.




This is the kind of player you can’t beat, 99 times on 100. This is true both for beginners and experienced players.

Their planes defy published turn time data, nevertheless maxed-out crews sustain the tightest turns;
their planes’ structure is abnormally steel-solid, whereas “cannon fodder” planes start dying after the first suffered shots;
their guns have a “robotic” effectiveness and kills in a few seconds;
their crews are almost never killed;
they win practically any head-on.

In practice, it’s the same situation of “paying aces” in the ghastly WT Ground Forces, just not so much clearly visible (having GF and AF very different dynamics and duels’ oddities in AF are not so clearly recognizable).
Of course, from time to time they are killed too but not before having made a carnage.

I met him in a battle when he killed 17 planes (with two losses but just for air collisions: nobody killed him, his last plane went on battling fine with huge holes on both wings).
After that I congratulated him for the effectiveness of … his wallet!
Of course, he is convinced it’s not P2W but just skill. He even told me that his personal kill record is 43 (!!!!) in one battle, so 17 could be even considered a “bad” result!

Nothing to be surprised of, though. I perfectly know that those “supermen” (and this is not a superman, is a HYPERMAN!) live in a fully apart world.
My God, thinking to be able to kill 43 planes in a battle without any “external” advantage is beyond any reason …
Great Gaijin’s job to convince paying players to be “just skilled”!

This kind of player is an exception even amongst Level 100s.
However, you should expect that any Level 100, even if not so effective, is dangerous.



The Mystery of Low Level “Aces”.

As I’ve already wrote, since any player can have more than one account and a nickname, some players could use a second account too and this could have a much lower player level than the real skill of the gamer. So you could encounter a Level 20 which, with his main account, is really a Level 100!

If you watch a Level 5 that has killed 6 planes or 6 tanks in one battle, or a Level 20 that killed 12 planes or 9 tanks, you can bet that he is NOT a new-born God of Air or Ground but a much more experienced and skilled player than what seems to be!
Or … he is a player that has been “helped” in some ways …

If you watch a Level 10 player with about 60% of average relative position in team, moreover being able to turn an SB 2M like a Zero (yes, sooner or later you’ll have to view even that, a thing impossible to do according to plane characteristic and logic …), you can bet he is NOT an air ace beginner, at least not one playing within the rules!
Or … he is a player that has been “helped” in some ways …

If such a player belongs to a squadron too, you can bet he is NOT an unexperienced player, notwithstanding what is written on his player card!

I’ve even had the suspicion that sometimes player level shown in player’s card could be plainly wrong, just as it’s in some cases with other Gaijin’s stats.

But there is more.

Remember that WT is a game designed to allow player to “become aces” by paying. So, a medium-low level player playing as a real skilled ace could easily be a paying player with already maxed out vehicles and crews. You read “level 23”, maybe less than your level, but he can play as an ace, much more effectively than you, just because he paid.
This is really evident with tanks, where you can easily find players at around level 10-15 (!) being able to kill 10+ tanks in the same battle, an achievement not realistically possible for a non-paying player except in few lucky cases!
But the same is true for Air Forces too.

Don’t you believe me?

Well, let’s examine this:



Level 12, just 195 missions (however well beyond the “grace period” granted to absolute beginners), all in Air Forces, with 1589 (!!!) air targets destroyed (i.e. an average of more than eight planes destroyed at any battle!, in the fight after which I captured the picture he shot down 12 enemies), almost 60% of victories an almost 90% (!!!) of average position in team!

Just an exceptional case? Not at all.



Level 13, 366 battles fought (both in Air and Ground), 633 planes and 1730 tanks destroyed, almost 70% victory ratio, more than 75% average position.

Again:



Level 9 (nine!), 108 missions mainly in tanks, 1016 ground targets destroyed (an average of about ten tank kills at any battle!), 78% victory ratio and 92.7% (yes, ninety-two dot seven percent …) average position!

Do you think I have collected some of a few outstanding cases of good luck?
Of course NOT.
It’s not a matter of “luck” at all: data proof that those “beginners” have incredibly high average stats, not just a very good fight from time to time.

Do you think that, however, there can’t be really many low-level players having such performances?
Wrong. There are a lot.
For example, I’ve captured the first two pictures the same day, just after having fought for one hour (about five battles!).
BTW, in all of the three examples the “beginner” finished at the first place in battle rank, being ahead of Level 100 players too.

I could capture proofs of such “unexplainable” achievements by “beginners” every day. And you could, too.

Do you think it’s all “normal”?
It isn’t.
Try to do something even barely similar to that as a non-paying TRUE beginner (so having weak crews and not fully spaded vehicles)!

Yes, you could have some good (or lucky) missions, maybe you could even kill eight or ten enemies in a single mission, but forget about having eight or ten kills as an average on 100 or 200 battles.

Even experienced players are usually unable to achieve such results.

This is an example of a good player’s stats, better than average. He was a Level 43 when I’ve captured this after an air mission, where he was the better player in battle with 15 air kills.
These stats are quite typical of a good performer, likely paying but however “normal”.
You can easily see how much lower is his performance in respect to those “beginners”.




Houston, we have a problem. We have “beginners” performing much better than really experienced players.

So, what’s the solution to the mystery?


Banned aces (i.e. cheaters) returning?

Some says that those surprising “aces” having low player level (e.g. 10) but performance similar to Level 100 could be people, especially cheaters, that has been banned, so they created a new account.
Another hypothesis is they are VERY skilled people having a second account, such as an “office account” to use from a different location than usual, for example from office.

It could be, but I’m skeptical that those are the answers, apart a few cases.

First, how many people have been banned from WT to have so many of that kind aces?
My God, I can’t believe there are so many!

In GF I think I find at least one at almost any battle, i.e. at least one or two out of 32 players, likely many more. Really, I check it just from time to time and only those I noticed behaving in an outstanding mode against me, nevertheless I find one of them about 20-30% of times I check!
So I suppose there are many more than I could see, I could guess no less than 15%.

They can’t be all banned players returning and there is another hint that they can’t.
On Forum the number of banned people is published and is about 150 players every two week. If in four years of life of WT there would be 150 x 25 x 4 = 15.000 banned returning players (if they all returned!), they would be just about 2% (two percent) of the about 670.000 WT players registered in Forum. Much less than the about 15-20% suspected prudential percentage of “low level aces”.

But I don’t know if they massively returned, because Gaijin should periodically fix holes in their software, to stop cheaters (which should be by far the largest percentage of the banned players).
And if a smaller number returned, the explanation based on them is even more unlikely, since the observed percentage.

Anyway, if they were returning cheaters they would be so effective for their cheats, much more than for their skill.
As I wrote here in “THE (SURELY) INFAMOUS "CHEATING" ISSUE” and in Ground Battles Beginner’s Guide at “The Dark Side of P2W?”, it would be a matter of P2W, not of skill.


Second, how many people would use a second account, when, how much often and why?
A second independent account has to do again the long grinding of vehicles and the long increase process in crew experience and would have inferior performances and characteristics (e.g. no Premium level) respect to the primary already grinded one.
Why a player would use it, if not sporadically?

I understand creating one just as a backup in case of technical troubles with the primary or an account to make “experiments” or for some other reason but I can’t believe they are often used as a principal account.
I have one secondary account too, which I created just as a backup. I never use it!

Moreover, how many really need to use a different account playing from office (!) or other secondary places? They usually could use the primary one.


Secondary account of “fake friends”?

In fact, on paper I could see just one reason to play with a new account: the “invite a friend” mechanism.

Since Gaijin gives SL and GE to new players which have been “invited as friends”, if they play a lot, and gives the same to the player that made the invitation.
So the latter could pretend to be a “friend”, create a new account, with a different email, use it and get SL and GE even for its main “original” account.

According to this hypothesis, very experienced players would cheat Gaijin to get easy GE and SL, pretending to have invited “friends”, and would wreak havoc in battles, thanks to their skill, even having low level accounts.
Let’s examine it.

At present these are the rewards that the player that made the invitation can receive:
- 70000 Silver Lions as soon as the friend reaches rank II in any nation.
- 500 Golden Eagles as soon as the friend reaches rank III in any nation.
- 2500 Golden Eagles as soon as the friend reaches rank V in any nation.

Please note that the only reward that is both significant and realistically tempting is the second one (500 GE at rank III in any nation).
The first one isn't really worthwhile because 70000 SL are a quite small amount, easily obtainable with average performances in a small amount of time.
The last one is quite good but reaching rank V in ANY nation requires a quite long play time with the "fake friend" secondary account, at the same time neglecting the primary one.

So, is a 500 GE reward enough to tempt so many experienced players to create a "fake friend" account for cheating Gaijin?
I'm not really convinced it is.
500 GE it's just the double an average player like me can easily enough win with a GE wager (periodically drawn in the login lottery) i.e. in two wager I can win 500 GE without much hassle. And an experienced player, like a Level 100, should be able to easily earn 500 GE or more just with one wager, using his primary account.

Why they should be really interested in faking that way, for a quite limited reward?

By the way, 500 GE costs 3 (three) euros and we are talking about very experienced players that likely had already spent much more than that.
And even 2500 GE costs just 14 euros, about the money needed to buy a single Tier III or IV plane such as P-61A-1.
Do you really think there can be many players willing to set up all that for those rewards?

There is a last benefit in “invite a friend”: after 10 (ten!) friends has reached rank III in any nation, who invited them is given one additional crew for any nation.
This is good but … it would really good for an average pilot much more than for an ace!
I’m just an average player and with GE wagers I won my sixth crew for any nation: they are plenty even for me, very rarely I lose all of them in a battle.
What could be the real benefit for an ace to have an eight crew, since in GF he can’t use it (max three) and in AF a top player usually lose two or three planes at most?

Again, how many players could be tempted to fake 10 accounts to play with all of them instead of with their better primary account?


This explanation, based on the "invite a friend" feature, could be likely just if I'd believe that is true, at the same time, that:

1) there are so many players doing that (and Gaijin don't perform any check on IP addresses, this could be possible anyway).
I said before why I don’t believe in that.

and

2) "skill is everything", regardless crew's experience, which in my opinion is not true at all.
If it were, spading vehicles and improving crews would be practically useless, differently by my own experience and by the logic itself of the game (pushing you to play and, especially at higher tiers, buy those improvements).
I can't believe that a Level 100 player using weak "level 10" crews and vehicles can have the same performance than with his "level 100" crews and vehicles. He can be above average but not as much good as when battling with maxed out equipment.
Of course, he can always max out them at instant by paying. Or simply benefit from undeclared advantages for paying players.

BTW, those who say that “skill is everything” and “low level aces are skilled veterans with a secondary account” seem unable to realize that they even don’t need the veteran option: if really “skill is everything”, those exceptional performances could be done by exceptionally skilled beginners!
Why they don’t say that? I suppose because they know people would die laughing!

Really, they should at least say “experience is everything”, it would be much more reasonable (also because “experience” in WT also means crews’ experience).


My verdict: I don’t believe there are so many experienced players creating a second “fake friend” account and use it so much often to justify the observed number of “low level aces”. And who did that likely should have spent some GE to max out crews, so making that solution even less worthwhile.
So that “invite a friend” hypothesis, to explain the most part of this issue, is unlikely and should be rejected.

Occam’s Razor or well-thought-out hypothesis?

There is no doubt that the answer “those aces are just Level 100 (or about) that created a secondary account so, thanks to their great skill, they are able to have top performances notwithstanding weak crews” is a simple response.
In some ways it’s like an “Occam’s Razor” answer, which doesn’t’ require much further thought (maybe it’s the reason why many agree with it …). One has “simply” to accept that crews are unimportant, skill is everything and a lot of players use frequently secondary accounts (none of those three axioms are really reasonable, IMHO, but there are people agreeing with them).

But Occam’s Razor isn’t always the wisest choice.
According to Occam’s Razor, JFK has been murdered just by a single killer named Lee Harvey Oswald, who made the plot alone, went up the Texas School Book Repository and shot him (just to being “strangely” killed himself after 48 hours).
It seems that just 30% of Americans believe that. They don’t know what happened and don’t know which possible “conspiracy” could have been carried out, fact is they don’t believe to the “simple explanation”. And they are likely right.
If you can’t have a full explanation of a fact doesn’t mean that the simplest answer is the best one.
This could be another case.


A mystery solution?
Since even in WT Forum, a place frequented by strange people too , nobody seems to be so mad to speculate that “low level aces” are real beginners with exceptional skill, the “mystery” could have one of these different explanations:
- just skill by secondary accounts of experienced ace players (that’s seems hardly credible to me, for already explained reasons, even more being coupled with likely poor performing crews)
or
money even by primary accounts, by paying Gaijin or by paying aimbot cheats’ makers (much more likely, even not all mechanisms are clear).

For sure there are non-paying players using sporadically secondary accounts but I don’t think they could be so many and so performing to explain the relevant observed number of “low level aces”, IMHO.

So my most likely explanation is:
a paying player, having been put by Gaijin in the “winning league”, so being advantaged in any battle, could start “artificially winning” since the beginning or just after that.
This would really have sense: if you realize that after having started paying you suddenly start winning, there is an high chance you’ll go on paying next years,

However, low-level “aces” apart, remember that … Level 100 players are always a danger!

Anyhow, apart “low level aces” issue, if you bump into a declared Level 100, you can be sure he is dangerous for you, no doubt.
At least because very likely he has very experienced crews and almost always fully spaded planes.

Some low level players are dangerous, but all Level 100 players are dangerous.
Ant this is true even if they wouldn’t paying gamers (however I don’t think there are many of them, reaching that top level without having paid even a single time).

A Level 100 player is usually able to shoot much better than a beginner or an intermediate player, having high level crews.
A Level 100 player is usually able to endure hits much better than a beginner or an intermediate player, having high level crews.
A Level 100 player is usually able to turn its plane much better than a beginner or an intermediate player, having high level crews and fully spaded planes.

In short, a Level 100 player is usually able to do anything much better than a beginner or an intermediate player and this not really for his skill but just for having a better equipment (maximized crews and almost always fully spaded planes).

In addition, it’s very likely that the “RNG God” protects them, whereas beginners and non-paying players are neglected.
In other words, WT is a P2W game (even in AF) and since Level 100 are very likely paying players they are for sure advantaged by the game.

So, if you are wondering why you are unable to do the same things Level 100 “aces” do, for example why some planes having bad performance if flown by you become, on the contrary, monster-killer if flown by a Level 100, remember that their skill is just a part of the answer and almost certainly NOT the most relevant one.
Even if those Level 100 will try to convince you on the Forum it’s all thanks to their great skill.


Squadron players.

Another category of usually very dangerous opponents are players belonging to a squadron (you can easily identify them by the squadron prefix in front of their names, like =SOMETHING=).
In fact, they usually are one of the most threatening menace.

These players are dangerous because:
1) many squadrons (likely the majority of them) accept only players with stats proving their high performance
2) by affiliating to a squadron they show to be “addicted” enough to the game, so they likely play a lot and are much more expert than any newbie ad even than many long-time gamers
3) many of them, being “addicted”, are paying players with fully spaded planes and maxed out crews to effectively enhance their performance (e.g. especially as a newbie never have an head-on with a squadron player, his crew and guns are surely much more lethal than yours and you’ll be killed at least 90% of times regardless his personal skill).

They are a risk even when flying solo but even more dangerous when they fly together with other players belonging to their own squadron (from two to four members in the same battle), you can check this in statistics table. Since they are expert and usually fight in a coordinated way, they are difficult to tackle. A four-player squadron in a team, with pilots above level 50, can easily win a battle in few minutes if there is no similar squadron in the opposite team (and too much often there isn't, thanks to a quite flawed MM mechanism).
On WT Forum there has been some discussions (sometimes harsh and discouraging to see) about how much decisive is a 4 man squad in WT Arcade AF. In my opinion there can be NO doubt that a 4 man of the same squadron is very easily crucial for the outcome of a battle, if not counteracted by a similar squad. Any attempt to deny that, talking about “a lot of squads having bad players”, is quite foolish. Yes, there are even bad players in squads and flying in a squad doesn’t guarantee the victory but, on average, the weight of the usual greater experience of squad players along with their coordination is an overwhelming factor.


Spawn campers.

The infamous "spawn campers" are a problem of course, especially because many of them are very expert Level 100 players flying in a squadron (!), passing of this misbehaviour as an "high altitude air superiority tactic": pay attention to them and look on forums for info about the tactics to defend against them (the simpler of these tactics is diving immediately and ignoring spawn campers, unfortunately leaving them their unfair advantage, especially to the detriment of your team's spawning bombers, but at the same time leaving them less easy kills).


“Painted” players.

Although it can seem ludicrous, pay also attention to players with "painted" planes (!).
“Painted” planes have been skilfully decorated by players with decals available in game, but stretched to the point they seem something very different (a quite typical case are bird wings painted on plane wings) and really distinctive.
Gamers which did that are likely so "addicted" to the game to have probably a good experience (and you can find many of them also at Tier I and II). Identifying these players’ plane is easy, so pay attention to them when you are still a beginner.
The same could be true for players using paid non-standard camouflages or paid decals, because a gamer that wants to spend 200 GE on a customised camouflage or a decal is unlikely a newbie. But identifying them is much less easy and straightforward.

· HEAD-ONS.

Don't easily accept head-ons, especially if you don't have a plane with powerful guns and an high Vitality+Stamina pilot (as a beginner, you likely have neither). Head-ons are always a risk even with planes having good guns, because a collision could always happen and destroy even the winner's plane. There are tactics to reduce this risk and increase the chance to win an head-on (with a suitable plane), techniques that can be found on WT Forum or on YouTube (e.g.: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Rbzl2P27Bk ), but it's much better to wait until your aim and plane control will be improved.

So, the general rule is: you should avoid beginning head-ons and, if attacked in such a way, first of all try to survive, avoiding to accept it (much more than trying to kill the enemy).
If you avoid head-on, you could prove your superior skill in a following maneuvered duel instead of resorting to a lucky shot in a frontal duel.

Refusing an head-on doesn’t mean just turning your plane, the base technique is firing a few shots when the enemy plane is 1.0-1.3 km away (you could manage to damage it), then making an immediate very sharp turn (trying not to deplete too much energy, though) or a marked barrel roll (I wrote marked, because a shaky one could easily become a poorly executed snap roll and would have just the effect to make your plane a bigger target).

There are other possible variants, such as a barrel roll followed by a Split-S, but the basics are:
- make your plane a difficult target, immediately moving it from enemy’s shots trajectory.
- try not to lose too much energy when making the above sharp move.
- in the very first seconds, before making your defensive move, you could fire a few shots at the enemy (until he is more than 1 km away).
After having done that, the fight is no more a head-on affair.

I’ve seen some very bad advices about this topic, for example experienced players saying that “in AB head-ons are the quickest way to make kills, if you avoid him you have a great chances to be killed by others” or “in AB head-ons should be accepted 90% of times”.
Let me say that those advices are plain, incredibly absurd bullshit, especially when given to a newbie (but not only)!
A reason for giving such bad suggestions is likely that counsellors were experienced players, so having strong crew (about Vitality and parameters influencing aim skill, such as Stamina and G-Tolerance) that allow them to win the most of head-ons even without the need to have a particularly good skill.
As usual on WT Forum, advices given by experienced players often reflect an entirely different reality than a beginner’s one. This is likely an example of that.

One thing has to remembered: head-ons are the most “brutal” and “coarse” form of fighting in WT Air Battles, the most similar one to Tank Battles.
And, just as in Tank Battles, the player with the stronger vehicle and the more experienced (i.e. “Vital”) crew almost always win (unless he is a really bad player).
An experienced crew will likely hit the target in an head-on, regardless the skill of his player, whereas the unexperienced one will fail.
A beginner’s crew with o (zero) Vitality will ALWAYS be instantly killed by ANY bullet from ANY gun (even 7.7mm) of ANY enemy.
A spaded and stronger plane will ALWAYS have much more chance to survive to head-ons, whereas a weaker and unspaded plane will likely be destroyed.
Although there is a component of true skill in head-ons (there are “good” and “bad” ways to do them), the largest component lies on planes and crews.

If you add this to the higher skill of an expert opponent it’s easy to understand why a newbie shouldn’t accept head-ons: he could win against other newbies but he will always lose against any other player. Always, except for a possible lucky case (such as a big distraction of the more expert opponents).

The same is true for a player with a weak crew: when faced with a player with a much stronger crew, he will almost always lose in an head-on.
Head-ons are NOT a matter of skill, if not to a VERY limited extent. They are a matter of crew/plane strength, like almost always in WT.

So a “wallet warrior”, with his maximized plane and crew, will win a head-on, without the need to use any skill, much more likely than a skilled non-paying player with a weaker equipment.

· THE IMPORTANCE OF DEFLECTION SHOOTING.

Learn and practice deflection shooting.

I repeat: learn and practice deflection shooting!
Shooting from 6 o'clock means a small target, deflection shooting means a bigger and easier target.
Moreover, if you shoot to bombers from 6 o’clock you are exposed for long time to their tail gunners which in WT are usually real and dangerous snipers (and things became worse after 1.59 patch, since the increased strength of bombers means a fighter had to shoot for a much longer time to be able to shot down even a light bomber).
You have just to adapt your shooting to guns in the different planes, especially about rate-of-fire and muzzle velocity, to know how much lead you need (which in deflection is always well ahead of the game lead indicator).

One really important thing that facilitates or, on the contrary, hampers deflection shooting is plane steadiness, which is given in part from plane's FM and in part by "Aim Sensitivity" and "Aim Control Sensitivity" settings (which you can set under Menu/Controls). But it depends (and potentially in a great extent) also by WT intrinsic settings, which could change release after release.
For example, with 1.59 update Gaijin made the really bad decision to "increase plane agility" in "Mouse Aim" and "Simplified" modes, leading not only to unpleasant flying (now planes “fly” just like X-Wings, arcade has won over any trace left of flight simulation) but to a generalized imprecision in aiming and a marked wobbling-in-turns of any plane, which made deflection shooting much more difficult. It was a quite typical case of an unwanted and unrequested-by-anyone change (old 1.57 aim mode was practically perfect both for flying and shooting). Changing the values of the two Aim controls ("Aim control sensitivity" and "Aim Sensitivity") and activating  "Mouse smoothing" can mitigate this kind of changes but just to some extent.

UPDATE: starting about from the beginning of 2018, it seems that Gaijin made an undeclared change (as usual), moving “Aim Sensitivity” to Common Controls section and removing “Aim Control Sensitivity”. Some guessed that the latter parameter has been just renamed but nobody knows if that’s true and what could be the new name.
Questions about that, asked by players on Forum, never had an answer by mods or developers. As usual.

· ZOOM VIEW!

Use “Zoom View” control when shooting, it helps greatly both in deflection shooting (you have a more precise view of EA's trajectory) and from 6 o'clock (a more detailed view of the target).

· GUNS ARE NOT ALL ALIKE!

Learn using different guns in different ways: cannons have relatively few ammo (from some dozens to some hundreds) but are very destructive, you have to shot in short bursts (even just a couple of shots when you are accustomed to them) to avoid to quickly run out of ammo and being forced to wait for reload.
On the contrary, machine guns have usually from one thousand to some thousands of ammos, any bullet being much less destructive than a single cannon shell, and you have to shot in long bursts to be effective, otherwise you risk to be unable to shot down enemies.
Although in the end cannons are more lethal, even MGs (especially 6-8 MGs in a plane) are very effective if used properly.

· AMMO ARE NOT ALL ALIKE!

Type of ammo is important.
Usually stealths (ammo without any tracer) are the most effective and, in general, "default" type should be changed to a better type as soon as it's possible, i.e. as soon as your guns/ammo are spaded enough.
For a few planes there could be belt types better than stealth (e.g. Air targets belts), seek for advices on Forum.

Avoid using ammo with tracers whenever it's possible, since they warn the enemy (and usually, even if not always, are related to less efficient belts). Tracers gives you just a false sense of shooting control and, just as was in WWII, learning to shoot with stealth ammo will give you more kills.
However, there could be cases when tracers are the better choice, simply because all other kind of ammo suck!

Keep also in mind that Gaijin, just like for any other game component, quite often changes ammo effectiveness. In these cases you’ll find in Forum several complaints about “ammo nerfed” or (less likely) “ammo buffed”.
This happened, for example, in 2018 for Italian Breda MGs, when tracers ammo became the “best” kind available because all other kinds had been quite clearly nerfed.

· CONVERGENCE.

Gun convergence is important too.
However, it’s a quite personal choice and the best convergence much depends on the player’s combat style.

A short convergence (e.g. 200 m) means a deadly effectiveness when shooting at a short distance but much less at medium distances. A player choosing that convergence will have to move closer to enemies and this could be not always easy and safe (faster enemies, bomber gunners even more deadly at short distance etc.).
A long convergence (e.g. 800 m) means that the player should fire quite far from the enemy, maybe a more safer combat style, but his bullets will arrive weaker on target.
For my combat style (deflection shooting at medium distance), after some testing with different convergences I choose 400 m and I’m happy with that, with any plane.

Really, convergence could (and sometimes should) be adapted to the different planes but Gaijin doesn’t allow personalized convergence for any aircraft, just a general value (in “Controls”). This forces the player to change the general value for a particular plane, if opportune, and then immediately restore the old value after having used that airplane: a really awkward way to remedy the shortcoming! I suppose that very few players do that.
It would be really nice if Gaijin would allow a personalized convergence for any plane, if the player wants to change it from the default general value, moreover showing a marker in hangar to remind personalization. It’s just another of the many improvements that Gaijin could make to the game.

However, convergence is more related to personal style and habits than planes’ characteristics so a “fixed” convergence value, for all aircrafts, is usually satisfactory.

My advice: test convergence in battle, from short to long, then decide which is the best for you.
I needed just a few weeks to settle on my choice.

· RELOAD YOUR GUNS!

Always remember to manually reload your guns ("Y" key) in battle, as soon as you have a quiet moment, knowing in advance the reload time and expecting to have time enough before being engaged by an EA. In AB there is an automatic reload once you have run out of ammo but is always better to have full belts before engaging enemy aircrafts.
So, in AB the good advice can’t be a simplistic “save ammo” (which is good just in Realistic and Simulator Battles) but “use ammo to the best of it”, which could be roughly translated in “use the ammo you need to shoot down enemies and reload as soon as possible”.

· SITUATIONAL AWARENESS, SOME WAYS TO GET IT.

Situational awareness is important, so use mouse with "C" key to look around your plane.
Be aware that in the middle of the battle you can't easily check around to look for dangers, so remember to check in advance before engaging EAs.

In addition, check often the small on-screen radar to keep track of enemies (it’s called “tactical map” by Gaijin, don’t mistake it for WT Tactical Map free app, see below).
The radar screen is quite small (for obvious reasons), so players gaming on a 27” display are greatly advantaged respect to players using a 15” notebook screen.
Anyway in Game Options you can change its size from 66% to 133% of the default size.

Another way to look around you is to use the in-game map ("M" key), where you can look at enemy positions. This map is large enough to be comfortable on any screen but when displayed it hides the pilot’s view, so it can be used just for quick looks.


There is also one free app for Android and iOS, WT Tactical Map (by Junkcode), that allows you to have, on external devices such as tablets or smartphones, a view of map, friend planes and enemies, being connected (by wi-fi, through the router’s LAN) with War Thunder running on a PC (or a PS4).
It also works with ground battles (maybe with an even greater usefulness).
To use it you just need a router with good and stable wi-fi and follow the simple help to identify the current local IP address of your PC or PS4 where WT s running.

Documentation is very poor, in practice it’s just the concise help feature where you can understand things such as how make it following plane path and automatically rotate the map, descriptions are brief and learning by trial and error is usual (hint: push the two icons “compass” and “plane” to change their state and check the effect in offline missions or test flights).

It has some oddities and bugs such as markers of older battles “death positions” left in the map.
Worse than that, it could not be able to connect automatically to PC even if set IP is correct, sometimes requiring a WT restart, some other needing app restart.
This happens quite often and very often when you apply patches to the WT client: never expect a patched client can reconnect a WT Tactical map already running, it usually can’t.
In any of those cases, closing both WT client and Tactical Map, then restarting WT at first and then Tactical Map usually allows the connection.
There is an automatic function to automatically search for the correct IP but usually it doesn’t work.

My strong advice is: having already set up the correct IP, first start WT GUI, then start WT Tactical Map. If in Tactical Map you can’t see a green rectangle saying you are connected, start a Test Flight (or Test Drive with tanks in GF) with whichever vehicle you want and check that the correct map appears, showing your vehicle and enemies.
If it appears, all should be ok and the green rectangle should be displayed when exiting the Test Flight. However, sometimes the rectangle became temporarily red, usually just to become green again when you enter into a battle. So, red rectangle doesn’t mean you can’t connect at the right time, if you already connected before.
If you are doubtful about it, you can re-check the connection restarting another Test Flight.

If the map doesn’t appear, exit both WT GUI and WT Tactical Map, restart WT GUI, then WT Tactical Map and try again.

Do that also when the connection seems to be unstable and drops from time to time: the connection HAS to be stable and reliable! At the most just one temporarily detachment or some stuttering of a few seconds every ten minutes would be tolerable. Beyond that, using WT TM in battle would be a huge disadvantage, since you would be deprived of vital info just while fighting.

As I wrote before, there is another specific recommendation: after having updated WT client, with the usual online patch, always exit the WT client then restart it before starting WT Tactical Map too.
In my experience, if you start WT client GUI, then WT Tactical Map and after that WT client updates online, there is an extremely high chance that WT Tactical Map won’t connect.
So, this is another case to shut down both client and map, then restarting first client, then map: this is the safest way to operate.

Sometimes there are strange automatic changes in background colour and details of the map.

The most serious is in Tank Battles: after you jumped on a plane and went back, you usually lose tank map details, it happens 90% of times!
It’s a bug so annoying and stupid that could likely have designed by the disastrous WT GF development team, in fact I really suspect that it’s fault of WT GF, i.e. of a faulty mechanism in providing data at external apps, more than the Tactical Map in itself!
When you lose map details after having flown a plane, you could exit Tactical Map and restart it, usually it resets correctly and restart showing the correct ground map but it needs several seconds to finish the app restart.

But, notwithstanding these defects, on the whole it works well enough.
One of its more useful features is that you can zoom the map by just pinching, i.e. the usual touch-screen gesture, and adjust the view at any moment in a few seconds to have a narrow or a wider view. This is a huge advantage on the small and fixed on-screen mini-map given by WT.

You can surely bet a lot of players, likely the majority (especially amongst experienced ones), use it (usually without admitting that …), even (or likely more) at high levels, just like many dedicated players use big screens, gaming mice and mousepads, powerful GPUs and other tools they get to make their gaming easier (tools more costly and likely more effective than WT Tactical Map).

You even can strongly suspect an enemy is using it by the fact he can “foresee” your behaviour, for example in GF waiting for you becoming uncovered and firing immediately as soon as he sees you, with his gun already pointed in your direction. Or in AF waiting your boom-and-zoom to instantly turn, at last instant, to avoid your attack.
Of course, that could be done even with the on-screen mini-map but that standard tool is so poor to keep an eye on the neighbourhood that is much more likely a WT Tactical Map use … unless (maybe) the enemy uses a 27” or 32” monitor!

But don't overestimate its usefulness, since in many cases is a distraction more than an aid, it can't show any difference in altitude and, for example, you could easily overlook a BnZoomer pouncing on you in a few seconds. And it's practically useless when fighting in a furball because you have no enough time to check it when you are surrounded by angry enemies.

Think at it as a giant version of the tiny on-screen radar (so being really useful for players with weak eyesight and/or small displays), with the other main additional benefits of zooming at ease, showing the direction of planes beyond position, and giving a warning sound when an enemy approaches within a predefined distance.
All in all, it seems to me that K/D ratio is really much less affected by its use (or non-use) than one could think, so its main utility is possibly giving some (in part unjustified) peace of mind to the player.
The most usefulness of WT TM is likely that you can very quickly know “where the action is” and head there (or move away if you are scared!), not what you can do once arrived there.

Some consider it a cheat (especially in ground battles, maybe less in air battles). It's fully legal, anyway, being just a much improved view of info you could anyway access with the browser while gaming (by changing the focused application thru OS) or by in-game map or on-screen radar. In other words, there no "secret" additional info from it, just the same info you already have but better and more effectively presented. In fact, it just uses info Gaijin voluntarily makes available even to external applications.
And Gaijin perfectly knows this app exists and declared it to be licit.

In my opinion it’s not more "illegal" or "cheat" than using devices such as TrackIR and the such, than just a few players have (WT Tactical Map, at least, is free and almost anybody owns a tablet or a smartphone now!).
And is not more “disloyal” than using big size screen (so having big on-screen radars) against players having just normal-size displays. Seen that way, it’s a quite “democratic” tool, since it’s free and requires just cheap devices that nowadays almost anyone already owns.

Speaking about WT TM in Tank Battles (WT Ground Forces), it's a quite different matter: in ground forces battles, where movements are so much slower and just in one dimension (ground surface), WT Tactical Map it's quite useful for detecting the position of enemy tanks at a glance on the map. But it's legal anyway.

On the other hand, since tanks shown positions depend by crews eyesight and by obstacles (buildings, hills etc.), even on that app (which doesn’t “invent” anything nor give to gamers any “superpower”), a player blindly relying on WT TM can be easily surprised by enemy tanks popping out “from nowhere”, previously unnoticed.
This danger is usually more serious than in Air Battles, because with planes the player uses the app just to have a momentary view of the fast-evolving area (and he knows that) whereas with tanks the gamer risks to rest on a false sense of security, believing too much to a quite static situation.
So, even in Tank Battles, WT Tactical Map is useful but not decisive.

But things, as always with “THE BIG IDIOCY” i.e. WT Ground Forces, are much worse than that: after patch 1.65 the idiots in Gaijin gave us their last “development”: fully invisible tanks! They changed the game, for stupid mistake or for even more stupid decision, so that many tanks, even at a few hundred meters (or a few dozen meters) distance, are fully invisible. You became aware of their presence just when they hit you. You can’t see them directly neither on on-screen radar map nor on WT Tactical map. So, using WT TM has become, after 1.65, even dangerous because it could easily induce you to expose yourself to invisible enemies.
If you could think that WT AF are a game full of shortcomings, you should know that WT GF is much, much, much worse. AF aren’t a fully demented game, GF are. And this is just one example.

All in all, my advice is to try it and, if you find it useful, use it.
If you usually play with a 15” notebook, where the in-game mini map is almost useless since its small size, you should find very convenient to use its much larger map on a 6”, 8” or even 10” device!

Only counter indication is: it’s addictive.
Although, as I said, it’s not essential nor decisive about performance, once the player has become used to WT TM it’s difficult to give up, if only for a psychological reason: going back to the miserable on-screen map is like having become blind ...

A warning: especially if you have troubles or experience slowness, keep the app upgraded to the latest version.
For example, according to my personal experience it seems the responsiveness of that app worsened a lot after WT patch 1.75, but after upgrading (in my case) from app version 1.63 to 1.65 things went back to good performance (app smooth and responsive again).
Another thing you can do, if you have troubles, is to clean app cache, using the command from OS GUI (if your Android or iOS have it).

· TRACK THE ENEMY.

Use Tracking Camera on the enemy. By shooting to an EA or by clicking the Lock Target key on an EA you make the camera point to that enemy and keep track of him, even when he isn't on your direct field of view. Tracking Camera is particularly useful when manoeuvring in vertical when fighting the enemy, a common happening at medium and high altitudes, since losing track of EAs in those situations is one of the most dangerous things that could happen.

· TALKING ABOUT BOMBERS (AND THE INFAMOUS “BOMBER BUFF” IN PATCH 1.59).


First, I’ll tell you a very educational story.

In March 2018 Gaijin released patch 1.77.
In this patch Gaijin, at first, nerfed bombs in Air Battles, making a difference at least against light ground vehicles. This was a VERY GOOD thing because it re-balanced Ground Strike battles which, after patch 1.59, have become a true “bomber fest”.

After that change, destroying ground targets still gave a reasonable amount of point but, finally, destroying 15 armoured cars without killing any enemy plane no more guaranteed the player to reach the top position in battle rank ahead fighter pilots destroying five or six planes and just a couple of ground targets.
But, at the same time, a team fully disinterested in destroying ground targets very likely would have lost the battle. It was a rebalancing, not a full reversal from ground strike to a dogfight battle
So it was better for players to take advantage of bombers, attackers and bombs/rockets in fighters to destroy ground targets. The difference was that true air skill in Air Battles was needed again to reach the top in team rank and bombers no more were so effective to decide the battle just by themselves and often to make battle last just a few minutes.

It was an almost perfect change (that’s an incredible thing for Gaijin!), making a game even better balanced than in 1.57 patch (best patch ever done in WT, IMHO, at least for AF).

Although the technique of nerfing bombs was largely open to criticism, the result was fully reasonable.
Maybe Gaijin could have done it in a better way, for example changing parameters in ticket depleting for air and ground targets, but even this was much better than before.
It was a change that WT fighter pilots waited for one year and a half!

This is a quite typical final rank of a battle fought with that rebalancing:



It’s a battle my team lose and we deserved to be defeated because we didn’t look for ground targets but just air targets. On the contrary, the enemy team fought in a much more balanced way, killing both planes and ground targets, and won.
But look at the red team rank: at top you find the best plane destroyers and just some positions below those player that went almost just to pound the ground.

So, destroying armoured cars, AAA etc. was essential to win the battle but top rank was reached by those player being able to make the most difficult thing: shooting down enemy planes.
And this should be the sense of a rank: rewarding the most skilled players.

It was as if we were back at the time of the very good 1.57 patch.
It was perfect.
Perfect.

So, “kudos to Gaijin”?
Unfortunately, NO.

“Spacebar warriors” immediately started complaining about that, filing “bug reports” to Gaijin. And Gaijin, in a very few days (an incredibly fast time for them!) made a “fix” to revert bombs effects as they were from 1.59 to 1.75!
It was just a bug, i.e. an unwanted effect of the patch, an effect that Gaijin promptly has reverted to the shameful “spacebar-ruled” state of the game.

So, the “Rebalanced Paradise” lasted just for four days!


This is another final rank, of a battle fought after the idiotic reverse:




Now, look at the red team (the winner, again): 4 plane kills and 15 ground targets (for first player in red rank) counted more than 8 air kills and 1 ground target (second player in red rank).
And I could bet that the first player was a bomber pilot that made some (if not all) of his air kill just by his bombers’ sniper gunners (what a “skill” …) whereas the second gamer was a fighter pilot, likely destroying one ground target with guns and dogfighting with enemy planes the rest of the time.

These are just examples and not always the rewarding is so unbalanced. Sometimes the first in rank is a good player being the best both against ground targets and against planes.
But sometimes the situation is even more unbalanced, even more benefiting bombers!
So, the game has essentially come back to a “Bomber Thunder” game.

After that stupid reversal, “spacebar aces” are again at top of battle ranks, sometimes even without any air kill, and bombers still decide Ground Strike battles. Which wouldn’t be wrong in itself, if not that Ground Strikes are more than 90% of all battles!
It means that bombers still rule the whole WT AF AB game.

So, we discovered that Gaijin made that healthy change by mistake! And they reverted it in a blink of an eye!

“Kudos to Gaijin”?
No, “shame on Gaijin”.

Can you better understand why I have NO TRUST in Gaijin and why I’ll never spend a DIME in this so stupidly managed game?

In truth, some week after the reversal several bomber players raised doubts that Gaijin could have maintained some nerfing of bombs, it could be just that the fix hasn’t been fully and correctly applied (a quite typical Gaijin’s behaviour …) or it’s just a false impression.
Otherwise, it could be that Gaijin has (quite incredibly) understood they had to somewhat limit bombers’ predominance and kept a little nerf on bombs.
However, as a player wrote, now “games are still won by ground pounding”.


And now, let’s recall some previous history which, unfortunately, is still (more or less) the present of the game.

Bomber pilot's life in AB was hard before 1.59 patch, especially from Tier II up where many enemy fighters have cannons being able to destroy a bomber with just a few hits. Moreover, rewards in attacking grounds units and bases were relatively scarce. In general, destroying single targets as tanks or cars seemed to be more rewarding than bombing bases, but the rewards were in any case less than killing enemy aircrafts. For example, just one EA shot down gave you the same score of a dozen of ground units destroyed. Before 1.59, if you wanted to have high battle scores (and high points earning) using mainly bombers, you had to be a really skilled bomber/attacker, with planes having a significant bomb load, to be able to reach top rank.

1.59 patch (June 2016) completely changed that and at present bombers are dominant in ground strike battles (much more determining for battle outcome, more rewarded, much more hard to kill).
Since ground strike battles are by far the most frequently drawn kind of battle (more than 90%), this means that the whole WT AB Air Forces game changed.

At the moment (and since June 2016) bombers rule the whole AF AB game.

So, if you highly consider battle score and if you want to really contribute to your team's victory, you should fly bombers and attackers now.

If you check the score table of a ground strike battle you’ll very likely find that the top-scorers are such for having destroyed a lot of ground target, NOT for having destroyed a lot of plane.
In many cases, the “best” player in any team had less air kills than several of his comrades, sometimes just one or even zero!

Beware! This is usually true, because in teams is very likely there are dedicated bomber pilots with strong bomber planes, which at the end decide battle’s outcome.
But it’s not always true! Sometimes you find that both teams are devoted to more to dogfighting than bombing, so the result is decided by better fighter pilots much more than by bombers.
The following one is an example:





A thing that has to be clear is that to have real success with bombers you have to fly real good bombers, not only being able to survive (at least for a while) to enemy attacks but also having a very good bomb load.
Another very important thing is that the reward for destroying ground targets as tanks, cars, AAAs, pillboxes etc. is MUCH HIGHER than bombing bases, so a successful bomber player has to destroy targets..

In the previous battle I flown an Italian SM.79 bomber, hovering at about 4000m and being lucky enough to be let alone by enemy fighters (which fought at much lower alts) so I was able to make three or four run on enemy bases, hitting them with a number of 250 kg bombs (not all, because of the high altitude drops). Notwithstanding I had no deaths and could drop bombs without being hassled, my final score was really disappointing.
Why that? Because I didn’t destroy any ground target nor any plane. The player above my rank position had a better score with just 5 targets destroyed and no plane, having four deaths.
The ninth in rank, much better than me, had just one third of dropped bombs tons but, with very few more achievements, scored almost three times my points.
It’s a good example showing that bombing bases poorly rewards.

In the following battle, another mission of mine devoted to base bombing, I dropped almost the same tons of the second player in rank but one assist and five targets were enough to give him six (!) times my score!




Although flying a bomber doesn’t guarantee you to be at rank’s top, if you choose a good bomber and/or attacker and destroy ground targets in addition to base bombing, you could easily have a much better score than using fighters and will contribute much more to your team’s victory..
The following one is an example:




It wasn’t so before 1.59.
At that blessed time, being first or second in team about air victories almost always meant to be in the best three or four top-scorers in team.
1.59 changed everything.

In my well pondered opinion this also lowered the skill needed to win battles and to get high scores, because I have no doubt that on the average successfully flying and fighting on a fighter plane requires more skill than flying a bomber.
At the moment, in WT AF “spacebar heroes” rule.

This never requested change (at least not in such an extreme way) raised a lot of uproars and it seems even a drop in players' number. A lot of players, me included, had a naïve hope that Gaijin could understand the mistake and go back, at least in part, to the previous state, which required some tuning but no such a twisting.
No way, Gaijin endured in that very bad choice.

So, if you are a bomber pilot things are, at present, much easier than before 1.59.

On the contrary, if you are a fighter pilot attacking a bomber is now much more hard and dangerous, for five reasons:

1) bombers are much stronger than before
2) fighter guns have been generally “nerfed” (i.e. weakened)
3) aiming is much more difficult than before due to the repulsive generalized wobbling introduced by 1.59, so less hits even on bombers
4) bomber gunners are as much lethal snipers as ever
5) long-range bombers’ spawn area is now higher than before, so they are even more hard to reach for fighters.

There are no easy solutions to these problems for fighters.

My advice to fighter pilots is to use planes with still powerful enough guns, much better if cannons (e.g. Hurricane Mk.IV with two 40 mm Vickers S cannons), and attack bombers with deflection shooting, possibly aiming at wings.
Since cannons usually have a limited number of ammo and a low rate of fire, you’ll be less tempted to stay for long time within the gunners range of fire (even less at 6 o’clock!) but will be induced to make repeated and quick attacks, much safer for you, and with cannons you can still be able to tear off a wing instantly.
Of course, with low rate-of-fire cannons you have to practice a lot to be able to hit in deflection with the few ammo you have.

· KNOW YOUR ENEMY’S PLANE (AND YOURS TOO).

Know your and enemy's planes. If you do poorly with a plane, ask yourself why: it's because your plane is still too much unspaded? Did you try to turn fight with a P-47 against a Zero? Did you accepted a head-on against a Fw-190, when flying a Ki-44-I? Are you using an inefficient type of ammo, so your shooting is hampered? You'll learn that with time and gaining experience but also reading advices on the forum.
Test flights, off-line missions and custom battles against AI are useful to know Flying Models too, but are not nearly a replacement for experience in real battles (War Thunder AI bots are so poor that can't simulate a mediocre human pilot not even at "Veteran" skill level, they aren't even really much useful in shooting training apart for a very basic exercise).

· CONTROL THE PLANE BOTH WITH MOUSE AND KEYBOARD.

When controlling the plane, use keyboard keys in addition to mouse, for moving ailerons, elevator and rudder. This will allow you a much more effective control of the plane.

A warning: keyboard keys activate control surfaces with an ON/OFF mechanism, i.e. if you push the key and keep it pushed down the surface moves until its most extreme position. But since the activation is smooth and requires some time to arrive to the max, you can control how much hard you use that surface just by making short or repeated strokes on the key. You can easily check this with a Test Flight, even with the plane still on the ground.

Remap keyboard keys on the most comfortable way for your preference, if needed. For example, some players could find convenient to remap the most used keys (roll control, rudder, flaps, tank driving, etc.) on or near the numeric keypad and the four arrow dedicated keys found on most keyboards.
Spent some time to find the mapping that works best for you, you’ll thank having done that when you will be in a crowded battle.

· MOUSE, MOUSEPAD, DISPLAY AND OTHER HARDWARE’S QUALITY.

Use a good mouse and a smooth mouse pad, don't underestimate the importance of this: they are the main tools for interacting with the game. If needed, remap mouse/keyboard keys with the most comfortable setup for your preferences.
The same focus to quality goes for any other piece of hardware you use to play (keyboard, display, GPU, CPU …). Although not decisive to achieve success, poor hardware could hamper your skill.
Display's quality and size are very important. Adjust your graphics according to the power of your GPU/CPU and according to your eyesight, even reducing details if convenient. Avoiding eyestrain and distraction is much more important than having wonderfully detailed graphics.
Since WT is an on-line game, routers and modem-routers’ quality is important too and internet line quality is even more crucial.
Unfortunately, hardware that was powerful enough yesterday could become not sufficient tomorrow. This is especially true when gaming with very limited hardware. I used to play in a decent and quite smoothing way (at minimum graphics) with an integrated GPU, until Gaijin changed something in game and I started to have sudden and continuous frame drops (from 60 fps to 35-40 fps) one or two times at a minute, really hampering my capabilities both with planes and tanks.
A stuttering game is terrible, I’ve lost several kills and have been killed several ways for that and even just the inconvenience is too much, since it disturbs player’s concentration (and highly decreases the fun). This is even worse in an idiotic game such as WT GF because hardware troubles add to foolish and already unbearable things like invisible tanks, kamikaze planes etc., but is very bad in AF too.
Plan to upgrade your hardware if you find yourselves in such a situation.
WT minimum hardware requirements are reasonably low but it’s unavoidable that over time old and poor performing hardware become inadequate.

· SET, TEST AND ADJUST YOUR MOUSE SENSITIVITY.

Evaluate different values in "Aim Control Sensitivity" and "Aim Sensitivity" (can be set under Menu/Controls interface) and choose ones you prefer.
Although it seems Gaijin never gave a clear explanation of them (just like they did for many other game elements!), Aim Sensitivity should be "how fast the on-screen pointer moves/reacts relative to hand-held mouse" and Aim Control Sensitivity should be "how fast the plane tries to follow the on-screen pointer".
So you could set Aim Sensitivity to make pointer react (slower/faster) to the mouse movements, then set Aim Control Sensitivity to make plane react (slower/faster) to pointer movements.
High value settings mean a faster-responding but less stable plane (good for dogfight flying, much less for aiming and shooting) whereas low values mean a slow-responding but steadier plane (good for aiming and shooting but somewhat hampered in dogfighting).
Of course, these effects are added to the intrinsic behaviour of any kind of plane, having specific FM (flying model). Bear in mind that the best setting for you could change as your skills (in flying, aiming and shooting) improve.
Also evaluate the effect of "Mouse smoothing" parameter (can be switched between "On" and "Off"). In my opinion it's convenient to switch-on it after 1.59 patch, mitigating in part the bad wobbling introduced by that patch, but you have to judge by yourself.

UPDATE: starting about from the beginning of 2018, it seems that Gaijin made an undeclared change (as usual), moving “Aim Sensitivity” to Common Controls section and removing “Aim Control Sensitivity”. Some guessed that the latter parameter has been just renamed but nobody knows if that’s true and what could be the new name.
Questions about that, asked by players on Forum, never had an answer by mods or developers. As usual.

· SAVE YOUR CONTROL SETTINGS.

Once properly set, save your controls in a file (“Export to file”, “floppy disk” icon on the lower part of Controls window). Sometimes happens to make unwanted changes, the number of controls is huge and it’s difficult to identify controls that have been changed by mistake. This way you could later restore the good settings (“Import from file” icon).
Furthermore, you could evaluate different settings and quickly save/restore the desired ones to/from file.

And you should remember that the typical Gaijin’s mess made by their “dilettantes” developers could make a mess even of your control settings.
It happened to me a couple of times, after two subsequent patches which changed something in controls interface: the first one deleted my driver assistance mode key for tanks, the second one deleted both my zoom camera key and roll axis controls for planes, then I discovered these geniuses also managed to remove my previous disabling of Enter key on numeric keypad! You could easily imagine my reception of that, especially because I discovered it just in battle …
I solved the issue by restoring a three-weeks-old backup.

· USE REPLAYS.

Use replays of your battles to learn from your mistakes and to learn good tactics from the best players. This is important especially for a beginner.
You can use “Replays” in GUI menu of WT client, choosing from a list of your last battles, but a replay of the single battle can be started also from battle summary at the end of any fight.

From replays you'll learn why best gamers are the best and often you'll find things usually not told on forums (and things that are the opposite to some widespread opinions, such as BnZ being the most effective tactic in AB regardless tier and player’s experience).

Let it be clear that the best pilots you'll encounter as a beginner have much more experience than you, spaded planes and expert crews, so it's very unlikely you'll be able to fight with the same success right away.
However it's always useful to watch them fighting and replays allow that in a wonderfully detailed way.
Even if you won’t be able to immediately replicate the behaviour of top players, it’s really useful to watch how they move in the battle, where they choose to fly, which kind of attacks they choose, how they defend themselves etc.

Don’t be discouraged if your skill is at the moment so much inferior to theirs. Little by little, playing for several months, your performance will become increasingly similar to those players until you’ll often reach the top of battle ranks, especially if you mimic their tactics, both for your own increasing skill and for crews increased experience and finally spaded planes.

I consider watching replays much more useful than watching the most of WT tutorial videos about “tactics” one could find on internet, especially for a newbie, apart some of them that explain specific techniques such as deflection shooting.

Unfortunately, at present replays are no more playable after any significant change in WT version, so play them as soon as possible after any interesting battle.
If you want to save an interesting battle at least as a movie, to be able to watch it in future, you need to use a video capture tool, such as MSI Afterburner or a similar one.

Since some time, Gaijin launched a second kind of replay i.e. “server replay” (“Streams and replays” in GUI menu of WT client).
This is a welcomed addition because in this kind of replay full info are recorded on the server and some details missing in local replays (it often happens) are on the contrary visible in server replay.
For example, if an enemy plane kills you apparently for hull break (i.e. just crashing on you) because in your local replay you don’t see any bomb dropped, rocket launched or cannon fired, checking the server replays could allow you to see that he really launched rockets before the crash (deplorable kamikaze behaviour but not hull break).
For once, a real and good improvement of the game … or it seemed so!
Unfortunately, I discovered that about the infamous “invisible tank” bug in GF, the only reliable kind of replay is a local replay.
It seems it’s just the local replay that is able to reproduce (even if not perfectly) what the player (not) viewed in a battle with invisible tanks. About that, read my “WT Ground Forces Beginner’s Guide”.
I don’t know in how many other cases the server replay is not trustable but the fact it’s not about tank invisibility makes me afraid we can’t generally be sure of its reliability to reproduce player’s experience.
So, in case of doubt always check both kind of replays.

Another unfortunate happening is that server replay reliability seems to become more and more worse.
Whereas at the beginning they worked well enough but as time went by I saw them often exiting (i.e. quietly crashing) when using time acceleration or even no more responding to time acceleration commands.

A final note: when I saw Gaijin introducing server replays I hoped they could keep replays even for older game versions, at least for the last two or three releases, keeping a few on-line servers (likely, virtual machines) dedicated to those versions.
This hasn’t happened: even server replays allow just to play the latest version recordings.
This could be due to the role played by updated clients, preventing them to properly interact with old version servers, and/or to the usual Gaijin’s laziness and disinterest in giving to players the maximum possible info.

· DAILY REWARDS, BATTLE REWARDS AND WAGERS.

Any day, after login, you are presented with a daily rewards lottery where you win some bonus.
They are classified as “Small Trophy”, “Medium Trophy” and “Huge Trophy”. This classification should be significant about the preciousness of the trophies, really it is in the most cases but in some cases not at all (for example, I’ve seen labelled as “Medium Trophy” a meagre +10% RP booster valid for just one battle! A kind of joke …).

Some of those rewards are “booster” (i.e. multipliers) for the earned points at the end of a limited number of battles (usually the number of battles is from 1 to 20 and the multiplier can be from 10% to 200% or even more, higher multipliers are linked to a low numbers of battle).

A different kind of rewards are wagers (you have to fulfil a task to earn virtual money).
You are not forced to immediately activate daily rewards. You can keep booster inactivated for some times (usually one or two days) before they expire whereas the wagers can be kept inactivated for an indefinite time (it seems even for years, at present). You can decide to activate when you think it’s the right time to do that, i.e. you are ready to maximize the bonus by playing well.
The best thing to do is usually to activate them when using your best (most score and points effective) vehicle presets, so you have a lower chance to waste the bonus.

Actually, the really critical wagers are the “Golden Eagles wagers”: they are rare (given as Huge Trophy, the most precious and less frequent daily rewards), quite difficult to complete and the reward is high, being an amount of Golden Eagles (GE), i.e. a coin representing real money (paying players use GEs for buying planes, additional crews etc.).
Completing the GE wagers is difficult but even if you don’t complete them you can win a partial reward, for example 100 or 200 GEs, quite small but useful nonetheless when you accumulate many of them.
If you win Golden Eagles in one or more wager you could buy things in WT even if you aren’t a paying player. In the first year and half of my “career” I bought the fifth and the sixth crew for any nation, using just Golden Eagle won with these wagers (I’m not a paying player).

Some players say that wagers are meaningful just for squadron players, because a squadron has many more possibilities to win than a solo-player, so fighting in a squadron (or, at least, in an improvised four-players squad) vastly reduces the chance to waste the wager.
I disagree.
For sure fighting in a squadron is much better but it would be wrong to give up wagers just because one is a solo-player: I'm just an average AF free player and I'm a solo-player (so no possible help to win from squadron mates) but I achieved my goals with several partially completed GE wagers.
If I’ve been able to do that … anyone can!

It’s convenient to login any day to receive the reward, even if you don’t want to play and use the reward just that day. Doing so you can get booster or wagers to use the following days and if you don’t do that, you can’t receive the Huge Trophies, e.g. GE wagers, which are given every 7 and 14 days.

There are other kinds of reward too, some of them are real shameful jokes such as the so-called “Huge Trophy: you have a 59 minutes test drive on the plane [or tank] xxx”. In practice, in this case the “Huge Trophy” gives you just the time-limited (countdown starts immediately) “right” to drive a Premium vehicle for no more than one hour, no permanent benefit, no GE and not even SL.
I stress: it’s called “Huge” trophy, being a thing that’s just a promotional initiative made to lure the player to purchase the vehicle!
Is there someone that’s still non convinced that Gaijin likes fooling us?

THIS is a “Huge Trophy”!



Unluckily, I wasn’t a reward given to me!
That image has been posted by a Level 100 player (when it rains, it pours …) with more than 12.000 battles fought.
After more than three years in game, playing almost every day, I never won more than 10.000 SL and just in three or four occasions, not more.

In addition to post-login rewards, after any fought battle the player could be given a post-battle reward, clearly appearing on screen. These could be useful things such as Talisman for an owned plane (it doubles the Research Points when using that plane) or quite insignificant “rewards” such as an Order (a quite silly “supplementary mission” that a player could activate in battle and be joined by other gamers, I think that most players just ignore them).
Another welcomed but less self-evident kind of reward appears sometime, after battle end, on the right side of the screen if the players fought well (e.g. ending within first positions in battle rank). Usually they consists in some additional SL, to gain that reward you have to click the blue button shown on screen.


And now, the usual embarrassing question …

One issue that periodically arises on WT Forum is: does Gaijin control players’ chance to win wagers or to gain points with boosters?
In other words: since many players think they has detected, whether right or wrong, to systematically lose (or lose much more than their average) when they activate a booster or a wager, it’s possible or likely that Gaijin “watches” players and try to make them lose when they starts those bonus rewards?

This is a typical question that is labelled as “conspiracy theory” by many and in my opinion it could be.
Personally, I never found such a clear link between boosters/wagers activation and losing (although I never made personal stats about that …).
So it could be just a psychological self-misleading, just as anti-conspiracy people says. For example, gamers starting a booster could play in a bad way because of anxiety.
For sure, I’m open to consider that is the truth. Or that those were just statistical fluctuations, without being significant.

BUT … many considerations of anti-conspiracy people are simply silly.
The most stupid statements made by those people (often stupid brown-nose players) are: “How could you think that Gaijin has a mechanism used to wait for high booster activation? How could Gaijin made those players lose? How could them handle the fact that there could be players with active boosters in both teams?”.
Do you think those are reasonable objections? If so, think again.

First, of course the Gaijin-made game knows when a player activate a booster of a wager. No need to have “15 people on staff all the time waiting for high booster players”, as an inveterate sycophant wrote on Forum, trying to make unlikely sarcasm.
Second, the game could easily facilitate a player’s defeat simply by putting him in the weaker team. There could be a “hidden parameter” saying that while the player has activated a booster/wager, he has to be put into the “cannon-fodder team” (selected by player’s and vehicle performances) for those battles. Look at my “But … how can they do that?” chapter in my Ground Battles Guide to have more thoughts about a similar “hidden parameters” hypothesis.
Third, there could be that there aren’t as many active boosters/wagers in both teams! No player can check it, so Gaijin could (obviously) make what they want. I spare you about a strange, contorted and unlikely “reasoning” of one silly dude, stating that for Gaijin it would be really worthwhile to balance the game, so they would likely equally share booster players between the two teams: it’s enough to think how many unbalanced battles do exist, every day, to understand that Gaijin has no real convenience in balancing games, if making an unbalanced game will give them other sure advantages such as favouring paying players or … damaging boosters and wagers, so saving lions and eagles .

In short, there could be a mechanism trying to void boosters and wagers by putting players in the weaker team and, on the average, being effective to reach that goal.
I’m not speaking of a mechanism focused on persecuting single players making them surely lose, this would be almost impossible to do and there is no need to do that.
I’m speaking about a possible mechanism that influences the game to favour defeats and doing that effectively works on large numbers.

I’m NOT saying that Gaijin is doing those things.
I’m just saying that Gaijin could quite easily do that, if they want. And they for sure would have have tangible reasons to do that. Maybe they don’t, but there are direct and easily understandable reasons they could want to.

Those arse-lickers in Forum could label that as a “conspiracy theory” (and they could even be right) but they shouldn’t make idiotic assertions to support their opinion.
Otherwise, they lose their (already low) credibility even more.

· OBSTRUCTION?

I play WT since a few years and, unluckily, I saw the game becoming generally worse patch after patch.
There are several reasons for that: changes in game behaviour (e.g. “invisible tanks” in GF), changes in rules, changes in game economics, changes in Forum moderation (becoming more and more arrogant), changes in available info etc.

These are the changes I saw that make me thinking Gaijin periodically wants to reduce info and choices to players, to make thing more difficult for gamers and more lucrative for the company.
Even if nobody can be sure of that, I think it’s very likely Gaijin periodically tunes info and chances given to gamers, usually reducing them just to be sure that free playing is not too much convenient, to reduce complaints and to keep game mechanisms even more secret and inscrutable.

In other words, these changes are not “forgotten bugs” but a voluntary “obstruction” done just for Gaijin’s interest.


- Gaijin has undeclaredly removed post-battle info on vehicles' BR of players. This prevent gamers to calmly check BRs and verify if the battle was balanced or not. The advantage is just for Gaijin because if players have less opportunities to check game fairness, they less frequently will raise complaints.

- once players were allowed to apply earned XP points to ANY crew parameter, then Gaijin started to restrict increasable parameters: now you can increase JUST parameters Gaijin, from time to time, allows you to do. So players can't focus on the most important parameters, the improvement of crews effectiveness is slowed, less SL, RP and XP are earned and, at the end, non-paying players are a little bit disadvantaged. The advantage is for paying players, which can pay to increase the parameters they want, so ... the advantage is for Gaijin.

- a marker appeared once on crews' icons to warn the player that XP points were waiting to be applied. Really, it never appeared as soon as you had points but just after a certain amount of stockpiled points. Now it seems that the marker has completely disappeared or pops out even less frequently. Having no more marker, a free player could omit to apply points or apply them later, in both cases his crews were less effective for a longer time: again, the advantage is for Gaijin.

- The “skull marker”, identifying the last player who killed you, has gone (without any explicit declarations by Gaijin). This, even if nothing essential, is a bad thing IMHO, especially because the “Eye for Eye” award still exists.

- “Aim Control Sensitivity” parameter has been removed, again without any declaration or explanation. This is likely a change done for technical reasons but the result has been to leave players clueless about mouse sensitivity tuning (nobody knows if the remaining “Aim Sensitivity” parameter coupled with some other control can replicate the disappeared parameter’s effect).

- In Customizations (hangar functions to apply decals etc.), it’s no more possible to apply the same decal “both sides”. The function is still there (“Shift-T”) but it doesn’t work, except maybe one time on one hundred apply (yes, this is about my stats about that)! This means that the player has to use both free decals if you want have them on both sides of the plane (a digit, a squadron sign …), so if he wants to have a different one too, he has (guess what?) to pay for it.
If this is a bug, it’s quite clear that Gaijin has no intention to fix it.
Guess why …


I think that there could be several other changes I'm not aware of.

· GOLDEN EAGLES, HOW TO SPEND THEM?

If you want to spend Golden Eagles (as I wrote there are sporadic wagers to win a moderate amount of them, too), you should avoid wasting them in useless and expensive one-time backup planes (likely the worst scam in WT, beware!), much better using for Premium planes, Talismans and especially for buying additional crews.

Having up to six crews is a sure benefit and buying additional ones is cheap enough until the sixth crew. Getting additional crews is useful because allows you to “spend” planes in the most fierce battles without becoming a spectator after just some death and, maybe as much important, allows you to have a more varied line-up in the preset (fighters + attackers + bombers).
By default you have three crews, the fourth crew is obtainable using Silver Lions (SL) but the fifth and the sixth require Golden Eagles.
Going further in the number of crews (beyond the sixth) gives limited benefit as your skill improves and your deaths become less frequent, although if you fly both fighters and bombers a seventh crew would be beneficial to have an even broader and more complete line-up. But the seventh ones are quite expensive (non-paying players should win a lot of GE wagers to get enough GEs) and the additional benefit is uncertain.
In my opinion using GEs won in GE wagers for buying additional crews, up to the sixth one, is by far the smartest use of these “free” Golden Eagles.

· THE FORUM.

Use the Forum and other information sources on WT. You can find there some valuable info (mitigating the shortage of official documentation), opinions and considerations.
But be aware that not every WT air combat video guide and not any advice on the forums really fits novices' needs, they often are made by experts that give advices not much useful for beginners (in many cases not useful even for veterans!).

In fact, I had to say that WT Forum is disappointing to a great extent.

Really, it has been the discovery of the mediocrity of WT Forum that led me to wrote these Guides, with the goal to give better advices to beginners.
At first the Forum seemed to me an useful place but very soon I realized how many bad, wrong and misleading considerations and advices are daily spread on it.
So I took the decision to write the Guides.

The level and vastness of stupidity in that site is depressing, even after some years I know that I still find myself shaking my head in disbelief of what I’m reading.
So much disappointing and so lacking in cleverness that I decided to limit my attending it.
Any time I come back I have confirmation I’ve been right in my choice and in my judgement: it’s largely (even if not entirely) a playground for morons, dumb players and brown-nosers.

Its usefulness is limited, largely swinging between a pub-like discussion about “technical” aspects of game (often without realizing that it’s a game, not virtual reality), sharing enthusiasm for newly introduced features and vehicles (for a few weeks, before realizing of their bugs and shortcomings), mistaking money effect for skill and being a stage for not-so-clever and cocky players giving bad advices and widely spreading “L2P” judgements.

Misleading newbies, even when done in good faith, seems to be one favourite pastime for several experienced players in the Forum. Many of them don’t even make any distinction between advices which are good for RB but are bad if followed in AB!

Bad behaviour and stupid statements are not confined to experienced players. Sometimes even some almost-beginners venture in arrogant and risky statements.
One of them wrote, “advising” another player on WT Forum: “You will see a lot of tin-foil hat theories about premiums/ bias etc....don't get sucked in by these, I've yet to see any of them supported by anything like overwhelming evidence....for the most part they seem to be a fusion of ignorance and an inability to understand the basic principals of this game type, mixed with a healthy dose of confirmation bias”.

Are you curious to know how long was his game experience? 1379 battle at the date when this player (quite a moron, frankly speaking) wrote that!
Yes, just one thousand three hundreds seventy nine battles, in practice he was just a little bit more experienced than a beginner. And (steel yourself!) he was “advising” a player with more than 9600 battles fought!
Stupidity, presumptuousness and arrogance: grave sins often coupled in WT Forum.

As far as I have seen, I’m afraid that circumscribed sub-forums, such as non-English language sub-forums, could be even worse than the general Forum, like a small “club” of people with narrow-minded views where it’s even harder to find stimulating discussions and unconventional thinking people.
I saw such sub-forums missing any comment about game mechanics or interface changes that, on the contrary, were immediately detected (and often criticized) on the international Forum. There is a lot of people, especially paying people, that could go on for many, many days arguing about new planes, new tanks, new maps, Premium vehicles and their cost, just while Gaijin, in often undeclared ways, is changing the game, fooling even them! My impression is that such “naïve” people could be even more numerous in sub-forums.
Then, after some months they start to have some “suspicions” and often say “I regret having bought that Premium Pack, just to play such a mess of a game!”.
Welcome to the real (albeit simulated) world, guys …

The less debated issues of the game are likely the more important, such as P2W and the real mechanisms ruling winning and losing.
And there is a particular reason for that: Gaijin’s relentless CENSORSHIP.
Any thread or message raising doubts about WT “fairness” really risks to be ruthlessly locked or even deleted within a few days or hours: it needed to me some years to start realizing how much often it happens, likely every day.
If you want to have documented examples of that deplorable behaviour, you can look at my “Ground Battles Beginners Guide”: I think that you could be surprised as much as I was.

So, always remember that WT Forum mirrors just a part of players base and not necessarily the more smart and reasonable one.


I for myself have wasted a lot of time in the first months in WT, trying to follow some superficial advices, unable to understand why they didn’t work.
Whereas in the Forum there is a majority of good people, you'll also find on it a good amount of the same kind of arrogant people, especially a few belonging to the more expert ones, that you find in any forum on internet (here you can easily recognize them by the abuse of L2P, Learn-to-Play, argument).



Many of the worst advisers in game are amongst the most experienced ones.

Paying players, Level 100 players, long-time gaming players in squadrons etc.: always beware to their statements, they could be good because their long-time experience or could be totally misleading … just because their long-time experience or the fact they simply paid to greatly improve their performance.

They too much often will tell you “do this”, “do that”, “learn this”, “change your approach” etc. without having meditated on it, even when the trouble you have could easily be just your newbie state, both you as a player and your crews and vehicles, and not due by your critical mistakes (this in GF is much more easily recognizable than in AF).
They will often tell you that things such as crews experience level counts little or nothing, that air combat manoeuvers are the most important thing to learn, that even in AB you have to “climb, climb, climb!” etc.
In short, some acceptable but usually almost useless advices, unfit for newbies, and a lot of plainly wrong statements.

You have to judge by yourself and also hearing advices from less experienced people, often much more objective and having a more clear idea of the issues, since they lived troubles identical to yours not long ago!

I know that a newbie could easily have an inferiority complex about very experienced player (“how I could doubt a Level 100 ‘Marshall’ statement?”).
Well, don’t have.
Experience and even skill don’t give wisdom nor smartness neither humility.

A “Level 100 Marshall” could be more misleading than an average player.
I know several examples of that.

They belong to a class that a beginner should learn to recognize as soon as possible, because they live in a world apart (created by the “artificial” nature of the game), very different from newbies but even from the average player, so they are often misleading even when in good faith.
In many cases I had the impression they don’t remember how things worked for them when they were newbies!

Even when in good faith, they too much often give advices hardly adoptable by a beginner, frequently even detrimental.
For example, what’s the sense in recommending “fire rockets just one at a time” when the adviser is a Level 100 player with high level crews having a much higher aim skill (due to higher Stamina and G-Tolerance parameters) than the newbie’s crew, so having an “artificial hawk-eye” that allows him to have easy one-shots whereas beginner’s precision is inevitably much lower?
Even Gaijin recommends to fire rockets in a burst, since their low precision …

Many of them are paying players (often being squadron players too), so having another huge performance factor that plays into their hands, but they naively thing that just their personal skill’s growth made them winning almost any duel and the most of battles.
Gaijin did indeed a good job in making those people believing in this, since that belief pleases them!

In short, some of the more active Forum’s participants are of very few usefulness and some of them are even detrimental to others, likely (hopefully …) in good faith.
Some others are wrong because seem to just repeat bad advices, without having thoughtfully examined them.



Blinkered people.

Many players seem to be remarkably lacking of observation skills too, even about things they should notice at any battle (such as the effects of crews parameters) and even evident changes in GUI or in game behaviour.
I’m constantly surprised realizing how much this is true.

For example, in April 2018 Gaijin suddenly removed the “crew knocked out” message that has appeared for ages when the plane is shot down just because its pilot is killed.
This info is not irrelevant, because being often shot down by that cause is a clear hint that crew’s Vitality is too much low, so the player should increase it as much as possible, anytime it’s possible. This is particularly important for beginners.
It could have been done just for a bug, since one month and a half after the message reappeared.

Well, it seems I was the only player to detect that change and to write about it on the Forum!
I wrote two messages on WT Forum and I discovered that other gamers seemed to be totally clueless about the modification.
I searched the Forum to check if others observed the same thing and found nothing: if some other people realized that, they were likely so few that nobody amongst them thought to write about it.
And it wasn’t a difficult change to notice at all!

So, you can imagine how that kind of blinkered people could behave on a discussion on the Forum!
In fact, I know a lot of players whose in-depth thinking and awareness about the game are almost non-existent.

Can you even better understand me when I declare WT Forum is vastly disappointing and of little usefulness?



Strange reasoning, naivety, pride and self-deceptions.

Participating to WT Forum is, at least, instructive. I've seen in it some of the most strange and wrong reasoning I met on the net.

One of them, particularly significant for its implications, is: "A P2W game needs to be overtly advertised as such, for business reasons, so gamers know that just by paying they can win (at least the most of times). Since Gaijin never declared that WT is P2W nor advertised it is P2W, then WT is NOT P2W".

I'm frankly disconcerted by such a "reasoning", which overturns reality (and I save you silly examples given along that statement, talking about automotive market as P2W (!), it's even difficult to believe they have been brought to attention ...).

Nevertheless, is really educational to examine it and realize why such a statement could have been expressed.
So I’ll use this example to explain the psychology of many WT players, especially long-time and very experienced ones.

Fact is, if there is something that ANY gamer HATES is knowing that the game he is playing is P2W, i.e. who pays has an unfair advantage over the non-payer:

a) non-paying players HATE P2W because hate to know that gamers killing them in game do that just because they open their wallets. Nobody likes to know to be "cannon fodder", even more when being skilled enough, unless he starts paying. This is even more marked in a simulation game that should mimics "real life" and "real skills".

b) paying players HATE P2W because hate to know that they are winning just because they paid, on the contrary they LOVE believing their superior performances are given just by their better personal skill.

In short, nobody likes a game knowing it treats you as cannon fodder if you don't pay (i.e. "losers" hate to know is P2W) and nobody likes a game knowing that you can't be proud of your performances because those are essentially given by the money you spent (i.e. "winners" hate to know is P2W).

So, NO game maker with a minimum of brain will ever admit its game is P2W, because it would make angry BOTH paying and non-paying players.

And, in a mass-players game, non-paying players are as much as important than paying players because they are the "critical mass" needed to fill battle ranks and the "cannon fodder mass" needed to please paying players (if there is someone that "has to win", there is someone that "has to lose"!).

In fact, I know NO game producer advertising his game as P2W! (does it means that no P2W game do exists? …)

You can have a countercheck of what I'm saying by looking at how many forum threads, complaining P2W or speculating about unfair advantages for paying players (sometimes even simply complaining about "unbalanced matchmaking"!), are quickly locked by Gaijin's moderators, after having been judged by them as "useless rants" or "conspiracy theories".

Gaijin, just like any other game producer, is SCARED in thinking that players could start believing the game is P2W!
And try to shut any voice which, for good or bad reasons, try to raise the P2W issue.

So, NO SENSE AT ALL in saying that "for business reasons, Gaijin should admit it's P2W".
The truth is the exact OPPOSITE: they had to deny that WT is P2W.
And they do that, also trying to hide and stop troublesome discussions.

A game producer can and should, on the contrary, make clear that by paying there is just a FASTER PROGRESS in player's performances because getting better vehicles, better guns, better crews etc., all things that can be obtained by a non-paying players too, even with an extraordinarily longer time needed.
Or they can make clear that by paying the player can earn more virtual money at any battle, so he can much faster get vehicles and repair them.
So naive players or self-deceiving players think that "is not P2W, is just 'pay-to-be-advantaged', so it's fair enough!".
This is JUST WHAT HAPPENS WITH WT.

Fact is that in such a game, and WT IS EXACTLY A GAME OF THAT KIND, a paying player can immediately reach the same level of "artificial performance" that a non-paying player can reach four or five years later.
So, even this is REALLY P2W, because the paying player can fight FOR YEARS with an "artificial advantage" over the majority of players (usually non-paying).

It’s really silly to say that “it’s not really P2W because even non-paying players can reach the same goals of paying player”.
This is NOT true.
Some things in game require paying, such as buying Premium vehicles or joining a squadron, others are practically impossible to do without paying, such as gaining very strong crews in an acceptable time, without having to wait for YEARS to collect XP points.
Equally impossible is, in practice, repairing vehicles beyond Tier IV, because the game don’t give enough money to afford it if the player has just “good performances”.
“Exceptionally good” performances would be required to do that but … one can’t have such performances without having great crews and repaired vehicles, even better would be to be part of a squadron!
It’s a quite simple mechanism: you need to pay to have performances like those you would need if you wouldn’t pay while trying to reach the top!
In practice, you NEED to pay if you want to progress in game. Are you a non-paying player? Fine, but you’ll stay for YEARS with crews at low-medium level and fighting alone, so being unable to be at the same level with “paying aces”.

This is no secret at all, any experienced players in his right mind knows that it’s practically impossible to constantly be at the top of ranks without paying.
And, obviously, Gaijin do nothing to deny that!
It’s absolutely fine for them if players know they need to pay to progress, so a lot of them … pay!

But there are also things that the game producer can do to favour paying players and has absolutely NO NEED TO SAY.

If the game makers wants to favour paying players, it can favour and protect behaviours usually exploited by paying players, such as spawn camping in Air Battles, defining and keeping game mechanisms that allow and favour them.

Or it can set up mechanisms that favour low skill and strong "artificial performances", such as significant score got just by being hit in GF. This way, a low-skill paying player with maxed out crews (max Vitality too) and a strong tank (such as an immediately spaded KV-1) can earn a lot of point just staying passively to receive enemy hits.

Well, could you believe it?, WT IS EXACTLY A GAME OF THAT KIND ...

So, there is a lot of reasons to believe that War Thunder is a Pay-to-Win game (with a reasonable starting stage where non-paying players can do well enough too, such as AF until Tier III, or with no similar fair stage such as in GF, unfair since the beginning).

Why some people, especially very experienced paying players, stubbornly deny that, for example with flawed "reasoning" such as the above one?
I's really simple: because they LOVE believing their superior performances are given just by their better personal skill, not (also) by the fact they paid.

It's a self-deception fostered by their pride and it reflects on a lot of other issues discussed in the Forum, such as judgements on spawn camping or tactics to recommend.
That’s one of the reasons why a beginner should ever take their advices and statements with a grain of salt.

Nothing new or never seen, nor too much upsetting at least if you don't give importance to "intellectual honesty", which in these cases is usually lacking ...




In addition to self-deception, there is unfortunately a not negligible number of players making quite nonsensical statements, about any issue.
I’ve seen people making funny statements such as denying the importance of crew experience level or saying that getting points just for being hit is a logic thing or denying that Japanese planes are on average weak or denying that using Russian and German tanks is on average a really safe choice etc., not to mention the wrong assertions about technical or historical arguments.
I have now a (still luckily short, but unfortunately growing) list of some of them, which I won’t wrote here , that invariably say things I deeply disagree with.
Even before starting to read their advice posts, I already know that I’ll disagree with at least half of those suggestions. Notwithstanding I know their mediocrity now, I still keep being surprised how they could invariably miss any target, a quite rare “capability”!
Unfortunately, many of them are amongst the most active Forum participants, so they can do quite a damage spreading bullshit every day.
They are really embarrassing and could be dangerous even for expert players, for example for long-time AF players starting to play with tanks (or vice versa) and so in need of advices, I saw examples of that.



An objective obstacle to giving good advices is that a lot of game characteristics have no detailed explanation by Gaijin, so many discussions on Forum are based just on guesses and/or “discoveries” that players did (or, worse, they believe they have done).
This uncertainty covers almost any aspect in the game, even fundamental ones, from ticketing system’s details to MM inner workings.

This isn’t a scandal (Gaijin has any right to keep a lot of details undisclosed and is reasonable they do that in many cases, even not in any case) and could be handled by players in an appropriate and reasonable way.
Unfortunately, many players talk about things they don’t know (and in many cases they can’t know!) just as those were sure and proven things.

I know that any player willing to discuss some issues has to make guesses, but the basic requirement is honesty.
I’m not saying, for example, that my deductions about WT being P2W are something more than rational deductions based on reasoning and observation. On the contrary, those players write categorical statements such as “Those things don't have an impact on that!” or “Things work this way!”, even if they can’t have any sure knowledge about the issue.

In these cases I’ve started to ask them polite questions such as “please, can you tell me where Gaijin gave a clear and detailed enough explanation about that? Or, at least, any reliable and trustable info from whatever source, not based on players’ guesses or impressions? Just because I haven’t been able to find one …”.
The most likely effects is to receive brusque (even if embarrassed) answers such as “if you have doubts about that, well, I'm just wasting my time here. Bye”.
So much for that.

But the worst thing is, maybe, players thinking they have found the “proof” of something when, on the contrary, they are unable even to understand data they have collected or have been presented to them!

For example, a player wrote, about tickets deleted by destroying targets, that “Not all air maps work with the same mechanics ... in this map 24 "hard" ground targets equal 2400 tickets. Every tank taken out took 100 tickets etc. … Plane kills had no effect on tickets, nor armoured cars, howitzers or AAA. Attaching screenshots to show the scoreboard”.
I thought: “Fine, so we could have some real data about tickets’ depleting in battle!”.

So, I went to check those scoreboards’ screenshots: they shown no air kill by any player (so he couldn’t have said at all that “plane kills had no effect on tickets”!) but, on the contrary, they shown score given by destroying ground targets without any possibility to know if they were “armored cars, howitzers or AAA” (so he couldn’t have said even the second part of his categorical statement!).

Just to complete the picture, he also said that “a bomber on my team took out all three bases which reduced enemy's tickets by about 500”. And, in fact, scoreboard screenshots shown a reduction of 500 tickets … but not for bombing a base, rather for destroying ground targets (icon for those scores are different)!

A complete disaster of an “explanation”, it didn’t answered to any question and was no proof of anything. It wasn’t even reliable in the specific example, let alone about the general issue!
Notwithstanding this, it pleased some other players on the Forum!

I think I can rightly talk about “functional illiteracy” here.

There are also a lot of player loudly complaining (and usually with good reasons).

On the other hand, there are players defending Gaijin even about their most absurd choices.

For example, there are players defending the (lack of) rules allowing kamikaze behaviour (with no penalty) for planes in GF, others defend GF scoring system (which is fully unrelated even with the low skill needed with tanks in WT).

The same is true for AF shortcomings.
And the same is true for the tale of WT being a “realistic simulation of Real Life”. For example, there are stupids that really think that the presumed “sophisticated tank’s DM” is just what explains so many “inexplicable” events, such as “invulnerable” tanks in GF. In this case their usual statement is “learn to aim better, you didn’t hit vital center, this is not WoT!”.

Many of them are naïve newbies, others are long-time players (often Premium paying gamers or paying players even without being Premium) which benefit of those absurd rules that Gaijin invented. Others simply express not-well-thought opinions.

Part of these players (usually paying, Premium and long-time gamers) seems really scared by any statement making clear that WT is an “artificial” game where player’s performance depends from player’s skill just to a very limited extent. So they usually starts talking sarcastically about “conspiracy theories” and sometimes even Forum moderators give them an helping hand, asking to shift to “constructive discussion” (really I don’t know any more constructive discussion than making clear who can win in WT and why!) or even locking embarrassing threads.

Quite often I have the strong feeling that the most regular uncritical players in Forum are battery chickens, raised by Gaijin using smartly hidden P2W mechanisms and fancy goods.
There are many of them in Forum, writing on it almost every day, and soon you’ll learn to know and recognize them.



Even this is nothing new or never seen in an internet forum. Anyhow, until a (too much great) number of these “uncritical” (i.e. dumb, if not hush-money) users will exist, Gaijin will be able to foist any piece of junk on to gamers.

You should find by yourself what's good and what's bad about opinions and advices, especially for your current level.
I strongly urge you to think for yourself, without being too much trustful in “very experienced players”: there is a lot of reasons they are much less trustworthy than you could think!

You can send suggestion and complaints on the Forum too, but don't expect Gaijin quickly answers and especially accepts them, in a lot of cases.

Their general philosophy seems to be "gamers always complaint and always will do, we have our company's goals and we are doing the right things anyway". The most effective way to complaint and to obtain at least some changes it's likely not to game or at least not to game those modes one dislikes, just like did Air Domination haters that regularly exited before battle start, which quite clearly induced Gaijin to drastically reduce the frequency of that kind of battle.

About moderators, well … they are classical forum moderators like you can find elsewhere on internet!
Some of them say reasonable things and behaves without arrogance, others not.

I’ve seen moderators locking threads just because the discussed issues were “embarrassing” for Gaijin (P2W, unfair matchmaking etc.), others drastically saying absurd things such as “there is no use filing complaints against spawn camping and players who spawn camp because spawn camping is NOT against the rules” (really, complaints towards Gaijin are usually just about the lack of rules/mechanisms preventing spawn camping! Is Gaijin unable to realize that?).

Just to make you understand what’s the level of many of them, especially about their will to shut up embarrassing discussions, the following is the story of a “verbal warning” I’ve received.

My post, made up just by a picture, was a sarcastic answer to an issue raised by a player complaining that his IS-2 tank had the side of its turret penetrated by a glancing shot of a T-44 at 750m (he checked on replays too), notwithstanding it should be practically impossible to do according to declared armour thickness/penetration data at that distance. He calculated that the actual thickness of the armour, given by the inclination respect to the enemy shot, would have been about 350 mm, a thickness impossible to pierce by a T-44 even at 10m with any kind of ammo!
And this even without taking into account the chance of a bounce (IS-2 has a markedly sloped turret, made to favour bounces).

This is a very common happening in WT GF, i.e. effects of a shot fully incompatible with Gaijin’s own declared tanks’ armour/gun/ammo data. So common that it’s easy to start thinking they couldn’t be just single bugs for all events.
Which, I know, could be quite embarrassing for Gaijin because it raises huge doubts about the reality of the famous “sophisticated Damage Model” they claim …

This is my post and the subsequent reaction of a Forum moderator:



BTW, the kind of “humour” I “attempted” is extremely frequent in WT Forum, but this was the only case where I saw a warning given for that kind of post.
You can draw your own conclusion.

If you’ll participate in Forum, you’ll learn to know some of these “moderators” (i.e. censors), which are quite (in)famous in players’ community for their arrogance and sometimes silliness.

Some of them are really paranoid about any criticism expressed by players, considering an “insult” towards Gaijin anything said in a sarcastic or even mildly harsh way.
An example: a player wrote (in addition to other precise considerations on that topic) “I can’t understand how Gaijin can be so incompetent in balancing vehicles’ BR” and a moderator wrote “it would have been better not to insult Gaijin”!
The effect of this silly and inappropriate intervention was just to highlight that post, being the reprimand enclosed in the usual very visible pink frame!

Nothing to be too much upset with Gaijin in particular: how many forum moderators on the Net have you seen saying really smart things and behaving in a reasonable and clever way (e.g. not instantly stopping people asking smart and useful questions, usually stating they are “off-topic” or redirecting them to non-existent “already given answers”)?
This happens in WT Forum too.


Gaijin changed Forum style and organization in 2016 (another unwanted and unrequested change, old Forum was fine), promising that after some time all older contents would have been searchable and accessible. After many months the search function showed to be so poor (“advanced” search didn’t work and results from “normal” search couldn’t be filtered or sorted!) that was almost impossible to retrieve not just older contents but newer too.
Some fix has been done to an overall very poor function but, after two years!, even “My Activity Streams” function, to retrieve contents the player started, posted in or followed, works just in part.
So my tip is to write down (or save in browser’s favourites) the URL of any thread or single post you are really interested in, because after a few weeks you could be unable to retrieve them!

Have Fun! (… if you can)

CloCloZ