Beware of Gaijin's tactics

Dihoru

Well after defending this game from unfair critique I now find myself on the other side of the line.

 

The story began with the latest major patch a few days ago when they made tier 3 and above tank play in sim battles a grindfest by slashing profits for tanks by about 50% thus forcing you to adopt a World of Tanks system of grinding (in World of Tanks past tier 6 you need secondary tier 4-5 tanks you are good at to fund your continued grind up to tier 10) which would be ok but unfortunately they've forced mixed battles to be both ground and air (1 plane with 1 respawn and 1 tank with up to two respawns depending on its type) which makes this solution while possible still insanely difficult as at least currently you can get people with tier 1-2 tanks and tier 3-4 planes. Now I would be ok with tortoising my way up to tier 4 with the now meager profits on a average win while absorbing the much more painful penalty for losses but currently using a Hetzer and either a BF-109 E3 or a FW-190 A5 will land me vs players with either T-34-57s and LA-5FNs or SU-122s/KV-2s and Yak-9Ts or even 9Ks. For clarity the T-34 is pretty easy for a Hetzer to kill but the LA-5 outclasses both my BF-109s and my FW-190s in performance and in the other case the Hetzer is a 1 shot kill for the SU-122 or the KV-2 (the SU-122 can sometimes fail to penetrate but it will still wreck the gun causing a repair time of around 2 minutes during which time your tank is completely immobile and helpeless) and the Yak-9s turn adequately enough to out turn the BF-109s and well enough to perma circle jerk both my FW-190s (we'd turn at the same rate to the point I cannot shoot him or him me and yes my planes are all fully upgraded) and worse of all the 9K can destroy tanks and the 9T can also tank bust if diving and shooting through the top armor.

 

The patch's reduction of profits by enough to make me lose lions even on a tight win once factoring in ammo and repairs coupled with the outright denial of the developers that the Yak-9 series is too overpowered considering its performance and durability led me to seek out a refund for my tank packs which were purchased on the premise of realistic air and tank combat simulation (the developers have gone on record stating that they would rather not balance planes purely on performance but also historical, IE if it was vastly overpowered for its time it would get a match from a later time like how jets were somewhat balanced) which is being outright overwritten by the current trend in development as evidenced by the fact that a plane like the 9K can fire bursts of 10 shots in rapid succession from one another and not suffer engine damage or the fact that the notoriously top heavy KV-2 can traverse its turret on inclines which in reality would've toppled the tank clean over onto its side to say nothing of that fact that a majority of german tanks get combat reload speeds while some russian ones get training reload speeds (realistic vs ideal scenarios) or the fact that some high caliber german guns have inaccurate ammo modeling whereas the same cannot be said of the russian ones (a recent discovery has shown that the 75 mm L70's APCBC-HE ammo is behaving exactly like its APCR ammo after penetration which is a massive boon for russian tanks of that level as the shell is more liable to not knock out a target).

The reply from the CS rep was predictable and to the tune "The product is working as intended, you agreed to TOS which state that if it is working as such you would not get a refund and the refund period on your purchases has expired." but this is where the story takes a twist: Since I replied stating that the product is not working as intended and would seek a reversal of payment from my bank if they did not provide a refund for a faulty product while specifying that I have no problem if they close my account down even if they agree to provide a refund as of today I am unable to log into the portion of the site linked to the support of the game, I am blocked by a setup for two-step auth system which provides a bogus, and I mean bogus the scan returns an unusable link, QR-code image and a fake Google authentification code (to use to obtain a code which would then be used to link my Gaijin account to my Google account as extra security) and my forum account has been place on post moderation which is infamous on both Wargaming and Gaijin forums as being a soft ban (you are unable to post directly and your posts rarely if ever show up on the forums,I noticed this fact first then my inability to log into the support to log a ticket about that to find out what post of mine caused that to happen because I have no e-mail explaining why that has happened when both for Wargaming and Gaijin the standard procedure is to e-mail a report of such disciplinary actions upon your forum account and no mention of a reason for this in my account history).

 

Thus tomorrow I will be paying my bank's local branch a visit and see if I can obtain a reversal of payment and warn anyone that invests in Gaijin games to be wary of these sorts of tactics because it is a awfully efficient way of denying responsibility and shutting critics up.

cptndunsel

agree. This ability to change the nature of the game, ignore player complaints, and turn the game into a giant mess is similar to what wargamming did with WoT.

 

The move to the BR system for air in 1.37 broke the game, allowing huge differential in plane quality between players. Despite complaints from actual paying customers Gaijin has done nothing meaningful and the 1.3 BR spread that allows 1940 planes to face 1942/3 planes remains.

 

Now consider GF - same horrific BR system. In RB and SIM you get nuked from the air and have little you can do about it. The BR spread is still too wide, allowing historical "tier 3" tanks to pwn "tier 2" tanks (i.e. 1942/3 tanks vs 1930s or early 40s models). You have the nonsense of needing to unlock 6 tanks in a "tier" before the next tier level opens for research (big issue for German players since they only have 6 tanks in tier 1 so you are forced to unlock all - even the ones you don't want). You have horrific damage models (german tanks are 1-shot coffins, soviet tanks typically take 3 or more hits to kill) and now you have the stealth nerfs to earnings atop the already horrible grind of research points and crew skill points.

 

Unless you open your wallet - takes forever to skill up your crews. Which, by the way, are not historical. Generic 5 person crews even for tanks that needed just 2-3 crew in real life.

 

Its all evolving into a pay-to-advance game. You need premium acct and premium tanks to make the grind bearable. 

 

As a result of this - I see more and more people quitting the game or simply playing in tier 1 and not bothering to advance (likely the free players). Meanwhile those of us with premium accts and higher tier tanks see a falling # of players in queue for matches, wait times are up, and the matchmaker creates garbage matches due to a user pop that is too low.

 

WT had so much promise and I really wanted it to blow away WoT. Right now Gaijin is throwing away that potential.