War Thunder's Feature Creep Problem 

Everybody knows ultimate feature is working headlights

I think the most unwanted "feature" is waiting a month for free repair.

Remember the last man standing mechanic for ground RB? When you had to guess shoot every tank 3 more times just to try to hit the guy that's constantly changing seats? What a great mechanic.

I'd be happy with Maps; I just want BR appropriate maps, They offer far more to the game than most bolt on feature.... *sigh* but Gaijin doesnt even have a map designer guy (I assume)....

The most damaging effect of feature creep is adding to the spaghetti code.

The issue also is that whenever a new feature is introduced, we don't immediately also get something to counter it. That was the case with adding SPAAs that could counter long-range ATGMs or giving planes/helicopters chaff and flares after AA missiles were introduced.

Ubisoft did Operation Health and it was a set of patches purely to fix the game. I think Gaijin should do the same.

I truly think war thunder should take a break from adding new vehicles and just spend time fixing bugs. This game has NEVER been without bugs that affect every day gameplay, and getting this game stable and fun would bring back so many previous players and boost popularity, adding more new players.

The demand for the Tomcat is a perfect example. If you play DCS you know that 4+ gen fighters are at their best BVR. It’s a completely different style of combat, and requires maps of hundreds of miles, not tens. Personally, I stopped grinding upwards once the missiles arrived. I don’t think War Thunder’s implementation of missiles fits their paradigm, or at least the part of it I enjoy. I know others disagree but when I want the cerebral, computerised fighting style I go DCS. I play WT for the gun fighting in planes and the more tactical play of pre-1960/70s tanks. Thermals, for example. One of the things that attracted me to WT was how good it looked. So I don’t enjoy switching to a low-res, black and white image much of the time. For the same reason I never play ULQ. Although when I tried it I could see enemies much better, it defeated the purpose of playing for me. Anyway, I agree we players bear a large chunk of responsibility for feature creep but Gaijin is also a terrible communicator and blatantly greedy. I look forward to the day a competitor arises but until then, I’ll keep playing. Just at mid BRs.

WT: feature creep WoT: power creep

An IT-1 in 2021, remember when this thing was the main problem of the game?

All I want is blinkers , horns and headlight . No really though , on point video .

A lot of the games problems could likely be solved if the dev team wasn't spread over like 20 game modes.

World of Tanks has test servers, where the change/new mechanic is tested there, tweaked and then pushed unto main servers, WT could def use smth like that

3:16 I agree. if the gunner has died it would realisticly take some time even if its short/quick, for the comander to be able to fire, since they are both focused on difrent tasks and switiching would not be instant as the comander would need to pick up from where the gunner left off.

They need to add a quicker way to research helicopters on console. I could care less about ka50s sniping my helicopter if I can do objectives and get more that 3k research in an hour

I dont remember when we asked for STOCK HEAT

I like the dead tanks, ally or enemy being allies after death

The commander should be able to react straight away as that is how it works. I’m going to be beating a dead horse by saying this but the BR’s need decompressing, by decompressing BR’s or even tier locking then power creep wouldn’t be a problem and most vehicles at their corrected BR’s would actually be more fun to play. That’s just my opinion but am curious to see how other people think.

Thanks for the videos and all your hard work you are very appreciated spookston

Can you talk about smurfing or high tier players dominating in low tier games like 2.7?

the commander override work weirdly, cause my both OF 40s didnt need to use commander sight and it just make the tank unstopable when you kill gunner, cause without any living gunner, the commander just start fire and use gunner sight.

What i would like to have instead of commander override, is the ability to choose where to put your ammo. With a small time penalty when placed far from the loader.

Your point about Naval is right on. It's a great concept and I love the modelling of ships and how they feel (normally...) to play. But the game mode is so trash that it stops me from playing. Until I played custom missions with them, at least. Also as a Star Citizen backer... yeah, feature creep is an ongoing issue, even though the kickstarter has finished - namely with new ships that are announced and then not worked on for years.

Thank you for making videos

I don't remember if it ever came up before but would it help if WT split into two games at this point? WWII - Korean War era for one and then Vietnam - more recent eras for the other?

2:05 describes perfectly how I feel about the change to allow commander to take control of fire controls if the gunner dies in certain vehicles. it's a game, I shouldn't feel punished for taking out the only gunner and loader because certain munitions are inconsistent with edit hahah damn, he started talking about it a minute later

I mean i just want repair costs removed, german ww2 tanks having their BR's raised back to what they were, f r i c t i o n / t r a c t i o n fixes, and of course some tank balancing (OP/UP tanks)

I know this issue as the “bike shed problem”. You’re gonna build a bike shed, then you decide it would be nice if you could add hooks to hang bikes, then in order to complement the hooks you decide the roof should be different, then… and it never gets done.

In other words; "Careful what you wish for"

Well sir, I done bought me one of those fancy Steel Beasts. Hope it works nicely.

You definitely have a point & it's so interesting

The KA52 is the perfect thumbnail for this.

Totally agree on the commander needing a delay. Doesnt even need that much just like 3-5 seconds since if you were expecting the gunner to fire, you wouldnt instantly pull the trigger after he gets vaporized. Overall feature creep in War Thunder really varies from "Hey thats neat. Glad they added this" to "This was entirely unnecessary and they should have avoided it." Commander view was a nice feature that likely has no real bearing on the game but it makes me interested in the game. Stuff like Vikhr missiles and TOW-2B's are fun while using but really throw balance a curveball. I hope that when Air inevitably gets to 4th Gen Fighters we do not immediately feature creep with missiles such as AIM-54's. An F-14a with Aim-9G's and Aim-7's will still be very dominant without missiles with greater than 30km ranges

The problem with feature creep in Gaijin is also how often it ends up being one side getting it. Remember the addition of helicopters, where only America and USSR got it? The fact not everybody got SAMs as soon as helis came out, and the first one to come out was alone and was the Tunguska. Not the Roland or any others, the best AA in game, was the first to be added. That's an example amongst others imo.

Best example of feature creep was Ottomatic and Tunguska addition, other nations had no vehicle like this when they were added. Ottomatic had feature creep for 3 patches, Tunguska for 2 patches until Roland, ADATS or Stormer were added.

A related issue is they likely have reference vehicles; one they use as the basis to build similar vehicles. The problem starts when you say use the 50 mm puma as the model for wheeled vehicle. That’s fine for vehicles that are more or less pumas with differing characteristic tweaks. But eventually you start to add vehicles with entirely new features. Now you can either create a new reference model, but at the risk of loosing a tight stack of vehicle types. Or you can add a special extension to the puma reference, but with the risk of loosing a tight reference model. Over time either choice leads to cases where a change is implemented and either breaks due to a special extension or is not carried over to all reference types. It is very hard to wrangle so many object types with such a range of attributes as found inWT even with a carefully designed project at the start. It is almost impossible to do this if you are shoehorning in changes and special extensions onto a much simpler starting project. WT seems like it suffers from this latter problem. Spaghetti code as you say.

Part of me just wonders if it would all be better if they released an entirely new game.

Another great video. Was happy too see it wasnt a "Gaijin is dumb get out your pitch forks" type of video, and more a "This is why things are and its hard for Gaijin to not do" Thanks again for another great video.

free to play games can work without needing new gameplay content. while not free to play at first CSGO has been able to stay relevant because of its match making. it has ranked match making. Ranked probably wouldn't work in war thunder without major overhauls. By giving players an objective to keep striving for that does not require a lot of development time after implemented will keep players spending money on GE and battle passes. if you reset ranks like rocket league or valorant it increases player retention by forcing players to get the drive to get a higher rank. a ranked game mode would also allow for a proper esports scene to form. and with an esports scene comes new players. another thing that CSGO has is a better community content. i don't mean youtubers and streamers i mean game content made by players. a lot of the maps in csgo come from the community not valve. and a lot of skins are community driven as well. this is all possible because of the steam workshop. there is no gajin supported equivalent. I often complain about how unbalanced the maps are but the barrier to entry for basic map design is a lot higher than csgo. for csgo you download the sdk that comes with the game from steam and you can make maps in a matter of minutes. for war thunder you have to go digging for the sdk and their aren't any good tutorials on youtube like there is for cs (talking about 3klicksphilp and tophattwaffle). And skins have a lot less value in war thunder because you can't trade with people. a big part of the csgo skin scene is trading. in war thunder that is impossible, gaijin forces you to use their marketplace (which is a direct copy of the steam marketplace). If they are going to implement player trading then a couple things need to change. 1 vehicle coupons should not need to be consumed to play. In CSGO if you get a knife in a trade you can use it in game then trade it later in war thunder you either get to play the vehicle or hold a coupon to sell later. 2 a trade wait time should be implement similar to CSGO. this is to stop scams from happening. a 1-2 week trade delay makes sure that both parties can cancel if the trade seems unfair after the fact. 3 an item value display in the trade screen. Since war thunder does not have rare patterns like csgo, the price on the market is the price of every item. so a item value display when trading will help prevent people from trading a KV-220 for basic 0.10 skin. 4 a ban on trading bots. trading bots made it possible for scammy skin gambling sites to thrive and scam kids out of their skins. by banning bots you make those types of sites impossible to stay profitable. all of this stuff is just an idea and if they committed to it would take years to implement. so i don't see it happening any time soon.

Commander override is basically the ability to hand out a big fat "No U" to your aggressor.

And here's me down at Rank II having the time of my life with just thirty bucks invested.

I like your commander override idea, shooting the gunner on tanks used to be something important but now at the higher ranks its just about as useless as the commander is

I really like the commander override, and Naval is one of my favourite things to do in Warthunder. I personally like all the little fratures and special gameplay elements, even though it makes keymapping a light nightmare.

Ok but where’s my Air-2 Genie

There is (sometimes) the dev server where some (content) changes get pushed sooner, but basically to generate hype. And in a game that is so grindy, especially with all the new vehicles and nations being added, there is little incentive to play on a server where your progress does not matter.

The ODST at the end was nice

Every time there's an update it feels like I'm installing more bugs than fixes

Commander override is something I didnt know of and wondered why the hell I could shoot with the gunner dead

I just realized when playing naval that the reserve USS Litchfield gunners don't know what aircrafts are. A very difficult bug this is, that not many and Gaijin doesn't care about naval. True that ship doesn't have AA guns but it at least have a time fuze flak auxiliary gun that has enough rear elevation but somehow something just leaves the damn ship completely docile and defenceless against even low flying close in point blank aircraft

I would love more features like automatic lead, commander override, active protection, ect for top tier but BR and repair overhauls are needed first.

from "just one hit and boom!" to "wtf!? one hit and boom?!" still remember that ad everytime I watch a WoT vid, makes me regret for enter this hell.

The commander overrides has court me out so many times

I always thought the commander override should have been a 50% or so reduction in the normal crew replacement time.

As someone whose never really exploited a tanks weakness and really just relied on random shots or flat armor and in very rare cases actually going for weak spots *(old point fixed mechanics)* on a tank. The only real change I’ve noticed with Volumetric shells with my gameplay that just bouncing off barrels or clippin some armor makes the shot go poof, Or if your shooting in tight spaces, But so what? Volumetric shells are only bad because people who’re saying that it needs improvement just don’t know how to adapt. Just continue to play the game and don’t go for weak spots that unrealistic point fixed ammo would just destroy in. Most tanks have other areas to shoot afterall. I understand situation as well can make this near impossible as well. Other than that little rant about volumetric’s I enjoyed the video!

the thing with commander override, it is instant, but it can be harder for a commander to aim irl

I had actually been wanting the commander override for a while but I hate how they implemented it, it's obnoxious to shoot someone's driver and gunner but they are completely unfazed because you can control the turret with the commander from third person and gunner sight, would be nice if you had to switch to commander sight to control the gun

My man’s here playing my favourite and dream tank - the Stalinium Bunker 7

Commander override is the same as stabelizers at least older tanks till like the mbts we see this day and age. A stabelizer didn't fully stabelize a gun but it certainly helped a lot

Commander override works as intended. There should be a button to push to take control over the turret in the even of a gunner death. Much like a fire extinguisher. It shouldn't just be automatic but the delay shouldn't be forced by the game.

I like how the new missiles fling off the protective covers 😂

I just wish we had more game modes to play for ground forces, it gets boring when every game is just domination. Why not add a free for fall? or a team death match type of game mode?

Working headlights, better functioning maps and variety. It’d be also nice if they made it so spawns could not be pushed so quickly and made objectives more worthwhile.

Your videos make me want to play through subnautica again

You should talk about the hell that is heli battles when you only have access to helis like the scout or sa

thought this video was made 9 months, went to check comments and noticed it was minutes. just thought that was kinda funny

A free to play game that I play regularly is Heroes and Generals. This game suffers from many problems but not feature creep fortunatly enough (but now they are going to introduce a battlepass I heard, that scares me. Playerbase is much smaller than War Thunder though. still a strong playerbase though with under-a-minute queue times between 22 and around 03 o clock when I usually play

They also haven't even implemented the commander sights correctly...some tanks that should definetely have them still lack them

Hey spookston, can you do a series about tank design games problem? Dust 514 is a great example.

I agree with a previous poster, Gajin should take a development cycle, or two, to fix what is already in game, with Naval DESPERATELY needing some overhaul and balance. While Helicopters also need such an overhaul, the reason I focus on Naval is due to the fact that at it's core Helicopters are just primarily an extension of Ground RB, a fill in between using a full on aircraft and a tanks. The outright removal of Helicopters honestly wouldn't change much in high teir ground RB, AA would lose some of it's effectiveness, because they lost the ability to (maybe, perhaps, partially, kinda) pop Heli's. Where as naval was a main selling point and part of what Gajin considered the core gameplay fratures back when WT was just starting off. To the point that almost an entire third of the game modes and tech trees are considered completely unviable, as compared to a special game mode. Another thing that I have chatted with friends about, and is something Gajin does need to work on quite a bit is their map design, specifically in ground and naval, as for the most part ground map design consists of "three lanes, with between 1-3 king if the hill objectives in the middle" or a straight up CTF set up, with the same 3 lane design. While in higher teirs this design starts to fall off a lot, it is still heavily prevalent in mid to low teir. Naval is somewhat worse, with an outer edge the Big ships play around in, and the other 3/4 of the map being the domain of the motor boat. A rather simple idea for changing the Ground battle would be to eliminate more of the "3 lane" maps while adding additional modes like "attack/defend" or "assault". A final thing I believe would help WT, though again, add a little of that feature creep (but honestly not that much) while perhaps removing one of the WORST aspects of ground and naval, would be to "combine" air matches and ground/naval matches. Basically queueing for an air match will put you in an air match with a ground match going on below for those who queued for ground. Ground can NOT go to air, and can only use tanks, air get ONLY their planes (or plane if they are in Air RB). Obviously matching air and round RB, and air and ground AB together for consistency. This would reduce the worst parts of ground RB, namely suicide bombing, give dive bombers and attackers more and better things to do, aside from bomb some AI for pathetic amounts of lions and research before they are killed by an enterprising fighter, and it would give fighters at least SOME (possible, maybe, but not likely) chance for help or to be saved by a player AA in the tank battles when they are pushed to the floor.

The best one I saw was a guy pushing for air dropped tanks. I’m like WTF push to find a solution to uptiers

As someone who is very much into Star Citizen. Feature creep is one thing a lot of the Major backers aren't too happy with. I've seen the guys who have 25,000$ into the game tell people who want [Insert complex mechanic that would make the game less fun] tell them to shut the hell up. I've seen people say "Capital ships should be too impractical to fly solo" and "AI should have complex stories" and a whole bunch of myths about how the game will be at launch. One of the biggest ones I saw that seem more like a myth is every AI you hire will have their own relation with you, so when you fire them with a good relation and they become a pirate and find you they won't attack. So far it seems the feature creeps that are happening is new tech for ships. Like better AI for turrets, Turrets that can change position on the ship, Reasonable stuff that should allow more ships to be made with those features.

That shot on the heli in the last moment was really good tho.

I feel like the commander override was added more out of convenience than anything. When you add a vehicle like the STRV 103 where every crewmember can control everything on the tank, if you want to implement that particular characteristic it's not a very large step to add it to other tanks that have similar features. A sort of "While we're in here adding more noodles to the spaghetti code, let's tie some knots on purpose"

Star Citizen uses the PTU or Public Test Universe to get feedback on their updates, so the update isn't pushed to live until around a month or more has passed with it in the PTU. War Thunder could heavily benefit from that if they decide to actually pay attention to feedback.

Yeah I think there should defo be a 4-7 second wait before the commander can take over If you're tank gets hit and your gunner goes down you're not instantly gonna know he's dead so it shouldn't be instant like it is in WT

The biggest issue isnt that features get added but rather that the devs take the basic concept and dumm it down so much for the sake of convenience that it barely resembles how it should actualy look and work like. Add ontop spaghetti code breaking shit and the lack of quality control and you get new features that barely work on launch take forever to get fixed and then end up in an overpowered state once fixed. And the broken state of things dont get considered in a vehicles balance or MM placement at the end but ive seen it plenty of times that brand new features that didnt work got vehicles moved down a few BRs only to sealclub later once that feature was fixed. About commanders override, i think we should get the option to choose if a commander replaces the gunner in the first place and ontop of that instead of having a commander take over instantly you should manualy do it by activating the override or having it active already.

One of biggest problems it’s bringing bi-planes in 10.3 how is the even fair? Slots that could’ve been jets stolen for bi-planes. A good solution is for duo trio and squad players have 1.0 br range ex where the leader br is 6.7 and teammates can bring 5.7 or 7.7 and that’s it.

Ive always been perplexed as to why a slide bar for fuel load (planes of course) wasn't been implemented yet?

Some tanks like XM1, XM8 and CM11 lacks commander sight.

If you want to see feature creep in warthunder to it's full extent, just look through the controls.

there was one game called war robots that was really good at first but now there are like 6 different currencys and they have massive power creep when as a free to play player it takes irl months to research robots.

Even tho the commander override has help me (in my Leclerc) it has also fucked me more times then I can count when fighting Leo’s just because it’s hard to kill all the crew in one shot

You all wanted more modern stuff. You get what you deserve.

The game deserves an overhaul. Changing the core of the game, starting from the basics of the gameplay, making guns do damage consistently, bombs damaging consistently etc. Good ol' "Hit" is the worst feature on my experience.

I unironically wanted commander overrides especially for modern tanks, but i think personally that instead of it bring instant, it should be a 2-3 second delay, any longer and this defeats the purpose of a gunner override

Sadly, feature creep (power creep or future creep) os something that is going to happen if a game is up for long enough as a live service (free to play mostly), this also happens in lol, wot warframe, etc

"I doubt this guy can fix ghost shells" Hits far too close for home.

I think commander binoculars should be either replaced by the commanders sight or, preferably, have a change to the model and damage model and have the commander peak out of his hatch and be vulnerable

The only feature i have ever wanted in the game is bt7/bt5 driveing without treads

Great video, anyway we have new battlepass season now, so i think it would be good to see a video ,,How to fix BP". My ideas are: 1. Remove easy daily tasks, and rework medium daily task. For first they won't be daily anymore. You will be able to do unlimited amount of them per day. Thats because many WT players only want to do their tasks, and they are getting angry when some bug ruins their task, like you have to kill 14 TDs, have 13/14 killed TDs, and you just destroyed gun barrel of M10 in front of you, but your teammate came to help you. It's specially frustrating when you dont have too much time to play another battle. But if tasks wont reset after day, you will say ,,OK, next day i have a lot of time". Also, sometimes I have very good day in WT, and i really want to play with 4.0 germany (my favorite lineup) but i can do only 2 tasks this day. And changing them should be less expensive. 2. Now special tasks and medium tasks must be did by III era vehicle to prevent pros grinding on 1.3. But for example: 4.0 PZ-IVH is III era but StuG IIIG is II era. I think they should change it, and tasks should be counted when your lineup BR is 4.0 or higher. So you will be able to do task with Puma, but only if you have PZ-IVH or something 4.0/above 4.0 in the same lineup. Anyway, hope you guys enjoyed this comment and see you in the next one. PS: And Gaijob should add graphic option that disable bushes, just like you can disable unhistorical cosmetics. Sorry for bad english.

The funny snail should improve what the spaghetti code they have as a game

Override should have the potential to be instant but there should be some sort of player input

Ah feature creep, in my opinion it started getting bad with the helicopters, i don't think anyone asked to be blown from 7 kilometers away by a Cobra or a Black Shart. Now that i think of it, the Valkyries update really started the trend of tremendous powercreep and awful higher tier gameplay

not only do they profit from selling premiums and premium time, also newly added features generate money for them. at low tier you only need Parts and FPS, the higher up you go in the trees the more stuff (components) you need to stay competative. first it was all top tiers, except a few countries that simply don't use it get stock HEAT FS; Then it was NVD in either infra red or thermal, added with night battles, people who don't have it are at a dissadvantage; and with their latest mechanic the commander sight, tanks that have it have another advantage; also the LRF coupled to the automatic adjustment of the sight makes tanks that already have it better; all of these can be used as incentives to GE your way up the components to stay relevant in battle.

I’d like the .50 cals old sound back tbh.

I’ve been playing war thunder a long time, and the complexity and nuance of the game is what brings me back. The thing I can’t stand however, is how I’ve been playing the same dumb game modes for 10+ years. Why no “rush” style game mode, or anything lol. That being said, something that is overlooked is that their really is no competition genre wise, no game has effectively done tank+plane gameplay other than BF3 and 4 imo, but war thunder has much more technical depth which I like (because I’m a nerd dork)

Adding a test server would necessitate giving access to new vehicles and features to the broader playerbase to test in a timely manner. Gaijin's entire business model is making gaining access to these vehicles long-winded and frustrating. For that reason alone I don't hold out hope for a meaningful test server.

How and why did some 50 people already dislike the video? What did my mans do??

the thing with commander override is that i think it was supposed to change the meta of driver/gunner and kill. but did it really even change it for the better? driver/gunner and kill meta is still prominent in low tier since they dont get commander override. i think what it did instead was increase survivability of already strong tanks. take the abrams for example. if im not mistaken, only one turret crews legs stick down into the hull, that being the gunner. you no longer have that effective turret disabling method because the commander will just instantly turn the turret and kill you even though just a year ago, that would instantly disable the turret and lead you for an easy kill. its helped me get a few kills before. someone kills my gunner and stay out of cover thinking im their dinner, just to die when i turn the turret to kill them because my commader is still alive.