YMMV / War Thunder

• Broken Base:
  • With different parts of the player base seeking different levels of realism, it's not easy to agree on what are considered Acceptable Breaks from Reality. One example is the matchmaking in the Realistic mode, which frequently eschews realistic match-ups and scenarios in favor of quick battles and shorter queues. This frequently leads to bizarre scenarios, such as Italian and Japanese planes fighting Soviets over the D-Day Normandy beachheads, East and West Germany planes fighting together on the same team over Korea or Japan Self-Defense Forces tanks battling US tanks on Kursk. Some players feel it detracts from the experience, others don't mind or enjoy the greater variety of scenarios.
  • Captured vehicles. Some vehicles from other nations are available in the tech trees, as either captured vehicles from enemy nations or lend-lease vehicles from allies. For example, the P-47D from the US tree is available for both the Germans and the Soviets, the Germans have access to Soviet T-34s and the Japanese can use German Bf 109 E-7s and American F4U Corsairs. From attempts to fool the other team by Dressing as the Enemy and the potential of friendly fire on markerless modes to the fact that the majority of these vehicles are premium vehicles (Bribing Your Way to Victory for some), they're quite controversial.
  • Each time Gaijin has added more advanced vehicles and weapons (such as guided missiles, modern tanks with composite and/or reactive armor, SPAA with radar, helicopters, and most recently supersonic jets and air-to-air missiles) this has been highly divisive. For some players, this is what they always wanted War Thunder to become and they'd prefer to see even more modern vehicles, while others are outraged that modern vehicles now get the lion's share of the dev team's attention, and some even have a low enough BR that it's possible for them to end up in the same battles as WW2 tanks which are helpless against them.
  • The different game modes have spawned much debate and division in the community. To wit, here's the breakdown...
    • Arcade Players: prefer getting into combat quickly, and enjoy having the ingame helpers to make life easier. Not too big on much of the realism, but certainly enjoy the game the most. They're also the player base with the largest populace.
    • Realistic Players: Slightly less populated than the arcade, but still actively enjoying the added challenge of not having the lead (aircraft) or elevation (tanks) indicators that Arcade players enjoy.
    • Simulator Players: The Serious Business players that usually have the most skill, but the smallest player base. While the majority of these players have the skill, some of them have the loudest mouths of the entire War Thunder Player Base. Some of them even began a low-scale revolt when Gaijin refused to answer their complaints about the abundance of bomber pilots in Simulator Battles.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome:
  • In air combat, generally averted as most matches will have a mix of planes from all nations. That said, British planes are rather common thanks to their versatility.
  • In ground combat, almost all players stick with vehicles in the Soviet, German or American nations. Vehicles in these nations have a good balance speed, firepower and armor while also covering a wide variety of roles from anti-air, tank destroying, tanking and scouting. In contrast, other nations are too specialized or don't have enough vehicles to cover different roles.
  • In naval combat, expect to see spamming of the USS Moffett. Not only is the premium American destroyer relatively affordable, but it also has good firepower and earns lots of silver lions (the in-game currency) even in bad matches.
• Creator Provincialism: This was thrown about for a time due to Gaijin Entertainment’s Russian origins. Several players charged that the Russian tree was overpowered, with most of their anger directed at the Yak-9T, at least in Arcade Battles. Its speed and maneuverability were nothing to write home about, but the armament and damage models generated a lot of heat. The machinegun is nothing special, but the Yak-9T is armed with a 37 millimeter cannon (the same caliber that the P-39 Aircobra is armed with). However, in earlier versions of the game, the cannon fired at a much, much faster rate than its American counterpart and did not overheat. This resulted in Yak-9Ts being able to spam huge, high-explosive rounds at a rate no other plane could match; if a Yak-9T landed a second or two of continuous fire, you could kiss your plane goodbye. The damage model was absurd as well, and was the largest complaint the fanbase had; the Yak-9T could take a ton of punishment before it went down, as demonstrated by “Lumberyak” video, which showed the plane hitting each of its wings on ground obstacles multiple times at 100% throttle. Though both wings were reduced to “black” health after the first hit, neither were ever removed from the airframe (and the plane recovered ludicrously quickly for being so low to the ground and suffering such a large amount of damage). For comparison, the video also showed a Bf-109 attempting the same stunt; it couldn’t survive a single hit.
  • Thankfully, the developers did nerf the Yak-9T; the cannon now will jam if it’s fired continuously for more than a few rounds, and they are rather flammable (if hit with incendiary rounds, they’ll light up like a fine cigar).
    • Aaaand in 1.33, Gaijin added the Yak-9K, which has a 45 mm cannon. Yes, they took a plane that was once considered broken and broke it further. If that cannon so much as nicks your plane, you're likely to be a cloud of debris.
    • Fun fact; the Yak-9K is real. Of course the problem here is that the 9K can only effectively fire the cannon in short bursts when traveling at high speed, and the recoil shocks caused the plane to leak oil and coolant like a sieve, which - if not modelled in the game engine - would no doubt make it quite overpowered indeed. Only 44 Yak-9K planes were ever fitted with the NS-45 gun, and they saw limited use due to the gun's unreliability and recoil causing airframe stress.
  • It's fairly notable that the descriptions of missions and events are usually written with the assumption that a Soviet player is reading them. "Mozdok-Malgobek Defensive Operation"? Sure, it's defensive if you're Soviet. "German aviation unleashed several groups of 25 bombers on the Soviet troops, repel the raids of the enemy bombers"? For a German player, wouldn't this be encouraging them to shoot down friendly bombers?
  • Back with a vengeance in Ground Forces, as the Soviets get access to post WWII tanks, while for obvious reasons the Germans are stuck with the during war stuff. The problem? These tanks fight each other all the time.
    • There have also been several scandals on the forums when investigative players would delve into the game code and discover interesting quirks in the code. The chances of a shell bouncing off a tank's armour are much higher than what physics would expect, which implies artificial difficulty to prevent players being destroyed too easily, however it was also revealed that this code heavily favoured sloped armour, which was a major design feature of most Russian tanks. It also was discovered many Russian shell types were operating with more explosive filler than could physically fit inside the shell. Many of these quirks have since been removed or severely reduced after mass outcry.
  • There is some grain of truth to these claims. Back when Gaijin Entertainment was based in Russia, the company received a grant from the Russian government, which attempted to boost native entertainment industry. However, this grant comes with a caveat that any media created cannot reflect negatively on Russia itself, past or present events. Whilst they aren't specifically under pressure to make Russian materiel look good, portraying cultural icons like the T-34 battle tank and IL-2 attack plane dying in droves like their real-world counterparts did is frowned upon in general by the Russian government.
  • In naval forces the scope of the entire mode seems to be working to conceal the fact that the Soviet Navy was rather small and insignificant to the conflict. It's rare for any nation to get more classes of ships than the VMF and the tech tree has been very slow to move past light cruisers. This is because the Soviet navy never operated true heavy cruisers and only had one class of old battleships during the war.
• Demonic Spiders:
  • Spitfires, especially at Tier IV. They boast an almost-perfect balance of speed, agility, AND firepower (packing up to four 20-mm. cannons on some variants), making them annoyingly hard to hit or shake off your tail. The Griffon-powered Spitfires (Mark XIV, XVIII, XXII, and XXIV) are particularly nasty; their opponents often call them "Spacefires", because they can out-climb almost any plane they encounter and then hover at extremely high altitudes, well out of their opponents' reach. Their sole major weakness is their wings' high tendency to snap off in extreme maneuvers.
  • Japanese fighters can be this if you're not careful, as they, too, tend to be both quick and agile. Unfortunately, they pay for it by being lightly armored, and their engines aren't designed for high-altitude fighting, limiting their advantages to low-altitude.
    • In the Meta Game, though, Japanese planes which aren't the Zero are regarded as a joke thanks to typically being underpowered for their rank. Most infamously, the Zero appears at Rank 7 in earlier versions of the game, and later at Rank III after the current "battle rating" system was introduced; in both cases, the way the Zero's tiered means it's competing with much more advanced fighters, such as the American Hellcat (notable for being developed specifically to counter the Zero) and the British Typhoon. Nowadays, Japanese planes suffer from massive over-tiering, partially costing them their "Demonic Spider" status.
  • The planes that have big guns on a fast, manoeuvrable platform, such as the the Yak-9T, Yak-9K, P-39 Airacobra and P-69 Kingcobra.
  • The Bearcats. They out-climb mostly everything else at their tier, and then proceed to BnZ everyone to death.
  • The Beaufighter Mark VIc and Mark X. In earlier builds of the game, there were no planes at Rank 4-7 that could even come close to rivaling their speed, durability, handling, and firepower. Also known as "Brokenfighter".
  • The T-50. Stupidly fast, and the same armor as the next rank up medium tank. It's only weak spot is the back of the turret.. and you're not going to see that if he's shooting at you.
  • Are you playing tanks in Tier 1, at BR 1.5-2.0 ? Enjoy facing near-invulnerable T-34s, which kill or cripple you in one hit.
  • Patch 1.43 had people crying foul over the then newly-introduced Tigercat, which has been accused of being an American UFO.
  • With patch 1.45, the T-50 has some worthy competition. The M3 Lee, despite being fairly large, can actually move at a good clip, and it can shrug off a lot of hits at its tier. It also has all of it's guns working, and as a result can potentially (if the player is good enough) engage two targets at once. In a Jingles video, it was said that about the only thing at that rating that can beat an M3, is another M3, or a lucky T-50.
  • The Tiger I H. At it's battle rating, almost nothing comes close to sufficiently damaging it, or having armor as comparable. It's closest rival, the Soviet IS-1, is a Glass Cannon compared to it.
  • With the introduction of American tanks, the M4A3E2 76(w) is this to German tanks of the same battle rating. Its turret is impossible to penetrate, and its frontal hull armor is almost as good with the only weakness being the tiny machine gun port. In addition, the the M4A3E2 76(w) also gets APCR ammunition, which has enough penetration to punch through German tanks at nearly any range regardless of how well the tank is angled.
  • The Fw 190, also nicknamed the "OP 190", can become this if they are not dealt with quickly. Boasting almost unmatched manuverability and massive firepower for its size, while it lacks in armor, it is impossible to lock onto its tail long enough to take it down anyways. Many an unwary pilot have fallen victim to the literal wall of bullets it spits out.
  • Update 1.70.1945 brings out the M18 Hellcat, the fastest vehicle in the entire game at the time of its release, packing a 76mm cannon, and having virtually no armor. Its ability to go to cap zones faster than any other tank and holding its own in a firefight spawned countless threads complaining how OP this tank destroyer is.
  • The Hurricane Mark IV released in 1.51 is pretty much the firepower of a M42 Duster combined with the generally good turn speed of British airplanes. It can two-hit kill almost any plane it meets while having a BR of only 1.7 . It's only weakness is its lengthy reload time of 60 sec after 30 shots and it's somewhat of a Glass Cannon.
  • The Tiger I H now faces competition in the form of the premium Black Prince from 1.53. With a 17-pounder gun that can wreck everything it faces at BR 5.7 and the ability of shrugging a lot of hits from tanks in its BR range. However, it can be easily defeated by flanking, considering the Black Prince has poor mobility (its speed tops out at 17 kph). ^note At least, it used to, before the Black Prince had it's BR raised from 5.7 to 6.0, placing it against much more modern tanks which happily shred the previously invincible monster.
  • Before it was uptiered to BR 2.3, facing the T17E2 AA scout car was the beginner tanker's worst nightmare. Why? Because it could kill every reserve tank it looks at...with twin .50 cal machine guns.
  • The Flakpanzer Gepard has now taken on the role that the T17E2 had. It's fast and it's autocannons can tear through tank armor at it's BR just as easily as the planes it was designed for. It's only weakness is the fact that it only has two crew and one of them sits on the relatively exposed turret. However good luck trying to hit the thing; the Gepard's rapid firing autocannons are devastatingly accurate even on the move and reloads incredibly fast. And don't expect to outlast it's ammo either; it comes with a generous amounts of extra magazines.
  • The 8.8 Flak artillery halftrack has been the scourge of the 3.7 BR since it's inception. It's massive cannon can one-shot any tank it sees from across the map, usually before you see it, so your only hope is to see it first and have some cover nearby (and even then it's not guaranteed, as it's shells can penetrate certain pieces of terrain) Despite being a halftrack, it's armored to the balls making it incredibly hard to destroy (not at all helped by the fact that they usually operate well outside of the ranges of most tank's guns, meaning half the time you can't even penetrate it's armor). And if by some chance you do get off the first shot and it can penetrate, the 8.8 Flak's gunner sits directly behind that massive gun, unlike all other vehicles where the gunner sits to the side, making it impossible to disable the gun unless you're shooting at it from the side. It's only weakness is that it stores the majority of it's ammo in the rear unarmored, meaning it will go up in flames if anyone gets around it, and it's huge profile makes it hard to hide completely behind cover. Like the T17E2, it was eventually uptiered to 4.3, where the tanks can actually withstand a shot from it head on and have a reasonable chance to retaliate.
  • The M1 Abrams might not have the armor of Challenger 1 or T-64B, the mobility of Leopard 2K, or raw gun penetration of the either 3, but it has a blend of all of that plus massive survivability and great gun and turret handling that makes it a terror to fight against, especially by lower tier tanks. It got so bad that a few weeks after Patch 1.77 came out, there was a BR re-balance that resulted in the Abrams being the only BR 9.3 tank that got booted up to 9.7 ^note And this is the tank that upon the initial reveal people think is way underpowered compared to the other 9.3 tanks and called for Gaijin to give it the M833 shell, which, as it turned out, is not needed. This is compounded by the fact that M833 shell has been datamined and everyone founded out that it would become the single most overpowered shell in the game.
  • Dive bombers of all stripes are pretty damn lethal in the early tiers of naval forces. Your AA crew won't be able too do much until it's too late (especially at the amount of training you probably got on them). A competent pilot can plant his ordinance on top of you and dart away before you have time to react, which is effectively a one hit kill to unarmored boats. Their machine guns also shred the lower tier boats pretty quickly. Hope you remembered to group together for AA and have a few friendly fighters.
  • The Pe-8 isn't really hated in air battles, where it's a mostly average to somewhat lackluster bomber that happens to have access to a bomb that is overkill for any situation. However, in ground and naval, it's despised. The Pe-8 can carry a giant 5000 kg. bomb that's capable of wiping out entire formations of tanks and one-shotting cruisers on a near miss. Even friendly teammates hate the Pe-8 since its massive bomb resulted in team kills.
  • The Tu-4. Basically, it's a faster B-29 Stratofortress with an even bigger payload, along with ten 23-mm. defensive cannons with a lot of range and coverage. So yeah, not only can it take out several bases in one pass, but the blizzard of bullets it can dish out will, in just a few hits, send you plummeting to the ground in flames. The Tu-4 was considered so overpowered when it was first introduced that later patches raised its BR to that of a low-tier jet and jacked up the repair cost to damn near unaffordable levels...and it's still an absolute monster. Your best chance against a Tu-4 is to swarm it alongside your teammates, because taking one on by yourself pretty much amounts to suicide.
  • The T17E2 and the Gepard have their spiritual successor in the form of the R3 T20 FA-HS, a 1980s APC prototype introduced in 1.85 with a rapid-firing 20mm autocannon that can shred pretty much everything it faces that isn't a KV-1 in its tier (at its BR of 4.0, it faces vehicles that are roughly 40 years older). While it may be a Fragile Speedster like the Hellcat, good luck actually hitting it.
  • Before it was uptiered to 5.3, the Panhard EBR was the bane of mid-tier ground forces as its incredible speed (which tops out at 105-117 kph depending on the game mode) and a powerful autoloader-equipped cannon made sure it could get away with one-shotting everything it looks at.
• Fandom Rivalry:
  • With Aces High. War Thunder players attack Aces High for being primitive and outdated, while Aces High fans return the favor by accusing War Thunder of focusing on arcade gameplay and graphics at the expense of a realistic flight model.
  • Not to mention World of Tanks / World of Warplanes. And with the additional of naval forces to War Thunder, also World of Warships. Whether War Thunder's higher degree of realism is a good or a bad thing is the key point of contention. For some it's exactly why they prefer it to the "World of" games. While others feel that War Thunder is neither a proper arcade game nor a true simulator, but instead an awkward mix of the two.
    • Surprisingly, the fandoms agree that War Thunder is superior to World of Warplanes as not only do the aircraft feel both fast and agile but also War Thunder has a larger tech tree with aircraft types left out of World of Warplanes (such as Bombers).
• Fan Nickname: Has its own page here.
• Game-Breaker:
  • The introduction of Patch 1.37 has led to the rise of an infamous cheese tactic called "The Yer-2 Base Bomb Rush". The reasons for this is that the Yer-2, a twin-engine Medium Bomber, has an ordnance capacity of 5000kg which can be reloaded in 40 seconds and is the largest of all the bombers in the game. And due to the fact that the Airfield has a damage capacity of 15 Tons (13607.8kg), the Yer-2 only needs to make three passes. As a result, there have been numerous complaints of Arcade Matches ending in less than two minutes due to 3 or more players making a suicide rush for the enemy airfield while flying in the Yer-2. It's not as bad now, as you have to kill all three minibases before you can damage the air field. Still, Yer-2's can be hard to catch.
  • The buff on bomber damage models in update 1.59 has led to the revival of similar tactics resulting in arcade matches ending within roughly five minutes. Update 1.67 slapped a nerf on bombers' durability, alleviating the situation a bit.
  • The Yer-2 breeds lots of accusations of Creator Provincialism due to the fact that it gets its theoretical maximum bomb load, while US and British heavy bombers have theirs nerfed by half, making the Yer-2 in-game a more effective bomber than the B-17, B-24, or Lancaster. So much for realism...
  • Same story for the Russian I-185 fighter. In the game, it's a high-speed kill machine that climbs like an angel and turns on a dime. In real life, the I-185 couldn't even get off the ground.
  • In Realistic and Simulator battles for Ground Forces, where enemy tanks have no markers at all, some players placed oversized black decals on their tanks in order to look like it's been knocked out...only to destroy an unsuspecting tanker who mistook it for a wrecked one. This forced Gaijin to restrict decal sizes unannounced, and the community is pretty much divided on that.
  • Players abusing Ultra Low Quality graphics as it removes all vegetation, which isn't exactly a good thing in RB and SB especially when your tank gets knocked out...behind vegetation that is as tall as a house. This one finally did get fixed, but it was in the game for a loooong time.
  • Many players consider getting their pilots killed is a bit of this due to the damage models being so realistic. What many of these players fail to realize is that only a handful of the aircraft in the game (IL-2 series, P-47s, anything Grumman made, etc) actually had cockpit armor. In 1944, the only way to ensure a cannon shell didn't turn your insides into your outsides was to constantly look around you, and not put yourself in a position to give the other pilot a chance to hit your cockpit. While there are cases where the game can sometimes throw an error and kill the pilot when the wing tip gets hit, these cases are rare, and in the heat of combat, most players don't even pay attention to how they killed the other guy... just so long as they did.
  • A lot of Ground Forces players are frustrated by the fact that planes, which can be flown through killstreaks, can kamikaze their way through enemy tanks and get back to their tanks unpunished (usually, unless an enemy finds your tank and destroys it). Coupled with the Game-Breaking Bug below, it gets a lot worse. There have been campaigns to remove planes in GF due to this, however, that would make most SPAAs useless.
  • Hull Break is a type of kill where a high-caliber tank shell simply destroys a lightly armored/open-topped vehicle; the damage caused by the round tears the vehicle apart instead of overpenetrating or killing part of the crew. Then switch "high-caliber tank shell" to "player-controlled planes." There's also the ridiculous situation that hitting Hull Break doesn't necessarily require actually hitting the hull of a vehicle. Hits to the gun barrel often activate it. It was removed in the Ixwa Strike update (2.5) in March 2021 in favor of an overpressure mechanic.
  • The Yer-2 Situation repeated itself with the Tu-4, the Soviet clone of the B-29. The problem was it had better defensive armament (23mm cannons to 50 cal machine guns), carried a bigger bombload, and had the exact same battlerating of 6.3. This led to a flood of the bombers in realistic destroying the airfield within minutes of the match starting, and they were very hard to down thanks to their firepower. They were later up-tiered to 8.0, the same rank as the Jet bomber!
• Game-Breaking Bug: Two tanks spawned into an indestructible building.
  • Some players get surprised that their tanks got knocked out from apparently nowhere, as in some cases, planes don't make sounds at all, even when they're almost beside the tank in question. Ditto with bombs. This was later fixed.
  • Certain aircraft's flight models have... Features... Which pose massive problems for their pilots. Examples include the Spitfire Mk V variants, which snap their wings if someone coughs on them while going quickly, and one on multiple aircraft which causes them to wobble uncontrollably during high-speed turns.
• Harsher in Hindsight: Gaijin was forced to cancel the "Divine Wind" special event (scheduled for 10/21/2013) due to a suicide bomber attack in Volgograd which occurred on the very same day. A very tragic incident that is both coincidental and ironic.
• High-Tier Scrappy:
  • The R3 T20 FA-HS is infamous for being massively undertiered for what it is capable of. It is an '80s era prototype APC that usually gets matched with mid-late war WWII tanks. Its combination of insane speed, handling, and one of the best autocannons in the game allows it to cap points, and flank and destroy even heavy tanks with ease. While a single hit from pretty much anything will put it out of commission, good luck actually hitting it.
  • The Ka-50 attack helicopter is a vehicle considered too good by many players. Its Vikhr missiles can reach up to 10km (outranging most Anti-Air vehicles), are guided manually so they can't be spoofed with flares, have a proximity fuze making it deadlier and they're also pretty good against armor. The helicopter itself is fairly fast and agile, well armored for an aircraft and, being a helicopter from the 80s, it also has many technological aids like a ballistic computer, radar warning receiver and automated flare/chaff dispensers. It can also carry a selection of bombs, rockets, gunpods and short-range air-to-air missiles, so the helicopter is good in every scenario. Oh, and it's a premium helicopter, i.e. purchasable for real money, so you can guess what some players think about it.
• I Knew It!: Considering the 2016 April Fools' Day celebration was a thinly-disguised test for naval forces, naturally, the 2017 iteration was viewed with speculation that the choppers and modern MBTs were a test for the entry of such vehicles into the game. This was later confirmed when such vehicles were later added to the game for real.
• Low-Tier Letdown:
  • Germany's Sub-Branch of Italian Fighters is considered garbage due to the pitiful Breda-SAFAT Machine Guns they're armed with. Patch 1.69 remedied this somewhat by giving Italy its own separate tree and buffing the Breda-SAFAT.
  • For all the debates of alleged Creator Provincialism, the Russian heavy tank destroyers are considered some of the worst vehicles. While they have hard-hitting cannons, they are also huge, sluggish, poorly-armored, and inaccurate.
  • The Maus, a 188 ton steel behemoth whose thick armor and powerful 128mm gun made it the definition of a Mighty Glacier. However, the game introduced newer tanks without the armor but with powerful guns whose shells can downright ignore the Maus' thick armor, leaving it Awesome, but Impractical at best and totally obsolete at worse (mimicking one of the main reasons why heavy tanks in real life became an evolutionary dead end for tanks early in Cold War). At the same time, it couldn't be placed at a lower Battle Rating as it was too good against older tanks without those high penetration shells. It got so bad that the developers chose to hide it for new players (meaning people who owned it got to keep it, but players who didn't own it couldn't research it anymore) and only make it available again for a short time during special events. Needless to say, people using it nowadays are few and far between.
  • The original French (AMC.34 YR, FCM.36, and H.35) and Japanese Type 95 Ha-Go reserve tanks were considered to be so atrocious that they were eventually taken out of their respective trees. They're still researchable, but only if you reach Tier II in that nation.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • No armor is best armor^Explanation Prior to the introduction of the hull break mechanic, thinly armored tanks were able survive hits from high caliber rounds, which fail to produce the fragmentation necessary for harming crew and equipment.
  • Germany Suffers^ExplanationA common quote among players who thinks every German vehicle was the absolute best in the war. Said fan typically complains about German vehicles not being overpowered and demand that Gaijin buff their tanks or match them with weaker opponent. Of course much of these complaints were colored by documentaries that sensationalize German tanks as unstoppable juggernauts, leading to overconfident players not playing to strengths of German tanks.
  • Russian Bias^Explanation Many have accused Gaijin of Creator Provincialism by making Russian vehicles overpowered. Most notably, the Russian Pe-8 and Yer-2 bombers are statistically superior to their non-Russian counterparts with better defensive armament and bomb payloads, and more recently the 2S6 Tunguska (a combined gun and missile SPAA) and Ka-50/Ka-52 attack helicopters became dominant forces in top-tier ground battles. On the flip side, some used this meme ironically to mock accusations of Russian bias by pointing out how the German FW-190 fighter and the American M1 Abrams tank are superior to their Russian counterparts or how the Russians have the worst tank destroyer line and the weakest top-tier MBTs as of 2020. Or how even the above-mentioned SPAA and helicopters can be matched just fine by their American counterparts (ADATS and AH-1Z Viper/AH-64 Apache), but those have the added advantage of going into lineups with the Abrams instead of the T-80.
  • NATO/Western Bias^Explanation In a reversal of the "Russian Bias" meme, some have accused Gaijin of being "NATO shills" or having anti-Russian bias by making some non-Soviet vehicles overpowered. The most notable examples are the American Abrams MBT family, German Leopard 2 MBT, British Harrier jet, and French E.B.R (1954) light tank. Some have also snarked how a Russian-made aviation combat game would overrepresent the British aircraft with 21 variants of the Spitfire.
  • Romanian EULA^Explanation For reasons known only to Gaijin, the Romanian-language EULA gets randomly removed and reinserted regularly in minor patches. This is never announced, it's just discovered by datamining. It's presumed that Gaijin is just having fun by giving the dataminers something meaningless to discover. Once this pattern was noticed, it immediately became a meme on the War Thunder forums and subreddit.
  • "Attack the D point!"^ExplanationA now-defunct radio callout for back when maps actually had four points of capture on Realistic and Arcade Modes. Constant radio callouts for assaulting/defending this non-existent point will usually devolve the chat into spamming random, disjointed responses such as "Leading for Landing!" or "Gramercy!", or be countered with "No!", "Defend the D Point!". Mentioning War Thunder on any other subreddit thread will usually start a similar comment chain of random in-game radio callouts. It's also an Ascended Meme, considering the countdown and background screens of their livestreams has a marker for the D point. In addition, the Warfare 2077 gamemode of the 2021 April Fools' Day event had capturing the D, E, and F points as its objective.
  • "You got a hole in your left/right wing!"^Explanation A similarly-iconic pilot dialogue that got traction for being frequently heard once you get hit, on your, well, wing/s.
  • Track and Barrel Torture.^{Explanation (Mildly NSFW)} A common tactic used by players when faced by a tank they cannot deal with frontally is to destroy its cannon barrel, leaving it unable to fire, then its tracks, to keep it from moving. This is often employed by vehicles with heavy machine guns, autocannons, and/or rapid firing light cannons so that they can either escape to safety or take out the enemy without any threat. Comparisons to the already existing Cock and Ball Torture meme began sometime in 2020, with this term soon being applied to the tactic.
  • Teammates are just enemies in blue ^ExplanationOwing to the brutal grind, which requires excellent performance to reap the most RP and SL, many players quickly become frustrated by the antics of their less useful comrades, with particularly annoying actions including refusing to cooperate and work together in achieving objectives, kill stealing, running around in the open, then immediately getting sniped, and impeding or outright teamkilling fellow players by ramming into them at high speed. Thus, the Teeth-Clenched Teamwork common in such scenarios (assuming that there's any teamwork to be found, that is), has led to the birth of this phrase.
  • Classified document leaks ^ExplanationThe game has become infamous, inside and outside its playerbase, for flamewars in the forums occasionally ending in someone trying to champion their tank or get another nerfed by resorting to real life specifications and documents... including actual military members resorting to classified documents on the vehicle's design in the heat of the moment. As of December 2023 it has been confirmed to have happened fourteen times, and more are suspected, leading to jokes about the game being a treasure trove for intelligence agents and a complete headache for defense ministries everywhere — eventually reaching the point where Raytheon had to deny reports that their security clearance background checks ask friends and relatives of a potential hiree "does he play War Thunder". Meanwhile, the game's Twitter account is "running out of jokes" for telling players to stop doing this.
• Misaimed "Realism": Several of the features of the "realism" of the game are wildly internally and logically inconsistent, although some can be blamed on restrictions of the game engine, which to be fair, is from Wings of Prey, a game from 2009.
  • In all ground (tank) modes, crew members can swap between any gunner or driver position, although this process generally takes 30-45 seconds. However, in all air battle modes (planes), if any of your pilots are killed, the entire plane goes down as the game says "pilot knocked out". Whether this means both of your two bomber pilots were killed/KO'd is unknown.
  • For most planes, aircraft crews are artificially limited. For example, the B-17 in real life sits between 10 and 11 crew, but in game it only has 7 crew members, and if a crew member is taken out, no one can replace them, ever. Contrast this to the ground battles where tanks will always have at least one driver and one gunner at all times, or at least attempt to fill the position.
  • Shell penetration is notoriously all over the place. Malzi has an entire Youtube clip channel essentially dedicated to it.
  • Helicopters as of 2021 notoriously can take tank shells and have their tail rotor ripped off, be set on fire and be fine and continue to get kills, although because the game's coding is suspect at best, any machine gun mounted on an aircraft, regardless of caliber will probably do more damage than any tank mounted machine gun. In air battles, wings routinely get shot off, engines set on fire, fuel tanks leak, etc., making helicopters insanely tanky in comparison.
  • The game partially attempts to be realistic, but there are no bomber formations, there isn't nearly enough flak, and games are relatively limited to 12v12.
  • In air battles, there are sometimes AI naval destroyers and PT boats that you can destroy, but only with 20mm or higher cannons, bombs, rockets and torpedoes. In real life and all naval battles, smaller caliber weapons mounted on PT boats are routinely used to harass and annoy destroyers with armor piercing incindiary .50 cal rounds or similar.
  • Many of the mission types are locked behind higher battle ratings. If you are starting out at 1.0 BR with only reserve planes, you will probably never play an air domination mission or capture the landing strip mission, let alone an AI bomber escort mission.
  • Random bugs that actually affect game mechanics, especially in Realistic battles. Examples include the ultra low quality trick for seeing through bushes that weren't rendered (which became an April Fool's Day gag from Gaijin itself), as well as a bug that completely silences some tanks' weapons.
  • Infamously, fans resorting to sending the developers the technical specifications of the tanks they want to see nerfed/buffed n an attempt to bring the game in line with "reality".
• Polished Port: The game supports ALL control methods on ALL platforms. Meaning that yes, that PS4 player you see could be using a full Hands On Throttle and Stick setup with rudder pedals. Which is a necessity given that War Thunder on all platforms are playing on the same servers. Any given battle that you load into is likely to contain PC, PS4 and Xbox One players at the same time.
  • The game has a built-in Internet Radio feature, supporting Shoutcast/Icecast streams, which now works on ALL platforms. Some players put a World War II music station in it, to add to the feel of the game.
• Porting Disaster: The out of combat UI on the PS4 version is not quite as controller friendly as it could be, though it has become better over time. Some PS4 players have taken to using mice for out of combat UI.
  • The game has built in voice chat, but PC players are used to not having built in voice chat in games or having it not work well so they never use it and use third-party VOIP solutions. PS4 players are stuck using the built-in chat. This can lead to lack of communication between PC and PS4 players in combat.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • The Battle Rating system took a lot of flak from the community during its early years (with BR compression being the more prevalent issue later on), especially with the ridiculously high BRs on German planes (enabling Tier IV props to face jets) and assigning different ratings for the same planes in different nations. The fact that matches are made with +/- 1.0 BR difference also creates balance problems, especially in Ground Forces, which places late-war tanks (e.g. King Tiger and IS-3) against some fairly advanced Cold War-era tanks. It does not help that Word of God has said that the BR of a vehicle depends on player performance, so bad players in a good tank theoretically can make it undertiered (overpowered for its tier) simply by playing bad. As of now, most propose narrowing the BR spread to +/-0.7 (which Gaijin has Jossed here), extend the BR range to relieve BR compression especially in the higher tiers.
    • On the topic of BR compression, naval battles get hit by this incredibly hard, as battleships can run roughshod over entire fleets of cruisers and destroyers without taking a scratch whatsoever. Mid-tier destroyers also suffer from this, with cruisers making short work of them with impunity.
  • Air Domination attracts some hate from the community due to the lack of time, often ending with both teams losing, and with the lack of ground targets rendering both attackers and bombers almost useless. It has since been relegated to an extremely rare mode.
  • The Last Man Standing mechanic in Realistic and Simulator Battles took a lot of flak for being unrealistic and for frustrating tankers who try to snipe the sole surviving crewman of the tank. This was replaced by the researchable one-use Crew Replacement upgrade.
  • The Hull Break mechanic, in which many lightly-armored vehicles can have their hull broken and are automatically destroyed when hit by large-caliber shells. While it's generally agreed that something had to be done to limit the power of such vehicles (since otherwise a shell that goes in one side and out the other without hitting any crew or ammo might as well not be a hit at all, spawning the meme that "no armor is best armor"), the mechanic is also widely hated because it can produce ridiculous outcomes like a shell hitting the gun barrel causing the hull or a light tank or armored car to break. This was eventually replaced by the overpressure mechanic in Update 2.5.
  • The use of repair costs as an economic balancing mechanism. Opponents of its use as such argue that increasing repair costs for vehicles that perform well turns them into near-unplayable silver lion sinks, leaving its use almost exclusively to experienced players which further increases their performance, and so on.
  • Close Air Support (CAS). This mechanic allows players who earn enough score in ground vehicles to spawn as a plane or helicopter. Ground vehicles on the receiving end of a CAS attack are generally helpless as their guns can't hit fast-moving aircraft, they're too slow to get to safety and CAS weaponry can be aimed at their weakspots. While dedicated anti-air could counter CAS, most anti-air weapons are rather inconsistent with finicky projectile ballistics and unreliable radar. Furthermore, the low requirements to spawn as aircraft mean that ground realistic matches can quickly devolve into CAS spam. Also ground vehicles aren't immune to friendly fire, which can result in lots of teamkilling.
• Spiritual Successor: The game essentially is a F2P sequel to Birds of Steel.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: The new system, introduced in Patch 1.37, has really caused a significant amount of negative fallout among players who were comfortable with the old system. Instead of 20 Ranks, you have 7 Ranks. And because there are only 5 Ranks, matchmaking is considered to be adversely affected because Reserve Aircraft (previously Rank 0-1, now Rank 1) will now find themselves at the mercy of opposition that was ranked very high in the old system such as A6M2s (previously Rank 6-7, now Rank 2) and P-39s (previously Rank 6-7, now Rank 2).
• Too Dumb to Live:
  • American Air RB teams have a reputation for this at mid tier, primarily owing to the Difficult, but Awesome nature of most American planes and the tendency of new players to fly American aircraft.
  • On the Ground Forces front, it's mid-tier German teams that are saddled with this reputation, not because their vehicles are Difficult, but Awesome ^note Germany is considered to be one of the most beginner-friendly nations in ground forces, along with the US and the USSR. Collectively, they're termed the "major nations" or the "Big Three.", but because of the tendency of new players to rush the Tiger I (and thinking they're invincible juggernauts).
• Visual Effects of Awesome: Balance issues and bias accusations aside, one area where the game really stands out is its astounding graphics, especially if you're playing at max settings. Screw max settings, the movie setting basically lives and breathes on this. Their in-house engine is even capable of photo-realistic rendering of the sky. For starters, try hopping on a plane in a battle and look below you for some Scenery Porn.
  • The New Power update added even more of this, with brand new particle-based fire, smoke, and explosion effects to replace the old sprite-based ones. Never has getting shot down looked so pretty.