I’ve been revisiting anno 2205, infamously the ugly duckling of the Anno series of RTS games. I don’t mind so much the fact that it’s different, lacks customisation and random map generation - I’m bothered because the game is so slow to progress through on challenge settings, and it feels like a game designed just to artificially waste your time; in other anno games, you can always pull tricks to dig yourself out of economic crisis - selling off assets and surplus goods, completing quests for other parties, or taking loans. 2205 is very very confined in terms of what you can do to financially recover in the early game and forces you into a lot of military events.
I was well within the top 1% of World of Tanks players, my friends and I were getting scouted by top clans and we played a lot of competitive rounds as well as the normal gameplay most people experienced. We knew the timing of when scouts would/could show up in specific spots on the map, how long it would take artillery to line you up in different places, etc…
It was funny to me that some people thought win rate was essentially random, it really isn’t.
All that to say I knew the game very well and I could describe with intimate detail exactly what was wrong with the game. Honestly my info would be out of date by years now so I’ll spare everyone that and just say the biggest mistake that I know is still in the game: premium ammo. It utterly invalidates armor making entire trees of tanks pointless to play. Was it hilarious the first time we drove a Maus over the front of an IS-3, crushing it? You bet. But the Maus got shelved pretty quick because it kept dying to frontal attacks with premium ammo.
I didn’t play War Thunder at anywhere near that level (gave up once the grind really set in, couldn’t bear to do it again) but I could see a lot of the same problems cropping up.
I focus on games that don’t abuse my time these days.
It would be pretty great if Gaijin just fixed bugs, but each major patch brings more than were fixed since the last.
Plenty of other problems too.