In December 2023, Enlisted’s campaigns were merged into research trees.
Naturally, it lead to a lot of positive changes in terms of matchmaking, but also inadvertently to a whole bag of mismatches and leftovers from previous campaigns.
There was a lot of stuff to be sorted out but we were told that in due time the outstanding issues would be rectified.
Let’s see what has been changed, fixed and improved over the 12 months:
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Battle of Stalingrad (1942-43) still hosts high BR (1945) matches, it has not been set to BR 1-3.
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No new high BR maps have been added to Soviet high BR to free up Stalingrad from its high BR slavery.
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Battle of Rzhev (1942-43) has been added, but again with access granted to high BR (1945), and even then Stalingrad was not fixed.
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The Ardennes/Bulge campaign was released for BR 1-3 and later changed to BR 1-5 for some weird reason. I guess to allow interwar sea-based planes to fight against sandy Italian tanquettes in the winter of 1944-45?
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Britain and Italy have been completely obliterated and forgotten. You can’t have their (pre-Merge) squads you want, you can’t enlist their soldiers you want, the Brits still don’t have their standard issue winter uniform and the Italians still don’t have any kind of European uniform at all.
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The promised “soft rule” when determining the map based on the army composition is forgotten and doesn’t work at all: you can set up an army of all-Italian squads, soldiers, vehicles and weapons, and still end up in Ardennes.
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Similarly, equipping all Volkssturm squads and weapons from 1945 can easily send you to 1941 Moscow.
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Vehicles (specifically tanks, motorcycles, APCs) still don’t even have basic faction decals (red/white star, cross) or randomized turret numbers. Let alone biome-linked automatic paintjobs system, which was obvious to become necessary with the Merge so must have been prepared beforehand. The weirdest thing is that those skins exist already from campaigns, just not used.
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In the year after the Merge there has not been even an attempt to address the issue of Volkssturm weapons and late war vehicles like Pz IV J or Puma appearing in early war battles like Moscow or Tunisia.
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Premium squads added to specific campaigns have not been updated with any kind of new battlefield-appropriate cosmetics: the Moroccan squad from Tunisia is still fighting in Normandy wearing bedouin robes and the Volkssturm squad from Berlin is still assaulting Moscow wearing business suits and VS armbands. Moreover, new premium squads such as Panther tank disguised as American M10 or Volkssturm guerillas in fur hats easily appear in Rzhev and Tunisia respectively.
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The overwhelming majority of additions to the tech tree (not even event or gold order) after the Merge have been fake/fictional/unused in WW2 weapons and vehicles such as AS-44, RPD, AutoHei, Tokyo Arsenal, HoRi, T20, Hyde, etc.) while very few actually “WW2” items get added.
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Dozens of iconic WW2 vehicles and weapons are still locked behind a pay wall (such as Churchill, Valentine, Firefly, Lewis gun, etc.) while non-WW2 stuff like AS or HoRi even get both premium and tech tree versions.
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Modders get zero support from the developers. The modding portal was opened but the community is left on its own to figure out the tools, file locations, game logic, etc.
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Time and resources were spent on the horrendous “Halloween” event which resulted in talks about the implementation of a Cosmetic Filter but it has not been mentioned ever since, despite a good portion of players applying immersion breaking decals in huge zoom onto their vehicles, affecting the game experience of everyone but themselves, ironically enough.
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Custom Games have received zero support or updates. We can’t even launch a match with anything other than BR1-5.
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The Merge caused nearly identical weapons from different campaigns to coexist, creating weird discrepancies. For example, Beretta 38/42 and Beretta M1 or “M1C Garand” which is on BR5 while “Sniper M1 Garand” is on BR3 and definitely was not used in WW2 (post-war scope).
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An APC class has been added, but many of those “APC” are just trucks and not actual armored personnel carriers. Meanwhile, other trucks are not classified as APC in the game, but rather transport vehicles/props.
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The premium Soviet female medics squad has had horrendously bugged 3D models since forever, probably since it was released? The soldiers aren’t even holding their weapons in their hands.
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In the year since the Merge, with the exception of Burma, we haven’t opened up any new fronts (such as Soviet-Japanese front, Italian front, battle of the Black Sea, etc.) nor did we get any “generic” maps not linked to a specific battle or year, which would allow for less immersion breaking.
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Factions still remain largely unbalanced by access to squads and mechanics: flexible BR paratroopers for USSR and not for anyone else, trucks as APCs for everyone except Germany, SPAA in tech tree for USA and Japan and only as old event squads for USSR and Germany, flamethrower tank in tech tree just for USA, phosphorus grenades for everyone except USSR, and maybe most importantly - loads of squads for USSR, Germany and USA after the Merge of different campaigns and very limited selection of squads insufficient to build 5 different BR presets for Japan.
- Bonus point: just before the Merge happened one year ago, a different, more logical and promising system was tested, but just for a couple days, which assigned letters like “N” for Normandy or “T” for Tunisia which would determine where the given item would be able to appear. However, it was only run on the test server where there aren’t many real players, only for a short while and most importantly without any restrictions on power level, which resulted in the classic “Stewart vs Tiger” issues which led us to the Merge conversations in the first place.
It’s a real shame that that system was drowned in “why am I fighting against STG with my M1903 comments” and instantly discarded (possibly, even intentionally by the devs).
I believe it really had potential to be accommodating both for matchmaking by liwer level, and eliminating insanities such as Panther tank disguised as American M10 time travelling to the 1942 Battle of Stalingrad.
Dear Santa @MajorMcDonalds I hope some of these points can find their way to the 2025 roadmap.
Game is already a War Thunder it’s only matter of time when they are going to merge both teams and we will be fighting KT vs KT