I’m a Battlepass, Premium Account and Campaign pass user willing to spend a dollar whenever it seems adequate. Yet despite me trying to even be very saving with my orders the economy of this game is still mostly unbearable.
Like many I just started completely fresh with the Pacific Campaign. Here’s my evaluation:
Rounds generate not even half the orders that would be adequate for proper progress. Even with already 4 stars starter weapons it is a waste of orders to upgrade weapons to 5 stars. 10 points per weapon is simply too expensive as you have to play around 3-4 rounds to be able to upgrade just a single weapon for a single star. And thats even despite these beginner weapons already being the cheapest to update. Higher level weapon cost requirements will bring everyone to his knees. With other campaigns (that don’t require a 30€ pack for access to higher starter levels) where the game will on average give you 2 star weapons/soldiers the economy problem becomes even more devastating.
The result is a game where it’s bad to make any investment in tanks or weapons youre about to ditch after some levels anyway. With soldier upgrades the problem is quite similar despite the fact that here it makes sense imho to upgrade your lvl 1 soldiers as you can use many of them over the campaign to fill your new squads until you get access to higher level troops that actually make sense to get. The ingame difference between a 5 star lvl 1 rifleman and a 5 star lvl 3 riflemen simply isnt as striking as it would compensate the enormeous amount of time required to get the orders required to level your lvl 3 troops to 5.
Yet even here the income is too low to generate a proper crew of 5 stars lvl 1 within any reasonable amount of time.
Suggested Solution Return 100% of the invested bronze orders once you sell a weapon/soldier and triple the bronze orders rewards so you wont have to play hundreds of games just to improve your high lvl weapons/soldiers.
The silver weapon order progress is also a bit slow but nearly ok. The problem is not as drastic as with the Stalingrad campaign where you made such fast progress that spending silver for e.g. Gewehr 41 for your squads would be a complete waste as a few matches later you could have spend them on an Mkb 42 instead but its still at a point where it doesn’t make sense to equipt your troops with pistols or even newly unlocked rifles that just offer a marginal improvement to your current equiptment. The result is an array of weapons barely any player will want to actually aquire because it takes less time to get to a campaign level to unlock the next better weapon that it takes to aquire the silver orders to compensate this investment.
Soldier silver orders are a different thing though. I believe to have noticed that at least in other campaigns the amount of bad soldiers (a.k.a. not enough perk points to even just get 16-16-16) you get are enormeous. 90% lack 3-5 points to their optimal points, not few only come with the points that would be fine if they were lvl 3 and not actually lvl 4. So when you attempt to spend enough silver to get troops that are actually worth spending bronze orders on you will waste A LOT of silver orders as 90% of your pulls are blanks. It’s not an exaggeration to claim that you will use up 10 orders to get a single usable soldier. This devalues silver soldier orders a lot.
The pacific campaign sale model is actually a real improvement here as you will get lvl 4s which are at least workable even if you don’t upgrade them, but this economy review is based on all campaigns and for most this sucks - a lot.
Suggested Solution Reduce the amount of bad soldier pulls drastically. It’s okay if full points soldiers can only be found every third or forth pull… but not 1 in 10. After all any non-perfect-soldier always holds the risk that you invest a lot of orders and the randomized addition for each level will make him turn out still with one point missing on any sector. Order drop wise there’s no real need of increase as you can generate enough silver orders just by playing the game with battle pass over lvl 75. That’s a fair mechanic in my eyes as it rewards playing the game which is good for the devs as it populates their game to keep and gather customers.
Everyone welcomed the option to change your soldiers visuals manually and everyone was shocked once they saw the prices. So now the devs brought good news by saying that the battlepass income of these orders has changed by a factor of 9(!) and while I noticed an extreme increase in bearded soldiers (half of my troops look as if recruited from hippies and bums) it’s clear that this is done to make more people spend their orders on at least for changing the face as most possibly have lost any interest in changing the looks of their soldiers after they saw the price the devs charge to change it. An increase of x9 speaks words of how unbearable the situation had to be before.
So Soldiers usually have 3 options to change (Headgear, Head Torso) while Stalingrad even has 5 (+Hands and Legs). In the previous version of soldier appearance orders I had to spend around 3 orders on average to get a randomized soldier that at least wasn’t having a face that was made artificially horrendous and changing the gear was just an (annoying) matter of time by switching these in and out again and again of the squad.
If you want to completely change a soldier now you have to spend 19-21 orders per soldier equally in the Pacific or in Stalingrad as the torso cost much more in the pacific than in the Stalingrad campaign. Obviously the new system of being able to tailor your soldiers just the way you want without any randomized results is clearly preferable from a player point of view and If you compare the previous requirement of roughly 3 orders per soldier on average to 21 now it’s an increase in cost by the factor of ~7 - so we actually have a real improvement here. A season now offers 200 orders (160 in the BP, 40 in the “weekly tasks”) which is enough to change the appearance of 10 soldiers if you want to fully change their appearance or 40 if you just want to change their faces.
While we saw a real improvement here 10 soldiers per season don’t sound that much. Most people will aquire many times more soldiers during a season by going through the campaign of their choice. The cost of additionally change an appearance is 30 gold per order btw so roughly 600 gold per soldier which is an equivalent to a whopping 6€. I guess everyone has to decide for himself if that’s an appropriate amount of BP orders for him now (40 changed faces per season aint bad) but the general cost to change a soldier feels extreme.
Suggested Solution Change the price from 6€ to 1€ per soldier by reducing the requirement of orders by half (while keeping the 200 orders) and adapting the gold price per order accordingly. I can’t see anyone spending 6€ per soldier and calling that investment reasonable or fair and my personal experience seems to be that after the introduction of the extremely overpriced new appearance system a lot of people simply have given up on caring about the look of their soldiers. So Gaijin could actually make more money by introducing reasonable prices where people actually begin to think if it’s a worthy investment instead of asking for absurd prices that barely anyone is willing to pay.
Order income is still so low that this game feels like work and not fun. Bronze order income should be tripled and selling weapons/soldiers give you 100% of the orders back. Silver order income is almost fine but the amount of bad soldier rolls is absurd, making you waste an enormeous amount of silver order troops if you want to pull soldiers that are worth the investment of bronze orders into. Soldier appearance orders amount is much better but could still easily be doubled for paying customers while the cost to get additional orders via gold are completely out of this world (6€ per soldier). In my opinion anyone who pays for BP, Premium Account and Campaign Pass should earn enough orders to not having to worry about spending orders to level his troops if he plays on a regular basis.