Simmer's wet dream is a complete misnomer for this one. Though it might one day be pretty fun if they implement the World War dynamic campaign feature well, I have serious doubts that this will ever be a proper sim. At the moment, people are giving it leeway because the flight models are incomplete. The reality of the situation is however that most of them are incomplete. The game features several planes with their FMs finished. One such aircraft is the BF 109 E-3. Flying on the "historical mode" (yeah right, I'll get to that in a bit) it feels ridiculous. Almost impossible to stall, turns like a champ while barely burning energy. There's very little feedback for your aircraft achieving unacceptable levels of angle of attack or too many G's, aside from a big red blinking message that says "OVERLOAD!" if you pull too many G's...not that I've ever actually managed to damage my plane going at 700 KM/H+ in this supposedly completely flight model. The controls would be fairly unresponsive at that point in an early 109. The weaponry is also modeled pretty poorly at the moment, not just in the above mentioned absurd power of the Mark Vc Spit, but in the ballistics; cannons are fuckin laser beams. Maybe they'll fix that, maybe not. Moving on.
I fly historical mode most of the time because arcade mode is mostly retarded (has a freaking dot telling you where to aim lawl). But even historical mode, which uses "realistic" settings, has a minimap, giant icons showing you where everything including ground targets are, an open cockpit so you don't have to see your cockpit or wings, and once again the flight model even on completely planes is silly. The potential of historical mode was that you're tasked with destroying enemy ground targets so that your forces may either repel an enemy attack, or attack the enemy successfully. Friendly tanks will rush enemy positions and based on whether or not you've done a good job, win or lose. The problem here is that typically a historical map is 10v10, planewise, and once the enemy loses all of its planes the other side automatically wins regardless of the state of the ground battle. How well the bombers did becomes moot. What this translates to in practice is that unless your entire team consists mainly of bombers, winning through destruction of ground targets is highly improbable. I've only seen it happen twice. More likely, the game is simply air Counterstrike, where you win by annihilating the enemy team. This demonstrates the gamism, rather than simulationism of War Thunder. The irony is that arcade mode is typically won by doing the objectives rather than killing the enemy because you can respawn in different planes.
Further, the playerbase appears to be largely shit. Most everyone plays arcade which is fucking pathetic. And the people who do play historical have almost no flying sense. They don't attempt to gain altitude with fighters of any kind, allowing me even in a piece of shit plane to choose when and where I want to fight, with hilarious consequences. In a Soviet I-16, I have killed a FW-190 D-13. In a 109 E-3, I've destroyed an La-7. These are but two examples of people being stupid as fuck because they probably haven't played a sim before. It happens alot. Although, that's somewhat positive beacuse it means higher tiered planes don't mean an automatic win...but really, taken altogether, it's quite silly. I hope it improves.
