Crew 2.0 Feedback Thread – by Lightning

Hello there,

first off, this is my review with my personal point of view, I looked for a Crew 2.0 megathread and I couldn't find one, so… I decided to make this post.

We are going to talk about old skill, new skills, instructors and conversion of old crews. Actually let's start with the conversion of the old crews

1 – The old becomes new with a magic trick from WG!

Ok first off, when you log on the sand box server you might notice some of your crews are missing, they are not gone, they are in reserve (old barraks). I got an heartache when my progetto crew seemed to be missing! They were chilling in the barracks.

I decide to call them from reserve, assign them to their progetto 65 and then the game suggest me to convert them into a new crew: the result would have been a level 80, specialist IV class crew. Not bad.

But then I thought about a great magic trick, what if i recall them from reserve to pilot the… Fiat 3000?! It's a two crew tank, I retrained them to be able to pilot the FIAT 3000, convert them and… again level 80 rank IV crew! But this time i used only two girls. I then recalled the other two girls, retrained, turned into a new crew, retrained for heavies and assigned to Rinoceronte.

Long story short, the real P2W no one is talking about it this, as long as you pull out your wallet by buying gold, you can double or triple your top crews, I can take my IS-7 crew that has 7 skills, retrain it for the MS-1 and create three insane crews, that I can retrain for nine tech tree vehicles.

That said, I spend a lot of money in this game, I don't mind, it's my money after all. And honestly I don't have many good crews, and probably a real veteran player with 10k gold should be done.

This is probably a move in the p2w direction, but no one force you to do that, you can convert them for free and keep the exact same number of crew you have now. Is WG greedy? Maybe, but it's not a charity company.

2 – Crew book don't teach an old dog new tricks

All my old crews became level 80, all of them. Crew books for veterans now are 100% useless, unless you plan to level up a new crew. And since I can do the trick I explained in point 1, I doubt I'll ever need new crews, ever. WG should allow players to sell crew books now.

3 – Super hero instructors!

All our old "special" crews became instructors: Chuck norris, Orzanel, Cobra Commander, Battlepass commanders etc became Valuable instructors, and other like the Christmas maidens or Dmitry Loza staff instructors.

You can now pick the nation of most of them, unless they are "hero of a nation" like Yuri Gagarin and Dmitry Loza can only be russian, and the skills, as long as they are of the same Certification, can be picked at your heart content but they cannot be resetted, ever.

WG doesn't want use to keep reusing the same instructors, reskilling them over and over, and this is the next P2W of this review: EPIC INSTRUCTORS!

Crew like the GIRL und Panzer, the Offspring and "the BOYS" from the netflix show became unique, nation specific instructors, all of them with +10 BiA, +10 Situational Awareness and +4 Covert Surveliance, no idea about the Sabatons, but I guess it's the same, but swedish.

Now this is brutally P2W, people can just buy the same tank over and over, they'll get gold compensation since they have the tank already, and get this OP instructor.

Also mind, four staff instructors give less bonuses than two valuable instructors, and way less than an EPIC instructor. So you plan to be competitive (ranked, clan war, strongholds, etc) you will have to buy to buy them. Or not. Up to you. Maybe you don't care of their skills, but… +10 BiA +10 Situational awareness… is huge.

So what can we take from here? WG wants to sell us EPIC instructors, and they wont move from this, it's the second time they showe them in our face, they wont move from this. They want to monetize the instructors.

4 – Your tank is more powerfull, but in a different way

What I noticed when converting the crew, is that the overall handling of them got better (example my 277 passed from 3128 dpm to 3333 dpm) but I lost a lot of skills that on live I was training out of boredom, like Camo. There are some skill that got translated 1:1 into the new sistem, like BiA which now works with a twist, your crew doesn't have to be wounded or stunned, other that got baked into one like situational awareness now also increase radio range, and new one that honestly I cannot imagine how they will impact our gaming.

Now this is where epic instructors become very P2W, if you use let's say the offspring crew, you have basically 20 points more to spend anywhere else, and instead of spending 10 points in BiA I can spend them let's say in Pain Threshold and prevent my crew from getting injured. And for an heavy tank, that could get farmed by arty, this is huge.

You have also new skills like Return Fire, where bouncing shells make your tank more precise (-15% dispersion on next shot) which honestly would make the game different and probably… faster?

All the tanks became more powerfull, more precise, better dpm and in this gold spam meta I can see the games become even faster than now.

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Closing and conclusion:

This system isn't really better or worse then the one we have now, it's different.

I can see new players have easier time getting on par with veterans since they are cutting the 50% crew, giving everybody Sixth Sense. Post level 80 progression require insane amount of Crew XP, and since you cannot use books but only Fexp, I doubt anyone will actually go ham and max out their crew via Fexp.

Btw to max out one of my level 80 crew I needed around 10mil Fexp, and assuming you want to convert your technical xp from your tanks you need 1gold per 5xp, and 1000 gold are 4.47 euro…. you need 8500 euro of gold. I doubt anyone is so mental to do that, and even then the benefit from doing so it's minimal. Not to mentions, I have 2.5 mil XP combined from all my tanks, so yeah you have also to farm 10 mil xp. It's not a P2W aspect, it's mental health warning.

Honestly I cannot be really negative about this iteration, I suspected WG wanted to monetize the instructors and now i've the confirmation with this sandbox. About the crew multiplication, well, I don't mind, since you are not forced to multiply them and you can get your very same crew at zero cost.

Sorry for the long post, and probably a ton of grammatical errors.