War Thunder is an enigma. Personally I love it.

I only play the sim mode. Its extremely slow, the economy is fucked, and the learning curve is steep and the skill ceiling is incredibly high.

You think to yourself "why do I play this", until you see a little dot 3 quadrants away, you decide "maybe this is a baddie". You start to climb, as you're flying an American war bird. This thing cant turn fight, the guns are okay, but shit you're not gonna play as germany or japan in a WWII era fight, and you already have all these planes on the American tree because you really wanted to fly a P51 4 years ago. You could try to build up the USSR tree but the grind is hell. You need to climb because your only advantage against a Japanese Ki or a German BF-109 is in the energy your bird can maintain in a dive and climb. The second you enter a turn fight, you're done.

You've been climbing for about 5 minutes now, you're chilling at 10-15k feet, managing your engines to balance maintaining speed and keeping them cool enough so when you go full throttle in the heat of it, your engines don't blow up. Finally that dot starts to look like a plane. You hit your preset team comms, "T-2-4", a silly little pilot voice shouts "Follow me!" and your location is displayed to your team. You hope and beg you're flying with some more experienced players. Shortly after, the pings return from your team, "follow me, on me, on me, follow me!". You check your map, none of your teams pings are in that zone so you figure you've been chasing either a noob teammate or an actual baddie.

The small plane shape becomes more defined, you pitch your plane to the side, look past the wing, and zoom in to try to identify the plane. You see that damn black and white cross on the wings and you know its on. You do your best to maintain visuals as you level out and turn to line up your shot. You're hoping and begging this wont end up like last time where you overshot at 450 mph and try to climb out, only for that yellow nosed devil to snipe you in a barrage of cannon fire.

You've lined it up, you're about 2k feet above him and he has no idea you're there. You start your dive, roll back the throttle, adjust your trim. At this moment you cant remember if you set your targeting range to 250 or 300M, the guns on your wings are useless if the rounds don't converge, you decide not to think about it. The bastard is coming up fast and you have him in your sights, now you just need to lift the nose to blindly lead the shot as the 109 rests somewhere in the wake if your nose. You carefully squeeze the trigger of your cheapshit logitech extreme, trying not to spaz out and flick the stick off target.

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ping

the lower right of your screen reports heavy fuselage damage, you lower your nose and you see a burning husk still clinging to life, you have to roll quick to avoid hitting it.

...

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.. ping

you see you got the kill. You've been flying this goddamn plane in a mostly empty, insanely large map for an hour. you got your fucking kill. You check the leaderboard and confirm it was a player and not an AI. You're on top of the world. You begin your turn back to the airfield to refuel and get the landing bonus. Staying alive in this game garners the best rewards in this unforgiving freemium economy. You let yourself relax.

...

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bam

you're on fire, you're suddenly in third person, "press J to eject".

You press it, you don't want to watch your plane hit the ground, it hurts to much, you're now losing money on this game. Do you try again? get back in the air? or do you leave the match and take a break. The match lasts for three hours, its designed to pop in and out of the game, there's no shame.