WG's Reward Crew Nerfs: Jason Statham Commander & the Zero Skill Debate
EDIT: I am sorry I did not research the past Holiday Ops commanders properly. I remember Vinnie coming with fire extinguishing and either repairs or BiA, so only of those must have been a zero skill. So please just ignore the parts of my post which concern the Holiday Ops commanders, but the point about WG giving out fewer zero skill crews still stands.
In the recent WoT monthly video we can see a picture of Jason Statham as a commander and the skills he is going to come with. It seems like he's only going to come with BiA pretrained (that I assume is going to be a zero skill, but that is just my assumption, so it could still be even worse that I think).
Holiday Ops commanders in the past used to come with two zero skills, look at Vinnie. This is therefore a continuation of nerfing of rewards crews and their skills. For example, during the Waffenträger event, the reward crew did not come with any zero skill. Even the CC commanders that WG offered for 5k gold a piece (!) did not come with any zero skills. The Babylon Project also did not provide any zero skill crew. The only exception was the most recent Vikings Battle Pass chapter, where the crew that came with Felice was a zero skill crew, but I suspect that someone at WG just forgot that they aren't doing that anymore.
I also distinctly remember that last year sometime around this time of the year there were Twitch drops where you could get 2 CC commanders for free, and they had zero skill BiA and enough XP for 2 extra skills. This year from the WoT monthly video it seems that we will be able to get only their skins - not even a commander, just a skin (although that was just mentioned briefly in the video, it could turn out differently, we will see.)
This has been happening ever since the crew perks rework. WG seems to think that getting a 6 skill crew is a breeze now and zero skills have to be given out more rarely. I had hoped that WG would at least leave the Holiday Ops crew unchanged, since it's the most profitable time of the year for them, but they evidently decided that getting one commander with 2 zero skills a year was too much.
Well I do not know how about you guys, but I have 45k battles and none of my crews has full 6 skills trained, let alone more. It still takes a lot of time and battles to train such a crew.
I am really curious to see whether the Santa's maidens that we usually get during the Holiday Ops for progressing through the Winter Atmosphere levels will come with zero skill as they always have or whether they are going to be nerfed as well. Although with the recent trend in reward crews that WG has maintained since the rework, bar the Felice exception, I am afraid they will not come with a zero skill.
It bothers me because towards the 6th skill it makes such a difference whether the crew member has a zero skill or not - it is either 3 million XP or 6 million crew XP, huge. I also don't like to play tanks that have regular crews, because it simply just takes double the time to get the crew competitive and I feel like I am not getting the most out of my time. I hope that if we speak out about this WG could change things, although it's of course very improbable.
What do you guys think? Does this bother you as well or am I just overreacting at stuff that does not matter that much and I should go touch grass outside? (I definitely should)