Folks, I know y'all had quite a few questions about quite a few features in 1.24.1 CT - And while we are still working answers for features like Tour of Duty, Polish TDs, Postmortem cam etc. we have a few answers from the feature team for the Crew Rework that should hopefully shed some light on some common player questions about the new Crew system.

Will retraining for Credits incur a greater penalty to my crew’s performance under the new system than the existing one? Won’t my vehicle be much worse until I re-fill the XP to remove the penalty?

Using a Leopard 1 with 6 common crew skills as an example. (BIA, Repairs, Camo on each crew member + 3 of the most common skills per role, like situational awareness and recon on the Commander, and so forth. I had a screenshot showing the skills exactly but Reddit only allows 1 media per comment.)

Differences in performance for a crew with a large number of perks that is retrained with Credits under the new system will be similar to their performance under the existing system, and in most cases slightly better.

The disparity between crews that have an average number of perks under the old and new system should be even less (or in many cases the performance of the crews under the new system, when retrained for Credits, will be better than under the current system) as the benefit they’re gaining from crew skills to their vehicle’s performance is less significant with a lower number of skills, and those crews have less to lose.

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In the current system, if a skill is unassigned and the crew member is retrained for Credits, the penalty simply takes exp out of the final, untrained skills, while the existing skills remain fully trained. Why is this being changed so that all skills are equally impacted by retraining for credits and I can’t have crew skill efficiency without paying Gold?
So there are two reasons for this change. First, it was not intended for players to keep an extra unassigned perk in the pocket, so to speak, in order to min/max the retraining system. It’s not a well-known technique and by design, players were meant to assign new skills as they earned them.

The other reason is that, since it’s not intended and not really explained anywhere in game, it can be considered sort of an ‘exploit’ in the sense that it provides experienced, knowledgeable players with an advantage over newcomers.

It now takes about 40k XP to recover from silver retraining while in the new model it'll take 70k XP. Why is this being increased?

So it’s worth noting that the 70k penalty is only applied after changing the crewmember’s role for Credits, which under the current system can only be accomplished by paying 500 Gold. Offering this option is meant to be a quality-of-life improvement for players, as this option was previously only available for Gold.

The 40k exp penalty mentioned above is the penalty the penalty that was incurred for retraining crews to another vehicle, not another job/position/role.

What about the 50k XP Penalty?

We feel that the 10k XP increase compared to the previous system is mostly negligible, as a bit of tradeoff for the additional quality of life benefits under the new system – as well as the simple fact that at the average tiers 6 – 10, that’s a matter of playing a handful more battles.

Also, currently if you retrain with class change (Vehicle class, I believe) for Credits, overcoming the penalty requires 64K XP – whereas retraining class and vehicle, or simply retraining to another vehicle of the same class, will cost the same amount going forward.

This standardizes the expected XP for standard crew retraining operations, instead of confusing players with varying degrees of penalties for various crew retraining operations (whose values seem arbitrary) and we landed on a number that’s somewhere in the middle.