The matchmaking issues I think may well be a consequence of the whole basic game design, which pushes you to “level up” to higher tier tanks as the carrot driving the whole treadmill. There’s no incentive to master different tanks at different tiers, as there is no real benefit to playing your III/IV vice your Panther, say. There is absolutely no incentive to do anything but grind to a higher tier, preferably a heavy.
The other thing that contributes to the problems is the lack of positive differentiation between the types of tanks. They’ve in effect combined two types of leveling, tier and weight class. Instead of having parallel tiering for light, medium, and heavy tanks–where a Tier N tank of whatever class is equivalent to a Tier N tank of another class–you have a definite hierarchy of heavy>medium>light, with the rolloff at the latter end being most severe (lights are hopeless against pretty much everything beyond the lower tiers, in most cases). Now, played in a team-oriented fashion with a team-oriented focus, you can exploit the mobility of mediums, the scouting of lights, and the damage-absorbing abilities of heavies well enough, but the vast majority of matches are played out by people playing as individuals, and who think solely in terms of 1v1 matchups. In that case, heavies are hands-down the way to go (maybe, maybe, the best mediums can be equivalent, but in a Maus vs. T-54 battle my money is on the Maus).
The game doesn’t take into account how people actually play, but rather rumbles on assuming people will do something entirely different; at least that is how it appears to me. Heavy tanks have nearly no drawbacks; if history had played out WoT style, all the nations in WWII would have fielded nothing but heavies. In a game where spotting, damage, and communications are modeled as they are in WoT, mediums have nearly no definitive advantages over heavies, except as a matter of personal style. And without better spotting, terrain, mobility, and other factors, lights can’t be nearly as useful as they were historically. Etc.
The net result is a very fun game, in general, but one that has some very irritating issues. Matchmaking doesn’t bother me much, as you can still manage to get decent credits and experience even at the bottom of the list. Play smart, don’t expect too much, and give up on the idea of always being able to kill stuff yourself, and you can do ok. But I fully understand that that isn’t that fun for many folks–and yeah, it’s much more fun to one-shot things, or at least survive more than one shot.
I also don’t know how to solve this issue. The basic game design pretty much guarantees either inequities in matchmaking, or boring, monolithic matches, because the ultimate result will, after a period of time, be everyone owning high-tier heavies, while along the way the haves will be feeding on the have-nots.
