3441

Some interesting changes coming to the game that should make it both more clan and solo friendly.
http://www.gamersdailynews.com/articlenav-2924-page-1.html

3442

Rammer, vent (you will notice), and I grabbed the spall liner because Tiger 2’s are juicy arty targets. That or a wet ammo rack, they seem to be fire prone now.

3443

See the difference is that in a High Tier match the Panzer3 can flip into scouting mode and do perfectly fine since its quite quick. The Lee is pretty much locked into fighting cause its so slow. When it gets thrown into crazy crap it can try to slowly scout and get one shotted or throw HE at things and then get one shotted.

3444

Mine has:

Vertical Stabilizer
Rammer
Binoculars

I can’t remember the last time I used Spall Liner on any vehicle, even counting beta. It just doesn’t do enough to warrant the use of an incredibly precious equipment slot.

3445

What I find most interesting in what they report are the comments from the Wargamer.net people about the differences between the Russian and North American player bases. The idea that Russian players view Premium account holders with respect for having the dedication/resources to pay to play, while Americans resent the “wallet warriors” is rather intriguing. I wonder how much game balance and “grinding” issues differ across the player bases, as well?

3446

Dude, it’s been explained many times and yet you re-post your numbers again and again. In that post you are talking about driving SU-5 and A-20, arty and a scout. These kind of tanks are in a group of its own and do get matched against much higher tier enemies more often. On purpose. You will NEVER be on top of the list in a SU-5. EVER. Adding this kind of vehicles to any statistics just invalidates your numbers.

It’s like counting the numbers of hot days in December in Canada and then complaining that Canada NEVER gets hot days.

Also I find it funny when people say stuff like this:

Now, the other part I find frustrating is that I had this same experience when playing T3’s…because you’re matched against KV’s at T5, so I thought…hey I’ll just grind to T5 , but holy shit, T5 is so much worse than T3 because I’ll be grinding for weeks to get to T7 because of the research costs.

You know what, every time you are at the bottom, someone is at the top. Just as every time you lose someone else wins. It makes zero sense to complain that when you are in T-46. KV’s are always on top but when you are in a KV, IS-3’s are always on top. You are contradicting yourself.

Unless the game is specifically designed to screw with you personally.

3447

Excellent point. It seems western audiences have this sense of entitlement where they demand everything for free and abuse anyone that actually pays for the game. It gets tiring constantly copping abuse simply because you are driving a premium tank or you choose to use premium items and god forbid you’re actually supporting the developers.

It’s ironic considering western audiences have the greater means to actually pay for the game.

3448

There is a really crappy culture among north american players of F2P games. I’m pretty sure this is what killed Company of Heroes Online. The player base would constantly mock anyone who bought items you could only buy with real money (because the items each player was using show during the loading screen and they could tell).

3449

Interesting. I kind of suspected something like this, but really hadn’t paid much attention. I know that when it involves buying gold in traditional MMOs, or even when companies have introduced legal ways of buying in-game advantages, people have howled about it. I wasn’t aware though that people playing F2P games got that bent out of shape as well. I can understand it from one angle, I guess, particularly in the case of gold buying, but do people really think “free to play” means the developers are doing this out of the goodness of their souls? TANSTAAFL, people.

Now, I started WoT in release firmly committed to spending not one dime. Erm, I relented, though I haven’t invested much; I figured I enjoyed the game as free, and enjoyed it a bit more paying a pittance here and there to grease the rails. Given that that’s how the game is designed, it seems odd to complain about it.

Then again, a lot of people seem to accompany losing their tank with an often obscene tirade in chat alleging one or more of the following: cheating, hacking, bad matchmaking, geometry glitch, spotting failure, inept teammate, or my favorite, wallet warrior using premium ammo. In other words, hey, in the absence of diabolical intervention, I always win. If I lose, ergo ipso facto, it must be devils!

3450

I think if WoT had used a standard monthly subscription scheme they would be earning far less money than the current F2P model.

3451

I’d agree; there’s something very tempting and easy to swallow about “just a few bucks here and there” especially when it’s tied directly to results–converting experience, getting the credits for that next upgrade, buying a slot in the barracks, etc.

3452

In COHO’s case it wasn’t even truly in-game advantages in most cases. I only spent $20 and some of that was left on the table when they shut down, but most of what I spent was on ability respecs. They had a system like WoT or LoL where there is a currency earned in game and a currency you pay real money for. Each commander character could equip a number of hero units and also up to eight ‘cards’ which would have things ranging from passive accuracy or speed bonuses for a unit type to having your base buildings equipped with defensive machine guns for free. All of these could be bought with either type of currency. The only things that required real money were cards that would speed the gaining of experience for your commander character or speed the gaining of the game-earned currency. Equipping them would actually make you weaker in battle because one of those cards would take up one of your eight unit enhancement card slots. But god forbid you had one equipped because everyone would call you a wallet warrior who buys your wins (as if that somehow even made sense)

League of Legends’s community is not as bad in this regard (though it’s bad in other ways). You occasionally get people who ridicule you for spending money on champions instead of earning the in game currency to buy, but honestly I think a lot of those folks are probably too young to have jobs so they are just lashing out. I’ve put over $200 into LoL and I think $80 into WoT. I don’t mind giving back to developers who make something I enjoy, and since I’m at a point in my life where I tend to have a lot less free time, throwing $20 here and there instead of spending a month earning LoL IP makes sense to me.

3453

They’re not my figures; they’re Tman’s. You undoubtedly have a good point about some tank choices skewing his figures, but you really don’t have a good idea of what his whole sample was; perhaps he could clarify. At any rate the figures do match up with my experience of being very dissatisfied with matchmaking since around the time of the Lowe patch.

I’m not saying anybody else should stop playing the game; I stopped because the matchmaking is broken as far as I can tell.

3454

I frequent Russian WoT boards to read dev posts or some tank discussions, etc. and I must say that I have never seen their equivalent to “wallet warriors” expression being used.

Not many complaints about the game being grindy either.

Game balance, however, is being discussed all the time. From matchmaker to spotting issues to OP/UP tanks, etc.

3455

For LoL, its certainly less of an issue, as the skins don’t affect gameplay in anyway. Ninety-nine percent of the time, when someone whips out a skin, all you’ll hear in chat is, “Cool Skin”.

For WoT, part of the problem is that certain premium tanks are a bit OP – or at least get thrown into matches with tanks three tiers less than them. I hate fighting the Lowe, damn thing just doesn’t die. But my highest tier is only six, and I think the Lowe is 8? And I regularly run into them with my KV at tier 5. I’ve never felt the need to berate anyone for buying one though.

I could also understand people being annoyed who worked up to tier 8 on their own, and then have to deal with all these players who started with a Lowe but don’t have all the experience of playing the game and run around clueless like the low tiers.

And yes, F2P games I think will always end up making more, as it gets certain personalities and grabs hold of them hard. Look at that DragonAge Facebook game, I think Foxstab spent over two hundred dollars on it.

Edit: My problem with COHO, and why I never even bothered, is I already have CoH, i didn’t see enough new to bother trying the beta, and COHO seemed to emphasize all the things I dislike, like hero units.

3456

Ok, here’s a question, and it’s a sincere one, as I’m open to a variety of views on the matchmaking issue–what would constitute “good” matchmaking? Is it a matter of tiers, of capabilities, of “fairness?” What constitutes a fair match? Given the inherent disparities between heavies, mediums, lights, TDs, and SPGs, how would you, if you were King of the Tanks, balance things?

The more I think about it, the more I wonder whether there is any balanced system of matchmaking that would appeal to everyone. Is it better to generally piss off everyone, but at for most folks a relatively low level, or royally screw 20% of the population–that would then quit–but make the other 80% pretty happy? Or is there some happy medium?

3457

It’s not easy, I feel like i’m in a good match when I’m within two tiers of everyone (even better if i’m within one tier of everyone), and the number of heavies/mediums/tds/spgs is roughly the same. I don’t mind the occasional oddball match with more mediums or tds on one side or whatever though. It’s the why the fuck am i here matches that bug me, where I am three tiers below the majority of tanks in the match, and I’m a heavy, so scouting is out of the question, all i get to do is plink at stuff and laugh as everyone targets me first since I die easily.

3458

This may be true, but the only “wallet warrior” complaints I have seen in-game relate to the overabundance of Lowes. And there is indeed an overabundance of Lowes and KV-5s. I think it has messed up the population distribution, and is not good for the game.

Personally, I’m all for supporting WoT, which (despite it’s obvious flaws) has been a source of enjoyment for me that has justified my Premium account. But my least pleasant games so far have been in the M6, and I think the reason is because the overabundance of Lowes puts me at the bottom of matches far more often than at the top. I have a much better record in my T1 Heavy, and the reason for that may be due to the fact that the T1 is not typically placed in games involving Tier 8 heavies.

3459

The whole sample doesn’t matter, if the matchmaking data includes SU-5 and A-20 (vehicles with completely separate matchmaking rules) together with “regular” vehicles, it disqualifies the entire dataset as you can’t really come to any conclusions based on the mish-mash data.

I could claim that 90% of my games I am in top 5 and “forget” to mention that vast majority of the time I am playing IS-3, with KV-1S and Stug thrown in here and there.

([edit] I re-read your post and I think your point was that maybe Tman didn’t include SU-5 and A-20 into his sample? But then why would he state in that very post that’s those are the vehicles he is driving atm?)

There are more problems with his data - for example, the way he breaks down the placement into 5 groups (1-3, 4-6, 7-8, 9-12, 13-15).

  • Why the middle group includes only 2 positions and the next one includes 4? To inflate the numbers related to lower positions?
  • What does alphabetical placement on the list have to do with balance? On my IS-3, for example, I am quite often placed in 5-6 position but only because there are 4-5 tanks of the same tier above me alphabetically. Or the other way around when bottom 5 tanks are of the same tier.
  • If some arty is placed in the 12th position, pushing me into the 13th, what does it matter? Am I somehow in a worse position than the same tier tank that’s been placed above the arty?

A more correct way to gather statistics would be to count tier differential. Because that’s what we are interested in, right? Not some arbitrary position on some arbitrary list. Are you 0, -1, -2, -3 or -4 to the top tier tank? Do it for 100 matches on the same tank, summarize, divide by 100 and look at the result. If it’s 3.5 then yeah, the game is fucking with you.

And make sure all your 100 matches are played in a similar “environment”. You have to compare apples to apples and games played on Saturday afternoon when 5x exp promotion is going on are going to be quite different from the games played at 2 am on Wednesday.

And do it within reasonable time - if it takes you a month to play these 100 games, your earlier results are too old and can’t be compared with the recent results (maybe they are tweaking the matchmaker?).

And then do it for every tier and every class. Because who knows, maybe the matchmaker is screwed up for tier 3 but works fine for tier 4.

And even then your analysis would be of so-so reliability because the sample is too small and the outside parameters are not defined and not fixed.

Statistics is a funny science. It’s hard enough to analyze the data that you do have (like the WoT devs do), it’s a million times harder to come up with reliable data to perform some “homemade” statistics analysis.

3460

This is just silly. You’ve actually got some really good criticisms buried in there, but their impact is lost when you’re overarching point is basically: “It’s impossible to know anything about the game unless you know everything about the game!”

Statistics is a funny science, but that doesn’t mean that you can hand-wave away month old data because it’s not fresh enough, while simultaneously mocking a small sample size. That’s basically denying the legitimacy of any form of statistical sample.