There was a presentation about Battlefield Heroes that connected forum people who complained about F2P and pay-to-win with those who actually paid money, and found that the people who complained the most about “wallet warriors” spent a disproportionately high amount of money in the game.
If World of Tanks was a 1v1 or 3v3 game, the concern about individual tanks would be more relevant to a pay-to-win discussion, but 15v15 dilutes the impact of individual tanks a bit. And as someone who mostly plays in the Tier 5 range, I’ve never personally experienced this super M4 problem (particularly in my LOL slow AT2, which has taken 50 shots in a match before). Is this on European servers?
Heh, I’m not all surprised that the whiners are really closet wallet warriors, that would fit.
The derp M4 thing is definitely big on the US server, too. It has to do with the combination of HEAT rounds being overpowered in their ability to penetrate tanks well above their tier (and do a lot of damage) and their easy availability for credits now that gold ammo doesn’t actually have to be purchased with gold. You see platoons of M4 derps (the 105mm howitzer armament) running around one-shotting things when they are in an on-tier match. It’s a form of seal clubbing and great for stat padding. It will supposedly get better with 8.6 for a variety of reasons, including increased cost for premium ammo and a decrease in HEAT effectiveness, but we’ll see. The problem arises from giving a fairly balanced Tier V medium like the M4 a gun that outclasses, in alpha damage, most everything else, while doing nothing to diminish the tank’s mobility and flexibility. Of course, because it’s FOTM you get an awful lot of very bad players going the derp route, and while they will get a few point-blank kills (the thing is not very accurate at range) they will routinely get demolished by even Tier IIIs sometimes.
As for 1v1 or 3v3 or 15v15, yeah, it’s not like a duel or anything. Players can carry teams, if they’re in a top-tier tank of the right sort; often, a great player in a mediocre tank is far, far more important than a crappy player in a great tank. And crews play a huge role–most bad players, regardless of which tanks they have, don’t have top-flight crews with the right skills, and they often lack the right modules as well. And premium tanks are generally not game-changers anyhow; they’re either balanced but unremarkable, or they are skewed heavily in one dimension or another. What is true is that often they have killer crews because you can use premium tanks to train your Clan War crews. I put my Patton crew in my beta M4 premium, my Soviet TD crew in my SU-122-44, and my IS-7 crew in my Churchill, for instance. Also, Type 59s, because they came out a long time ago, are not for sale any longer, and until last patch had no Chinese tanks to put crews into, are universally full of crack crews, if the player has played the tank at all. So, most Lowe crews you see from good players are really E-100 or Maus crews, most IS-6 crews are IS-7/IS-4 crews, etc.
It’s not really a huge problem, depends how you look at it. As with anything, majority of the players are either bad or mediocre and can’t drive even overpowered tanks (they do become fairly useful to their teams while driving them though). Plus most people don’t really read forums and they form their opinions about tanks based on those stupid “So how’s the T-50?” questions in the beginning of a fight. :) I’ve seen countless M4s and Hetzers driving around with “regular” guns (as opposed to the 105) and I’ve seen countless M4s and Hetzers with very mediocre stats.
However, when you see either of those tanks with with 4-8 kills or a platoon of them with 8-12 kills or you see >65% win ratio on them, you can bet those players know which gun to use. :) And you can bet they get this kind of numbers most of their games.
It’s always been like that with any overpowered tank in WoT history, like VK36 with Konisch gun that was nerfed a few patches ago - not that many people take advantage of them. Only now it’s much easier since you can buy gold ammo with silver.
And yes, the 8.6 patch will help a bit with this particular issue, since 105 HEAT rounds will have their penetration reduced from 150 to 101 or so. And their price will go up. It will be harder to one shot heavies in a frontal attack, so maybe it won’t be as effective, I don’t know, we’ll see.
As for your AT-2, next time you lose 90% of your health from one side shot, you’ll know why. :)
New CW campaign started yesterday. Have you guys participated? What did you think?
I played several games and found them to be a lot of fun, I have never seen such tense tier 1 matches. :) I think this kind of format should help smaller clans to get into CW, what was your experience?
My clan got into top 5 after day 1, which was kinda surprising.
We ran a bunch of battles, but failed to take any land. We had good participation, and I agree the battles were really engaging, but we ran into rather tough opposition eventually and were not able to close the deal.
As for getting smaller clans into the mix, the jury is out. Pretty much every attempt Wargaming makes to rein in the megaclans falls flat, because it runs into their prime directive of milking the playerbase for as much money as possible. Even in the Landlord campaign now, the big clans were dispensing gold so that every Tier I tank was outfitted with 100% crews, enhanced gunlaying drives (possibly swapped in from other tanks), etc. Hell, even my clan payed for the gold cost to swap equipment around. Richer clans paid for people to swap in their elite light tank crews with multiple skills as well. So if you look at the standings for the NA server today, it’s the same cast of characters mostly.
And of course Wargaming screwed up the times and has been a fountain of poorly explained and inconsistently transmitted information. But yeah, overall, it’s a neat diversion indeed.
I don’t know, my clan did not dispense any gold and did not require stuff like 100% crews, etc. Most of my clanmates (including myself) simply bought a tank, threw in some modules that were laying around (I had toolbox, net and the laying drive, pretty ridiculous setup for a T1 tank :)) and stuck some crew from another tank in there. I was driving my T1 with the crew from my T71 without re-training them, so they were at 75%. We didn’t use gold ammo either, that would be too expensive for these machine guns at 2g per round IIRC.
I don’t know how we are going to run it in the future phases but we definitely didn’t bother with creating uber tier 1 tanks. At these levels, there is not much point.
I know it’s common (and kind of true to an extend for regular CWs, less so with gold ammo for credits now) to say “rich clans win everything” (lol, back to our pay-to-win discussion) but, at least in this 1st round of this campaign, that wasn’t the case. IMO, more than anything else, tactics won this round.
Well, tactics plus gold–I don’t think we ran into a single tank not firing gold. A T1 Cunningham with a full load of gold ammo means $144k in credits, but you’re not likely to fire that much in a single game. Tactics, yeah, I can see that–we had zero practice time and our tactics consisted of moving as blobs and trying to focus fire. We won against lesser foes but running into Relic and UF, et al, we got beat by their combos of snipers backing up their blobs; we didn’t coordinate very well. Part of it, too, is that we rotate people so as many as possible get game time, rather than building cohesive teams that work together. It’s an approach I endorse because we’re a semi-casual clan, but it does show on the field sometimes.
Yeah, when we ran into Relic and Crabs, we had to assemble the best teams we could but other than that our teams were usually built based on who played the least games in that day (to give people an opportunity to play 5 games to become eligible for the T10 Patton in case we win it). We haven’t used gold ammo and I don’t think there was much sense in gold, since all the tanks’ average “silver” penetration exceeds the armor anyway. Well, maybe it made a little bit sense for the “snipers” due to distance (even then, MS-1’s gun has regular pen 56 while all the tanks have 18 mm of armor max) but certainly not for T1, whose distance is limited to 299 m anyway and the gun has pretty comfortable 30 mm penetration. Hehe, accuracy is more of an issue than penetration. :)
What I do see happening is all the diplomacy all over again. I guess it’s a part of the game but old CW alliances are working together again to eliminate “independent” clans, which usually means smaller clans. I don’t know much of WOT diplomacy though, maybe there is a way for a smaller clan to find allies.
It’s certainly been fun so far, nice diversion from the regular established T10 setup. I am guessing it will get even more interesting later on when with more tanks to choose from. The overpowered “same tier” arty concerns me a bit though, matches will probably turn into arty duels when Hummels will be one-shotting all the KV-1S’s.
Woot, my clan ended up the 4th in Stage 1 of the campaign and we’ll be getting the new M60 tank! :)
In other news, patch 8.6 has been released in Russia this past Tuesday. People are reporting that accuracy increase is very noticeable, even maybe too much so but it’s too early to tell. Can’t wait to try it out! Doesn’t look like it will be released here today, probably early next week.
Re the gold round / derp stuff. I notice mostly when I am playing something that is normally an armored beast for its tier. Like that horrible French light, the Duck. The real name escapes me at the moment. But normally it will bounce everything, and that’s basically it’s one saving grace. Any of the Derps shooting gold will one shot it easily. So Hetzer or M4 or PzIV (that’s derping) will just make the thing explode. That’s when it’s annoying, when you’re playing a tank that piles on armor to the detriment of its other stats, only to find that someone can circumvent that completely with relatively cheap gold rounds. (for premium users anyway)
8.6 is supposedly an attempt to address this (among other stuff, of course) with increased costs for sprem ammo and reduced pen I think for 105mm derps. But Wargaming has clearly and deliberately built the game around a weird sort of balance that requires premium ammo for some tanks–the T69, for instance, is crap without firing gold ammo, when it becomes pretty amazing. I like the game, but I think it’s safe to assume that every decision the devs make is based first and foremost on milking money from the customers, and only secondarily on any more abstract considerations of game balance or design. Once you accept that, and the game for what it is, it gets a lot less annoying.
In re the current clan wars campaign, my clan sort of tanked (hah hah); we had five or six lands and poof, we’re pulling off the map tonight with none to start over tomorrow. We simply couldn’t compete with the NTRs of the world who could field multiple A teams simultaneously. And, as a more casual or casual/serious hybrid clan, our level of prep was simply not up to task. We got smoked in one match by NTR when they had nine tanks, one of which was a Tier 1…this was in a Tier 5 match I think. We are generally quite decent in normal CW, but this campaign has exposed some structural weaknesses we have. The M60 is looking sorta out of reach now.
I dunno–it’s just too abstract for me–just the menus and matches. I need the illusion of actual places to move between and an avatar/character I guess.
I didn’t have much time to test it out yet, only played a few games. So far I am loving the increased accuracy change, although it works both ways and it would kinda sucks to be on the receiving end of it. :) I looked at some “after battle” stats and people on average seem to be missing as much as they used to. Hopefully it will be the change that rewards good players for aiming carefully but still punish bad players for auto-targeting and shooting at full speed.
To me accuracy increase seems to be noticeable but doesn’t result in “no need to fully aim anymore” like the whiners on the official forum make it look.
We’ll see. Developers mentioned that their stats show that hit ratio on average increased by only 5% so far. It’s a good sign.
Too early to say anything about arty - I still get hit by it, maybe a bit less than I used to. I haven’t played one yet but I still see plenty of it in games. Russian servers, after a week, definitely see decrease in numbers of arty per fight, which is IMO a good thing. Maybe I’ll start playing my tier 10 tanks again.
Mostly I’d agree with the assessments above. I hate the new sounds; while the sound mixing and other technical aspects seem much improved, the actual sounds are crappy. Getting hit by a large-caliber cannon sounds like you were swatted with a rolled up newspaper. And everything else is sort of muted. Ugh. The “Critical hit!” exclamation accompanied by no discernible effect on the enemy is back with a vengeance as well. Other than that, though, I like the “feel” of the game better now.
Ha. I just discovered the Camo Net add-on module. All of a sudden, I’m getting 1 or 2 or 3 kills per game rather than none, and I’m surviving more often than not. I feel like such a noob.
