Heh, we went round and round on these things a year or more ago; we’re not going to change each other’s minds I don’t think.
It’s not the same as a fantasy MMO in terms of nerf/buff, though. I find that any game that tries to meld historical/simulation aspects with arcade/competitive gameplay is gong to have issues, necessarily. I mean, if WoT was World of Hovercraft, or Mechs, no one would care about pen values, dispersion, etc., because with fictional weapon systems, no one knows but the game designers. But with WWII stuff, I damn well do know (and have a shelf of books and reports on) the penetration values, armor values, dispersion, etc. of pretty much every weapon used in armored vehicles from the 1920s to the 1950s and beyond. So, when they change stuff, it immediately runs into a cognitive dissonance zone that’s hard to get out of unless you really try to suspend disbelief. Not a big issue overall, but Wargaming persists in trying to have it both ways. They want you to revel in their historical accuracy and modeling, but also they want you to have a stable of competitive tanks where none of them is demonstrably better than any other at the same point on the power curve.
Ditto with the amazing array of tanks. Sure, it’s really fun to explore the tech trees in a way, but eventually you realize that to make that many tanks, they have to homogenize them to the point that you lose much of the individuality of the vehicles. “Balance” is essential for a game, but again, using real-world analogues means that you are trying to balance things that were never balanced in that gamey sort of way; the game does not simulate all the stuff tanks had to do and the needs they had to fill, nor the constraints on production and logistics that governed their design. Ergo, from the get-go you have a fundamentally impossible balance situation, unless you do what they have to do, which is homogenize and nerf/ buff.
As for mechanics, spotting is wonky and illogical IMO. Accuracy is bogus and while it “works” in game play terms, it’s neither intuitive nor satisfying to the player. Arty is a fantasy and just weird. Weight systems are absent almost entirely–most of the bridges in the game would collapse under the weight of all that armor. This alone makes the physics mechanics bizarre in my book. None of this matters in terms of pure game play, independent of anything else, but again, put in the context of real-world stuff that many of us not only know something about but have spent many years studying, and (perhaps unfairly) it sets up a barrier to enjoyment.
Cynicism? The way things are marketed, the pricing, the on again/off again availability of certain premiums, the cultivation of envy with rewards, the Clan Wars systems apparently designed to make clans fight each other more than the enemy–yes, I find Wargaming overwhelming cynical. It’s not as bad with Warships, not by a long shot; the different team and different player base makes a huge difference.
Chat? Sure, you can turn it off. But in a relatively slow paced (compared to a shooter) online game, and a team game to boot, chat is important. The fact that you have to turn it off is, to me, a negative. No chat also detracts from the (occasional and rare) team work with strangers, and while I played a lot with clans and voice chat, I also play at odd hours and want to be able to interact, civilly, with strangers. XVM and the lust for blue and purple makes that nearly impossible; even a green player gets called a shitlord each and every game it seems. And no, Warships doesn’t have this problem to anywhere near the same extent.
Is it fun? Yeah, sure. Once in a blue moon I log in. I have a shit-ton of tanks and still like the basic gameplay. But I have to totally disconnect myself from nearly all of the things that kept me going for nearly 30000 battles, because none of that --progression, competition, community–works for me there any more.
But YMMV.
