When they killed my Type 59 they killed my interest in their game. Too little, too late.
Oh, and another thing: arrogance. When they started making money hand over fist, they became amazingly arrogant and dismissive of any criticism. It doesn’t help that Armored Warfare, which was supposed to compete, flopped, leaving Wargaming with little competition.
I haven’t played in ages also because the community became overwhelmingly toxic. If you weren’t an XVM-certified blue or purple, you were constantly called a shitlord and worse, and the tricks people used to get and maintain their blue or purple status made playing the game like I did–exploring different lines, trying to help the team, experimenting with different approaches–a surefire recipe for personal humiliation, as it generally resulted in about a 50–52% win rate.
Funny story - I thought I was a pretty good player, and we had 2-3 of us that frequently played together and we’d do pretty good unless the RNG gods decided to fubar us.
I decided to try & join a real clan. Tier X fun times. It was so stupid. Practices were nothing but sitting on a field letting people talk for an hour on strategy & whatnot, really not listening to anyone else.
when the matches came, they’d be over in 2-3 minutes TOPS. Both teams just rush each other & POW BAM everyone’s dead except for a few tanks on the winning side. Grant you, these are the blues & purples!
I had way more fun playing in pub matches. Oh you’d always get the few people being way too aggressive, but so many games end in a cat / mouse with the dead cheering you on, it was fun.
Yeah, I hear you. I was in a relatively competitive clan, one that usually held territory and got gold but wasn’t top-tier by any means. We usually had daily clan wars battles. The crap to fun ratio was waaaaay off, though. The combination of the usual clan dynamics, the crappy Clan Wars system, and all the rest made it super frustrating. The worse were the Clan Wars events where you had to accumulate a certain amount of points doing whatever to receive some sort of reward tank. We had all sorts of battles within the clan about who got to play, how to min/max the points, etc. Blech.
I never played the clan stuff, and never took heed of the XVM bullshit. Never had a win ratio over 52%. To me WoT is sortof a single player in that I dont really think of the other players as people. Less aggravating. Also on .eu more than half the player speak klingon; ie hungarian, bulgarian, polish or czech. that makes it easier to ingore em lol.
Anyway to me the game lost most of its appeal when it ‘speeded up’. line after line of high-damage, low-armor, high-speed vehicles were introduced. The game became too quick for these old brains. So i jumped ship to the far more ponderous world of warships.
My favorite part of the game used to be playing my PZ II and murdering opponents. When I left the game my PZ had a 65% win rating. I miss those days.
Played over 7K games before quitting for good. My best game was 11 kills with whatever the first tier US arty was, on that map with hills on both sides and the big valley in the middle. I just couldn’t miss and even got a couple of blind kills on enemy arty by watching where their shells came from. Of course there have been many arty nerfs since then. :)
So I’m downloading it now. Probably to play once and delete it. I have the willpower of an amoeba.
Wow. The UI has changed a lot. OTOH I have a pretty good record with about 12 tanks. Of course not counting my very first gold purchase, a Lowe, at 42%. My PZII is on top followed by my Marder. I do so miss those days. :)
Prior to all the arty nerfs, my favorite vehicle was the SU-26 Soviet tier 3 self-propelled gun. It got hit by the nerf bat very hard and its howitzer was replaced with a 76mm pop gun that does relatively minor damage.
Other nerfs to arty in general include longer travel time for shells to reach their targets and less accuracy. All in all the nerfs took most of the fun out of playing as arty.
To the point that when you hit and kill something, you know the other person is somewhere screaming bloody murder about arty and OP and wallet warriors (the usual WoT insults). Meanwhile you’re exulting over your lucky shot of the last few days.
Holy crap, they are selling tanks for $80. My Lowe is almost $60. I know I didn’t spend that much on it. Talk about wallet warriors. And then, down the road, they will nerf it? That’s insane.
The Russian market–which from what I can tell drives 100% of the WoT decision making process–apparently is all in with the absurd pricing. Why, I have no idea. I dropped a lot of cash on WoT when I was in an active Clan Wars clan, for about five years. 28000 games or so? Did I have fun? Er, yeah, mostly, but i’m glad to be done with it. At the time, I just figured, hell, I was paying fifteen a month for a crappy MMO since 1997 or so, so this isn’t much different. But after a while, the nerf/buff cycle, the cynicism, the XVM snobbery, and the bizarre mechanics, plus clan drama, sucked the fun out of it for me.
It’s no fun to log in and be abused constantly in every single game–not personally, necessarily, in that the people raging are raging against anyone and anything, but each and every game is pretty much an exercise in self abuse, and not the good kind.
World of Tabks on iOS is its own thing and actually pretty fun. Everyone kind of sucks because of the controls so it makes it actually a more interesting game with a wider margins to deviate within. It also sucks and helps that you can only join with one other person in a game.
Warships is the only World Of [x] game I put any time into any more. I never liked World of Warplanes compared to War Thunder and although both tanky games have plus and minuses as I’m already in War Thunder for the planes, I stay there for the tanks.
I did get an email from World of Warships yesterday saying that as I’d gone four months without being reported as being an asshole I could have some free ship camouflage. I wasn’t aware I’d ever been reported for anything and my in-game record shows as clean, but thanks anyway!
Nerf/buff cycle is a part of all online games, there is no way around it, it’s in fact required in many cases. Also for what it’s worth, WG are much better at handling their nerf/buff bat lately. :) When they nerf a tank nowadays, they don’t nerf it into the ground anymore, the changes are more subtle.
Not sure what you mean by cynicism or bizarre mechanics.
As for toxic chat, that’s also unfortunately a part of online gaming nowadays, LoL is just as toxic. In WoT, however, you can now simply disable the chat and enjoy the silence. :)
It’s still a fun game and it’s a favorite Friday night game among my friends. It has its share of issues, what game doesn’t, but it’s just fun to kill some tanks from time to time.
Plus all the new tank lines introduced in the last year or so (Czech, Sweden, German) are fun to play with. Czech line is a bit weird because their tier 8 tank sucks and it’s tough to grind a sucky tier 8 tank, so I dropped it. :) But other new tanks are lots of fun.
WoT also got rid of team-to-other-team chat a while back. That helped a little. Still won’t play it now though. :)
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.
Why didn’t they just make tanks have real life stats? Like down to the cm and accurate guns etc based on reality. Then they set teams up to balance those numbers. The vehicles never ever change, just the number of people on one side vs. another. Of course you could still work up to the ultimate tanks like the Tiger II. But scenario changes to balance out you super tank vs. lessers.
They sort of tried that with their historical mode and no one played it. Turns out no one wants to be a Sherman fighting a JagdTiger.
If you’re talking REAL stats… most people don’t want to play a game where everything one shots everything.