What a shock. Their rationale for the buff is “historical accuracy”. When asked why the Tiger is so much slower than it should be, their rationale is “game balance”. Balance applies only to weakening Germans/Americans; historical accuracy applies only to buffing already uber post-war Soviet vehicles.
I gave up on non-Soviet heavies months ago; frankly, I’m amazed everyone hasn’t.
I play my king tiger because I have it, once a day for the double XP bonus. After the next soft wipe you can definitely bet I’ll be going for russian heavies. The only thing I’m not sure about is how much american stuff I will try. I think I’ll probably pick up IS-3, and maybe panther again because it’s my favorite tank. Strongly considering maxing soviet and german tank destroyer lines too to try them each out.
The KT is the only decent German heavy, and you can certainly have fun in it. I maxed one out myself.
I have good rounds and bad rounds in it. The IS-3 appears superior overall so I’d like to try it for myself to make sure that it’s not just a ‘grass is greener’ scenario.
I’ve played maxed out versions of both, and I think you’ll find they’re fairly comparable. I’d give a slight edge to the IS-3 because of its superior speed, maneuverability, and sloped armor, but it’s close. The IS absolutely crushes the Tiger, and the IS-4 and IS-7 blow away the Maus and mini-Maus. T8 is the only tier where the German heavy line is competitive with the Soviet.
And the KT is just so damm pretty.
ShivaX
1667
The game honestly breaks down past tier 8.
They should’ve just capped it at that. The IS-3, a tank that never saw combat in Europe, would make it in, but it would get rid of all the stupid-as-shit post war crap. The IS-7 is a fucking 1948 tank. The Maus never made it to the field.
The only loss would be the JadgTiger, but it wouldn’t be required if there weren’t fucking retarded tanks like Ausf Bs and IS-4s rolling around anyway.
I mean at tier 5-6 you have a decent chance against a tier 8 tank. Not great odds, but you can hurt it and even take it out. Against a tier 9/10 tank you can’t do shit and its a waste of fucking time to even try unless theres 8 of you with HE guns.
The game is great until the tier9/10s show up, then the game becomes silly. And maybe if we didn’t have absolutely insane tanks rolling around arty could be toned down so its shots don’t do 1300+ damage.
The balancer is off too. Time and again I’m in my T6/7 medium and at the bottom of the order, facing multiple IS-7s, Maus, AusfB, JTs, T30s even. And the “filler” is KTs and IS-3s. On my KV-3 with the long 122 I sat about fifty feet from a Maus pumping shots into its lower rear hull. Half of them actually penetrated for modest effect, but most didn’t. Fun.
Hehe, being there on KV-3 is not that bad. I stopped leveling my M3 Lee, since 90% of the time I am fighting in those crazy ass matches with multiple IS-4’s. Now that lots of people leveled up to T9/10 and got tons of credits piled up (or have the Hummel to farm with), it’s becoming more and more of a problem.
I don’t mind it that much when I am playing me Ferdi or Panther (<edit> well, actually I do, matches with 5 T9-10 and 3-4 arty on each side are simply not fun for anyone, hehe) but it’s ridiculous when playing Tiers 4-6. When there are 20 IS-4’s in the queue, the balancer has no choice (in its current settings) but throw in all tiers it’s got so that the poor IS-4 doesn’t sit there longer that he already had.
Tiers 4-7 should be the meat of the game, that’s where most people spend most of their time. Having it absolutely fucked up by throwing IS-4’s in there is ridiculous. Add arty and you have a situation when 4 people have fun and 26 are annoyed. Doesn’t sound like a sustainable business model.
They either need more people or a more strict balancer. Fuck Tier 9-10, if they have noone to play with and they sit in a queue for 5 minutes, they can switch to T-34 or something and play. Even though in reality they will switch to the Hummel, hehe. BTW fuck arty too, there should never be more than 1 big or 2 small arty on each side, if they want to play more often, they can get into a normal tank.
The balancer needs to cater to the middle tiers as opposed to the highest.
What the game really needs (and to be honest it could be a really great game), is a good development team that actually gives two hoots about balance, communication, and listening to their “testers”.
At this point with the exact same game being paid for in retail in Russia…what exactly are we testing? And has anyone suggested anything that has appeared in the game? Found a weird bug that they actually replied to?
And the Russian bias is ridiculous…adding armor to the IS-4 next patch? Um. Alright…can my gun hurt it more when it gets through? No? Um.
And let’s ‘improve’ all the mediums and lights in the next ‘big’ patch by lowering their spotting distance. But they can turn a little faster. Uh. Don’t know about you but I’d rather see opponents instead of playing race-time.
Pretty much at this point when I get thrown into matches I just go…uh. Whatever. I know I can kill the lowest three guys on the list and if I come across them, great, otherwise I just hope my team is the horribly unbalanced one so I can get a little xp after I die.
That’s no way to play a game.
Wait, what? The heavies already hide behind everyone else as it is.
That, at least, makes historical sense. Tanks with harder-hitting longer-ranged weapons naturally want to take advantage of their ability to kill things at distances where only other heavies can hit back effectively.
Don’t mediums have more accurate guns than heavies, though? (in game, anyway, dunno about historically)
Some mediums have accurate guns, some don’t. Most heavies have at least one accurate gun choice, and many have several. The last-to-unlock heavy gun is usually both accurate and hard-hitting.
So true. As a beta, this is a complete failure, the worst I’ve ever been associated with. The only purpose testers serve is as server load tools. Aside from that, we are completely ignored.
All that said, I still think it could be great. Such an excellent replacement for the usual gun-toting FPS multiplayer games.
If it weren’t for the ridiculous Russian bias…I mean hey I know actual Russian tanks were pretty good but really.
If it weren’t for the horrible matchmaking (which is actually being redone in December with the softwipe, and I can only hope they mean it)…
If it weren’t for laser guided artillery instead of area of effect artillery…
Actually with just that I would be pleased as punch to play it and buy the occasional gold to support it.
But yeah, right now, I’m not too sure. If it went retail tomorrow…hell no.
As I understand it, generally, heavier weapons are more accurate, all other things being equal. More mass means less likelihood of losing ballistic stability over distance, among other things. What makes a lot of heavier (that is, larger caliber rounds usually) rounds less accurate is that they often are fired at lower velocities; as you increase shell diameter and weight, you need to increase the barrel weight and probably length to keep the velocity the same, and often you end up with weapons that are too big for the vehicle. So, you get large bore weapons with relatively low muzzle velocities compared to lighter weapons.
It’s much, much easier to make a smaller, lighter shell go faster and hence more accurately with a flatter trajectory, so you get a lot more high -velocity, very accurate smaller caliber weapons, and far fewer high-velocity large bore weapons.
At this point with the exact same game being paid for in retail in Russia…what exactly are we testing? And has anyone suggested anything that has appeared in the game? Found a weird bug that they actually replied to?
As Dave said, at the least, we are testing mostly the US hardware plus localization.
As for the feedback, a bunch of UI improvements I’ve seen suggested have been implemented, warping bug was reported and fixed, “hit but no damage” - reported and fixed (actually I still think I see it sometimes but much less now), inivisibility bug was reported and in progress, arty 10% accuracy nerf is in response to the feedback (inefficient but a response nonetheless), map issues, some tanks issues (like Ferdi getting stuck on environment), etc. In-game platoon identification was acknowledged as a good idea and they said they are working on it. Balancer (again, even if it works properly only half of the time) was a response to the feedback from before October(?).
And it’s not like other companies are eager to implement their customer’s feedback. WoW warlocks were whining about soulshards from way before the release and Blizzard finally got to deal with it in Cataclysm or so I heard. Fear whining? Bubble? And don’t even start about balance in WoW or any other game. Premaid groups in WoW battlegrounds were an issue for a loooong time.
Bias? Yeah I heard it all before - Blizzard favors Alliance, Mythic favors Chaos.
It is unfair to say that the game doesn’t improve at all, improves too slow or doesn’t improve in the areas YOU want it to improve. It’s a beta (for us anyway, customer satistaction in Russia is their problem), look back only 2 months and you will see LOTS of good changes. On the other hand, it won’t be perfect even when it releases, nothing is, not for everyone anyway.
The game is far better today than it was when I started the beta a while ago. If nothing else, you can actually shoot stuff at more than pistol range.
Oh, I agree things have improved. I just don’t think tester comments have had much to do with it. There’s no real dialogue between the devs and the beta community. The devs fix what they want when they want, pretty much.
