hiipanda

I did a summary of the changes (I'm lazy so the formatting is fucked). But really, it doesn't take a professor of anatomy to tell you that the changes are ass. Here's why:
 
1. Crews lose skills
Your old crews that had 3-4 skills will only have ~40ish skill points in the new system, which will lose you - 2-3 skills/perks in practice
3-4 skills were basically enough for anything that wasn't a highly specialised LT build,
but now, you have to grind much, much more to get those crews to perform at the level they perform now, i.e. >75 points in the new system which is the equivalent of what is now a 5 skill (non-0th skill) crew.
for a more detailed take, see: https://www.reddit.com/r/WorldofTanks/comments/lqriw0/this_average_crew_loses_24_skills_when_converted/
2. Crews do not combine
If you were in the habit of grinding several crews to 3-4 skills instead of having 1-2 crews which you maxed out (which most people will be), you're shafted because crews do not combine and you're stuck with multiple (un-competitive) crews
this is unfair to the players because under the old system, there was very little incentive to go past the 3rd or 4th skills, whereas now you're massively penalised for it with no recompense whatsoever
if you think this is just sandbox and they might change it later, community contributors have said on the forums that they do not plan on introducing merging crews as a feature.
3. 0th skill crews have exactly 0 worth
If your crews are Christmas crews/0th skill BIA crews, the extra skill you have will not be counted in the new system - you lose 2-3 skills from that alone - not counting the fact you effectively lose 2-3 skills anyway for what are currently 3-4 skill crews
this massively shafts people who bought/ground out 0th skill crews with zero compensation
4. RNG-gated instructors
Speaking of 0th skill crews, special 0th skill crews will now become 'instructors' which give small bonuses to specific perks. you have a choice between 3 perks of one category for each instructor - and which 3 you get to choose from is pure RNG - no rerolls.
this locks bonuses behind a pay to progress, RNG-based mechanic where previously you just had to grind crews to progress.
which makes the game even more unfair as between the players that pay up and players that don't (or can't).
5. Massive endgame grind for even more inequality
They nerfed the commander bonus and introduced a new 'expertise' grind where for each level of progression you grind past the 75th point, you get a 'small' bonus to your vehicle handling. vehicle handling is the same thing as what BIA does now, and the maximum ('small') bonus you can get from expertise is 20%........on top of the 5% you already get from the renamed BIA and all the other bonuses you have through skills/equipment.
Previously, crews, once you were past 100% and had BIA, no matter how much you played with them, no matter where you got them, no matter how many crew books you bought and fed to them, were capped at the same level of performance - you won't get a faster reload, you won't get less aimtime.
For the mechanics of these changes, see: https://www.reddit.com/r/WorldofTanks/comments/lqlt46/crew_20_sandbox_general_feedback/goi4lif?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3
Now as for their effects....
The new system introduces an all new grind that gives you the equivalent of stacking an extra ~ 2.5 more bond vents on your tank
this not only adds a new grind, but increases the already gaping inequality between players
a new player with a fresh crew will lack the renamed BIA, he might lack equipment, he is likely not to be be running food, he certainly won't have the expertise bonus on his tank - and he will be facing veterans with crews that perform 40-50 percent better than what he has.
*this hypothetical player would have to grind the equivalent of 7 skills in the current system just to catch up.
the only bandage on this fresh bullet wound is the free sixth sense - which players in the current system could have got pretty easily by crew books in the first place - and which could be added without all this hullabaloo with the new system.
CW Implications:
some of the perks would be very strong in a competitive setting, which I admit isn't a bad thing necessarily.
for a decently competitive clan, crew 2.0 would mean basically mandating people to have the equivalent of 6-7 skill crews in order to perform on a 'level' playing field
and that's not counting stacking with bond/bounty equipment and access to reward tanks
There are also side issues with tanks with large crews seemingly being shortchanged but that's minor compared to the iceberg that we're headed towards.
Don't look a gold sink in the mouth!
one of the touted features of Crew 2.0 is that you can train 1 crew for up to 3 tanks, only that..
u/Kuratovsky has kindly pointed out to me that in Crew 2.0, training your crew for the 2nd and 3rd tanks, just like retraining crews under the current system, will result in a penalty.
unlike in the current system, the retraining penalty for the 2nd and 3rd tanks is 10% of the crew's total experience.
if your crew has, say, 13 million exp (~6 skill crew), you will lose 1.3 million crew exp from the F2P option - and this directly eats into your crew skills/expertise bonuses
currently, the penalty for retraining a crew to another tank is 10% of the major qualification, i.e. 10% of 100k exp. this does not affect the crew skills/perks.
if you want to avoid bleeding XP, the solution is simple: 750 gold, 750 gold for every tank other than the first tank, and for every new tank that you switch in.
the effect is that what appears to be one of the most F2P friendly features of Crew 2.0 is simultaneously the least F2P friendly part of the changes. this is because people who don't have gold will be forced to lose 10% of their total crew XP every time they retrain a crew to a different tank.
Concluding thoughts
For those of you who say that there's nothing to worry about and WG will surely revise the sandbox changes and make them good, I present to you the examples of:
what happened to WOWS (https://www.reddit.com/r/WorldOfWarships/comments/k44sbi/flamu_dissects_the_upcoming_commander_skill/)
what happened to Console(https://www.reddit.com/r/WorldofTanks/comments/l12hd1/world_of_tanks_console_ruined_with_1_update_dont/gjx40yr/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)
and what is happening with the HE changes despite the population being generally ambivalent towards them (http://forum.worldoftanks.eu/index.php?/topic/765180-sandbox-test-he-shells%E2%80%94feedback-and-reaction/)
For those of you who still remember, Rubicon failed in 2015 because the playerbase was not okay with cosmetics having an effect on gameplay. That they made heard. These changes with Crew 2.0 are of a much greater magnitude, are much less accessible, and in their current guise, it is safe to say that they will impact the game much more negatively.
The multitudinous changes to the system and the overhauls to the interface only serve to hide the fact that your crews will be worse, that as players we will suffer, that we will have to pay more, grind more, to get less in return.
There is no reason that the playerbase should allow these changes to happen.

Havent seen it properly myself. Friend did a long summary of it.
From what he said it sounds horrible. Changing it fully from a mostly passive stat boost that it currently is to a full blown gimmick system. "You get this for 5 seconds after doing this" "if you get this many kills you get this boost" 
 
No no no no no no no. It sounds awful. I didnt actually want WG to change crew skills because aside from making 6th sense default, I didnt trust them to not fuck it up. And it looks like thats whats happening to me. 
 
 

Additional forward speed would be good for lights and ebr.

Additional forward speed would be good for lights and ebr.

You and your fucking zero key.

what the fuck is going on in this thread. 
 
I don't even know who to mod and who to call an idiot. 

It's like oicraftian stole all his 0s and he's really butthurt about it.

Nah, downtiering the tigers to their proper places is too obvious and effective. We need to beat around the bush and fire random stat changes out of a shotgun

Don’t. Alpha creep sux as much as all the other creeping-leaping going on in this game.

I despise boosts with a burning passion.
Because they utterly destroyed all forms of map balance. There were some absolutely broken spots that made some maps unwinnable from one side. And clan wars degraded into a cesspool of playing 100% around these damn boosts where every single lobby you had the caller saying "can you do the boost?" "i need someone who can do the boost". It was the most unfun period of clan wars in the entire game for me (coupled with the 268v4 meta right after) and pretty much killed a very large portion of interest in this game for me.
 
 
 
Anyway, wheeled vehicles. Agree with everyone else. Broken. Not needed in the game. Bad idea

I don't mind one bit. In fact, I'll cheer and sing praises if they nerf Defenders and IS3As and I own these things, because I am a fucking stupid idiot, like everyone who got these things.

Think the seagulls from Finding Nemo... but all saying "Fame Points?!"

Hello!
 
A new feature has been released on WoTLabs. Now you can see a detailed list of all the tanks that you played during the 24 hour, 7 days, 30 days, 60 days and Recent periods. At the last row of each column, you will see an option to show the breakdown for that period.

Using this, players can identify problem areas more easily, allowing them to see exactly which tank is having the most impact on their performance.
Hope you guys like it!

Hello!
So all that I'm gonna talk about here happened last night over a period of around 4 hours. This post is VERY wordy and somewhat rambly, so be warned. First things first, I'm working on a new feature that will let you see a "Period Breakdown" of each period, so for the period of, say, 24 hours, you will be able to see all the tanks that are counting in that column, along with each tank's individual stats for that period.
But in creating this feature, I ran into a problem where there were massive discrepancies between the amount of battles that the Account Information method provided, and the sum of the battle count of your tanks. For instance, the difference between your overall battle count between the latest update and the one 24 hours ago might have been of 20 battles, but if took the battles played by each tank over this same period and added them up, the number would sometimes be different. Sometimes they were off by just a couple of battles, sometimes by 10 or more.
This is obviously a great issue for a website that is supposed to provide statistical accuracy. I believe that what causes this issue is that not all of the methods of the API are updated all at once, so when the system grabs your stats, your overall battle count updated, but not your individual tank statistics. Again, that's just me throwing a possibility out there, I'd have to talk to someone who has access to the API to know for sure, and I have no idea who that might be.
The way I fixed this was simple: We stopped relying on the overall numbers, and started deriving everything from the sum of each individual tank's statistics. That's what's used to calculate your WN8 already, so it's a logical step. As for potential issues, the only problem should arise in the fairly uncommon case where a tank takes a long time to be added to the API, so players would play several battles in a tank over a period of time that would all get lumped together under the "24 Hours" column once the tank's information got added to the API and WoTLabs could actually see what tank you were playing all along. But the thing is, this issue already happens! It's just masked because the numbers that were shown in the columns were based on those overall numbers which always get updated. The only place where you could see this issue happening was in your Average Tier and WN8 calculations, which several players have noticed and reported on this forum. WIth the now fully functioning system that automatically checks and updates tank information once a day and no longer relies on me checking for new tanks manually, this should be an even more uncommon case.
With that fixed, the feature that allows you to see a detailed list of the tanks played during a certain period will be released very soon!
Whew, that was a long one. Now, for the last topic of discussion: Why my Recent WN8 took a nosedive, and why yours (in very rare cases) might as well: Back in May 2016, we had to create a new table to hold all the detailed tank information (which is the data used to calculate WN8) since the original one could no longer perform its duty. The old table remained behind for historical queries, but as time went on and disk space became an issue, very old data started to be deleted, including those very old records that were no longer relevant... Or were they?
Drama aside, if you're like me and you played very few battles between May 2016 and now, your Recent WN8 might have taken a nosedive. Recent WN8, as you probably know, is based on your last 1000 battles. When the system checked for the update made 1000 (or close to 1000) battles ago, it would take the timestamp and look for the tank information so it could calculate the WN8 for this period. However, if this update happened before May 2016, then there are no more tank information stored! This means that the system was actually using your overall tanks to calculate your Recent WN8, making them look very similar to each other, as was my case.
The way this was fixed was to tell the system to ignore every update made before May 2016, and only look for those made after that point. If you played over 1000 battles between May 2016 and now, no problem at all! if not, then the closest update that has tank information available will be used. In my case it's my last 428 battles, which unfortunately encompasses the 370 battles that I've played in the past month since coming back to the game and sucking really, really bad. So yeah, RIP my Recent WN8, but at least it's not a lie anymore.
That is all for now! If you made it this far, sorry for all the words. I really, really like to write.
Cheers!

Knowing wg these things will have worse guns than the tier 10 light tanks.

DPG per tier? 

Most played tank

I'd love for them to do it at a tier without the broken prems. Tier 9 for instance. 

https://worldoftanks.asia/en/news/game-events/10yrgiveaway-26nov18/
Like getting a bouquet of roses when you were expecting domestic abuse

Repairing a track is like seconds and you had 3 fast  firing arty hit you. The lorraines are like low 20 seconds, the m44 is like low teens, and that jackson was plugging in all the gaps the arty might have had. If you had went low road the lorraine at the beach would have had a harder time hitting you and the jackson wouldn't have been able to track you either.

Hello!
As many of you probably saw, we had a big server migration recently. Here's the low down of what happened:
As I have disclosed in a couple of posts, the database server ran into an issue where it ran completely out of space. The biggest problem was that the database engine we were using kept all the data in a single file, and that file could never be shrunk even if you deleted older records. This caused that file to grow bigger and bigger and bigger over time, until it took up all of the considerable space on that server (1.5TB). When there was no more space left, the database server would crash and the website would go down.
Fortunately, I managed to work with DigitalOcean to secure a great virtual server which meets all the needs of the database and the website in a single server. This is a 12-core, 48GB RAM server with 1TB of SSD space. The next step was transferring all the data over. This took the longest time. All in all, the database totalled around 5 billion records, and after removing the inflated space from the database engine, clocked in at around 500GB.
It took 3 days to transfer and import all the records into the new server, which now runs the latest versions of PHP and MySQL for better performance, plus it lets me clean up old records that aren't used anymore in order to reduce disk space, meaning there will always be space available.
Not only that, but as the website and the database are now on the same server, there is no more issue with the firewall tables getting reset, a problem which, despite a LOT of research, I couldn't actually fix. This was one of the biggest causes of the downtime in the past, as the database server started refusing connections from the website server at random.
All in all, you can expect WoTLabs to be MUCH more stable from now on.
Thanks everyone for all the support!

The op new tanks was the final straw for me. Like don't get me wrong the Super conq was pretty bs when it came out but was fun to play I guess. Final straw for me was when the 268v4 came and out turned into the yolo you tank of choice and WG started contemplating buffing the fucking thing. Throw in all the P2W prems like the Defender, Patriot, Skorp G, etc and it's been fairly unpleasant to say the least. The arty changes were meh, at least you don't get oneshot anymore. However they really should have kept it so that they can't platoon with anyone, fuck em; if you wanna be cancer... do it by yourself. Haven't played since January and still don't plan on touching the game again.

"How would you stop this monster?"
 
Fire the balance team

"How would you stop this monster?"
 
Fire the balance team

"How would you stop this monster?"
 
Fire the balance team