Jesse_the_Scout

Minor necro, I just skimmed the old Sandbox thread because I have no life. Here's what I think is happening. The first sandbox was to test the ongoing armor creep approach which WG had already begun to see if it yielded the results they wanted. The question they were trying to answer was, "how do we balance the game better without removing gold ammo and arty while still being fun to play?" As most people on this forum know, the answer is, "you can't". Those mechanics inherently make balancing the game a shitshow. Their answer was, "you increase armor to the point where armor feels meaningful again even in the face of gold ammo." 6 months later I'm hull down in a T28 Prototype with a Defender 300m standing in the open and I realize I can't reliably pen him in any way other than shooting gold at his lower plate. The power creep which became the defining aspect of the game after sandbox was the chosen method of implementation, with results favoring armor. Even buffs which didn't increase armor directly had the effect of increasing armor in the game; buff the mobility and soft stats of tanks like the T59, Super P, and T54 Proto and you see more of these armor-centric tanks being played. It had many advantages over a dramatic, sweeping global change: subtle instead of overt, selling new tanks for more cash than ever, no stated goal so players don't have a mission statement to judge. Within a couple of years the number of players tanked. Checking the numbers they lost about 25% of their players in the two years after the sandbox, with heavier losses in the profitable NA market. Bottom line is players didn't like the changes. This is the year they're finally backtracking on things they would never do, because their revenue is finally hurting at this point. You can see it in the increasingly desperate pace of tank sales, the huge boosts to premium account, the exceptional drop in pricing this Christmas, and all the features that should have been in the game years ago like crew books and removing team damage. They tried it their way, and it failed. Some of the things people are complaining about now like the huge, open lanes of fire on maps like Glacier, Fisherman's Bay, Erlenberg, Ghost Town, Studzianski, Kharkov, this is all trying to make sniping more effective and roll back what they've already done which can't be easily undone. Yet again, these changes don't make the game more enjoyable, because the core mechanics are the real problem: arty, gold ammo, big tier spreads, etc. The question at this point is how far are they willing to go in walking back what they did and giving players what they want? Will the gold ammo reduction ever see the light of day? Is there really some huge rebalance in the works or are they so internally divided it never happens? Are they even finally considering removing artillery?

I never really followed the 3 mark mechanics because who cares, but I do have to ask this out of curiosity: I 3 marked the T25/2 eons ago, I don't know when. I just played my 100th game and noticed now my MOE is at 94.3%. How the crap does that make any sense?

Because exactly like I said when they nerfed it: 22, shoot the cupola, done. It was just going to take pubbies 6 months to realize it now has a giant glowing red "boss monster" weak spot.

Lots of changes, most positive, some negative. General theme is handing out faster advancement to keep people on the hook and increasingly desperate attempts at finding something novel to add to the game. 3/5/7 got toned down to where the game is playable again, you now see a lot more same tier and 1 tier spread games. Hopes are now resting on the mythical "global rebalance" WG claims is underway deep within the bowls of the dungeons of Minsk. Supposedly gold ammo gets rebalanced and all the tanks in the game get adjusted to compensate. If it truly exists it's being kept very quiet.

Man, this one is painful. Terrible gun arc, terrible bloom numbers, terrible mobility, huge profile and no camo, no gold round because ??? reasons, paper armor HE and arty bait. The only redeeming quality is the sick shooting sound effect and 500 damage that melts from the target's HP bar on the rare occasion a shot actually lands. This is one of those tanks that is actually baffling... why is it even this bad? It's like they just decide to make some tanks unplayable. EDIT: upgrading to swear words. Fuck this tank.

The point I'm really trying to make is that there's not even an objective basis to start with to determine if there's manipulation occurring. If the EPA wants to prove a company is dumping its runoff into a lake it can test the lake and find the Mercury levels are 14 times normal. In tanks, win rate changes due to a million variables including changes to the game. There was a time I could grab any old shit tank in tier 4 or 5 with a 75% crew and still win 60%+ solo. Those times are long gone. Grinding through a shit tank now it's not at all uncommon to finish with a win rate of 50% or even worse. A lot has changed since then: vision control died, gold ammo was added and is now spammed like crazy, accuracy is different, maps have changed to remove powerful positions, the game has been made way more shitlord friendly in general. In that environment where you have no consistent baseline and many explanations for changes in win rate it's literally not possible to determine if manipulation is occurring. The subject is actually kind of stupid now, because they've "rigged" the game right in front of every one. Fact is the changes to the game have caused a lot of win rates to drop, it's part of why so many people have quit playing. And there are still people putting on tinfoil hats even though it's been done right in the open. It's like how every one thinks the "global elites" are engaged in conspiracies. Why the fuck would they need conspiracies when they're taking everything right in front of our faces and people keep voting to make it happen?

I'll save every one some trouble: if WG did manipulate the MM there's no way you'd ever know unless they did it so badly it was obvious to everyone. The amount of confounding variables and the sheer variety of ways in which they could manipulate the MM to get the result they want make it impossible without literally running a statistical experiment involving thousands and thousand of test games. If they did it in a way to cover their tracks even that wouldn't prove anything. They could tweak your win rate a few percentage points easy and there would be no way to know.

This mode is right about as stupid as I imagined it would be, and that's pretty fucking stupid. I should play a few more to give it a chance I guess.

This tank is a sad sack of shit. It has all the problems of wheeled vehicles but lacks the speed and gun handling. It's like a heavy tank without armor or a TD without pen.

I just want to add something about why tanks is boring as fuck now: the tanks have gone unchanged for so long that there are no questions to be answered anymore. Back in the day every other patch would change 30ish tanks with several stat changes on average. There was a constant churning of buffing and nerfing occurring. And even if they didn't get it all right, at least the constant flux meant there was a lot of new things to try out. That was the biggest excitement of patch day, to test the changes to see what tanks are the new winners and losers. Now, you can look at the tank lineup and know which team has the advantage. The tanks have gone without adjustment for so long that the game is stale, predictable, and dreary. It's not just that the balance is bad, though it is, it's that it's been bad and unchanged for so long that everything has been settled. I just counted all my tanks in tier 5, which is my most played tier. Only 4 are winners. Another 9 I would call playable. 44 are useless, noncompetitive garbage. 75% of the content in the game is not even really content, basically. So now my tank ritual when I get the urge is that I log in, I play 2 or 3 stupidly overpowered tanks that have been absurd for years now, and then I'm bored. The decent tanks are boring, the overpowered tanks are SUPER boring, and I actually want to play the lame tanks but know I'll just get frustrated and rage quit because they suck. If WG just starting making sweeping shuffles of all the tanks' stats the game would at least be interesting again.

I just want to note my favorite feature of this mode, which is that it encourages being a bot-level shitbag. Half the pubbies just sit at the redline sniping what you spot because they're scared to get hit, so you end up taking the bulk of the driving rain of snapshots while they sit and gobble up damage risk free. And of course if you do the same you'll end up with 2 full health tigers being initially spotted 30 seconds from walking over the base. So you get those games where every one is dead and the 46%er is still on his first tank because he never engaged anything. At least they did fix the scaling. I played two today and it was doing 6-7 waves for games it was doing a full 10 on before.

I really want to know which one of these geniuses decided 4 tier ones with a single tier three warrants a full fucking 10 waves. How genuinely incompetent can you possibly be to not understand difficulty should scale? WG is like a doctor that doesn't know how to take a pulse.

Finally, a mode where you get to face wave after wave of brainless opponents in higher tier tanks driving straight forward and defeating you through a combination of ludicrous statistical advantages and constant miraculous snap shots. This is a very fresh and new experience.

Hit points reduced to 1500, hello next tier 8 premium.