Little more than a year ago, a post on the other blog had me hit up my friend for a couple rounds of World of Tanks for the first time in forever. Or so I thought.

First of all, it was more than a couple rounds. We played together for almost exactly one year, roughly an hour every evening, and it was perhaps the most stable routine I’ve had during that time.

Secondly, it wasn’t “for the first time in forever” apparently… I originally started playing the game in 2012 or 2013, shortly after it came out, simply because I happened to read a game’s magazine (an actual printed one!) and they had a long guide about World of Tanks as well as a CD containing the installer. Yup, the olden days were great.

Anyway, I don’t remember too much of that time. I must have played the game a lot, as 6000 rounds played suggests somewhere between 1000 and 2000 hours of playtime, making it probably my most or second-most played game. I think it was the only occasion I was really “into” an MMO in my life. There was still my time with Eve Online that came a few years after that, though that didn’t last as long.
I think I played the game for about 1.5 years, but my memory is hazy honestly. I was of the impression that most of that time overlapped with the time the other guy played it, though he says that he only started closer to when I quit the game.
I don’t think there was any specific reason why I quit. It had become a habit for me to play every evening, starting around 20:00 and playing until I went to sleep. But at some point I grew tired of it, and my rounds in the evenings were often cut short when too many matches in a row left me with nothing but frustration.

When I started playing again last year though, I used an account I had created not too long ago, and that used my own email adress instead of my mother’s. It turned out that even that account was 4 or so years old and I had about a thousand matches on it already. Huh. I didn’t remember playing that account much and I wonder when that happened. Anyway, this was only convenient because this way I at least had tanks around tier V or VI like my friend so we could play together from the start.

Skip ahead to about a year later… already four months ago because I’m lazy, and also IMHHW… and my friend finally quit. I have almost stopped playing as well, though I sometimes start up the game to reroll daily missions and play an occasional round of lowtier to complete them… #HealthyHabits

So, here go a couple of impressions about that year with the game and my takeaways from that time.

The Game has Changed

To no big surprise, the game has changed in the past 9 years. The other guy went over many of the relevant changes which I will not repeat now, though I’ll add some impressions myself.

For one thing, the number of tanks in the game increased massively. Several new nations were added in the meantime, several new branches in the tech tree as well as a ton of premium tanks. To be honest, I didn’t care much for the new tanks. I’d never gotten to tier X on my old account, so it’s not like I was running out of interesting tanks to play. Sure, more tanks means more choice which isn’t a bad thing, but the first impression that stuck was that I only encountered stuff that I didn’t know on the field, and generally felt pretty insecure about getting back into the game. What do you mean I actually have to put in effort and learn things?

This might be a good time to take a step back and look at what kind of player I was back then. For one thing, bringing up the stats page for my old account tells us that I was not a good player. An overall WN8 of 1064 doesn’t seem too bad, until you look further and realize that I spent 85% of my matches in tier VI and below, including over a thousand battles in tier I and II tanks. Looking back, it’s no wonder I never owned a tier X tank. Though for some modicum of justification, in the olden days it took much longer to gain the necessary XP, and playing tier V/VI tanks was necessary in order to earn the credits to even play my only tier IX tank. And looking at my stats on the T-54, I was green on it? Ignore the 44% WR

Anyway, to get back to the present, it seems like I wasn’t a good player in the first place and learning would be part of the process. And so it happened. WoT was (or still is, if I would be playing that is) a heavy learning experience, but you can see the fruits of your labor when that one tank suddenly clicks with you after a hundred matches, or you see your overall performance improve significantly in the general statistics kindly provided by websites such as tomato.gg and wotstats.org.

So I had to learn the important properties of a ton of new tanks (and relearning old ones) which mostly worked well, but to the very end I still struggled to differentiate tanks with similar names. For example, I kept mixing up the T49 and T69, although one of them is a tier IX light tank, and the other a nice tier VIII medium tank. Let’s not even talk about the VK-30wtf ones and all the other VKs. And then there’s the occasional collector’s vehicle or rare reward or premium tank that you encounter perhaps once in 200 matches and would have already forgotten that it exists by the time you see it again. Or, well, I would. Don’t trust my memory.

In general, this sometimes evoked the feeling of it all being a bit too much. People on the forums and Reddit were arguing that they need new tech tree lines because they’d already researched everything there was in the game. I disagree. If you believe the game is not worth playing without having new tanks to research, then I think there’s other more important problems. Though of course that’s easy to say for someone who’s never been in that situation.
Perhaps though, the bigger problem are the premium tanks. Tanks in a tech tree line at least tend to share similar names and characteristics, which makes it easier to remember them as a set rather than inidividuals, as is often the case with premium tanks.

The health pool of vehicles in the game has significantly increased across the board which I think is a good change… for the most part. It does reduce the “every single shot counts” mentality and generally makes the game less punishing (and less rewarding) which is not entirely positive imo, but at least it means less oneshots from vehicles with high alpha, and less getting machine-gunned to death in a single autoloader-clip.

There’s a couple… I would call them QoL improvements, though that’s really the end result of Wargaming relaxing their policies with regards to goods that were formerly only available for gold. Back in the old days, you started out with only five garage slots and the only way to increase that number was to pay real money or win in some of the rare contests. Fast forward to today, where you already start with more slots as you own the tier I tank of every nation, but you will also semi-regularly receive garage slots as rewards for daily missions and other in-game events. This significantly improves flexibility for F2Ps, allowing you to try out more tanks etc.
Another great addition are tier VIII premium tanks in the bond shop. While not having active premium time still means significantly reduced credit gains and potentially having to save up for quite some time for a new vehicle, those tier VIII premiums help alleviate that to some extent. There’s also regular events with discounts on consumables or equipment which helps further and generally means less time spent grinding credits. The bond shop premiums aren’t as good as those only available for gold (surprise) but they’re certainly decent enough and absolutely playable.
Finally, add demounting tickets that you get for free from daily missions, so you can use and reuse your expensive equipment on multiple tanks.

The interface has changed quite a lot. Some of these are questionable changes, such as giving every vehicle a “firepower” rating derived from it’s alpha, reload time, accuracy, aim time and what not accumulated through some arbitrary formula no one knows. They seem to go into the same vein of mechanics aimed at making the game more accessible, such as the penetration indicators in-match, except in a way that distracts from the necessary complexity.
But some of them are great. The penetration indicator means that you’re at least not hard-punished for every single well-armored tank that you didn’t memorize the entire armor layout for. Showing actual and maximum view range on the minimap is great, and there’s several other good changes.
The module interface had me miss the old one a little, though in the end I got used to it.

One thing that has changed significantly though, is that the interface has also succumbed to the “it all being a bit too much” I mentioned earlier. WoT added a ton of components that clutter up the garage view, to the point that some of them even end up overlaying each other, e.g. news in the bottom left overlay the daily missions until you click the news away. There’s now the daily missions in the bottom left, a tab for vehicle comparison in the bottom right, possibly a banner for the running battle pass below the battle button, and a button to switch game modes next to it. There’s two additional banners for the campaigns, then five expandable tabs of vehicle stats on the right of the screen that don’t even fit completely, including the aforementioned accumulated ratings that shouldn’t exist imo. This was definitely overwhelming for me when I returned, and you have to consider that I already knew half those interfaces. Again, I got used to it and it’s not that bad after all… but sometimes, the game’s interfaces include some very questionable choices or generally design that doesn’t give a great overview.

The missions tab for example shows, I’m guessing around 30 active, missions at any given time. Most of these will be irrelevant to you because you don’t have the necessary tank, they are sometimes limited to only a day or two, or only one to a few completions, while others can be repeated daily, some only with tanks of certain nations or tiers or tech tree lines etc. and it’s overall such a confusing mess that I relied more on the news in the game launcher to tell me what’s up and only use the missions tab to check the conditions for specific missions that I already knew existed, instead of using it exploratively.

This is one example, but there’s plenty more cases where some piece of information or functionality is placed somewhere you would not expect it, or you have to google how some functionality works because it’s not properly explained in-game, or the interface is inconvenient.
As another example, I don’t think anyone tells you that you can’t just remove equipment from your tank again after you’ve mounted it. You can either destroy it, spend gold to demount it, or use a demounting kit. And in the case of improved equipment (or was it the other one?) you’ll need bonds to unmount them.
Additionally, you get a preview of the effects a piece of equipment has on your vehicle’s stats before you mount it. But that doesn’t work after you’ve already filled the slots. Are you considering switching out your vertstabs for vents, but you’d like to see the stat changes first? Have fun computing them yourself, or spending a demounting ticket to demount the vertstabs so you can then preview the stats for vents on the now-empty slot. It’s minor inconveniences like this that don’t break anything, but there’s a ton of these with the WoT interface which often makes it cumbersome or plain annoying to use.
Finally, why is the Twitch drop store located under the “Depot” tab, instead of the Store? What?

Some of these can fortunately be fixed by mods. While there’s certainly questionable or even plain dumb mods (I get the arty hate, but why would you automatically blacklist every arty player who ever shot you?), there’s some that help with simple conveniences, such as showing gunmark and mastery stats for your active tank in-game. This is nice, but it does make me wonder, why aren’t they part of the game itself? Why do I have to re-install a modpack for this on every bigger update?

Finally, let’s get to those additions which are perhaps the most interesting to discuss… the new rewards. Mostly, timed missions and events (such as weekend specials and arcade mode), battle pass and daily missions. These sometimes offer pretty cool rewards such as time-limited and decent premium tanks or blueprints that let you research tanks for free. There’s no doubt that these are exactly the sort of rewards that are supposed to motivate you to play more (and in some cases spend money) and you know… it works.

In the worst possible way.
I remember spending an hour beyond what I originally wanted to play, trying to finish that despicable “7 crits in one battle” mission in my tier II tank, because I really wanted those three blueprints. This hour wasn’t fun, it was pure pain as, for once, everything went wrong in those tier II matches and I didn’t get those 7 crits because RNG said fuck you. And this wasn’t the only time something like this happened. Those new events and missions ultimately get me to play in a way I don’t want to play. I remember playing one of the arcade modes (the snowball/sliding one) and complaining the entire time how much I hate the mode. I wanted those quick 300 bonds though, so I played it. Similarly, there’s tons of players grinding up through arty lines to finish campaign missions, even though they would never play arty otherwise.

The former are partially on me of course. That was deeply unhealthy behavior I engaged in and I wasn’t able to convince myself to stop most of the time. That said, I’m pretty sure it’s working exactly as intended. The fact that I still log into the game… to reroll daily missions and play matches in my tier I and II tanks to clear them? That’s stupid and speaks to how effective these tactics are. It’s unhealthy, not only for me, but for the game as a whole.

Looking back, a new Perspective

Playing the game again after so many years, it was quite interesting for me to see how I perceive many things differently.

For one thing, I think I wasn’t aware that World of Tanks is hard. At this point I believe it might genuinely be the most brutal strategy game I’ve ever played. To be fair, I’ve never gotten more deeply into RTS games: the best I could do was play Age of Empires II against easy mode CPU as if the endgoal was to build and research everything you can.

But in a way, WoT at least feels way more strategic than all the other strategy games I’ve played. Or maybe it’s simply more complex. When I stop to think about it, the amount of factors you take into account when deciding where you head at the start of the match can be insane. Sure you might go “I’m a heavy so I go heavy flank” regardless of the fact that you’re two tiers down, have no gun depression and play on Malinowka, but most of the time that should work reasonably well. But if you’re down for it, you can thoroughly go through the various strengths and weaknesses of your tank, the various flanks and positions on the current map, the composition of your team and the enemy team, the way they split up once it starts etc. And that’s only the opening moves.
Knowing when to retreat and how is an incredibly strong skill in this game, and few players are good at this.

For being an arcade shooter, the game requires a lot of knowledge. There’s the knowledge about every single tank in the game which starts with “can I realistically penetrate it frontally” and goes through various hoops such as “will they spot me if I shoot here” or “can I circle this isolated heavy” to “can I justify dunking my tier X tank into the roof of this tier VIII TD right below me and what creative insults will my teammates hurl at me when I inevitably do?”.

The maps may suck in some or a lot of ways, but they’re often full of tiny details that can result in interesting situtations and make or break a playable position. A tiny bump in the ground can possibly be what I needed to go hulldown with my Patriot and demolish everyone approaching me, or it can be my demise as it prevents the gun of my SU-101 from targeting the tanks approaching on a flat plane right in front of me, and remind me why I hate this thing so much.

At some point I developed a kind of of intuition that told me what I was about to do would go horribly wrong. But rationally I knew that pushing the isolated enemy heavy with my fully loaded auto-loader is exactly what this tank was made for, and since I’m a rational human being, I do it anyway. And then get eaten alive by a tank one tier down after missing one shot at point blank range and bouncing two on his 80mm of side and ass armor before going into 35 seconds of reload and eventually leaving the match as top tier with one shot worth of damage.

It’s a complex (and sometimes heavily luck-based) game, and, unfortunately, in part because the game doesn’t tell you about the details of some of its mechanics. I don’t even know how I found out about the 70° (or whatever) autobounce angle, though I suppose the other guy told me, and by extension I didn’t know about sidescraping for a long time, which is an essential technique for some heavy tanks. Some systems like spotting are fundamental for the entire game and yet never properly explained. And even after you’ve looked at guides made by other players and having played thousands of matches, including in scouts, you still end up completely stumped by some of the things that happen. At some point you accept that the system is a meme and trying to understand what happened is often a waste of time and energy.

Sometimes, frustration mounts because of the absurdly bad luck you’re having. For one thing, RNG is an integral part of the game. The damage you deal, the penetration of your shell and where exactly it hits is in no small part up to a dice roll. Even if you accurately aim at an enemy’s weakspot from point blank range, the game might still fuck you over by having your well-aimed shell fly off into Nirvana, rolling -25% on penetration so you barely fail to penetrate, or get a very low roll that leaves the enemy alive with 10 HP on a shot that should have easily killed.

Add to this the fact that, even if you play like a god, often times your team will let you down by playing like absolute morons, being smacked like flies, leaving one of the key points on the map completely open, only turning back to de-cap when it’s already too late or straight up sabotaging you by pushing your tank out of cover, refusing to participate in the match, and intentionally or unintentionally drowning themselves.
Statistically, it can be said that you can only affect the outcomes of about a third of the matches you play. The other two thirds are guaranteed losses and guaranteed wins. This wouldn’t even be so bad if these were fun matches, but steamrolls are an uncannily common occurrence in WoT. It doesn’t take long for a seemingly balanced match to turn into a one-sided slaughter that doesn’t grant you even a second shot of damage before you’re overwhelmed by the unstoppable mass of enemy vehicles. And just as often the opposite happens, matches where your team wrecks the enemy team so fast, you either didn’t get the chance to fight at all as you were busy catching up with the frontline, or maybe you even get your fair share of damage in, but no one could call it a fun or in any way entertaining match.

WoT makes it very easy to feel like the victim. I know that statistically this shouldn’t be possible. But you’ll still end up asking yourself, why did I lose 10 matches in a row again when I don’t think I’ve ever had such a long winning streak? How do people consistenly hit and penetrate my Patriot’s hatch multiple times in a row, when I’ve almost given up on these types of hatches as they’re virtually impossible to hit for me? How did my shell land outside the aim circle? Why does my 122mm gun fail to overmatch 20mm armor plates, yet a shell with 60mm pen gets through 200mm of my armor? How is it that, when pushing early scouting positions, I’ll get destroyed instantly on half my attempts, while the average enemy scout takes only a single shot?

Some of these are either skill issues or the result of a bunch of well-known bias being in full effect. But these can’t answer all the questions raised, and the frustration remains anyway to the point that the game sometimes has me question my sanity. Knowing the mechanics of the game well in addition to some basic statistics has only made this worse I feel.

What I Learned about Myself

I take some interesting lessons away from this year of playing WoT. One is the fact that I’m very vulnerable to techniques like what they do with daily missions, as I described above. This wasn’t completely new to me, as I remember collecting daily login rewards in various games months after I stopped playing them. But that’s tame, I log in, pick up my reward, forget about the game for 24h. WoT on the other hand, showed me how badly this can be abused, and it’s something I need to be more aware of in the future.

Another thing that isn’t exactly new, was seeing how much more motivated I am to play when I’m not alone. Most of the time I played with my friend, but on days where he couldn’t play, I found myself playing a couple rounds alone at best, and sometimes not at all. I don’t even think playing together makes such a big difference. Often times we went to different flanks and effectively played on our own separate part of the map anyway, yet somehow that made the entire experience much better. The frustrating parts of the game in particular became more bearable when I wasn’t playing alone.

What was a bit surprising to me was seeing how little I enjoy “campy” TDs and similar tanks. I’ve played almost a thousand matches in the StuG III on my old account (though to be fair, it’s a very flexible TD) so I assumed I’d like that. No, I don’t. Sitting in the back waiting for the rest of the team to lose the flank so I get some targets to pop is pretty much the worst playstyle I could think of. Of course, sniper TD doesn’t mean you have to sit at the base the entire match, but generally… eh. I’m a patient person, but this isn’t for me.
Arty on the other hand, I found surprisingly enjoyable. I couldn’t play more than three arty matches in a row, but as a change of pace compared to regular tanking, it worked fine for me.

Finally, the most interesting bits.
I get mad at games. I think I’m generally a pretty chill person, but there are some very specific things that can get me mad very quickly, and some video games hit that weakspot. This is one of the reasons I mostly avoid playing games against my friends and prefer coop instead. Getting mad at your friends over a videogame sucks.
Anyway, if this happens depends a lot on the game. It used to be pretty bad but I think I’ve gotten much better. That said, WoT showed me that I still have a pretty long way to go. I wasn’t able to stay calm playing this game on some days. It sometimes got bad enough that I quit early because it wasn’t fun, for me, and perhaps for my friend as well. Though I guess a big part of this is the general frustration with the game, and I’m not sure that staying calm would have helped much with that I supppose.

The last bit was seeing how greedy the game could make me.
Imagine seeing a lonely enemy through proxyspot right around the corner and he’s turned his turret away from you. He’s most likely alone there, but it’s one of the key spots on the map, so there are probably one to three TD guns pointed at you. Do you take the shot?
I tend to take chances like this. I would often times take very obviously unjustified risks when the situation looked like free daamage. It’s not that I wasn’t aware of the consequences, I just hoped for the best, that I would get my shell out and not catch three in return fire.
Sometimes this worked out nicely, because the enemy team decided to leave the classic TD spots completely open by sheer luck, meaning that guy was completely alone and I got a shot of free damage thanks to my courage recklessness. On average though, you get a free one-way trip back to the garage instead. I was quite surprised that I would frequently struggle this hard to make the decision that was without a doubt the smarter option.

The Spark

I feel like I’ve said a lot of negative things over the course of the past couple thousand words. Well, you know the tradition on this blog. But I’ll not end this on a “I still kinda enjoyed it” note, but go into a bit more detail.

WoT has good moments. In fact, it can be cathartic, exciting and get my pulse up (in the good way) perhaps unlike any other game I’ve ever played.

The late game in some matches, when there’s only a handful of tanks left on each team, you don’t know where half of them are and the situation is pretty balanced, can be very exciting and the perfect moment for some deep strategic thinking, trying to probe for what the enemy team is doing and how you can best employ your tank in this specific situation. There’s nothing quite like barely wrangling victory out of the hands of an enemy team that fought tooth and nail to survive, ending with an amazing sense of achievement as you know you earned this victory.

The game is full of good moments like this. Maybe you end up having to hold one of the main flanks in the match with one other random guy, and it turns out he does not only have a brain, but you synergize so well that you manage to win against four enemy tanks and afterwards you know you could entrust your life to your newfound bro.
Sometimes you take out an enemy tank entirely through blindshots because you got the positions down that well. Or through sheer luck, the HE shell that was meant for the impenetrable front of the enemy Obj. finds its way into the side of another enemy heavy, high-rolling on both pen and damage for a whopping 800. Or you spend one minute and 5.000 credits in ammunition failing to penetrate an enemy tank that similarly did nothing but bounce off you in the same timeframe. Or maybe you enjoy an absurdly stupid last stand against eight enemy tanks, somehow managing to take out half of them because they somehow keep missing, only hit your tracks or bounce on your 30mm of back armor. Or maybe you had a guy from last match send you the most creative insults over something you don’t even remember happening.

Some of these things I still remember to this day, because they were this lucky, funny, or exciting. It’s these moments that reignite the spark, that remind you why you play this game. In a way, every match you play is an attempt to find these moments. But at times, it feels like the game is a desert of frustration and unbalanced game design, and the occasional moment of excitement is but a fleeting reminder that you’re in a very unhealthy, addictive relationship with this game.

There’s still some general satisfaction to be had by getting better at the game. There’s been a surprising number of times where from one day to the next a tank seems to have suddenly clicked with me, and I started performing at least notably above average on it. And sometimes you find that rare beauty that somehow works for you even though everyone else (including statistics) say it sucks. I will always love you, KV-3.

Miscelleaneous

There’s a few more unrelated things I wanted to note.

For one thing, I noted with interest how Wargaming managed to come up with some sorts of gameplay that are generally unfun for everyone involved. This goes in particular for some specific tank (lines).
One example of this is the Italian TD line. Playing against them isn’t fun, as they have very high DPM due to their special autoloader guns, and it’s virtually impossible to damage them frontally since they’re almost completely without weakspots. Interestingly, while I haven’t played them myself, the general consensus seems to be that they aren’t fun to play either, by virtue of being plain boring in terms of playstyle.

A sort of takeaway for me is the fact that tanks can be very un-fun to play against, despite being in no way overpowered. Take the FV4005, which is generally only notable for its gun with an alpha huge enough to oneshot even many tier X tanks with a highroll. This may sound OP at first, but considerig that the tank has mostly underwhelming stats on almost all other parameters, most players don’t regard it as particularly good. I doubt there’s anyone who would argue that the tank is overpowered. However, I still believe it constitutes bad gameplay. Almost the entire point of this tank is oneshotting other tanks. This doesn’t work out too often, but every time it does, it most likely ruins someone else’s match entirely. Oneshots, in a game like WoT, are a very bad idea. This is a distinction that I found very interesting, and curiously, many players seem unable to make it. What I observed is that they think in terms of “is the tank good/OP or not” and this is where it ends.

In general, the WoT community seems a bit… weird honestly. It’s sort of toxic, but that’s keeping in tradition with all online games that are at least somewhat competitive. There’s a pretty big crowd of people who are seriously trying to get better at the game and are very knowledgeable and sometimes helpful, yet at the same time harbor some strange opinions. A common argument on the WoT Reddit was about gold ammo. The apparent majority of players respond to complaints about goldspamming, saying that gold ammo is not more than a way of eliminating non-pens due to lowrolls and that it is not a replacement for skill.
The first one is a very weird argument that I’m not even sure how to respond to, and the second one is plain absurd. Yes, an idiot with gold ammo still plays like an idiot. That doesn’t change the fact he replaced the “skills” (or specifically knowledge, positioning and/or luck) that he’d need to penetrate my tank from the front with a simple and brainless “gold ammo goes brrrr”. This goes back to the first argument: gold ammo is more than a way to circumvent RNG, it fundamentally changes how you play the game. Apart from being a straight upgrade to regular ammo in 99% of cases, as someone who barely uses gold ammo, there are many fights you know you cannot take as you’re simply unable to damage the enemy tank, which ultimately means you have to think much more about where you go in general, and how you manage your positioning to get into enemy’s sides etc. Gold ammo eliminates a sizable part of the strategizing here. Many tanks that would be hard to deal with suddenly become easily damageable.
Anyway, the WoT community is weird. I’m always a bit stumped when people are so unable to make basic, comprehensive arguments.

Conclusion

I’m pretty there was more I wanted to say, but I forgot what it was. The usual, I guess. Enjoy a sub-6k-words article for once I guess.

In the end, I’m not sure I will miss WoT. I’ve said I’m still “playing” but I’m not really playing. I certainly enjoyed it for the time it lasted, it was a nice routine to have for relaxing (?) evenings, and I appreciated being able to talk with one of my bros on a daily basis.

Maybe I’ll pick it up again for a couple rounds, or even a couple more in the future. For now, I’ve had my fill and I’ve already made good use of this extra hour every evening to get some Japapense vocabulary learning in, and I’m quite happy with the progress.

PS: I would’ve loved to add screenshots all over this article from funny situations I’ve had in matches, but even though I have all the replays saved, I can’t watch them anymore since the game client has updated… eeeeh