SS: Continuing from where we left off, JD made a new interview – this time with the popular streamer Jingles! Enjoy.

1. Jingles, what playstyle do you utilize?

Depends entirely on what I’m driving, what the map is and what’s on the opposition. I do tend to prefer the faster machines, but I’ve noticed lately that I tend to use the speed to get into good forward positions and ambush enemies rather than dogfight with them like other people would in the same tank. I seem to be a camper at heart, but I’m a camper who likes to camp as far forward as possible with the option of retreating quickly if I need to. Having said that, I’ll do whatever the situation requires, but there are certain styles that I just seem to settle more naturally into.

2. So, what is your favorite tank?

I’ve had a number of favourite tanks. It used to be the Marder II until it finally got nerfed to death, it’s still the machine I’ve played the most games on with the highest win rate (334 games 67%). I don’t tend to focus on any one tank, if you look up my stats you’ll see that I play most tanks more or less equally, with an average number of battles in all of them. I’d have to say that lately I’m really falling in love with the M46 Patton, though. I love all of the tier 9 machines, as a group I think they’re the best tanks and TDs in the game. The Patton, however, hits that sweet spot of speed, agility and a really powerful gun that I love.

3. What made you start making videos on youtube?

Initially it was just as a way of saving my favourite World of Tanks games. Shortly afterwards I started saving my old version of WOT instead of overwriting it as each new patch came out, and that allowed me to continue viewing old replays. I kept on doing the video commentaries because I found I enjoyed doing them, largely inspired by other YouTubers like Pandy, HighFlyer15 and Quickybaby. Pretty soon I started getting appreciative comments, and that encouraged me to do more, which led to more comments, more subscribers and so on and so on. When I started getting my very own haters, trolls and serial downvoters I knew I’d made it at last. ;)

4. Did the fact that you were publishing videos of you playing WOT make you more cautious on how you played or how you performed?

It really should have, but it mostly didn’t. There have been a number of occasions when I’ve lost my temper over what I perceived as rampant idiocy during a match and remarked less than politely about it in a video, only to have it pointed out to me by my subscribers that what actually happened was completely different, and I was acting like an arse and should shut up. All of it completely justified. This is one of the main reasons why I don’t do live commentary anymore and record it all from the replays. It’s easy for 75,000 internet detectives to point out my mistakes while reviewing a video frame by frame, not so easy for me when it’s happening live.

It took me a good long time to learn to give people the benefit of the doubt if there’s the slightest chance they were acting on information I may not have been aware of, and I still get it wrong from time to time even with the benefit of watching the replay afterwards before I commit any words to video. Luckily I’ve got those 75,000 internet detectives to keep me honest, and they seem to get some kind of perverse pleasure from listening to me rage about the window-lickers anyway. I do try to obscure the names of the victims of my rage now, to at least attempt to preserve their modesty!

5. Are you ever worried about what reaction you’ll get from your viewers?

No, never. If I was worried about negative comments I’d never do a critical review of anything. As long as you’re giving what you believe is an honest, balanced opinion, you can’t worry about how people are going to react to what you say or do. No-one ever got anywhere by trying to please all the people all the time. When I first started doing commentaries I was tempted to try to do them in the style of someone famous or popular, but quickly rejected the idea. People can generally spot a fake, and spending so many hours trying to be what you’re not would get very boring very quickly. That’s the advice

I always give to new people trying to make a start on YouTube – just be yourself and if you’re good at something, do a lot of it. If people don’t like you for who you are or what you do, it’s no use trying to pretend to be something else. Take the hint and do something else with your time. Or say “screw them” and keep doing it if you enjoy doing it and don’t worry about the view count.

I’ve done a couple of videos that I knew in advance were going to attract a storm of hate in the comments and spark multiple flame wars, but I’m never going to pretend I like something just because I’m worried about losing subscribers. I’d rather be honest, give what I hope is a balanced view and if I lose subscribers over it, well… they’re probably the kind of subscribers I could do without anyway. I have had a few subscribers write me very eloquent Private Messages explaining very politely that they’re unsubscribing because they no longer like the material I cover or the way I cover it. That’s absolutely fine. It’s a big internet, there’s a YouTuber out there for everyones’ tastes, but if I’m not the one for you I’m certainly not going waste both our time pretending to be. Unsubscribe, move on, good luck and best wishes.

6. What advice would you give to a newer player to help them improve?

Well the first thing I’d tell them to do is go watch http://youtu.be/HX0znHSeDMU- I made it especially for new players but it’s astounding the number of veteran players who told me they learned something new from it, too.  As for general advice I always tell people pay attention to three things:

1.  Your stats are meaningless until you’ve played 3000 to 4000 battles.  Don’t worry about them.  You’re going to be suffering from newbie syndrome until you get past into at least tier 5 tanks, and then you need to play a few thousand games for your stats to recover from how badly you did getting past tier 4.  Once you’ve got some experience with tier 8s you can start to judge how well you think you’re doing.  So don’t worry about your stats.  Try to do well, obviously, but at first you don’t know enough to know how to do well and probably wouldn’t know “doing well” even if it bit you.

2.  Try to understand how the game mechanics work and learn to react to what’s going on with your map.  There’s a lot of useful information you can pick up from the World of Tanks wiki and YouTube, but don’t stress yourself out trying to learn it all too early.  A large part of doing well in World of Tanks is understanding the strengths and weaknesses of your tank, the tanks backing you up and the tanks trying to kill you.  The only way to do this is by experience, and experience is a harsh mistress.  You’re going to die a lot learning things the hard way.  This is why your stats are meaningless until you actually know what you’re doing.  In the meantime, just paying attention to what’s going on the map will take you a long way.  You won’t always be able to do anything about what you see happening, but it’ll help you understand why things went wrong
when they did.

3.  Finally, when everything goes wrong, take some time to try to work out WHY it went wrong.  The “invisible” tanks that
killed you were invisible for a good reason, not because they were hacking.  Your shots failed to penetrate that Tiger for a good reason, not because the game has it in for you.  Equally, try to analyse why things happened they way they did when it all went well.  World of Tanks is a relatively simple game, but you can give yourself a huge advantage by understanding and taking advantage of how the game mechanics work.  The video I link in the first paragraph of this reply should help a lot.

7. When did you first start doing really well?

That was because of two reasons, and I know I’m going to catch hell for saying this but the biggest reason was because of War Thunder, Gaijin Entertainments’ WWII flight sim.  I was very lucky to be one of the first YouTubers to start doing serious coverage of War Thunder who already had a good subscriber base thanks to World of Tanks.  It’s probably safe to say I brought thousands of players to War Thunder, and my Gaijin forum thread attracted a lot of other War Thunder players, who saw my World of Tanks coverage and got into that too.  So it’s been mutually beneficial, and that’s when I started to really “take off”, if you’ll excuse the pun.

The second reason was because I was becoming pretty disenchanted with random matches and the average standard of play in World of Tanks, but my love for WOT was rekindled by Quickybaby when he launched his WOT Twitch Livestream and invited me along to stream with him.  Playing with streamers like Quickybaby (and later Circonflexes too) revitalised my World of Tanks coverage and made me enthusiastic for the game again.  It didn’t hurt that both games were mid 20th century wargames and so there was a lot of crossover between the two audiences.

So it was these two things that saw me grow from the first 10,000 diehard subscribers in my first six months of YouTube to the current 75,000 in my second six months.

8. Are there any guides that helped you improve your skills in game?

Initially I used to learn a lot from the now defunct WOT Armoury blog.  Watching other YouTubers like Highflyer15′s World of Tanks Tips channel was greatly entertaining and taught me a lot at first, too.  I was heavily influenced by other YouTubers like Quickybaby and Pandy, but their stuff was more entertaining than directly informative, although if you know what to look out for you can learn a lot by watching them too.  I should also give a shout out to Cody Menz who has a criminally underrated YouTube channel and also runs a highly informative and useful blog, WOT Guru.  I found Cody’s stuff relatively late and didn’t learn a lot from it that I didn’t already know, but it’s a great resource for newer players.

9. Any players who are on the NA side that you would like to face?

Quite a few, but I’d rather they were on my side than facing me!  I managed to play with Sidestrafe on the test server recently, that was a lot of fun, we both have similar playstyles and seemed to work well together.  I’d like to shoot the breeze with Pandy too, and managed an hour with DungeonGuruNet once.

10. What would you say your greatest achievement was in game, on the forums and on youtube?

In game?  Clutch game in a tier 9 match in my Jagdtiger, coming back from being 6-10 down and winning with 10 kills.  On the forums?  Having a topic in the Fan Zone subforum with more views than the next 10 most popular topics combined feels pretty good.  On YouTube?  I like to to think that every video I upload is increasing the average intelligence of the player base, one video at a time.  If not, at least people are being entertained.

11. Any tanks you regret grinding?

Not really.  I’ve learned something from all of them, even if all I learned was “never play this tank again!”  Yes M3 Lee, I’m looking at you.  There are certain tanks that are horrible to play while you’re researching modules for them, the VK3001(P) being a perfect example, but I learned a valuable lesson from that one too – never unlock a stock tank with free xp, save the free xp for unlocking modules so you never have to play the tank in the stock configuration.

12. What is the biggest issue with the playerbase if you see any?

Hard to say.  I’m pretty well known for having a good rage at the sheer idiocy of some of the… shall we say, “less gifted” of the playerbase who drive their tanks as if they’ve just consumed a quart of vodka, but I have no idea what’s going on at the other end of their tank.  The guy driving could be five years old for all I know, he could have severe learning difficulties, he could just be having a bad day or he might be one of the multitude of online gamers who honestly couldn’t find their own arse in the dark without the aid of written instructions and a flashlight.

It winds me up when I see the top tier heavy tank on my team afk the entire match and only moving to defend himself when he’s the last one alive and eight enemy tanks start shooting at him.  It gives me the rage when I see stealthy tank destroyers forced to try to shoot past KV-2s who’ve occupied the best sniping positions or scout tanks hiding behind friendly artillery, or people rushing to cap when we outnumber the enemy five to one and have all their tanks spotted and surrounded, or any number of blatantly stupid uses of tanks in-game.  World of Tanks isn’t unique in this respect, pick any online multiplayer game and you’ll find any number of players herp-a-derping around as if they fell out of The Stupid Tree and hit their heads off every branch on the way down.  Any idiot CAN play online games, so any idiot DOES play online games.

Who am I to judge, anyway?  They’re entitled to play whichever they please providing they’re not breaking the in-game rules and terms of service.  I guess the biggest problem is a combination of intolerance and high expectations on the behalf of those of us who do have a vague idea of what we’re doing.  It took me a long time to learn the most important lesson in World of Tanks, and I still forget it from time to time even now:

“In any situation where your life and death depends on the ability of random teammates to do the right thing at the right time, expect them to fail utterly and plan accordingly.”

You could apply it to online gaming in general, of course, not just World of Tanks.  This lesson is why a competent platoon is the single most useful thing you can do to enhance your enjoyment of the game.

13. What is the most “noob friendly” tank mid tier wise?

Well you want something that has enough armour to give you a fighting chance when you inevitably drive into too much trouble for you to handle.  You want something that isn’t particularly fast to increase the chance that you won’t be able to drive off ahead of the team to your doom in the first place, and you want something that has a competitive gun that can kill whatever jumps on you either through rate or volume of fire.  I’d say there were two real choices.  If you’re on a budget, get a KV-1.  If money is no object, a premium Mark III Churchill.  The Churchill gun doesn’t have much penetration, but it never faces anything higher than tier 6 (the KV does) and it also gets an experience multiplier.  It’s also massive fun to drive.

14. Any achievements you are having trouble unlocking?

Given the trouble I have killing artillery (I’m pretty famous for being unable to kill arty) most people would be surprised to hear that I do actually have a few Pascucci’s Medals for killing three in one game.  I’ve actually been on a bit of an artillery-killing roll lately, long may it continue!  Still no Radley Walters or Pooles’ Medals, though.  I have games with the requisite number of kills but all they were good for when I played them were the old Wittmann/Boelters medals.  None earned since the new medals were introduced, sadly.  Since I mostly play platooned up with players like Quickybaby and Circonflexes I’m unlikely to get any, either, but on the bright side, the Crucial Contributions and Brothers in Arms are rolling in!

15. Final words?

Thank you to all my subscribers, I’m very happy to continue entertaining and hopefully educating you all.  And always remember, if you’ve not been hit by artillery yet, it’s just because they’re taking special care to aim properly with their next shot!

Take care on that battlefield, and I’ll catch you next time.

Thanks to jingles for his time and patience in answering these questions!