One does not want to be fooled, one want to be smart as hell, and x-ray analyze everything that is not in your control and proove that it’s rigged. 911 was rigged, everything… coincidence is sometimes hard to accept.

But there is the Probability Theory that is not fully fitting in our understanding i think. We know what it is, but we struggle sometimes to fully understand how big coincidence still can be, without that stuff is manipulated.

Well, the day it would be known that WoT is manipulated – Noobs get bonuses or WR is manipulated to keep as many Players active as possible. I think it would be the day that WoT will start do die.. It’s the worst Thing you can do to fool people, they loose the confidence.. they loose motivation, they quit…

I personally don’t think Wargaming is doing that, and i rather think Wargaming is respecting the Community that is feeding them, if not.. they would be utter fools! ;)

I ground my way up US, Russia and German to tier 7 and 8 and can no longer stand to play it because of the blatant cheating.
If your experience is different as non prem then great – have fun.

Dynamic battle session matchmaking in a multiplayer game
Publication number US8425330 B1
Publication type Grant
Application number US 13/472,945
Publication date Apr 23, 2013
Filing date May 16, 2012
Priority date May 16, 2012
Inventors Victor Kislyi, Ivan Mikhnevich
Original Assignee Wargaming.net, LLC

http://www.google.com/patents/US8425330?dq=8,425,330&hl=en&sa=X&ei=OIaMUeWBAuLIigK32ICYDw&sqi=2&pjf=1&ved=0CDQQ6AEwAA

WRONG
“Rushing and dealing damage earns more XP/cred per time”: OH REALLY? I would have never expected this from a game that pays damage and spotted damage, but gives nothing for sitting in a bush and waiting. [/sarcasm] No matter how strategical important it is to cover the area in front of that bush – the fact remains that a careful player spends half his time watching the screen and WG doenst pay you for using your brain to think up strategies.

WRONG
“Different tanks earn different amount of money”: Well, acutally he claims different income ratios depending on playstyle, but then he tests it with vehicles of different classes. No comment necessary.

WRONG
“WG manipulates starting positions”: I just one a Himmelsdorf encounter with my arty at top of the hill. Actually quite good position for an arty to start this map. And in general: In his first or second article he mentions that WG won’t rig MM to put weak players into one team. And hes completely right there: Punishing the whole team would mean to mess the stats of 29 players to “correct” these of a single player. That can’t work out, no matter wether you rig the team by MM or by placing. Thats true random and as the WoT community contains aproximately 90% retards, its very easy to have a bad start with your team.
But it’s just as likely to happen to the enemy and if you consider this, you can still win. (e.g. lemming trains: Follow them. A person who understands the game would know that you can’t hold one flank alone anyway. And in an assaulting team you don’t have to defend anyway. So go with the lemmings – they can suicide spot and catch bullets like anyone else, allowing the good player behind them to kill more and probaly enough enemys.

However: He started of good. And was RIGHT about a few things:

RIGHT
“Wargaming has a reason to rig games”: Oh yes. Not to direct people into the “should buy premium”-zone. That’s a question of balancing and WG balances tiers 5 to 8 in a way that will keep the maximum amount of players in that zone all by itself. But they need to rig the stats to get as much people into the game in the first place. Because no one enjoys a game he looses all the time. On the other hand, people winning more then average can’t be more then “a player”. To maximize the amount of players, all should be rather equally successful.
The extreme oppiste are games, where experienced and/or good players own Newbies all the time. Think e.g. of CounterStrike, which is fully unrigged and skillbased. And has hardly attrackted any new players for a long time because the just die like jellyfish in a desert. For months. No one could earn money with free to play CounterStrike.

RIGHT
The rigging reacts to a players history. I don’t know, wether it is winrate itself, but as any factor of successful gameplay is reflected in the winrate, there should be some form of correlation. AND IT IS. The effect might even be subdivided into tank classes, tiers and/or individual vehicles. So being bad in a tier5 scout won’t give you a big boost in a tier10 heavy. But IT WILL GIVE YOU A BOOST in that tier5 scout (and probably other scouts and/or tier5 vehicles, though to a lesser degree)
I’ve checked myself and taken some rather weak low tier tank (pls don’t do this above tier4. You will ruin the battles of people who are more then just checking out the game) and botted the hell out if. The results after probably over a thousand AFK battles?
1. there is no effective system against botters :-) (at least not against people who mix in battles they actually play)
2. players with 3X% winrate must be worse then abyssmal. Because a non-player can stay above 40%
3. botting has NO (or very little) negative effect on total winrate. Despite having spend a guestimate of 20% of my battles AFK in over a period of months and loosing a lot of them, my total winrate stayed the same. I just got more “lucky” with my other tanks
4. if I know use this miserable tank and actually play it, I’m very, very likely to win.

Which leds to the question “how is it one?”. And again, the Goblin got a part
RIGHT
“lucky shots depend on lack of success, unlucky tanks can take a whole lot of potential damage”. Thats exactly what I found during my botting sessions. I had (randomly) chosen a tank with rather lacking penetration for its tier. And not exactly perfect precission. And it just felt like this type of tank before botting: Better at catching bullets then hurting anyone. After botting the winrate into the low fourties this tank is now a pure beast. I can reliably penetrate areas that are in the upper range of its shell capabilities, shells hit almost always the inner third of the aiming circle (post 0.8.6 : the inner quarter) and it deals above “average” damage on average. It also seems rather good at spotting (can’t judge “being spotted”, as I took camo as skill. But it works surprisingly well ;-) ) and it bounces better then ever.

And, btw, I also noticed the opposite on my “good” tanks. Thats one of the reasons I started my little experiment: The tanks I was overall most successful in were also the tanks most likely to percieve lol bouncers, 0dmg hits, low dmg series (in 7.x times I even had some below-min-AP-hits), inexplainable spots, etc.)

My personal conclusion (yes, this is another “single player” verdict – anyone who can provide data from 10.000 players may step forward, because right now we only have a handful of people who actually ran tests. Note that “I don’t win as often as I would like to” ain’t a test ;-) ):

- Gameplay is rigged
- Gameplay is rigged to prevent good players from dominating the hell out of bad players (which, btw, ain’t necesarrily bad. But I would like to be open about this and tell me my “handicap”)
- Rigging is based on past success (measured by winrate or other means), most likely in several categories
- Rigging influences a huge number of non measurable stats a bit, so it does nudge a players success, but is not easily detected or even proveable. (Imho this also explains overall Winrate-distribution: There seems to be a pretty clear decline in numbers of players with 50%, 51%, 52%, 53% and 54% winrate. But 59% aren’t that much less common then 61% or even better. This would be expected of a rigging system with limited capabilities, which gives an increasing handicap from 49% onwards, but reaches the maximum allowed handicap in the mid-fifties. So to get from 53% to 54%, one would need to play 1% better AND overcome additional handicap, but to get from 60% to 61%, one would “only” need to play 1% better, the handicap stays the same)

Now some of the very few people who read all this will say “WAY TOO COMPLICATED, they would never do this”.
But it ain’t complicated. One easy implementation:
- take the number of victories on a vehicle in the last 24h, the last week and the last month.
- do the same for all vehicles of that class, all of that tier and all of the vehicles of the player
Sum up these 12 numbers of victories – this is your “general handicap”. You may repeat the processes every battle, after a number of battles or within a timeframe. The latter two would explain “streaks” as well.

Now, before each battle (real battles only – not active in training rooms where it could be tested, probably not in CW), this “general handicap” gets compared with a reference value (so you get below and above average) and then converted into positive/negative points for various stats. E.g. the player receives a -5% on maximum penetration (also moving the average down by 2.5%), a +4% on damage for hits received, etc. . Or, if the player is bad, he gets +10% on his camo factor.
The absolute values of course have to be balanced and have to stay small enough to not be obviously detectable, but these are the only limits. They may very likely affect stats, that are not even supposed to be RNG based like armor effectiveness. It is recommendable though to keep the “various” in front of the stats. A nerf of ALL stats would imply an ongoing, predictable nerf. So two players might easily compare their results on certain tanks. If one only chooses a random four out of e.g. eight stats, it will only seem to be “a bad luck battle”, when every other shot deals 0dmg.

(some might note that I did NOT count the losses, but only the victories. This must not be the case, but it is easier then using winrates and it has nice side effect: Players who simply a whole lot get overnerfed. These are the players most likely to gain skills and then start seal clubbing. On the other hand, players who rarely play will find themselves quite successful. And success is fun. So they might start playing more – enough to buy prem?…)

I’m not going to go find it and quote it because that will just generate even more traffic.

He has been linked on the WoT forum many times before, I can’t believe that SS only just heard about him.

turns out 4.8k damage amounts to 3k experience ^.^