That actually is usually the best option in Encounter. Capping is usually completely ridiculous because it takes forever and most of the cap circles are complete open for people to snipe you.

Because planes are fairly expendable when you get a few hits, or if you’re not doing so well, or if you find an enemy pilot doing particularly well or nearing something important, it’s almost trivially easy to just ram your plane into his. This doesn’t gain you any points directly, but if you’re not a very good player, of if your plane was nearly dead anyway then you’re very likely doing something that’s good for your team, and what’s good for your team is good for you. However it’s EXTREMELY unfun for the other player, and the more people do it the less fun everyone has, because right when you get your favorite plane out and are about to drop some big bombs on some unsuspecting tanks, BAM, smashed into.

Obviously this isn’t as big of a problem in World of Tanks, but I could see a lot of people with shot up light tanks suicide scouting so they can pull out their KV-1S that’s next for them in their garage or something, which isn’t a HUGE deal, but I’m sure Wargaming wouldn’t approve of it at all.

The garage battle works like this: You have a certain number of crews for each country, 4 to start, but you can buy more. Each crew can be in one plane at a time. The tier system is very different, but basically you’re put into a match based on the highest tier plane you have, someone else already said that lower tier planes aren’t as comparatively weak in War Thunder, and they were very right there. Once in the match, when you die you can hop into another plane from the same country and start again.

You kept mentioning a “second round”, but it doesn’t really work that way. Some people survive a long match in just one plane, others might go through all of their planes before the end of the same match. You come back into an active match when you respawn. The match only sometimes ends with everyone on one team losing all of their planes, more often it ends when the objective is completed by one side or the other.

Personally I feel that this works better with planes than with tanks, because low tier planes can still damage higher tier ones, because they don’t have 100mm of armor on them.

However I think this could still work with tanks, but probably not in randoms. In more of a Company Battle or Clan Wars style it could work though, and maybe with an encounter battle style, or maybe a multi-stage encounter or assault sort of thing, where the goal moves. Maybe King of the Hill even. Obviously it wouldn’t work the way it does in War Thunder though.

You could have a preselected group of 2-4 tanks per person, not your entire garage. You would have a tier cap on the whole thing, and maybe one on each person as well. You also give them classes like Tank Companies do.

Maybe you could even do an escalation sort of thing, so the first batch is up to tier IV, then tier V, then tier VI. That way when you lose the first tank, you get a higher tier one, and the match is a little more balanced, but as the higher tier tank kills others, they also come back with higher tier tanks.

There are definitely fun and interesting ways that it could work, IMHO.

Possibly? I still have a leaked supertest screenshot from Karelia garage battle dated 5 Oct 2011.

“another difficulty is the position of destroyed players: they obviously would have to wait until the end of the “round”, which makes the whole thing tedious, leading to possible AFK’s for subsequent rounds”

Why do you think there would be waiting involved? Your tank dies, you hop into the next one right away; your last tank dies, you can just go back to garage, just like now.

“Long battles (30 mins for example) would take this away.”

I think you overestimate the average time such a battle would take, in said screenshot the battle’s fate is decided after ~19 minutes.

SS, you should check out WT and see how they handle garage battles first hand, and why it made WG look like idiots saying it’s “impossible to pull off” to “maybe”.

If you get destroyed quickly, or if you are one of the first that gets completely wiped out, your tanks are in the game.

I think the reason, why a tank is locked for the time the match takes, is that the game is completely server calculated. If your tank is in a game, and it shouldn’t be locked for the entire matchtime, the server needs to make a “temporary copy of your tank”.

Let’s think the plan, of a non locked tank unlike we have it now.

So your, let’s say, IS is on a match in Himmelsdorf and you get shot after the 3rd minute. The game takes the whole 15 minutes because of whatever reasons. This means for the actual system you have to wait another 12 minutes until you IS on Himmeldorf gets calculated (What happened in the rest of the time, XP, Credits etc etc).

How would it be if there wasn’t this lock?

Without it, you could just again select your IS and go to another battle. This means (because of the server calculated nad rendered system) that the server has to creat a “temporary copy of your specific tank”. Specific why? Because there are crew perks and skills, and gun/track/turret configurations that your IS has, but another player hasn’t.

So now you finished the second match and in the meantime the other match ended. Now the server calculated your EP, credits, and other stuff from the first match and added it into your “place” in the database. Now it needs to merge the temporary copy to the existing one in the database, and delete the temporary copy, so it doesn’t think you got 2 IS, that hat the same crew/tank setup.

This would be much more calculations for the server and for each player. Now think about it the player changes the setup of the tank while it’s in a game? This is a huge amount of additional calculation.

Now think about the amount of players on the server. This would bring it to it’s knees