Source: http://www.clantalk.net/t/very-interesting-interview-with-storm-about-wot-in-2014/16309
Hello everyone,
Clantalk portal translated some parts of the recent interview with Storm by Russian videomaker and streamer Jove. Special thanks to Daigensui for letting me know about it. Here it is.
Translation of video from discussion with Storm (by Jove) – (paraphrased from Russian by ClanTalk.net):
Q at 00:53. Patch 0.8.0 was really nice, why were the patches after that underwhelming.
A. There were a lot of work in progress about better graphics, and models, and this work isn’t fully finished thus cannot be rolled into the patches. Perhaps we should have been more active in communicating what we are working on for players.
Q at 1:45. Are you happy with the SPG nerf, did you achieve what you wanted?
A. We cannot look at emotions, we have to look at stats. At top tiers there are 2 SPG per game, which is appropriate. At lower levels there are less, so we will gradually buff mid- and low-tier SPGs until there are more.
Q at 02:45. Do you see a problem that considering the SPG nerf, TDs have become too OP and imbalanced? Thus too many play TDs and many maps become dead-locked?
A. We try to fully understand reasons for this. The opinion that SPG nerf is the reason is widely shared, but there are more reasons, such as increase in precision (TDs gained from being even more precise), and that many SPG players have now moved to TDs. Also, just because there are more TDs doesn’t mean there are too many. There are indeed more, but not more than HTs or MTs across all levels, so it is not a big problem. We will have to make a decision on this, but we haven’t decided yet.
Per request of the ClanTalk owner, I pulled the rest of the text down, you can find it here.
The last question, I fully agree!
We need it ASAP!
TDs are OK the way they are, no need to change anything
>We were considering lower damage for higher-penetration shells though.
Very interesting, we’d get regular shells, HE with more damage and criticals and finally high penetration ones with less damage.
Hey! Maybe they even drop the cost and make them on par with silver ammo!
That’d be neat.
My thoughts exactly
Yeah, I think I would agree with this too. Especially for something like High Tier Tank Destroyers with high Alpha
Yes and in the next patch, after seeing the economical results of this decision, they either change it back, or they introduce platinum ammo. But hey, gold ammo will be balanced, only platinum ammo will be unbalanced.
It is not very likely that they will get rid of one of their major income source. But dream on…
The size of shells is not the only thing that causes damage its also the speed. Projectile with more speed causes more damage than projectile which moves slower. APCR may be slower than AP ammo, but it also hits its target with higher speed.
Major income source? I can’t imagine why would players pay gold for the ammo anymore, apart from clans with gold income that is. And there aren’t nearly enough players who use gold to be seen as “major source of income”. MY two cents would be, your whining about gold ammo use.
Biggest income source would be premium accounts.
And why the fuck would I buy premium accounts if I don’t need credits? And what cost a lot of credits? Premium ammo. Morons like you…
Dude, no need to be a major asshole now…
>And why the fuck would I buy premium accounts if I don’t need credits?
Faster exp gain. Additionally, relying substantially on gold shells is still a net loss of credits, premium account or not.
I always kinda wondered why they never did that before, it could be a nice balancing feature, and makes sense -somewhat- from an “ArcadeRealism” point of view: APCR, atleast, is physically smaller then regular shells so less explosive = less damage
The idea to allow only a percentage of total loadout of shells to be premium, is excellent and really would add some balance to the game. The question of do I fire the APCR (or whatever) to get a first shot pen really becomes important. The intution skill would really come into play.
During WW2 “premium” ammo was always in short supply, with most tanks lucky if they were carring a handful of “premium” shells. I think 10% premium shells of total loadout, would achieve this very well.
Appy/Samantha
10% is always the number that I’ve thought was fair. The only problem arises when you compare ammo capacity of different tanks. There are some tanks that have so much ammo that even firing on reload will take most of the match or longer to empty the rack, where others like the Hellcat have so little that you can empty the rack in a few minutes.
High capacity tanks could on many matches just spam their 10% gold and not run out (or only run out late in the match) where Low capacity tanks may only have 3-4 gold shells available.
I do not have any particular problem with limit to 10%, but then they would have to rebalance tanks which are gold-dependent, T69 is the best example I guess. It can survive with regular ammo, but it is subpar. It has too long aim time and not so great accuracy that it can snipe effectively for weakspots, it does not have such a great speed to flank, it is neither small enough to run “unnoticed” and to be too small of target to hit easily nor small enough to evade at least few rounds nor is armored enough to ignore even lower tiers than its own.
In fact, I quite quickly learned to live with premium ammo being thrown around and many major events (eSports, etc) became dependent on it, at least for some tanks. It simply gives an edge for a team and everybody who really wants to win will spend those few more credits. As I was writing this, T26E4 came to my mind, it also struggles to survive without at least 4-5 premium rounds spend. If it fires just one, even heavy T9 will take it seriously, but if it does not, every tank in the game will roll over it sooner or later, resulting in lost match “just because of that one tank he could not penetrate no matter how hard it tried”. Gold ammo on battlefield does not bother me so much, since I never trusted armor enough except good old E75 and such, which can truly hold their ground.
Only moments when I really hate premium ammo or I feel sorry for others when I shoot premium ammo is when the target is E100 or Maus. With premium ammo, both tanks are simply rendered obsolete. Maus can at least angle turret enough to bounce, but E100 does not have turret sides strong enough to angle enough to ricochet high pen rounds. When someone (especially TDs) load premium against E100, it is just countdown to death. It can not run away, it can not slug it out. It just waits for death. At least it does not happen too often so E100 is still fun, most of the time.
The idea of making it lower dmg+higher pen is nice, but then I would prefer a bit lower price for it, being lowered proportionally to dmg lowered.
Autoloader tanks will get affected by this much more, partially since you can’t load mixed ammo in the clips.
Same with BatChat. 10% of total 30 ammo is 3 HEAT rounds. Not enough to fill one clip.
“I think 10% premium shells of total loadout, would achieve this very well.”
then FV215b (183) could carry only one HESH ammo
We call these “gameplay decisions”
Do you nuke 1 tank early? Cripple the Fascist box tank? Hold on to it as a ‘just in case’ emergency get out trouble fast card?
Likely if they go to limited it would 10% (or what ever number) +/- some shells for balance – Then the FV can have 2 nuke shells
that would make this stupid POS balanced
Premium ammo has nothing to do with historical accuracy so there is no point in discussing whether it should have lower damage or be available in less amount due to historical reasons. It is the cashcow of WG and the developers are very happy with it. A translation of what was saying Storm exactly:
Yes, this is a critical question, and this has both pros (it earns money for the company) and cons (unbalancing the game, making certain tanks ridiculously OP, basically it has only cons except that it makes US rich). So we are thinking that maybe we should limit it, but we all know that we won’t, SerB will not allow it and tell me to go to hell on the meeting, just like he does every single time when I want to make changes.
Come on, seriously. We know that SerB > Storm and SerB was always happy with premium ammo. “Unbalanced game? How horrible…”
That they’ve admitted to even considering possible changes means that they take it seriously and not just seeing $$$. Otherwise they’d just say that statistically things are where they want them.
Storm has considered hiding stats. They talked about it and decided to do it. Then came SerB, said no and everything was cancelled. And hiding stats was not even an important decision that would affect the profit of the company. Storm is a small fish, he has no power.
And Serb didn’t want to change the KV-1S at all and we will have it split.
It goes both ways. As I said, their admission that they are looking at it as a possible alteration is a good sign. They could easily just dismiss citing stats we’ll never see. I have no expectations on what, if anything, will happen but I like that they’ve mentioned considerations for rebalancing premium ammo
SerB was actually fighting so the KV-1S could still have its 122 mm.
Guess what, the gun stays at tier 6. :)
KV-1S would have been nerfed months ago if SerB is not against it. And we still don’t know if it will be nerfed at all. The gun says, the mobility should suffer, but they didn’t say how much. Maybe -1 kmh top speed and that’s all, KV-1S is balanced by SerB.
TDs are only really problematic in high tier battles, specially tier 9/10 where they have too much penetration, alpha and same hit points as heavies. I think TDs need a nerf to their hit points and their alpha should be lowered to 750 while maintaining their Rof.
I think T10 TDs in general were bad, T10 MT was fine to add, but T9 TDs still wrecked T10 Heavies easily
That something like a Foch155 and IS-7 are ‘equal’ (Tier-wise) is hilarious
LoL. What a retarded opinion. You just cant play. There’s nothing inherently wrong with either premium ammo or tier X td’s. You just fail to adapt to the game mechanisms. If everything you asked for came true, you’d still suck balls and unicums and even mediocre players still would kick your ass.
What prevents you to load your Foch155 with premium only? I dont need to do that at all and I still enjoy my games in heavys and meds with no premium ammo.
pffft…
riiiiiiight, I can’t adapt, which is why I perform better than 99.5% of the entire retarded playerbase
seems legit baddie
Glad to see that they are considering a limit of how many premium shells you can bring into a battle. Having a maximum limit (like 10-15% of your overall ammo capacity) would mean you could have premium shells for when you really need them, and at the same time no one can pay to win by only using premium shells. I think that’d be the most fair solution since the only ones who would really be hurt by it are the ones who pay to win.
These are some of the best questions, many I’ve been wanting to ask for a long time but figured they wouldn’t give good answers.
Even better, these are some of the best, most honest, and up front answers I’ve ever read.
Really? I thought that most of those questions are either old or have been answered already.
Like:
“Q at 00:53. Patch 0.8.0 was really nice, why were the patches after that underwhelming.”
or
“Q at 08:30: What will Japanese tanks be like?”
or
“Q at 09:20: What about lack of atmosphere (burning tanks, smoke, aviation) in many maps?”
And those are only three randomly picked questions.
Well you randomly picked some of the worst questions then.
I guess most specifically I’m referring to the responses of the SPG Nerf/TD Boom, random penetration/damage, the “Every new tank is OP” phenomenon (Although his answer wasn’t that great), and the premium shells for credits.
Well the first arty buff was already in 0.8.9 and it was announced quite some time ago that they wanted to buff low/mid tier arties in the Q&A.
The TD boom, especially wasn’t mentioned, that’s true, but SerB did say at one point that they don’t think of it as an issue yet and that they will keep an eye on it.
The random pen/damage was answered around the time accuracy was buffed.
Heck it was answered before that already when they changed it so that tanks would more often survive with 1%-5% health… when did that happen? Two years ago?
The not all new tanks are OP and those that are will be re-balanced was said before, and happened before so there is nothing new about that either.
(Rolling fortress E-75 after the E-series release anyone?)
Last but not least premium shells for credits was mentioned before already, and it was also mentioned that they’re thinking about changing aspects of prem shells, but aren’t sure how.
The new thing Storm mentioned was that they “consider” adding a limit to premium shells, which is basically saying “it came to mind” and to which my cynical half says:
Mindblowing! It would’ve been sad if it wasn’t mentioned while brainstorming about the issue… after all it’s among the first things that come to mind when “nerfing” the premium shell spamming.
Maybe it’s because I’ve been around for a while, but most of those answers were either answered already and have just been rephrased or were easy to realise yourself.
The best example for the later is the “limited amount of premium shells” question.
It would make me facepalm if someone honestly thinks the dev team didn’t think of this already… heck I would already assume that atleast one of their devs threw that into the brainstorming before the game left the alpha version.
Btw the way Storm answers this is the typical open for everything type of answer, and he couldn’t give a definite answer anyway, neither could SerB or all the devs together.
Gaming development is fluid, you change a thing and suddenly something else becomes an issue.
It could very well be that in six months from now on the devs decide that premium shells are not the way to go with and completely delete them from the game.
Is the chance of that happening high? Nope, but you can’t foresee what the future brings in gaming development… changes can happen quickly and all too often it’s a 180° turn around.
So… any more great/new answers you got from this interview that you couldn’t have found on the internet already or thought about yourself?
In my opinion the only value this interview had was to do some marketing:
“See people? We do things!”
That’s nice and all, but dont’t even pretend that there was a lot of valuable information to scavenge from this.
Maybe I missed all of these posts answering these questions before, idk, but all I remember seeing is stuff like “Premium rounds are fine, Random Pen/Dmg is fine, stop whining” kind of answers. These responses are far better than that.
But if you’re really determined to call these the shittiest answers ever… I really don’t care? Good for you?
Excuse me please, but I prefer it if people don’t put words into my mouth.
What I wrote was that these answers are nothing new and mostly marketing.
I didn’t call them shitty, thanks.
>Prem shell changes
Holy shit, they finally came to their senses and realised that high cost is a stupid way to “balance” a purposely OP asset when the game isn’t about resource management?
No, they didn’t. Storm is a nobody when it comes to serious decisions. I want to hear this from SerB or even better, from Victor Kislyi. They can make decisions like this, Storm is just daydreaming.
I’d rather get answers from storm than “How Terribles” from SerB.
WG will never do it. Everything is about money. All my tanks have Fully trained crew, full camo, all equipment, all consumables and All of them have Gold rounds only. And I don’t have a problem with paying for that. I don’t have patience and time to grind all that stuff. That’s why WG loves my wallet…..LOL
that’s pretty sad, I mean really full gold ammo? I use gold ammo too, but loading full gold ammo is for noobs only in my opinion.
“Some people have suggested to add moose running out of forests”
Why?
Who needs moose? We already have plenty of deer.
“we will gradually buff mid- and low-tier SPGs until there are more.”
hope dies last
“We want to help players have less problems with using mods, for example so that XVM doesn’t break upon each patch. We will make resources which are approved by WarGaming where a player can easily install a particular mod, so that players avoid trojans or other issues.
We believe mods overall help the game.”
Well i lived to see this ^^, Looks like serb and storm have diferent ideas about stuff :P
Too much TD’s nowadays. Im a TD fan, but games have became too campy, even for my taste. Its like a Camp Olympics.
Seriously, releasing a NEW TD line, just at the peak of TD usage, was not a good idea.
Kids didn’t know what they were asking for when they cried to nerf arty.
This was a positive review, wheter you like it or not. I belive WG team knows their shit – this is obvious, if you are not a trollfaggot whiner.
What have they got against moose in the forest? It’d be really funny having light tanks KO themselves by accidentally running into it.
(This is a joke. I understand why they wouldn’t implement it)
Give light tanks longer viewrange or bonus to spotting. This may discourage TD bush camping.
>Per request of the ClanTalk owner, I pulled the rest of the text down, you can find it here.
ClanTalk should be very happy about it – they have so many visitors, that their hosting server is overloaded – I keep getting 502 erro.
Most effect five way to counter TDs is to make it so if there’s a large annoying, make mm throw in arty into a match. 1 arty existing on each team balances TDS out on nearly all the maps.
You can flank only so much, but for TDs, you can only sit in so many arty safe spots.
So, more TDs= need at least 1 arty
First things first is to get more mid tier arty in the game for now
There are a lot of deluded idiots out there, who will claim you used gold ammo to kill them, even if you did not.
exactly. Yes, there are more TD’s, but there are not too many. There are not any more TD’s than there are mediums or heavies. For every battle I have that sees 7 TD’s per side, I see a battle with 7 heavies per side. Nobody who claims “battles are swarming with TD’s now!!!” has ever provided any evidence that isn’t anecdotal.