Hello everyone,
so, tomorrow’s the Christmas day here and there are only a couple of days left till the end of the year. It’s time to look back – and forward. If you forgive me, this time, I’ll just skip the contributor review, I will make a separate post later on. Thank all of you who contributed of course – it’s just in this post, I want to focus on something a bit different, the past and the future. It’s going to be a long post, so be warned. Gonna split it in parts by topics.
Of me and Wargaming
Right… where to start. A lot of people think that I actually hate Wargaming. This is a matter I explained several times, but still the feeling lingers on, fuelled by my… let’s say more negative posts. It’s not true, at least mostly not. My attitude towards Wargaming is actually quite complicated. For me, it’s about the specific people. There are people I respect immensely and in a way am glad I am not bearing their burdens of responsibility – people such as Storm, or Evilly. Practically all of the people I really respect are Russians or Belarusians, although I must say that despite having some disagreements, I also am very fond of American server’s very own historian, The_Chieftain (and his epic hat), I also remember Overlord, who moved on to WoT Blitz and god knows what he’s doing now, haven’t heard from him in ages. And let’s not forget the historical and balance department, those are some awesome guys. And the supertesters, some of them are pretty great as well :) Won’t give names, reasons are obvious.
On the other hand, there are people who I truly detest, like the EU staff, who I think are generally a bunch of pisspots. Yes, I know many of you like Ectar & Co., I don’t. There are exceptions of course. Then there’s Yuri Pasholok, but that’s a very specific case. We’ll see how he acts in real life, won’t we? According to WG guys I met, he’s coming in January to Prague… pack a raincoat Yuri, the weather here is shit. That’s global warming for you.
Overall, I was surprised myself to find out that there are more specific people I like than those I dislike, at least specific people – strange, yes? What I really dislike is the way Wargaming shifted in last months. Maybe it’s just me… I don’t know. I just have this nagging feeling that something changed in last half a year and Wargaming as a whole moved much more towards the “money at all costs” policy. I mean… too many offers, the discount system is almost arcane, hard to keep track even for me these days. I get it actually – World of Tanks is still the main product that HAS to be used to make as much money as possible. World of Warplanes didn’t work and World of Warships… that I don’t know. The feedback for that seems to be really positive, but even if the final game is MUCH more interesting than what we’ve seen in the test, I really don’t believe it will ever cross the “niche genre” boundaries, because ships – that’s very niche thing (tanks on the other hand are not niche in post-Soviet countries, there is a huge fanbase of armor, the Great Patriotic War and all that, much larger than a ship fanbase I’d wager).
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