127 thoughts on “Meanwhile in Historical Battles…”

1. Posted this on my page. Feel like it is a good idea to post it here too.

   “Now, this is my post on why I think the Historical Battles mode is the worst mode ever made.

   It’s not directely that the German tanks are more powerful than the Russian or American tanks. Hell, I’ve won all the current battles(2) where I only managed to play Ardennes as American.

   You can rarely even get into a match in it. Simply because the queues are filles with Wehraboo faggots(that I hate so much right now I could break their every leg and leave them for a pack of wolves), who think that this is a great oppurtunity for muh gurman superior tanks.

   This creates SO long queue waiting times that pretty much 90% of the players leaves it because they will never get in the game because of these idiots. And that makes it even worse as it gives less Ally people waiting in the queue while Wehrfags jerk off to rule 34 pics of Wittmann and Tiger tanks while listening to Panzerlied.

   It only worked on the test server, since there, there was russian who atleast had faith in their own nation and its tanks.

   So the reason because it is the worst is that you can never play it without waiting for hours. Confrontation actually worked because you COULD play it, even though it was broken balance wise.”

   • yeah, there is no real reward or “force” to play lower tier tanks.

     Its just ridiculous how everybody wanted to be Toptier by nature as he sees himself pwning “lowbobs”.

     I still think, a special “historical grind” to unlock playability of certain higher tier tanks in that mode would solve that problem.

     • i once played in Kursk with T-34 made 2,5 k spotting damage and a total of 60k net income

       “once”, because i could get into battle only once out of 10+ try (5 min time expired)

       • I tried it with my SU-76… 2 matches in like 200 minutes… the problems are not the Germans, but the MM waiting for something that is not needed…

         We were 50 USSR and 40 German tanks in the que, but no match started… -_-

         • I made this screenshot on 17th April: (Kursk) http://i.imgur.com/fdgevXB.jpg

   • I think the answer would be to make the whole mode significantly more lucrative for silver. If it became the money grind mode then it would fill up fast.

   • As one of those so called Wehraboo faggots you pretend to know about. I would have you know I also play U.S and USSR tanks, just so I can get the queue going faster. And it does not seem to help very much.

     I would personally tell every one to play what ever floats their own boat. But I think zerging a few tigers and panthers with a swarm of derp m4′s is funny as shit.

     Please don’t assume that just because some one likes one tree, that we are the cause of all your problems. The real problem is that no one is playing.

   • Intended to agree. Had a game in mah hellcat in which we had to take down 2x Tiger II with an assortment of Panther M10s and JgPanthers. And before every wehraboo starts whining about swarming – we had almost as many tanks as the germans did. You try to do that with a tin can protected by 13mm of armor firing it’s – less than stellar 76mm.

     The cherry on top? When we managed to take one of the KTs out(there’s no accounting for human stupidity) the reply was: “gold noobs”.

     That was the end of the game for me as I was really unable to stop laughing at that point.

     http://postimg.org/image/51ae1679d/full/ <—-just in case someone goes the whole "pix or it never happened" defense on me.

     • *inclined to agree – arrgh, proxy won’t let me edit the post :(.

       • Try it on USwest, with 9k players, you will NEVER get in a game. USeast is almost as bad with generally under 25k players. I have managed one historical battle since 9.0 launch.
         Team Battles are the same thing, you look for teams, and it is a graveyard. I try to get others to play here in the US, and they all give up after a week, there is no community here at all. Also, the trash talking on the US servers is 1000X worse than the EU servers, and we have no mods that care even the littlest bit.

   • So only you have a legit reason to play German tanks, and everyone else is a Wehraboo fag?

     sounds about right for a typical WoT player.

2. I always get idiots when playing Hellcat.

   • Same, when playing Easy8. 8 Hellcats stopping at a bridge, trying to out snipe a KT and a assortment of Panthers/JPs…

3. jingles has a video on this, i know you’re not a fan of him, but you may want to check it out.

   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGWVco51C0A&list=UUpnjlvS2zxhbNJuGNo_TxkQ at 13:22

   • LOL, litterally just finished watching that and then clicked on FTR to find the discussion about the same subject. :P

     • Yes, this sums it up pretty good.
       I’ll stick to the real HB’s, you know, the ones created by the HB-mods team.

   • I think SS is a fan of jingles. It’s quickybaby you’re thinking of! And ditto, watched mingles and came on here and bam same discussion. Interesting what Jingles said about tank companies. Shame it wouldn’t work, hard enough to get a company battle outside of 6-9 let alone one with specific requirements of what everyone has to drive, what the other team is driving etc.

     My biggest bugbear with HB? I have ONE eligible tank. I’m too high tier on Murican and my first line was the Chinese. Basically no Russian/German tanks in my garage. There isn’t enough incentive to keep tanks in the garage when slots are limited.

4. Fool, try WT GF Realism mode

5. I had the problem of waiting until timeout with 30 odd tanks in the queue for both teams.

   maybe people are giving up because of this?

   • Actually it’s more likely a negative feedback loop of sorts: people wait in the cue, the five minute cue limit comes around for these people and kicks them out of the cue, and so the next set of people have to wait longer, until they get kicked out, and the next one, and the next one…basically, the matchmaker just doesn’t work, period.

     • Exactly. Both servers, different tanks (StuG, SU-100, Jackson, Hellcat, Churchill III) and nothing happens. I had maybe two or three battles activate, among 30 or 40 tries.

       However, I played HB a little on test server, and actually had some amazing battles with a teamwork. But it seems, that there were more of good players on test. However, this mode definitely needs teamwork, a lot more than randoms. Playing solo (as now) is really hard. This mode strongly needs TEAM MM (like companies or 7/42), with limits of vehicles/types. Additionally, there should be some multipliers (e.g. low tier earns 200% of XP/credits, but top tier only 75%), and repeatable missions (e.g. 250K credits for every ten wins, being in top half of team)..

6. WoT is a fucked up game at the moment. many players are leaving the boat.

7. Also I belive it would attrakt more players if they had costum made maps for it. As it stands now the whole thing is identical to random battles.. Just not the possible to pick tanks and equipments.

8. Well, already before 9.0 release I wrote on Overlord blog that HB need months of working, fine tuning, special rewards for some tanks and so on.

   IMO in current version HB shouldnt be released or they should be released with adnotation that they are alpha version released for testing, feedback collecting and further development. They can be fine, but need to be well done. They have to be made like a different game not some fast made (half baked) small addition. They need different balance, different rewards, different costs, maybe some extra rewards like prize tanks with historical decals (or some special decals, special camos on tank that you used in those battles) or maybe captured tanks.

9. The historical battles should have a random picker.. where the server itself would make a list of your tanks compatible for Historical battles and pick a random one for you to play with.

   Then the guys that have only Tiger II in their garage would certainly have to change their tactic.. or either just to quit Historical battles mode

   • How so? The random picker, having only a Tiger II to work with, would keep trying to find battles for it, resulting in zero change for Mr 1 tank only, and frustrating those who have decided to blow off steam in their T-34, only to wind up driving a Stug.

10. And when devs explained there are not a lot of players who will play historical battles, everyone laughed and said thats the most wanted mod since wot beta.

    Silly players always think they know the best.

    • +1

    • Historical battles would be great if introduced properly. But they weren’t, so no wonder no-one plays them.

    • Yes, because those HB are so well done, so balanced, so much work was put in them… They have such wonderful historical maps…

      It is like dropping a piece of shit claiming that it is gold and when no one moves to take it writing that people do not want gold…

      • yeah, because real battles were balanced, both sides had same tanks, same number of tanks, balanced terrain, same logistics…

        You are just full of shit.

        • I see that you can’t behave like a human and you do not understand differences between reality and game.

          No brain and no culture. People like you are worst thing in WoT. Worse then biggest fails of developers.

          • WG made this mod more or less exactly as people demanded it (more low tier tanks vs less high tier tanks), no gold ammo (or in limited quantaties), what else do you want? HB are exactly as wg announced them and they suffer from the exact problems predicted by wg:

            Not nearly enough interested in HB (hell even 1st day there wasnt more than 300 people in all 3 battles out of 100k on eu1)
            of those interested, people want to play just top tier’s, making que impossible
            there is like 3:1 ratio of german : alies tanks in que, and german tanks are the ones that should make smaller teams.

            you can call me what you want, but if im one thing i would call it realist, and the rest can just stay in corner whining how this game is not how they want it to be…

11. I know what it is, people think they know what they want. When they get it, they don’t like it.. Surprise.

    • Oh, you’re right,

      So, you like cakes? Let me give you a piece of shit that looks like a cake. What’s wrong? You don’t like it? Oh, it turns out you have no idea what you like. A shocker.

      • You sir, just discribed the situation perfectly. It fits 100%

12. Here is the big elephant in the room about HBs at the moment.
    It is lacking core features and the devs know it very well.
    Remember the list of things we already have for changes coming in 0.9.1? Yeah…

    It will be much more interesting to play once those changes are in, but without them it’s pretty
    much broken.
    You know stuff like adjusted hitpoints for every tank to balance low and high tiers?

    Wonder why they didn’t hold the mode back like all the other things they cut from 0.9.0… … ah yes…
    the patch would’ve been pretty empty without the HB mode.
    0.9.0 was a giant screw up by WG…

    Well there is hope that they will learn from this.
    One assumes the upper management intervened when they saw that more and more features wouldn’t make it for 0.9.0 and despite the developers telling them it’s not ready the time ran out.
    This is of course highly theoretical, but it’s a typical thing to happen in the game industry and this patch suggests that exactly this happened.

    • agreed 100 percent.

    • Well said, sir.

      I think it already is backfiring, judging from general forum posting. It also seems liek there is lesss players on the EU servers, but thtats just my subjective feeling.

13. the reason of the failure is quite simple in my opinion. Wanting to make realsitic stuff in a pure arcade game is just never gonna work. Yeah, many people wanted that, but Im sure most of them pictured “historical” battles kinda differently than the current state. Lets not fool ourselves, its basically random battles with screwed up balance and stock tanks. It adds literally nothing to the game. When it was introduced, i expected something like special maps for that, with like objectives or something. ( something like, you are a Russian in the battle of Moscow, you gotta defend for x time etc ). In the very moment it first came to the testserver I thought “this is not gonna work”. So besides the balance thingy, i guess the players just realized the gaming experience is basically same as in the randoms, its just less actionous. I personally played one historical battle with a hellcat (which is only vehicle in my garage actually able to enter those) and guess what. Game crashed :)

    I think WG should focus more on the selling point of the game, which are ARCADE AND UNREALISTIC random battles. It was like that from the moment the game was released and i got literally no idea why they wanted to change it. Who wants realisim and historicity will either go into WT FG closed beta or wait for open beta.

    • Funny things you mentioned it. I just got myself my beta invite yesterday and I’m loving it 100%. I am and never was a hardcore player or a realism/ historical accuracy fan but I just like WT GF more dispite having played 12k battles in WoT. I am going to play both but I’m more and more leaning towards WT. Let the haters unleash!

      • Haters gonna hate, that’s a sad truth. WT:GF will lure a lot of people away from WoT, that’s for sure, but WoT will survive, no matter how many fuck-ups Wargaming will do, simply because so many people got so much investment in it (mostly time, but often it’s also financial) that they cannot simply depart to another title in a day.

        • ^^^This
          We have put a lot of time in it.
          We have put a lot of money in it.
          Wont be easy to leave although it may be the right thing to do.

          • i have put 2.5 years and 400 eur on WoT, but now i’m moving away it was fun, but WT much stong game….

14. What i hate the most about 9.0 is this: Removal of the Interface that shows you how many people queue in what tier.
    For HB they should simply show you how many people pick what tank excactly and then make a popup like this “Hey do you wanna switch your tank plz? +20% credits for you!”
    That would at least people encourage to switch the tank.
    But yes before there are special HB maps + HB tank stats, hb will be dead.
    Very sad for all the people who wanted this mode. GG WG

    • +1 Actually a great idea! I think silver is the best way to motivate HB participation. I also think that 10 gold for a win would work without breaking the overall economy. I’d sure as hell play HB to earn a bit of extra currency for new tank time :P moving equipment and retraining eats it up!

15. Its same for me..
    I dont have any russian tanks… (I hate the horrible accuracy on their guns)

    Every time I join with one of my german vehicles… its like soviet: 6 german: 75

    usually after 10-15 minutes waiting I give up.

    I have never ever played a single HB yet …

16. Funny, when I played Ardennes I kept losing as USA, because I was only one of the few people smart enough to play a Jackson. All the Hellcats kept dying uselessly, Shermans didn’t fare much better.

17. I’ve yet to get a game in the historical battles. Every time waiting time expires doesn’t matter which tank i try. Even tried over the weekend and it was the same. So dont think i’ll be bothering again.

18. Wg should stop listening those whining cry-bastards and do thier plan…

    • +1

19. Could have worked, should have worked…don’t even care about the maps. I love the idea of the forced configurations and loadouts. The problem is, as Gnomefather said, everyone wants to play the Tiger. I tried to play the other night on NA and there were 30 people in the queue, but 28 of them were loading up German tanks. I don’t know what the solution is really. Incentivize the other sides more maybe. Or just have more early war historical battles that don’t involve the Tiger, Panther, and Tiger II. I think a lot of the people in the queue now are the ones who just want to stomp someone, can’t do it in random where things are (usually) a bit more even, so they figure they’ll grab their Tiger and go blow up some low tier USSR and US tanks.

20. I had the same problem recently about getting into HB. I couldn’t get in even with the T-34 and Pz IV. I did manage to play a few battles, but were not even remotely satisfying. They are very predictable. Playing with the Germans you lose often while playing with the Allies you win often.

    HB need to be much more different than random battles. One piece of the solution would be to lose the ability to choose which vehicle you go into HB with, it would picked automatically from your garage if you have more than one adequate vehicle. Another piece of the solution would probably be to remove the same win-lose mechanic found in Random Battles and give people some more objectives

    • “HB need to be much more different than random battles” – yes it does, and that means different maps, designed for this game mode, different rewards to make people play it, proper interface to make it as seamless as possible, and a weekend events. Oh… and balance. Like a proper one, not just random, fail-guesswork from Wargaming. If that means one side gets 150% more tanks than the other – so be it.

      • Yes, pretty much all those things would help. I think people ask for new modes all the time because they always expect and want to get a very different experience from the standard battles, but they only just get slight variations of the same, which are usually harder to play and gain nothing interesting.
        The win lose mechanic should be different as it will never be properly balanced in this form and having a good experience in the HB depends too much on having well coordonated teams, at least for the German side.
        There should be no bases as they are now, maybe bases could be moved to more spots around the map or capturing the base means that another one will appear somewhere different depending on whch side captured it.
        They could give small missions to individual tanks to complete. Those would be a boon to low tier tanks but not limited to them.
        Example: -Spot at least two tanks in x minutes and cause y ammount of damage.
        -Scout from this spot for x minutes.
        -Survive for x minutes and do y damage.
        -Capture x building
        -Hold this area for at least x minutes.

        There could be a monthly special event where if you played x number of HB and completed some side missions you could get a some low tier captured tank.

        I hope they’ll keep working on these modes and really make them into something exciting. They have so much potential.

        • “I think people ask for new modes all the time because they always expect and want to get a very different experience from the standard battles, but they only just get slight variations of the same, which are usually harder to play and gain nothing interesting.”

          Quoted for truth. This, absolutely. People don’t want slight variations on standard battles – they want something completely new. New maps, new objectives, new rewards.

          And to be honest – even the standard battles really need a lot more variation. This game very much plays the same all the time, and doesn’t really stack up to any of the proper MMOs (no, I don’t really consider WoT to be an MMO). It really is lacking a lot of variation, especially in the maps, all of which I’ve seen way too many times by now.

21. The main problem is the picker. You got into national battles because they were assigned randomly. HB? You have to click the HB and hope that other 29 people feel like remembering to play HB at the same time.

    I suppose it’s like this:
    80% come and click Battle right away
    20% come and play with friends, usually from clans – platoons, TBs, CWs
    9(,9)% just lurk around
    And only the rest remembers to play something like another single player mode a week after it’s been on.

22. WG should just scrap Historical Battles and focus their developement efforts elsewhere. You’re never going to get close to something satisfactory with the current, very arcade and casual framework, and you’re definatively not going to beat WT at it.

23. Historical battles are boring, because they doesn’t innovate something new, they are same as random battle alot. There are still the same tanks, same maps, same default mode (cap base or destroy all enemies). So yes its a new mode, but on the other hand its almost the same gameplay as its now. I think that WoT need some another sort of mod, something different, completely new, not just mix of current setting.

24. :D go with in HB with some friends and cheat the hell out of it :D

25. Let’s copy another things WT has and fail at it because all we want is to measure dicks with them and not actually do a quality mode.
    HB because WT has them—->failed
    HD tank models because WTs models looked nice and shiny—->failed with horrible optimisation and fps drops
    Just focus on the main shit you had in plan and stop looking over there to see what’s your competition doing

    • HB in WoT were already in plans at least in 2011.

      • Yes, as everyone would expect from a tank game, but it was postponed since then and all of a sudden they have implement it in several months. Surprisingly just after WT released their Ground Forces in closed beta.

    • And at the same time there is so many small things in game, which could be really improved. A tutorial, of course (present is a total joke). Let”s take customization: more different camouflage patterns, custom signs (maybe not so many as in WT:GF, but having a personal logo, why not?), custom inscriptions, etc. They haven’t even optimize the quality of present camoes – it looks like crap on my Hellcat…

      There is also a lot of things available via mods, which should already be implemented into vanilla. Like e.g. tank carousel & filtering in garage.

      9.0 had THREE public tests, and it still made probably worst crashes in months. I agree, that it’s rather management to blame, not devs.

26. I was really eager for HB, but as always WG halfassed it and matchmaking (including tank setup) is ridiculous, Also fun thing is that on all my Ardennes battles, Americans NEVER won, and Kursk’s fate was dependent ONLY on Ferdi’s skills… Anyway fixed WoT by doing uninstall and moving to WT since I got the CBT key

    • people choosing tanks with good unhistorical but mediocre historical setup, or trying to play vehicles that pwn only in random like they have nothing to fear… yeah, all WG fault… :D //sarcasm off

    • I loved Ardennes im ny Easy 8. I noticed that the “survivors” who decided to play them in spite of long waiting times are real fanatics – to the point I won quite a number of battles in Ardennes as Americans, even those, which looked hopeless – like 2 KT’s, few Panthers and generally more germans vs 3 M4A3′s, couple of Hellcats and Jackson. But I saw the same people all the time – maybe it’s the key :)

27. People barely play the fucking team battle mode. Could not find a single team today outside 5minutes of waiting or more!! Im not surprised at all that historical battles is as dead as team battle mode.

    Who asked for this waste of time modes? we could have had some new sounds and more HD models reworked instead of these worthless modes that no one play.

28. In ASIA server, u just never able to enter a single HB becoz simply NOBODY there even during the holiday. Literally nobody queued on all sides and all maps. Big fail

    • +1, but I think the situation is the same for all regional servers

      And even when there’s some people playing, the match is so GOD DAMN CAMPY…..I first thought I could use this mode to grind my stock Tiger I easier…..but it seem impossible and I might as well save some more Free experience for upgrading :(

29. I said from the very beginning, it wasn’t going to be any different then team battles is/was in popularity.. people scream and throw a fit over getting it, then when it arrives, them same people play one or 2 matches, then go back to being pubstars

30. The interface for it all is too clunky, just like the Team Battle one. It needs to be just a 1 or 2 button option. You click on Historical Battle and then the game picks a random tank in your garage which fits into one of the battles. You shouldn’t get to choose – this is the single biggest thing wrong because all the little kids want to be the top tier tank so you just get teams of overpowered SU-152s. They should give large xp and credit rewards for playing the low tier stuff, x2 xp for T-34s in Kursk for example (win or lose).

    Most important of all though they need to fix the fucking game. Its nigh on unplayable still for me and many others. The hotfix fixed the CTD issue for me but my FPS still are 20+ slower than in 8.11 and the graphics look MUCH worse. The game looked great in 8.11 but now the tanks just look like shit, and that includes the new “HD” plastic toy tanks. Really, I don’t know how they can make the graphics look worse and decrease FPS at the same time, its really quite an achievement.

    If I was in charge I’d immediately rollback to the 8.11 graphics & sound engine and start from scratch.

    • >The interface for it all is too clunky, just like the Team Battle one. It needs to be just a 1 or 2 button option. You click on Historical Battle and then the game picks a random tank in your garage which fits into one of the battles. You shouldn’t get to choose

      Too many possible conflicts. For example player could have a vehicle without a crew (because it was moved to premium at the moment), or without a camonet/binoculars. What then – he would have to check all possible vehicles, if they are ready for action, before going into HB? It would be ever more clunky.

      There should be no individual MM< but like in companies or team battles.

31. US steamrolling Germans in Ardennes? Are you joking?
    Hellcats in Ardenees are shit – weak engine, slow turret rotation, shit gun – how do you want to even scratch Panthers and Tiger II?

    Played maybe 3 or 4 battles in Ardennes, 3 with Hellcat, one with Jumbo. All ended the same – US side is populated by about 15 vehicles, mostly TDs against a handful, like 6 or 7 German tanks – Tiger II, few Panthers and two suiciders in V tiers.

    In such situation noobs on US side feel stronk and rush, just to be slaughtered by Panthers and King Tiger they can’t even scratch.
    The most valuable vehicles on US side are Jacksons with 90mm guns, but they are too few.

32. It’s just as bad on the NA server, nobody’s playing them. Which is a shame, because I really enjoyed them on the test server. It was a really nice change of pace from all the artillery, autoloaders, and gold spam.

    Really hoping they do something to bring more players in. =/

33. I think this has fallen in catch 22 (is it that called?). People quit because of very long waiting time (this has diverted me), so waiting time grows even more.
    They need to make push somehow or this is going to be complete waste of time

34. Can confirm this, at least for uploaded Battle Results to vBAddict.

    Uploaded Battles of the last 30 days:
    Historical Battles: 5567
    Regular / Public: 2666591 (Out of this, Encounter: 373591, Assault: 147305)

    Other Modes:
    Company: 31437
    Clanwars: 22107

    • What about team battles (7/42)?

      • 7/42 has ~51k Battles

35. I’ve tried a few times in the T34 but even on Kursk I get to one minute and still no start. So I go back to the regular game. Still haven’t had a HB.

36. i was talking with a friend about that not much time ago.. i think HB are basically a good idea, but if the tanks and theyr configurations are historical, also the damage the guns can do should be appropriate.

    I was watching a film about hellcats, they were used many times to sorround tigers and shot them in the back, taking one down, change place fast shot to others, and so on.

    In WoT’s HB however this is not possible, due to the ridiculous alpha of hellcat’s 76mm and the huge HP of tiger.

    The solution could be to remove HP and rely on critical hits of internal modules (but i dont tink WG would do that risking accusations of copying “War Thunder GF”), or reduce HP amount of high tier tanks or some other stuff.

    Anyway i don’t think HB would never be a sort of brilliant thing of WoT, is just something more that noone really needs.

    this is why i think WG should use his resources to improve the quality of what made it as big as it is, and when the main job is done, focus on this kind of new modes.

37. Historical Battles are basically Confrontation mode fucked up even further. As far as confrontation was playable – this thing here is just a pure joke. Even if you do manage to get a team – nothing but top-tiers matters in a game, and they’re so badly imbalanced that it’s just a flippin joke. Wargaming tries their best to make team equal – they even announced plans to ignore stats of the tanks and create special sets of statistics for HB mode – but I honestly doubt it’ll change anything.

    They should really scrap the whole idea, restore confrontation mode instead, only this time with a limit: maximum 4 tanks of a single type per match. This will prevent shit like hellcat spams, and at the same time make matches more interesting while at the same time not being even nearly as fucked up as HB mode is.

    • Yeah, bring confrontation back, it was playable at least.

38. “playing Panzer IV in Balaton for example is utterly pointless – that L/43 cannot harm the IS even with gold ammo properly”

    Still don’t know why the Panzer IV has that gun at this battle, it should have the L/48

    And I’m still holding a candle for my idea, regardless of how little chance I’ll see it happen in reality
    “TBH I think HB mode would be more successful if it had a series of bots designated to fill each team up completely, and as tanks fill the queue they replace a corresponding bot. If the matchmaker can’t fill anymore after a short time limit it starts the battle room. With this, you get full teams, faster team assembly, and removes the issue of lack of player availability for certain unpopular tanks

    So yeah, more like Gaijin >_>. And it would take a while to code a competent bot. And WG would have to figure out how to deal with the extra server load of the bots(which is why they shot down suggestions for this in training/randoms before).

    Well, one can dream.”

39. Tired to get in to Historical Battles mode this week can’t, no one is playing it. So far I have turned off all but standard battles in random mode and I have stopped playing team battles. Did clan wars that sucked donkey balls and the tournaments are just broken. So till they get things cleaned up I wouldn’t be playing much anymore. And it’s kind of sad as I want to like this game so much, it has so much going for it, if only the developers would spend a little time finishing it, instead of adding stuff that breaks the game and makes people with any common sense leave the game.

40. I once had a historical battle in the Ferdinand. Took me 3 days of trying with roughly 10 attempts each day before getting in a game. I didn’t choose the ferdi to noob bash it was the only tank i had that fitted for historical battles.

    Get into a game we’re out matched 2:1 against IS’s SU-152′s Churchill 3′s and the lot.

    I racked up 4.8k damage and recieved a potential damage of 3k. I wasn’t even playing well! Ferdi was over powered and i carried the team no issues doing the majority of the work. I then went “Well that’s unbalanced and wasn’t fun” and left.

41. I have issues just getting the platoon missions done each night. If all goes well, its seven high tier battles, about ten minutes each, so seventy minutes right there for 15k xp. But the games never go well, so I have to play many more battles. No time for the historical battles.

    The other problem is the tank selection. The only tanks I have for HB are KV-1S, Hellcat, T-34-85, and Tiger. The first two are totally gimped in historical battles, so I won’t play them. Tiger takes to long to get a game. I played one Balaton game in the T-34-85. We won, but I couldn’t contribute much. I suspect the high tier tanks for HB are also popular tanks for random battles, so that’s what folks have in the garage. I’m not going to get a T-34 or Pz 4 H so I can scout in HB. Wonder if people aren’t playing HB because they don’t have the low tier tanks and the queues are too long for the higher tiers.

    We could kick around a bunch of ideas – eg let you play low tiers in HB if you’ve ever unlocked them, you don’t even have to own them currently- but the problem of game play still remains. As one of the other commenters said, It’s still random battles with stock tanks.

    • That’s the case with me (well, I DO have a Churchill III and a SU-85 for Kursk, but I can’t even get into games with those ones, plus I hate the SU-85, so I sold it as soon as I unlocked the SU-100)

42. This is my opinion on how the game can be approved

    1 remove cap circle or make the capping longer

    2 make maps larger I find that we can easily be flanked once we are spotted in German tanks

    3 lower the health of all tanks in historical battle adding the realism of getting one shot in real life.

43. Why not give A.I. and those “bombardment and such prettiness” (which will come with fortification) into the HB?
    It would be more fun and would be less queue. IMO.

44. People played KARL longer than they did Historical Battles.

    Reevaluate your priorities, Wargaming. The people have spoken.

45. I would like to play HB, but the waiting times are killing it.

46. Hummm…sounds like high tier games in WoWp…

47. I played all sides and some of the tanks in HBs (HelloKitty, Su152 ,KV1S, StuG, T-34/85)

    Flaws , according to me , are:

    1. Maps. NEW MAPS specifically for HBs have to be introduced, and they HAVE TO BE balanced around opposing sides, regarding tanks that are appearing in that HB. Random maps are boring, seen sooo many times in randoms/TC.

    2. Incentives. Ppl dont have much of a reason to play HBs, apart from some minor reasons (curiosity, no arty mode, possibility of grinding stock tanks – was planning to grind Jackie from scratch, left for some better times).
    This is when silver incentives HAVE TO kick in. Much more profitability, scaled upon tiers , i.e. 75% more for low tiers (3-5) , 50% more for higher tiers (6-7) , 30% for top (8). Also , a mission system based around HBs could do the trick – lets say win in all 3 maps on both sides and win 1 GLD or Vents.

48. At least you can get into HB’s, try Asia where I havent even managed to play a single historical battle yet, most I have ever seen in the queue was about 11 people on the day 9.0 was released

49. In historical battle you are meant to work together more. With the usual tomato noob lemmingteam. Auto-fail.
    Wg has to pull its shit together, or soon there wont be nothing to pull.
    what they do now is like having a car which has its engine blown off. Wargaming gets out, and start to clean the body, sure it.doesnt work but at least it looks nice.

50. Got one single match in the T-34, got kicked out of queue every time I tried it. With the IS, no problems…after 2 or 3min I was in.Never even bothered to try my Ferdi, Tiger or TigerII (only suitable german vehicles). Easy8 gets matches quick as well.
    But!
    -The objectives are just the same as in randoms, which is quite boring.
    -A noob team or Top tier AFK guys have much more negative impact, and destroyed my morale pretty quick.
    MM. When playing US, I had a battle where the germans had nearly as much tanks as the US. And we had only 76mm armed vehicles, whereas the germans had at least 4 JPs, + of course two TigerII. Guess how that match went, if you consider my previous complaint..

51. Not sure why anyone expected WG to get historical combat right, there very much locked into the way they see things and in so doing any measure of a balance goes out the door. A HUGE issue with various historical battles in these tank engagements is the presence of other unit types. Infantry, Anti-Tank guns, Artillery, Aircraft all play roles in EVERY battle in the war in some way. Negating these factors often leads to lop sided results, for instance the fear of Matilda steam rolls in Tobruk … what would level them out are the 8.8cm flak gun emplacements and 7.5cm l/43 anti tank guns etc. They won’t be there so the historical nature of how the real fight was fought will be lost. There are many of these examples all through any battle they choose for HB. On top of that they didn’t set new objectives for HB so your still able to just cap out the tiny team or swarm them. No real incentive for the people being swarmed to play.

    Couple the issues with historcal perception / unit mix with the present vision / penetration mechanics and you get some very bad games trying to represent historical battles. Sadly if you want these types of battles you will more than likely have to wait for WT:GF to do em. The health system will never allow for a realistic representation of any historical battle.

    Just my opinion and yes i tried them for a bit having most of the tanks in garage for the very reason they are historical. Results matched what the OP got too, which told me to move on.

52. do you even need to ask?.
    i’ve always been preaching this since this shit mode was announced: WHO the FUCK CARES ABOUT THIS SHIT MODE.
    evidently, noone

53. The one thing I do like about HB is the change up in which tanks are used for the most part. The Tigers of course though crippled a bit from there norm and the usual Russian heavy derp. The rest of the tanks though are an interesting mix of modules causing a change in there play.

54. I tried for half an hour to get into a battle with my pimped T-70 tank… to no avail… the reason why nobody plays HB is that nobody can get into a battle !!! As with the rest of the “goodies” of 9.0, the HB mode is bugged.

55. I had the same experience. I tried to get to Kusk with Tiger with no luck. So I switched to Stug III and Ardennes. Lost two battles when theoretically two Tiger II should rule the battlefield.
    There is little reson to go back to HB. The same map I already know with the same vehicle setup.

56. This mode is a total failure. Like the previous ones: team-battle or confrontation. WG shows and they are stupid. That’s a huge stupidity, nothing else.

57. Well ok everyone must see that the HB are a total failure. I didnt even trying for obvious reasons.

    First of all I find no fun in raping scrubs in a IS or Tiger or SU, but at the same time I find it crazy to put IS against the pzIV with that shit crap gun. Seen ppl literally giving no fucks and alone driving into faces of those puny tanks with their IS and wininning. Was like Pz2J in a T2 game… Hilarious

    And last but not least its the fact that the rewards are simply not worth it. Waiting for endless minutes to get anyway raped by autoaiming scrubs.

58. Why don they just make a joint server for RU and EU players for historic battles? Would be more fun I guess. Level of competitiveness will rise as well.

59. I guess most of the people that are attracted to historical battles have already migrated to WT.
    The Arcade system, the small maps, the HP system are things that are not supporting this mode in WoT.

    Also – to mount a real team you are more than ever in a need of a team and communication – the complete lack of platoon and company possiblities and the little effect and manouvers small tanks can do make it pointless to even try it.

    Also – even if you try – you cannot seem to get a game. I tried multiple times at various times of the day with various tanks and till now there either were not enough people for one side or too few players at all for one type of scenario. The whole system is crap in my eyes and even people like me who really waited for this mode to come are put off by never ending queues and frustrating team building.

    WG was able to get a neat arcade game running but for historical stuff they simply don’t have the audience and the game principles resulting from the target group of the original game concept.

    Tank tactics in history especially when it comes to clashes of supperior tanks against inferior tanks left more room for manouverability and means of disabling the target. Tanks could be taken out by immobilizing them without possiblities of repairing them instantly. Pz IIIs had to circle KV1s to take them out and it worked in early days due to those operating as a solitary infantry support or much larger scale terrains and in early days inferior training of the russian crews and their communication or crew setup (unified roles of the tank commander etc). Also anti tank support from infantry and artillery are missing.
    German tanks suffered a lot from their complexity and their field repairs form the manyfold different platforms opposed to american streamlined platforms for example. Factors you cannot reflect in a game like this properly but maybe time factors can be altered.
    A lot of factors are missing and even WT will encounter difficulties I’m sure though I haven’t had the opportunity to test it.

    I guess most people still try to play HB the same as they’re used to in the standard mode. They’re not carefull enough, don’t use terrain for their advantage and engage solitary due to lack of communication and team building.

    I think the only way to save this mode and make it work is to get rid of the HP system (even if devs claim people would get lost in it), open the mode for company-, team- or platoon based teams or even special clan system as I’m sure there might be people motivated to play in such a format if done right and maybe some sort of randomized system in the scenario so you can broaden the pool of players available for one battle.

    Enforcing a different game style might remedy the situation but I doubt WG has the motivation and ideas to really make that happen. So far they only try to make different modes adjusted to the general aspects of their original game concept rather than adjusting their original concepts to the needs of a certain mode (imo uneven teams are not enough of a lever to manipulated to make it work).
    Also the dispersion of the comparably tiny player pool attracted to a such a game mode is very unfortunate.

60. To implement HB like they do better dont do it and waste time and resources… HB needs be more like a “wargame” with more details.

    I think HB needs be like company battles where a guy create the battle, select the team sizes and composition (even in 90s i can play shooters where there were limits in special classes) select the nation level of training and modules.

    Of course respawn help a lot to have a new game mode and not a bad version of random battles, for me HB needs much more and to be fair i think they need start think in a capture mode with flags in the maps to win by capture points i really dont understand why they dont test this in HB but well when they understand by hardcore mode destroy all modules and kill all crew in a tank… you dont need be a genious to know is not fun lol.

61. It would be fun to me. Just aim to the weak spots as usual….
    The awareness of HP is something that is very dangerous if you want to create historical battles.
    the whole threat that a tank is usually implying is lost if you know that one He or even a dire ram attack is the only thing to finish the job. It makes people uncarefull and overly self esteemed and it is to easy to kill a tank that way.
    This is something that plays a huge role for teams with inferior numbers.

    Another thing is the need for tem work which will only be a matter of coincidence in randomized games.

62. The main problem is: most players are idiots.

    First, they want a new battle mode, then – when said mode is implemented – they create a queue with tanks that have the biggest mm weight because they want to pwn. After 50 attempts to join the battle they decide “DIS BULLSHIT! FU WG IMMA PLAING WAR THUNDER NAO!”

    And then, when there are only a few players who want to try this new mode… They blame wg, because everything that goes wrong is their fault, right?

    Most tards don’t realize that mm queues are PLAYER MADE. If it’s full of tigers, kt’s, jt’s – mm can’t make a battle since it’s restricted by rules. If there are insufficient vehicles in the queue – because all Wittmann wannabes decided to screw hb and don’t play it – battle won’t start either. If you want to blame someone – you should blame the playerbase.
    /thread

    • Queues are as long as people are inclined to play certain game mode. Right now there’s absolutely no reason at all to lay HB. Come back when you’ll understand this part.

      • There is no reason to play any game mode….there is only motivation.
        Quite a number of people that came to the game are also tank-afine; they’re either interested in tanks themeselves, certain tanks in particular or in military history or technology.
        Those were probably a majority once WOT startet out.
        However the game principle is aimed to attract a much larger target group then just some historical tank enthusiasts. The concept worked and nowadays the main target group is more or less indifferent to the historical context of the tanks themselves. The whole e-sport campaign makes it very obvious that the more abstract experience of tank warfare is more present these days.

        Still there is a group within the group that WG doesn’t want to lose to other niche games so they felt the need creating this mode. The reason might be that historical tank enthusiast spend more time and money on specific (premium) tanks. They probably thought they can kill two birds with one stone and fascinate both parties for their new game mode.
        Unfortunately they spoiled both…

        The current queues and the tank choices that lead to these are a result of this conceptual failure.

      • @Sky
        Hello, you must be new here…

        Now, who was bitching about introducing historical battles ever since wot got released? Yup, the playerbase. Now the playerbase wants an incentive to play a battle mode it wanted introduced, BITCHED AND MOANED EVERY TIME IT WAS POSTPONED? That’s ONE OF THE MOST RETARDED THINGS I’VE EVER HEARD.

        Talk about unpleasable playerbase… :/

        • @orzel286

          What people asking for HB want is a very different expericence than in Random Battles. What they actually got is Random Battles with a different name which are harder to get into and much harder to play well.

          This whole mode is unfinished and poorly thought out. Why nobody is playing is because nobody asked for this shit.

          Dead_Skin_Mask said this in the first comments above.
          “It is like dropping a piece of shit claiming that it is gold and when no one moves to take it writing that people do not want gold…”

          • What, you thought wg will implement something sim-like? Really?… And wg is responsible for overblown expactations too? What next, “fu wg, stop supporting Putin!”?

            And how many people would play sim-like hb mode? Hm? In case you didn’t notice: realism doesn’t sell well. If it did, there wouldn’t be q3a vs ut war – everyone and their dog would’ve played rainbow 6 instead. inb4 gay thunder crap – 80-90% play arcade iirc (found the exact numbers somewhere, but no idea where).

            Also: how is this mode different from cumminity-run historical battles, except for dedicated interface and matchmaking?

            tl;dr – community doesn’t know what it wants and talks out of its ass.

            • “Also: how is this mode different from cumminity-run historical battles, except for dedicated interface and matchmaking?”

              Exactly my point!! This is the same as people used to try and run because it was only possible in that way. That’s not what I wanted.

              If they really want to make HB work then they should experiment more with different game mechanics not give us something made in less than 3 months.

              I didn’t have any other expectation than it would be a much different experience than Standard Battles. I was willing to play them, but where is the fun in playing the same Random Battles with the same mechanics in unbalanced and unequal teams??
              I don’t expect or want 100% realism. I want something FUN, interesting, that is somewhat historical and more than anything a different pace than what we already have with the other modes.(PS. Not a War Thunder clone)

              • *sigh*

                Well, looks like I’m right about community not knowing what it wants and overblown expectations.

                I don’t even anymore, this is preposterous. Bet Minsk office had a group facepalm if they’ve saw those reactions to hb.

                • Double Sigh.

                  Those are my own personal expectations. I don’t know what expectation other people had, but clearly no one expected what we got in the end.

63. the problem with this crap is that historically 2 tigers were able to kill a fleet of m4-s ‘cos they killed them with 1 single hit while they were able to shoot back only if they managed to get in their back and still needed several hits to take 1 tiger down, while in wot tigers simply cant shoot enough to kill a single m4 before those derp them to hell… crappy game mechanics put in historical events is a fail

64. HB is bullfuzz, same thing every time 30 ussr tanks 45 germany and after 5 min of waiting time queue expired!
    i want national battles back!

65. Imho the best would be if a random tank will be picked from your garage and gave it random HB … outcome -> random tank in HB -> shorter waiting times.

    or at least random tank of tanks you choose .. i. e. three tanks.

66. Well I have tried to get into kursk battle with t-34 and t-70 and i have always failed to get in. But when i pick su-152 its pretty much instant. So for me it gives me an imperssion that MM just ignores some tanks in queue.

    I have played all the historical battles with both sides with strong tanks and with cannon fodders.

67. Yep SS, it’s impossible to say if HB is bad..I tried, as a lot of others did, to get in with T70, but never got into any match..So I just gave up. It will be hard for WG to get ppl to play HB again I am afraid.
    To think that at one point WG actually said MM broke because NOT ENOUGH people picked lowtier or light tanks!

68. I tried to play HBs twice, always quited after 2 minutes of wait and sold tiger II (which is the only tank in my garage that fits HBs).

69. Historical battles is somewhat interesting but than again not. I mean sure i think its cool to have 15 t6s vs like 5 tigers or w,e but that doesn’t want to make me want to play it.

70. With new maps, the response would have been overwhelming.

71. I WAS IN THAT HELLCAT YOU KILLED :D
    these battles were really fun but i guess as you lost all the time it wasnt that fun for you…. I knew i should have switched to tiger II to join your team…

72. I was thinking – how WG could heal this mode? Only way to attract users, is to give you tank and ammo, at the end you pay used ammo and damage, also you can play only in researched tanks, make more realistic balance, not necessary 15×15 tanks on field and that’s it. You get some random tank, with appropriate ammo and crew and thats it, maybe if you have crew that passed training for some tank, you can get your crew. Everything else will screw up this mode.