Are WoT Developers Confused as to What To Do Now?

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Hello everyone,

I posted a shorter version of this text on the EU forums yesterday and even though I didn’t intend to before, I decided to repost that here with some changes and corrections.

Disclaimer: It’s a personal opinion, not a fact post (some people recently whined that FTR gets “too many personal opinions” – well yea, it’s a blog, I run it from the start that way and it won’t change). It’s also quite long, sorry. I will also try to be constructive, so bear with me.

Okay, here’s a feeling I’ve been having for quite a while now. Usually, for all my criticism of WG EU and whatnot, I was always quite content with the way the game development was proceeding. I mean – when the game was released, the concept was very clear. Tanks fighting other tanks on a battlefield. Simple, clean, easy to understand but difficult to master, which is exactly what I like in games. Sure, there were issues such as the infamous tank disappearing, spaced armor eating shells etc. – but it was very playable and it turned the game into one of the best free to play games ever created.

Years passed (literally! just think about how long some of you are around here) and a lot has changed. We got new physics, we got an improved render and pretty much everything was fine and I was still happy. The development proceeded in the direction of “more tanks” and “more maps” without putting too much emphasis on the graphics (well, until relatively recently anyway), which might not have been good for the owners of top notch rigs, who want to play a game that looks like Crysis 3 or whatever passes for graphics benchmark these days, but it was good for the wide group of players with weak computers, that still had something that could enjoy and run. Of course, time doesn’t stop for anybody and eventually, something just HAD to be done with the graphics (especially with the first War Thunder HD screenshots) and so they did – or at least attempted to (the HD model program).

And here we find ourselves in the aftermath of patch 9.0, considered (even internally by Wargaming) to be one of the worst and most bugged patches in World of Tanks history (four hotfixes ever since the release do speak volumes – although at least they actually are trying to fix things instead of hiding their head in sand).

What I have to wonder now is: what is the direction they are heading?

Consider this example:

Since cca 2-3 months ago (perhaps even earlier), Storm started openly stating that there might be a problem with the client size. With the rework of all the models into HD standard, it might reach dozens of gigabytes (I’ve read various estimates for a full HD client, ranging from 40 up to 70 GB). Naturally, not everyone will download HD textures (their download is supposed to be optional from 9.2 on) but the size of the client is considered a problem – a problem enough for Storm to openly admit that this might affect the introduction of new branches and in extreme case their reduction to one or two per year. Considering how much there is still to implement, this would be a major disappointment to a lot of people (French tanks? Yea maybe 2016, maybe…). Worse still, other branches, ignored by some, but eagerly awaited by others (EU tree) are in danger of being completely axed (as far as I know it will be decided around this year’s autumn). Italian tanks? More French, British? Sorry, the client would get too big.

And yet – at the same time – Storm confirmed that the alternative hulls are still planned. To refresh your memory: alternative hulls were mentioned as early as last year’s autumn/winter, perhaps even earlier. Basically, tanks, that had such an option historically, would be able to change their hulls as modules along with their suspension. In other words, each tank with an “alternative hull” would have to have TWO hull models, which is like 50 percent of the model. In other words yet: the file size of such a vehicle would increase by 25-40 percent. You might think – alternative hulls, but that’s not bad, perhaps even useful. After all, it would be nice for the suspension to actually have its graphical effect on the tank.

Nothing could be further from the truth. As it was presented, this option is utterly pointless.

First and foremost, most changes would be just cosmetic – for example, two different suspensions for JagdTiger: Porsche and Henschel. Both had the same performance (Porsche suspension was cheaper and faster to produce), in-game difference would be negligible. Another case would be alternative hulls, that do in fact have some sort of use (for example, early T-54 hull had 120mm frontal armor, late one had 100mm). It’s logical that more armor means more weight and less mobility, but in this case, the additional armor belonged to an EARLY model, that could for example mount only the stock turret and the LB-1 gun, not the D-10T2S. So in effect, you don’t have two really alternative (comparable) hulls (each with its advantage and disadvantage), what you have is a stock hull and a better elite hull and that’s it. In this case, the elite hull has less armor, in other cases, the elite hull would have even more armor (Panzer III, IV and their late hulls with schurzen/additional frontal plates).

To sum it up: for the 50 percent increase in model hard drive size (everything in HD, so it’s a SUBSTANTIAL increase in absolute numbers), you will get absolutely pointless cosmetic changes or a stock/elite hull, noone will play the stock one more than they have to and you are right where you started. So on one hand, WG thinks the client might get too big, on the other hand, they invent a pointless way to bloat it even more. Personally, I think that in the end, cool heads will prevail and the alternative hull idea will be scrapped, because – if you want to talk profit, there are literally hundreds of thousands of Polish and Czech players (two out of three biggest EU communities), who don’t have their own tanks yet and judging from various threads and questions in both sections, they do want them. Or Italian tanks. Or Swedish tanks.

Another recent case of “we are not exactly sure what we are doing” would be the historical battles. I mean… the idea was good, but it has one tiny small flaw. Nobody is playing them. Storm recently said that they planned for HB to be played by cca 4 percent of players. That means that on a 100k online EU server, 4000 people should be playing it. Not 40. The implementation was clearly botched and now the developers are clearly shaking their heads as to what went wrong, only a few days ago Storm asked the Russian players for a feedback, apparently because he and others do feel that this was a failure (and how could they not, the queue is empty).

Or the new game modes. Strongholds? Really? What is this, Travian? Personally I don’t believe it will be a success either, because clans that would really have the discipline to do such a thing (strong and large clans) will be playing either CW for gold and honor or team battles/e-sports for real competition, while smaller clans (20-40 people), who have 10-15 people online at the same time will not be able to muster enough manpower to play what is effectively a rehash of the company mode. I mean, it’s not a bad idea, but it targets the same hardcore audience as CW and team battles. And team battles already practically killed the company mode. And don’t forget they are STILL planning garage battles. AND in-client tournament mode. AND some sort of tier 10 “team battle” mode was mentioned as well.

I am actually not sure how many of you, dear readers, realize this, but having a large clan does NOT equal having enough members for organized activities. That requires discipline as I mentioned. Those of you in large (in numbers) clans that don’t play CW, ask yourselves – how many companies have you played lately with your clan? If the answer is “none”, my guess is you won’t play the Stronghold either.

Last but not least, it’s the “historical tanks” schizophrenia. In the beginning of WoT, the historicity didn’t matter that much (that’s where various abominations like the E-75 with a gun that can’t fit inside the turret and silly unhistorical armor came from), now it does matter to the point of “that gun was not planned so we can’t have it”, yet at the same time, unhistorical fake garbage like the WT E-100 (or the Soviet LTTB LT8, which is practically guaranteed to be unhistorical, as the historical turret for that tank was not even designed) keeps getting into the game. Why? Either you want historical tanks or you don’t.

Conclusion

Personally, I think Wargaming is overstretching. New graphics – granted, that is needed (preferably without the loss of performance on low settings for bad computers, not like ehm… 9.0), but gameplay-wise, I think this game should return to the roots, to what made it successful – and that is the Great Belarussian Random, with more tanks, more maps, fix historical battles (it’s still possible), scrap pseudoTravian, scrap OMGwarthundercopycat modes like garage battles, scrap alternative hulls, rework the models to HD if you must and churn out more tanks. That’s what I would do anyway.

180 thoughts on “Are WoT Developers Confused as to What To Do Now?”

      • It’s not a simple task. Engines should be built with multicore support. Modifying an existing engine would be a horrible hatchet job that would most probably take longer and produce a lesser result than starting over.

        • multicore CPUs existed ever since WoT was still in CBT, and the acceptance of multithreading was extremely noticeable – hell, i even have the same quad-core since back then
          WG chose the wrong engine for the client

          • I don’t believe they have the inhouse expertise to make another engine either…

            • in fact, BigWorld DOES SUPPORT multicore.
              its just not utlized in WoT. Devs confirmed, and there was even article here on FTR about it.

              Yes, the engine is rubbish, but it does have the multicore support.

          • To be honest – using multicore and multithreading is easy (just adding some line of code) BUT you have to deal with so called “thread synchronisation”. I personally write programs in C# and there are several ways to deal with “harmful competition” between threads. It’s all about using same data stream at the same time, seeing that this in 90% of cases will lead to errors in computing (not assembler ones, simply misscalculations – two threads using one data at this same time and trying to save them to one file at one time). There are several ways to deal with these. You can use synchronisation class, semaphores, mutexes etc. BUT the worst part is – you have to decide where “critical area” for method/function is, or it’s even worse if you have 50-100 classes and they are overlapping too much with data usings and you just cant do much to implement threading well. Mostly you’ll have to rewrite all the code, but first desing it. Yeah parallel programming is hard as fuck

    • “spot system revamp,penetration system revamp, armor system revamp etc etc”

      What for? The biggest problem of the game are armies of nobrainers. I play since 2011 and never winning a random battle was such roulette like now. Battles are insanely onesided and most of people die in 2 minutes. It is most frustrating thing together with long loading times and unbalanced vehicles like KV1s.

      I have no problems with spotting, penetrating and armor, I understand how they work. But every day I see no brainers who in tier V medium frontally attack AT2 (and do not even try to shoot at copula, oh no, they shoot at hull…), idiots who shoot at AT2 side armor at 45 degree with their 57 mm guns, idiots who go on top of hill and are surprised that they are dead in 10 sec, idiots in KV1s, who manage to make one shot and die (had 3 such morons in battle 10 minutes ago where I was lowest tier and they were top, oh what a fun to see them dead in second minute of the battle). These are real problems of that game… It is unplayable because of idiots…

      Ok, sorry for rant, I am pissed off after morning session with 25 win ratio due to bunches of no brainers in almost every team

      • Yeah..I have almost quit playing because of tye sea of reds ruining gameplay at high tiers. Steam had arma3 on sale last weekend, so I got it and it is very fun.

        Im not quitting playing tanks but I am playing it a ton less now that I have arma.

        • I had already one break – it took me 8 months to try WoT again, and after a few weeks I am again fed up. No fun in WoT anymore until maybe you take tier II and sealclub, but it is not even half as fun as good battles a few tieres highers.

          In older times there were quite often interesting battles in which 5-6 last tanks in both teams were playing almost chess game for victory. Now we have only festival of fails and stupidity. And victory goes to the one, who had less idiots in team – one team crashes the other and winner is obvious after 1-2 minutes.

          In older times I was able to play for a few hours. Now I quit totally irritated after 3-4 battles.

          • yeah me too.. now I’m playing about 30 battles a week .. I don’t need premium to play so few battles. and if I don’t need premium WG doesn’t need my money ^_^

          • I don’t want to sound like a fanboy or anything, but ever since WT:GF went OBT, I haven’t played WoT …. I have over 6 thousand battles in WoT, I used to be hella addicted to it … but in the last half year, the game became way too frustrating for me to play … idiots who “troll” teammates … scrubs who sit at the base, spamming the map and doing nothing else the entire battle … in their top tier heavy tanks … I just … in GF, I’m just having wayyy more fun there days. That and Sabaton became my epic double of the day. Even when I get killed by a KV-2 in one shot in GF, I just laugh my ass out, jump into another tank, flank him and get him killed. It feels so much more intense. The battlefield is more “disarranged”, there’s explosions everywhere, AI tanks to farm easy exp on at the beginning of the battle, randomness happening all around. Like on a real battlefield, for me, WoT became too much sterille, especially after I had to turn down the graphics a lot to keep competitive fps.

            That’s just my personal opinion, I don’t force anybody to accept it, if you feel ofended by it or something, feel free to ignore it :)
            ^^Cheers

      • I dont like the armor system… it really is mostly pointless.
        Makes me play squishy vehicles instead.

        Lets take maus, its main feature is the armor… Okay, you can forget armor when they are shooting gold rounds.

        lets take leopard1 .. main feature is mobility and firepower… I dont care if they shoot gold, silver, flower or wooden shells. I still have the mobility.

    • The game mechanics are fine, just give me skill based matchmaker, leagues like in starcraft 2 => the system works right when everyone is down to 50% winrate. Or up. Those guys would be happy as well I guess.

      95% of this game’s rage comes from sucky team-”mates”.

      Also: We don’t need more tanks. Even now there are too many tanks that are basically the same.

      • Even if they can’t fix mm to balance teams due to long queue times, I think they could at least make it so you can’t purchase the next tank in the tree until you get Master on the current one. That alone would keep most tomatoes in the tier 1 – 6 range.

        • If a skills based mm increases queue times they are doing it wrong. Just make it biased to skills. If it cannot find a match with all unicum players after a minute, go with the next best thing.

          Or make queues more entertaining. Ever played the tanks game on Wii Play? Implement a mini game like that for the queue.

          • Ever thought that MM could swap players between teams after it created teams according to (atleast) rating to make it more balanced?

        • This would be a brilliant idea, but what do you do with the current playerbase? Grandfather them in?

  2. I personally don’t care how big client will be. Storage is so cheap and I already have 2 teras worth of it.

    But they could always optimize is better, well they could optimize EVERYTHING better.

      • Internet transfers? You mean the patch download? I don’t see what the problem with downloading new content is…that’s how it gets to your PC after all. Yea WG servers might be strained for a day or two until everybody has patched but that’s unlikely as well since patches are already downloaded P2P.

        • have you tried the P2P for patches ,
          WG severs are way better, now that’s saying some thing.

          • I always P2P the patches. I didn’t know you could set your download to WG servers only. Last time I checked the WG launcher initiates a p2p connection to download the patches.

            • And for many people the patch downloads ten times as fast if you turn torrents off.

              P2P in the launcher never worked very well.

        • When you have such a massive playerbase it stops being just a problem of the CNDs that distribute the patch.

          ISPs/major routes get overloaded when such number of people start patching their game – that’s where most of the “patch day” lags are coming from. Now increase the client size by a factor of 4, 5 or 6 and you have even bigger problem.

        • The problem with downloading new content is people living in rural areas and having 1000 kb/s connections.

          • downloading something as big as discussed, is a problem, but there are ways around it. You can pre-patch a download, instead of download and play instantly, they could allow you to download the patch days before it goes live. This approach would allow people to setup the download before they go to bed, or before they leave for work in the morning.

            Something like 9.1 is available for download today, official release would be another day this week or even next week. When you launch the game client it would simply update the download that you already had if need be, and on release day when you launch the patcher, an initialization patch would enable the content.

        • I guess that Windows Update, performing updates every two, three days, strains interntet “motorways” even more that few GB update. Moreover, most people just get the client updated, so thay usually do not donwload full client.

          I think that the client size is the least important among the things Silent mentioned in the article.
          However, I observe the same as him – it seems that WG wants everything in WoT – fun, historicity, nice graphics, fast client etc. but many of these are simply counteracting – war was not fun, so how you can stick to historicity and still make the game fun for players and well-balanced when the historical goal was just the opposite – to implement machines that outpowers and outguns the enemy.

          • Windows update servers are probably more central to the overall ‘net architecture with lots of regional hubs since Azure is perfect for that stuff. I doubt WG have the same access to backbone fibre that MS have… Causing bottlenecks on all the direct nodes from their cluster during updates. They might have to go dark just to have the bandwidth available and avoid DoS

          • I guess that Windows Update, performing updates every two, three days, strains interntet “motorways” even more that few GB update.

            Windows Update patches are very small, several MB ones are rare. Even more, WU patches are optional. WoT updates are much much larger and are obligatory.

            Moreover, most people just get the client updated, so thay usually do not donwload full client.

            Still such updates are substantially larger with several hundred MB each.

        • WoT downloading 2GB = 7 hours… (for example Nfs World download 5GB = 2 hours, WT download 7GB = 2 hours) my internet is not the best but in other games i have ping around 25ms but in wot i have 75ms… their servers are actually.worse than my net :D

          • If you download 2GB for 7 hours I guess that the problem is not WG server but probably nasty bottleneck between you and their server. I get the same for about 2 hours. Maybe even less but minutes doesnt matter here.

            Ping: constantly between 35-55 ms. EU1, Czech Republic (countryside), ADSL connection.

        • Many players, even in North America have bandwidth caps, with some as low as 40 to 80B per month. The fees over this amount are quite high. Even if you don’t download anything else in the month, the HD client could eat most of your cap for the month.

      • Nowadays most of the 1st world countries have suitable connections available for fair price if you’re talking about actual download of client and patching it to required amount. And I bet they dont launch all content in one huge patch.
        In year or two prices will plummet more and speeds will increase.

        WG should just improve their servers to handle downloads of the patches while maintaining playable game servers.

      • I’m curious about memory requirements. If every tank takes 50MB of memory and there are 30 different tanks on the battle field, it means 1.5GB of data. This is very close to limit of 32 bit application – and there is wot client and lot of libraries loaded as well. Battle loading is another issue (or spotting several tanks at once if models are loaded on demand)

        I would prefer for example more detailed terrain in standard renderer, i dont care that f.. ugly m103 has ten times more details when i’m constantly shooting to the ground in hulldown position, because collision model on server is more detailed than terrain in my client. Actually i would be even more happy if improved renderer on mid details will run above 30fps again.

      • Zzzzzzzzzz. I live in South Africa, a country with notoriously shit internet and the prospect of downloading an 80gb client doesn’t worry me that much. Sure, it will take some time on my measly 10mbps line but this is what uncapped internet is for. The biggest hassle will be deciding what other games to uninstall to make up the space :-)

      • In Estonia 100Mb/100Mb connections are normal. If WG servers give me 11MB/s like they normally do, then I can wait for the 40GB client to download in ~62 minutes.

        Other than that, I agree with SS’s point – we need more tank trees and prettier, but properly optimized graphics, not more game modes.

        Multi-core support is something I think WG will never achieve with this engine in a manner that actually boosts fps. Using Havok to load other threads is not exactly giving better performance, but since those threads are idle anyway, I can see how I might want to use them to make the game look prettier.

  4. Agreed. I’m really worried for the fate of the game this point, WG are really making some bizarre decisions. I have practically nothing to add as you have illustrated all the current big issues in the game’s development road-map. And to think I was fooled by the dev diary video earlier this year into thinking 2014 would be the best year for WoT yet…. it could be the first of a slow decline from its peak :(

  5. Hmm, could it be the producers who are fucking up all of this? Since developers are basically just doing what they say?

    Oh and the funny part, which is failing is… why the hell are WG trying to copy WT with things like different modes that nobody play? I think they should just continue with the game they did before, and they will be succesfull.

    Oh, and no more fantasy tanks please.

    • I think Stronghold makes organised clan based fighting much more accessible. I still don’t have a tier 10 but have been playing shed loads of the tier 8 clan matches on the event map. Now it won’t necessarily restrict your activity by having non tier 10 players. The fact that you get a clan wide bonus in all other modes is awesome too. Company battles are fun, but they are a bit hardcore and don’t provide tangible benefits. Especially when stuff like the SuperPershing mission only applies to Team and Random modes.

    • Well I’d LOVE to play historical battles.

      Sounds fun, to try the vehicles as they should be… tiger with L56, or stug without L70. Maybe even the armor would be that good as it was back then…

      The problem is, I want to play HB, but Im sick of waiting 15 minutes in queue.
      I’ve never played one single HB, yet I spent almost 2 hours in queue in total.

      • I play on the Russian server. I played HB for a week to complete some missions they had. Don’t worry, you’re not missing anything. HB are more reliant on teamwork than randoms and the teamwork in them is awful. Examples:

        1. Kursk Soviet: SU-152s need spotters but KV-1S and Churchill III players either camp or suicide. On the flip side, spotting in KV-1S but SU-152 players fail to take up good sniping positions or, even worse, rush.

        2. Kursk German: Tiger and Panther teammates advance and get two-shotted by SU-152s instead of spotting and then taking cover or attempting to flank.

        3. Ardennes American: Hellcat mob splits into two groups. One half makes contact with enemy while other half does not. Unoccupied half makes no attempt to link up with the others and engage the enemy. Germans mop up half the team and then finish off the other half.

        4. Ardennes German: A few teammates split off from the main group, get swarmed, and annihilated. Mob of tier 6 Americans now has an even greater numerical advantage and wipes out the Germans.

        5. Balaton Soviet: ISU-152 players camp and try to engage Tiger IIs frontally instead of flanking. Force gets split up and taken out piecemeal.

        6. Balaton German: Force splitting up is a disaster. Another disaster is Tiger II bouncing a few shots from ISU-152 and IS tanks, getting overconfident, and closing distance to them. Soviets now can hit Tiger II weakspots and quickly take it out with their massive alpha advantage.

        • Quite awesome is also if your TigerII is afk. Sure, a top tier afk is bad in every match, but in a random, you have (mostly)2 or 3 three other high tier tanks, and not cannon fodder.
          I would like to play HB more, but the fact that you are even more dependent on your team than in any random match (unless you are the lucky guy in a TigerII or SU-152) and extremely long waiting times for a T-34(!!! – and when I got in a match, I was the only med as well!) killed it for me.

    • And mix it with some fighting games pls. (fight clubs for the commanders and such).

      • And grand strategy game where leaders of alliances build entire cities, manage resources, etc…
        ..oh, and if we’re on that: they could integrate it with MOBA and spawn fighters and bombers on a maps (build on a grand-strategy level) that would attack tanks from the air with tanks being able to shoot back… it should also make all of these small machine guns sticking out of the turrets actually useful – for AA defence.

        lol

  7. Agreed, I mean, what can go wrong with “Back to It’s root”, other online game have done it for years (CS, Dota, etc.), so why couldn’t WG do the same?

  8. You miss one thing – IF stronghold mode will give benefits, organized clans will go for them. And for them achieving those benefits will be easier than for lolclans made only to pump clan founder ego.

    So instead of reducing the gap between competent players and tomatoes it will make that gap even bigger – more XP, more free XP, more crew XP, more credits -> more tanks.

    In stable situation on global map, well established clan can have one or two battles, all other time with set up squads it can spend on stronghold farm.

    • Isn’t that a good thing? The game is maturer now and more end game content is necessary. I know a few people who are grinding but only because it’s there, they have the tier 10′s they want to play and don’t care about the rest. More to do that isn’t as time dependant with a queue system and with rewards sounds good to me. Not to mention the fact that with t6, t8, t10 modes it will be way more accessible for the player base.

      • WoT has shit endgame content looking at whole playerbase.
        A player willing to take successful part in Clan Wars has to be next to nolife and dedicate to WoT few hours per day – he needs to grind several tier X tanks, need to fight CW, if landing – possibly for whole week.
        So that content is not for all.
        Even before that economy comes – playing on tiers X requires a big amount of skill or a big amount of silver to cover the expenses – single CW battle may cost 50-100k. Plus regular grind of lower tiers, when economy strikes at tier VII or VIII depending on skill – a tier VIII premtank is really handy.

        So WG tried to make a kind of endgame available for everyone, regardless skill. Unfortunately also in this case skill will rape lack of and the gap currently existing thanks to CW selection and thanks to gold farmed on global map will become even bigger – better clans will harvest resource needed to develop strongholds, and will boost their gameplay with stronghold benefits, while weaker ones will struggle to achieve anything.

        • Yep. Perfect summary, especially in the last sentence. Completely agreed.

          Plus – the end-game content for those not interested in clans just… isn’t there.

  9. Bring back confrontation, change MM rules for it and merge the mode with historical battles, with module tier deciding which battles the tank can access to.
    WG had modules connected to MM before, it can now as well and it likely would help stock tank players in many instances.

    Of course, it might slow down the free XP buying a bit but I’m sure that developing more cash sinks won’t be a problem.
    The less manual actions to do, the more the mode will be played.

    • You mean it would work like this?

      Enter battle with elite KT with top 10.5 gun, MM selects “historical confrontation” mode, auto-adjusts your modules and ammo loadout -> play.

      That could work :)

      • Yes, or if for example you have stock Panzer III you could be picked for one battle instead of another.

        • IMHO the biggest problem of HBs is that they are completely separated (just like team battles), with no platoon support and lack of incentive to play them. Also I wonder how many players (%) actually know about HB.

          I would like to play some iconic tanks in their historical configuration, but current HBs ain’t working.

        • You would just make unpopular HB tanks unpopular for random battles too.

          Take your PzIII out to play4fun, wind up being cannon fodder in an historical battle.

          • TBH I would like to play HBs, but it’s impossible to get some people to play at least one.

            Idea is not bad as such. It could be excellent way to gain XP on less liked tanks. Unfortunately WG didn’t prepared early battles like France 1940, where low tier tanks could be used. Without EU tree it’s impossible to make Poland 1939 or some early clashes in Africa. It’s a shame.

    • agreed, but confrontation sucked balls.

      hopefully never will come unless greatly reworked

  10. i play on normal render, and dont give a f about graphics… counter strike has old graphics still lots of people play it because its enjoyable. i’d rather play a bit worse looking game with good performance, no lags and 2 min wait times, rather than looking at an unplayabe scrap telling ‘how beautiful you are’

    • Counter strike, enjoyable? Sorry for my bad language, but are you one of the bastards who like that piece of shit game? What’s the fun of getting shot by AK across the fucking map, when you know that AK doesn’t fucking hit the moon after 150m?

      • ^^Looks like someone sucks at CS and blames everything else except himself for it. +1 for OP. I like older games(partially because my PC isn’t state of the art) because they had fun gameplay and were fun to play and not because they had awesome graphics. I play on standard render too and i’m having fun just as much as i would had with maxed out graphics on improved render. WoT needs to stop focusing on cosmetics and starts to focus on gameplay, game optimisation and get back to its roots where the game was simple yet enjoyable.

        • I fully agree. IMHO graphics has little to do with game feel and game experience. CS is a great example; sure they had to change shit around to improve it (remember scoped m4 and no recoil saw?), but as soon as they started focusing on making it better looking, the game feel changed completely. Not saying making a game look better will automatically make it worse, but you have to be very careful so that the game feel doesn’t change too much.

  11. There are better more efficient ways they could do the textures to prevent them getting too large.

    Above you mention Crysis 3 as a graphical “benchmark”, how big is it’s install?

    HB is botched, as you can choose a tank to play… IE a T-34 and… you can’t play, it just times out… Choose an ISU 152 and you get in quickly…

    New tanks, fine, new hulls fine, but yes agreed don’t bother on the strongholds Idea. Maybe as a feature for holding lands and having a base in CW maybe.

  12. I’d suggest Wargaming makes up its mind on what type of game they want to focus on (with respect to WoT). Either go for a more historical/simulation approach (so basically attempt to keep warthunder at bay by using all your resources to keep 1 step ahead) or stick with the arcade version (omg we have both real and made up tanks) which has been successful for a long time. Don’t get me wrong, I love new stuff in game, however adding stuff just to spite other gaming companies, by literally saying “Whatever you can do, I can do better” seems outdated. Like SS said, add new maps, some vehicles (not a butt-load of them) and even out the ones that are currently in-game. But first and foremost optimize the game to a degree where most people can use the HD models they’ve all been working so hard on.

  13. Problem with historical battles is that it is TOO SIMILAR to random. Same maps, stock vehicles, no story elements, no immersion. Leads to low interest manifested in long queues. Long queues create perception that the mode is not rewarding to play, and reinforces the long queue problem leading to a self-fulfilling prophecy.

    Imo, in order for historical battles to work it has to be substantially different from random battles. AI bots to level the playing field, scripted events like big orchestrated charges, narration and something more at stake to fight for, these are all possible elements the devs could introduce. Until then it will just be stock-tank pub-lite.

    • Totally agreed. HB looks like an idea someone had and implemented in a one day of work.

      There’s absolutely no reason to play this garbage. They’d need to scratch it and actually implement a proper game mode with proper campaigns, proper rewards and proper maps based on historical locations.

      I think that Wargaming itself never had a faith in that mode, so there’s the effect. Just look at what SerB said few days ago – they won’t build dedicated maps for historical battles cause noone plays them… only noone plays them cause there’s nothing new to see there, and custom maps would definitely improve the situation.

      “Do or do not. There is no try.” – and yet WG settled down with “try” and by this – failed.

      • They just did it in spite of WT. Oh look, those faggots at Gaijin thinks they are smart with their historical maps and historical battles. Let’s make our own historical battles. Just make tanks stock and give them prokhorovka and let them pretend they are fighting at Kursk. Yea, great idea comrade Ivan. Few months later at WoT’s historical battles http://stream1.gifsoup.com/view4/1158287/tumbleweed-o.gif

  14. But SS, they have a competition now.
    And i agree,they should finally implement that multicore support,optimise game better etc.

  15. About the EU tree:
    I was at the swedish community event last weekend and attended the Q&A session with Ectar and The_Challenger. When asked about the EU tree they informed us that they had been given specific instructions not to say anything about it.
    However, they also told us that The_Challenger have an assistant (Hunter?) who’s job is to do research and take messurements of tanks in european museums. They dropped the comment that “every time we see him he’s bussy.”
    We’ll see how this turns out.

  16. In my opinion, Wargaming doesn’t work towards improving gameplay of the GAME for the very long time.

    And their biggest problem at the moment is their choice made in 2008. Choice of game engine. They didnt expect this game to go that big. And now Bigworld just cant handle all the things that WG needs from it to support such a game and all that “i’ve got cool idea”\”let’s implement this feature”. Because nowadays it should be on par with other games like WoT. Can Bigworld do this? Well, ask community about its perfomance…

    • Nope, that is not the thing here.
      Back in 2008 Big World engine was their only option,they said so themselves.

      I think they should work on changing the engine itself,that would fix everything.
      Who knows maybe Big World can not handle multicore support and that is why they are postponing it so long.

      • Nope, that’s just marketing garbage.
        There were a lot of engines, however, only after 2010 become common, to give the engine for percentage of the earnings instead of fixed price.

        Biggest problem with the Big World, is the server side, not the client (they can replace the visual engine with anything they want…).
        BW is originally designed for Korean F2P MMOs, and utilised the already mentioned Free To Try system.
        However, Korean mmo-s use smaller “servers”, to sell more premium account, usually running more instances on one computer, each using one core.
        In Silkroad Online each server can hold 2000 people. If you register, you see a lot of crowded servers, and a few medium/low pop one. However within a few months those also become crowded, and if the server reach it’s limit, the server kicks out nonpayers, if somebody with premium account wants to play…

      • “Back in 2008 Big World engine was their only option,they said so themselves.” – BS. It was just one of these pathetic excuses, just like the reasons for why they haven’t had any HD models until competition came out with tanks that looked 10 times better than anything WG had.

  17. Yeah Stronghold, meh.

    Historical battles, great idea but you need to incentivise people to play the lower tier tanks.

    Big Boss Victor was right in aiming at “Daddies” who want to sit down, play for 30 mins, get 4 or 5 battles done then go and do something else, like cook the dinner.

    Most of us don’t want to spend hours waiting in queues and having long drawn out battles.

    We’ve been spoiled by instant access randoms and anything that causes queue times to increase by splitting the player base focus onto other things is just gonna fail.

    HB has failed because who wants to wait 5 minutes in a queue when you could have been shooting things in randoms for those 5 minutes?

    I think WG’s focus has become a bit scattershot and most of their great ideas are doomed to fail

    Make randoms better, incentivise low tier tanks in HB, that’s all most of us want or need.

  18. IMO producers should keep their noses out of what the developers are doing, it fucks a lot of shit up. I mean, look what happened: WT released a HD screenie with a tank in it, and PR says “WE NEED HD MODELS NAO!” that’s not how it supposed to be. competition is okay up to a certain point, if you start releasing content for the sake of competition you’re doing it WRONG.

    I don’t want WoT to end like Mechwarrior Online.

        • That’s completely independant from WG. Chinese WoT is held by chinese company because of some laws and since rice eaters likes pay2win models they gave them golden type.

          • They have a law which only allows companies with at least 51% Chinese governmental or company ownership to do anything in China.

  19. WG needs to improve the engine of the game. Look at Crysis 3 and other top games. They never have this kind of freeze like WOT has since 9.0. The lies WG is making are filthy. They said to me it is your PC and not the game.

  20. /agree..
    they should focus more on

    -balancing
    -new player tutorials
    -new tanks (french, us, british & co )
    -new good designed interesting maps (not like the last one brainless noob maps)
    -maybe new game mods, or an improvment to the current ones (more maps for assault mode!!)

    But all this wont change, until the player number start to fall..
    I havent played a game since one week and the week before it was about 7 -10 games..
    In my best wot time, i used to play 20 games a day..

    The game is getting boring, full of noobs, bots, afk, suicider and more of dumb brainless content nobody whats to have…

    • I would like to add
      - fix wiki, cause it is completely outdated, incomplete and unprofessional (pros and cons contrary to each other, not reflected 8.6 arty changes done year ago, no senses as “Looks like an ugly piece of gray soap”, “25 times more visible than a Hetzer” on GWP E100 page for example)
      - make spotting mechanics clear and up to date (i was surprised that shooting while sitting close behind a bush helps by few tens of meter and tanks 15m behind opaque a bush can be spotted – at least most of them if they are not sitting still)
      - less hidden stats cause comparing for example hull traverse, speed bleeding in turns and accuracy on the move is impossible
      - who the f..k approved introducing WtfE100 and FV215b/183 into a game? Hellcat is OP, but at least it takes 7 seconds to kill tank two tiers lower so he has time to react and hellcat can be killed by two shots from KV1S or ARL44 (or KV2) and it faces higher tiers.
      - game is sometimes too much divided into players who clicks on tanks and deal the most damage (TDs, SPGs) and players who are trying hard to do damage, spot someone for them, win the game without being killed by the first ones (meds, lights) and keep enemies in the proper distance (heavies) who are less rewarded. Airfield and Komarin are worst maps in that aspect, because if teams have proper deployment, it cant be won, it just can be lost by trying to push – although sometimes is possible to wear enemies slowly.
      - WN8 is somewhat broken without spotting damage or damage blocked by armor. Not a fault of WG, but some games are ruined by statpadders – it is better to lose or have a close game with 3000dmg in HT when you let team mates die in front line (in reasonable amount) and reduce number of “competitors” than to have game with 1500dmg, 3000spot, 4000dmg received and fast victory (if you are not killed by arty) – this is problem of green players with slightly above average win rate in general. Same problem with income. I would like to see average XP without bonuses and spotting/blocked damage available to third party sites like noobmeter for next generation of WN.

  21. What I’d rather like to see:
    - Change penetration values on tanks so that heavy tanks are at least somewhat usable. There are only a few heavy tanks that can actually use their armor because either shots just penetrate anyway or the glaring frontal weak points are so huge that everyone can easily hit them (and so soft that everything will penetrate) – so why play them in the first place?
    - I like the spotting system, it adds strategy to the game. But scouts in high-tier matches are useless because most mediums or heavies have the same (or better) view range.
    - Spotting system is too laggy. I have a ping of about 50 ms and a few times I was aiming down a road (like in Himmelsdorf) and a light tank simply crossed it and slipped by me. All I could see was his arse and then he was gone, didn’t even have the chance to shoot.
    - Maps are too small and too “three-tunnels”y, making scouts even more useless.
    - Just steal map ideas from fucking War Thunder, jeez – it’s not rocket science if a newly released game can get it right.
    - The phisics engine needs rework, I should not get stuck on the side of a hill just because the back wheel touched it.
    - Change SPG mechanics, full-on RNG with massive damage is frustrating for both the player and the one who gets his. More accuracy, less penetration, less damage. So those who got hit can get the hint and move instead of getting one-shotted in their tier 10 tank.

    And probably a few things that I forgot which are a lot more important that new game modes or better graphics.

    • Mostly agree with you sir. Its all about to improve the game as it is at this point and to ad new crap besides tanks and maps. That laggy spotting system is crap and very frustrating… it should work immediately!

    • I forgot to mention one thing about SPGs:
      Of course aim time, flight time, range and mobility should remain unchanged, I don’t think anyone is too keen about having six FV304s in every game. With the reduced damage reload time should also be increased, but not by too much.

  22. I’m waiting for garage battles a long time and I don’t want to see it scrapped! :’(

  23. Personally I think the biggest point of frustration is the weird shots that happen due to server latency.
    Even with server reticle and mods I’m still experiencing weird shots. All three crosshairs and the gun barrel pointing straight at the enemy center mass, I fire, and the shot still acts as though I need a forth (and even slower) crosshair to compensate for the latency. I have the biggest Up/down possible where I live (Denmark, 2nd biggest city).

    It’s getting to the point where I contemplate auto aiming because everything is better than shooting straight at somebody and be denied. Potshots or firing clutch feels like moving through jelly sometimes. The gun feels like a big rubber cod in those situations.

    This only happens when the red lamp in the corner blinks.

    • This is in part due to the laggy spotting system mentioned above. You can literally poke a corner twice without spotting someone who is in plain view if it is in between the exact moments where spotting checks occur.

  24. well this sort of happens when they try to listen to all those demands of players…

    • If they listened what players wanted in historical battles it wouldn’t be such a disaster as it turned out to be. So players whined how they want HBs. And what did WG do. They removed elite modules from tanks, gave them stock modules, put them on Prokhorovka and called it Battle at the Kursk. So fun, very historical, much wow.

  25. Why are people wanting to hold technological advances back because they run the game on a 1970′s Russian toaster rather than a modern gaming PC?

    If your PC is a POS then either lower your setting to the minimum and deal with it or go play something else?

    I spend money on my PC so I can play modern games and in the medium to long term Wargaming will have to develop the game to the extent that all you 286 PC players wont be able to play. They want people to play their game who have money, not people who cant even afford a 300 euro PC

    • So you are playing games because of how they look and not because of their gameplay? Let me guess. You also play4fun. Am i rite? Everyone likes to see improvements in graphics, but if those changes are optimised as shit(9.0) and you can’t even play it right even on high-end PCs then it’s logical that people don’t want any of those changes because most likely those changes will fuck up the game even more. So if people have to chose between shitty optimised, but good graphics and shitty graphics and good optimisation they will chose the latter one.

  27. more tanks, more tanks, more tanks

    historical battles was doomed to fail, the problems are well known!

    team battles, seriously t1 and t8 in same match, yes good tactic t1 caps and win what ever
    still i would had preferred a t10 or 2 t9 and the rest 8 to be competitive!
    as in t10 + 6 t8 vs 2 t9 + 5 t8

    tank companies, good for training, bad for income if you lose, t7 and t9 and lower are left out!
    there are some interesting thanks at those tiers, and frankly t9′s can be more fun than t10′s!

    and still waiting for return of national battles!

  28. Imho one of the biggest problems right now is the engine. I know they didn’t had a choice when they started the development of the game, but right now it indeed shows it’s weaknesses. Also replacing the engine it’s like developing another totally new game, except in the case that WG can build a newer version of the current engine and “upgrade” the game. Very difficult tasks.

    WG also did the mistake in the past to not rely in the WOT community. Unbalanced and boring maps for example came from that bad decision.

    • Can’t agree more with this statement.
      Main problem of this game is not average PC specifications of the player base but the awful engine of this game.
      WG already recognized that BigWorld in its current state is a pile of crap compared to other game engine. Even with the best optimization (that apparently is either difficult or coders are just hopeless), it would still be crap compared to other standards. Where they screw it big time is when they tried to put HD render and models without implementing a new game engine. Waste of time and effort.

      New game engine will need time and effort to develop but if they don’t do it and they continue to try to put things in the game that the engine can not handle, they are going to their doom, no doubt.

    • Exactly. I can understand why WG decided for Big World. But now this engine is simply old. His net part is simply overstretched and not working properly. They must look for new engine or just hurry up guys in Big World (they bought them) to make new, I hope, better version.
      Lately they trying combine Big world with Havok. I’m not specialist but i think merge two very different engines could be a very problematic.
      So i don’t think that reworking all tanks to HD now is a good idea. This take a few years (two?). In this time Big World would be utterly obsolete. So when they choose new engine, they have to rework all tanks once again? It’s time for strategic decisions, how this game will work in few years, and, how the game industry will look. For a few yeras the WG was creating a trends, but now opponents are close nad they also got a few ideas.

  29. I play this game since closed beta so i saw a lot of things and how this game became what it is today. Back then the game was made like for tank enthusiasts who knew something about them and knew how to use them. Today the target group changed. Its not like they say : we make this game for hard working daddys… no. The target group seems to be that average “western 14y old, mom gimme 50 euro i wanttobuystronkpremjumtonk kiddos”. That is the wrong way, cuz as you see the level of gameplay decreased drastically over the last 2 years. Back then there were not as much kids and not as much insults. It was real fun to play and meet nice people who actually helped you in the game and played like a team. Thats all realy sad but that time will not come back any soon.

    Basically what they could do to improve the game is scraping all that new useless shit modes wich noone plays. Second thing is to add game atmosphere, as in add more ambient sounds and effects like smoke, mist, realistic engine, track and gunsounds and and overall improved feeling that you drive a motherfucking tank and not a toy or racecar. As someone said going back to the roots is teh thing! Just improve what you already have, add new tank branches, new playable maps (not that shit 2 or 3 routes maps), further imrove graphics and ambient, weather effects, wind and fucking tracers of AA guns (:D)and such things so you get that feeling of a real battlefield.

    • “Basically what they could do to improve the game is scraping all that new useless shit modes wich noone plays. Second thing is to add game atmosphere, as in add more ambient sounds and effects like smoke, mist, realistic engine, track and gunsounds and and overall improved feeling that you drive a motherfucking tank and not a toy or racecar. As someone said going back to the roots is teh thing! Just improve what you already have, add new tank branches, new playable maps (not that shit 2 or 3 routes maps), further imrove graphics and ambient, weather effects, wind and fucking tracers of AA guns (:D)and such things so you get that feeling of a real battlefield.”

      inb4 everybody whines that they get 1FPS (especially with stuff like mist and smoke).

      • I got a rusty 6 or 7 y old computer and that thing is still capable to give me about 20 25fpson low-mid settings on improved render. Thats not much but i can play kinda comfortable. If any noobs are crying about fps being to low they must have stoneage computers…

  30. I disagree that Stronghold is aimed at professional clans, actually quite the opposite. Big clans will fight for gold, while the smaller clans will get 15 players together so they can profit from small silver or XP bonuses. Also it gives the players a bit of a feeling that they have something in a clan, because up to now the only difference is logo on your tank and clan chat, really (if you can’t do CWs, that is).

    I’d say let the players test it. It can always be pulled off, but I think it’ll actually work.

  31. i agree..they should go to they roots..first fix the fkn gameplay that it don’t sttuter and twitch if they wan’t to put tanks in HD put them but not at expense of playing the game..constantly balance the game and invest in the fkn new(more) servers..give us more cool tanks and maps and yes don’t copy WT..unless if they can copy there engine optimization lol

  32. ” STILL planning garage battles. AND in-client tournament mode. AND some sort of tier 10 “team battle” mode was mentioned as well.”

    In the past i would have said that garage battles are a good and interesting gamemode. But now? Not so much. Scrap would be good.

    An in-client-tournament mode on the other hand would be great. Maybe even in direct cooperation with ESL.
    It would be something good.

    btw. yes i also got the feeling sometimes that they don’t really know what to do next. They now just bring new stuff as fast as possible….

  33. Anyone for a F*****G MATCHMAKER REWORK ?
    Seriously this thing needs to get reworked, and to care about players stats in both teams.

    The game isn’t even funny anymore when you see a full team of experimented players again the other (not always yours) full of begginers with 1k battles who are trying to play well, but just don’t know how to do well enough.

    When the matchmaker is reworked, we’ll be able to have some fun in every battles because we don’t think at the start “ok, we’ll play hard, we’ll sure do a awesome game, but we’ll sure lose”.

    And btw it will make the ER become useful.

    • They already said this will dramatically increase the queing time, is this what you want?
      I mean I completely agree with you that a “skill” MM would be cool, but since no indicator is very accurate and it will lead to wait issue, I don’t think it is a good idea.
      Skill segregation like in LoL (for example) could solve a part of the problem but it is not an ideal solution (in term of player progression) and higher skill levels will have wait problem (not enough unicums at a given time :P).

      • Not so drastic skill levels that unicums only against unicums.
        But in team battles you dont get bobs and BOTS(maybe 5%) in randoms you have 50% bobs and 20% BOTS. So skill based MM would be good. Like they have tier matchamaking why not to try toeven teams by win rate and tier point. etc.
        I enyoy playing team battles because it is more difficult and more even game.

  34. All that WarGaming needs to do is to READ THEIR OWN FUCK!NG FORUM!

    But they will reather lead their game into the disaster then listen to what their playerbase has to say.

  35. My opinion:
    1. Stronghold – not gonna play it.
    2. Historical battles – even revamped, I would not play it despite the fact that I was hoping to get my 2x first victory in it for some vehicles – not gonna. This just needs to be part of Random battle mode and your Hellcat to enter it in with historical equipment rather than your standard.
    3. Alternative Hulls – stupid, not needed.
    4. Companies, CW – not having the time to play it.
    5. Team battles – having fun playing it with friends or randoms, just the waiting for proper teams, “Ready”-clicks, finding enemies and all the time spent outside of battle is killing my mood.
    6. More HD models – okay, but I have slower laptop and I prefer to play without HD models and without all the glamour and shiny graphics. Make it optional ffs.
    7. Unhistorical tanks – not needed, they are ruining the imaginary game balance. Rmw – 700 dmg, rotating like a light tank. KV-1S, 390 dmg in tier 4-6 games… one-hitting puppies. T18 in tier1-2 games — nerf that boxed frankenstein. Blueprinted tanks, prototypes – too much crap, overpowered resulting in further rebalancing of other tanks. I would love WG to remove 3-4 branches and introduce one country more! Who cares if there will be tier 8 Russian tank or not? We already have French and Chinese T8LT and you can scout in tier10 games with tier7 LTs anyway. Russians have heavy machines, and this is their strength. We have four tier8 German TDs already… dozen of tier7 TDs. And they keep considering introducing TDs for China and Japan which never existed… why, why why?
    8. Maps rework – total fail of new Pearl River, new Northwest (and the upcoming one), new Severogorsk and upcoming Arctic Region. You will have to be a medium tank to ever succeed “Ace” tanker on any of the above maps. Any other vehicle class will have to def the cap circle or cap the enemy one for the win.
    9. Lag spikes, FPS drops, freezes, CTDs, flying tanks, ghost shells – no thanks.
    10. Revamping of spotting system and penetration mechanisms – okay but think it very very wise. Else we will start using gold ammo in huge quantities (for example) and players owning Maus, T95, AT15 and KV-1 etc. to quit the game.

  36. “Personally, I think Wargaming is overstretching.”

    Yes, I agree to that. Or rather I believe that’s what can be assumed out of the surfacing issuses, though I don’t know if it’s really true. But I believe one should look further into the “whys”.

    Graphics update: It’s needed. Simple as that. Money is in player numbers, and most “casuals” who want to start a new game will base their decision a lot on graphics options.
    On the graphics issues: It seems we will get an option for non HD client. That solves most of the problem for low internet connection players.
    The whole client is currently about 6GB as a full download, double that “ready to go” on the hard drive.
    Most figures seem to suggest a maximum of five times that with all HD models. That’s a download of about 30GB wich is still reasonable, IMHO. [and no I don't have a 50mbit/s FTH connection...]
    It’s about the same size as new “Blockbuster” Shooters are going. [Wolfenstein New Order 43GB...]

    Historical Battles: It just shows one thing: WG shouldn’t listen to vocal minorities. The whine for that game mode was seriously breathtaking sometimes. And why? Apparently because the whiners had wet dreams about pwning T-34s with their Tiger Is. In the current situation, the only way to make the mode work is by randomly assigning vehicles to players and fill up a battle with a couple of fixed vehicle rosters on either side [let's say 5 equal MM weight rosters for both sides. That leads to 25 "unique" battle combinations; hells even with three Rosters and 9 "uniques" that would be more diversity than on some Tiers in random]. I see no way that any “soft stat” changes on vehicles will really work.

    Patch 9.0 problems: A lot of stuff was changed in one patch. But mainly with the graphics stuff I don’t see a way to do it much different. Simply put a lot of changes had to come at once, and for me hotfixes are not only a sign that stuff went wrong, but also that it’s being worked on as a priority. On most other issues, from bugs that were supposed to be fixed and for some still exist, to the FPS problems: We are a vocal minority here. And a certain part of our vocal minority is very adamant about these issues. But in the end about 85% of the playerbase is simply playing on. Of course bugs are annoying. And for some the low FPS has really ruined the game. But when I browse through the forums I see a lot more people complaining about having 35 (lowest) FPS instead of 45 (lowest) FPS, then those that went from 35 (average) FPS to 25 (average) FPS. For the latter it is a gamebreaking issue, for the former it’s not (simply put because for most humans there is simply no visual difference [in WoTs slow paced perspective changes]). I seriously can understand WG’s increasing “anti-mod agenda” here, as a non issue that’s based only on numbers on the screen and no actual gameplay issues takes such a prominent place.

    General Issues: If stand back and take a look, it’s amazing how much [early!] development information we really get. It’s also amazing, how much of it is sometimes contradicted a couple of days later, or scrapped alltogether. But simply put that’s what happens in game development [and not only there]. Ideas don’t work out, some senior programmers are really hot for certain features and try to push them, and so on.
    For improved communication, what WG would really need is someone with a good understanding of the actual work being done, a good overview of future plans and the actual importance/difficulties of the issues. In short a senior project supervisor. And this person then would need to spend most of his/her time on the community. This is not going to happen, as said person would be much more valuable in actual project work. So we get what we have now: Senior WG Employees answer questions. There are mistakes, and a large part of the active community takes every word as 100% accurate. That’s BS, of course. 100% statements can be made after the client files were pushed to commit, which is once every six weeks.

    In the end: Is WG overstretching? I don’t think so. But community interaction might make one feel that way. The Question is, whether it’s worth to know about stuff that is in early development phases and might come in half a year, two years, never or somwhere in between? Or whether it isn’t?
    Related to that, is it worth for us to loose our nerve about stuff that might come in half a year, two years or never? No!
    Is it worth for us to inform WG about isses we have and things we’d like to see? Hell, yeah!

    [damn this was longer then I thought...]

    • +1
      Merge HB and Confrontation into one mode as part of the Randoms (the same way as Assault and Encounter are currently living peaceful and prosperous life).

  37. WoT before 8.0 = “Nice game, GJ”
    WoT after 8.0 = “Pure useless BS”

    Simple like this.

  38. WG stretching Bigworld to it’s limits is pretty impressive, the question is, have they really reached the limit like the germans reaching the limit of the PzIV?

    I don’t think HD tanks are needed, all they need to do is update the models(no hexagonal roadwheels, etc) and texture.
    The current mechanics are fine, though they may need some tweaking, the spotting system needs to have spotting checks more often, maybe show the smoke/muzzleflash from enemy invisible tanks shooting to help the ones getting shot by unlit enemies,
    Some balancing for certain tanks would also be great.

    I would prefer no gold shells, something like giving the user a choice in which shell to use based on the situation, for example: AP for decent pen and damage, APCR for high pen but low damage, HE for low pen but high damage(if it pens), something like that.

    But perhaps, the one thing we need are game modes that are more “fun” and relaxing. Remember the Karl and the map it was on? Something like that. Tank races, ramming fests, etc. Shooting other tanks isn’t the only thing a tank can do.

  40. There’s too much to write and i have thrown some ideas earlier. You know, SS, one thing comes to mind: with WT competition they may have started to think more about milking the cow instead of feeding the cow… I mean, maybe they reached the moment when it’s more profitable to suck as much money out of it as they can and let it die – that’s what money guys do everywhere and even entusiasts like SerB can’t stop them.

  41. WG should find another engine, because Bigworld just doesn’t work anymore. Bigworld is causing too much problems, makes tanks too large as files, ETC. WG should do something similar as WT does: Make skinning easy by exporting optional files and make remodeling harder (and if it would be possible, make the PKG files a LOT smaller, it would need a lot less space).
    Just think about it seriously, remodeling is awesome, but do we really need it? I mean, of course, it’s fun for historical accuracy and stuff, but it would make it a LOT easier if remodeling would be made impossible by adapting another, much lighter engine. Because IMHO, WoT already takes up to 7 hours to download for me and for me, this is a reason why the engine should be changed around. What engine to pick? No idea, it should at LEAST make the game download and update around 30-40% faster and also make the game 30-40% lighter.
    If this would be do-able for WG, the whole game would be MUCH better. Because: Skinning would still be possible because (in example) the original DDS skin files are still used, but they are put on other kinds of files. I am very much sure that all WG’s plans would still be possible for WoT, if they just somehow made the game lighter.

    What can also help is just to remove all useless shit. Last week, I was browsing around the files and still found the files of the OLD KV!! I mean, seriously. This game needs a cleanup. Tanks that nobody or just 1 or 2 people have, should be removed and the people should get a gold refund. This would already clean the game up.
    Supertesters should get a separate client (if they don’t already), like common test with special testing maps and bots.

    • “WG should find another engine”

      replacing an old engine with a new engine is like….making a new video game, which will take a VERY LONG time….

      • Still, it would be a MUCH better solution and I wouldn’t mind getting mini-updates for half a year or so which only add small improvements if the game would switch to a lighter engine.

  42. Nice!

    Bdw it is well known on the market, that having one focus on one good product rather than focusing on multiple products. Why? It is because product will reach perfection faster just because one focus and everybody working on it. Basically the reason why otto and diesel engines got popular in 20 century.

  43. WG is apparently trying to kill those companybattles away, if you have noticed all mission are random/team/historical(/sometimes even cw) battle only, so far there have been zero (0) mission that could have been complited in company mode (so no wonder that there is so few player in that mode). Maybe stronghold mode will chance that, because it look like streonghold is just company battles with goodies to clan so maybe that mode will revive some intrest to those organized gamemodes (teambattles are somewhat boring and limited, while tier X company is fun but there is really not that much player in that mode) in form of raiding.

  44. the highest prio for the dev. should be to balanced vehicles.

    instead they introduce tanks that good players identify as imba after 1 night of playing , but takes a couple of month for WG to finally “admit” needs rebalancing. (like borsig, fv304, wt-e100).

    the prio of balancing tanks just seems to take for ever. everyone knows kv1s and hellcat are imba but it just takes years for wg to fix it.

  45. SS, you mainly seem to measure progress in WoT by the addition of new tank branches. Imo this is overly short sighted. There are more than enough tanks in WoT already. Actually, the newer tanks (T57HT, Leo 1, WTF E-100, …) and tank branches (British, Chinese, Japanese) mostly are superfluous, since they are more or less a reiteration of what is already present in WoT, or a bad mixture of features of several already existing tank branches.

    What WoT really needs are substantial gameplay improvements, and translates to better maps as much as to skill based match making, just to name two main issues. Other issues are the obnoxious, unreliable and unintuitive visibility system or smaller flaws in the damage model like the possibility to destroy a massive tank by just shooting the same tiny weakspot over and over.

    Physics would play a role as soon as they have an influence on gameplay. As long as they are only eye candy, they add some more or less welcome flavor to the game, but nothing more. Turrets flying off tanks? Oh well, it was getting old soon for me, as it isn’t an essential gameplay element.

    WoT needs to grow in *quality*, not in quantity.

  46. They should have started making World of Tanks 2.0 a year ago on a more modern engine, and implement everything they want without any compromise…

    • +1

      they chose the “legacy” system approach, lets salvage the current system with patches… turns out it cost much more then to bu id a new game.

      after playing straight WT for days returning to Wot was a very bad experience overall…
      lol those health bars, broken spotting and too much arcade feeling all around, the game should be scraped and a new one should be build.

  47. They should introduce more french tanks. This country is a home of tank’s technical innovation : turrets, hydrolic suspention, autoloader/Drumloaders…
    They still have a use in game, they are perfect for team operation, but they can’t stand alone, and aren’t very conventional. That’s why it isn’t played. Add “normal” tanks as AMX-30, or real heavy tanks, and it would be played.
    Chinese tanks has the same proble of unpopularity, but because their tanks aren’t in game enough different from the soviet ones. who will play chinese tanks when they have the original, same, soviet tanks ?

  48. While doing graphics and balancing for the rest of 2014 they have more than half a year to investigate new areas of interest. I think WG are doing better now than they did a year ago…

  49. I join WOT ages ago because it was the only WW2 tank MMO in the market at that time and for a time I believe it was a historical good game other than the Arty system which is annoying although the game was more enjoyable after 8.6. Then they had to realise OP fake German paper tanks that is completely unbalance and suddenly my WR has suffered unless I just played those TDs while ignoring my other tanks.

    These TDs were never deployed in real life and not even protype so it is a complete fake and I felt I was playing mechwarrior online using them and if I use other tanks I was at their mercy. I though historical battles would solve the problem as these fake tanks don’t show up in the mode as well as Arty but almost nobody was playing them so I can’t enter.

    This kept on until warthunder ground forces arrived with the CBT and I bought their Sherman tank package, then suddenly I was enjoying tank battles all over again. Finally jump over to ground forces when open beta started although I’m still obligated to play CW when I have lost interest in WOT. Not spending anymore money for WOT until they fix this mess.

    • i’m in your same boat man, i played WOT from day 0 and it stopped being enjoyable because of the retarded idiotic decision they make, but since it’s all i had i gritted my teeth, played whilst raging and being pissed off and stressed everyday.
      all the sudden WTGF appears, that does everything right and i’m having fun playing tanks again!, they’re madly enjoyable!, ven when i get oneshotted and blasted i know it’s my fault for not seeing them or having a shit tank, not because the game randomly decided so.
      i took a month prem and gave a 1 month away notice from wot to my clan, fuck CW

  50. Please continue to ask advice on how to improve the game from people who barely understand how the game works (45% players). The best players (60%+) understand almost every mechanic and meta of the game yet WG has shown no interest to seek their communities and ask advice.

    • Well unless you want advice on how to stat pad with OP tanks like the Hellcat I don’t think most 60%+ players would be any use tbh.

  51. IMO client size is a problem. Not because of download but because of local system performance.

    The larger the client to more the game is going to have to read from the local disk. Each read comes at some cost. At some point the client will over flow the available system memory and will have to swap part of itself out to disk. As different parts of the client are needed the read / write cycle will be happen more and more often. This impacts performance.

    For low power clients, especially with minimum RAM, this leads to very bad performance and horrible lag spikes. Just as we are seeing in the game with release 9.

    WG is at a decision point. They will either have to raise the minimum system requirements or find some way to optimize the client. They are avoiding that choice and it’s hurting them and us.

    • Ah, let them squirm in pain. Like everything alive, they’ll die.

      Fuck the WG and its’ fucking programmers, I deleted their fucking shit from my computer long time ago. It’s not even a program, it’s just a pile of garbage codes.

  53. Well dont concur in several points, specially that they need to STOP ADDING TANKS, simply FUCKING STOP.
    in fact the game has far too many tanks that NEVER should have been in game, starting with an entire line of fake garbage like the 2nd german TD line, the T28 PT, the t50-2 back then, etc etc.
    And you’re asking for them to add more stupid and unnecessary tanks…., rrright…

    In fact, game as gone downhill ever since T10 meds where introduced breaking their promise(which according to them “never happened”) that T10 where to be only heavies, and game was perrrrfect back then, you have 3/4 T10s, and that’s it, no need for more fantasy crap.

    Also wot has hit a hard wall with the retarded core mechanics that simply dont let the game progress at a high level, retarded mechanics such as having a spotting “system” and “view/draw/detectionrange”, since they wont change those mechanics because they treat players as garbage the game simply cannot evolve anymore.
    no matter how pretty your HD models are, if the gameplay is shit(which it is) it will remain shit

    • I disagree. The game is a lot of fun to play and it only gets better when you get to play CW and companies. New tanks are usually fun since they are, well, new. Change of pace is always a good thing to keep things interesting. I do not keep reading the same book over and over again, either. As for the second German TD line you mention, you do realise most of the things in there are actual designs and some were in fact production tanks? It is just the T10 that is total and utter garbage.

      • err, NONE of them where production tanks, in fact, only a very small fraction of ALL the tanks in wot ever saw production.
        all the rest are paper tanks or pure fantasy.

        the game stops being fun when you reach endgame, i have years and years of playing this at high level since day 0 and CW since it came out and the retarded gameplay is so limiting it’s not fun anymore(you can only deal with a tank “VANISHING” in clear sight for the ten thousandth time before punching your monitor and jumping out the window)

  54. Good article. Although I am not averse to what if history – which does include designing turrets for tanks without an actual turret, it would be nice to keep things within reasonable limits. Those limits mostly being physical: things that do not fit, should not be made to fit using a magical wand.

  55. what puzzles me, howcome are the HD models so big ?
    They dont even look THAT good…

  56. well and regarding new branches and tanks …
    I’m probably one of the few who could care less about these..

    I’m playing chinks and japan just because I have to … for the is6/SP mission.
    I find those tanks absolutely boring, ..especially chinks, its just copy-paste of russian tree.

    I don’t care if they introduce eu tree even though Im from europe. I probably wont play them anyway,, because honestly.. there will be no “unique” vehicle. it will be just copy paste of germans and soviet vehicles. For example hetzer is cz/sk afaik. some modification of T-34 was most used vehicle in my country.. its soviet T-34 in a diffrent setup.

    What I’d love to see is actually some sort of “tinkering” or modification of the vehicles I have and enjoy playing… Probably more useful crew skills, maybe some “cosmetic” stuff to personalize the vehicle and so on.(they even mentioned this at some point in the past…) You know,.. some fine-tuning of the tanks I like and drive the most.. because right now, all I get for playing another battle is 0.0001% of a 4th or 5th crew skill, which is mostly the skill I dont even need that much, I just had to take some taht I dont have yet.

    the client size.. doesnt matter to me. Well of course its awkward to have 70GB client, especially when the game looks like crap, even the new HD models desnt look that good, but 70GB is what ? for gods sake its 2014… 1TB HDD is really cheap nowadays. Download time … well Im not downloading the client every day.
    And even then… there are ways how to download just part of it and rest is downloaded during playtime…

    TLDR:
    more branches ? – yes, IF there will be unique vehicles, not just copypaste like chinese.
    more content to “customize” tanks, be it cosmetic only or some new skills or whatever.
    client size is the least critical issue here.. Id gladly have 200GB client if it runs smooth like hell and looks great. But it neither looks good (not even on max settings, neither runs smooth)

  57. The game was better and much more enjoyable back in Beta than it is now; that says a lot.

    Nearly every “step forward” WG has made has been a giant waste of time and in most cases actually made the game worse: Gold ammo for credits being the biggest fuckup. All the new maps they have made have been complete shit campfests. The new tanks (most of them) are UFO shit like WT E-100s which are just one giant facepalm. Clan Wars and E-Sports shit… wank. Historical Battles should have been good but they fucked it up as usual. Their continued refusal to nerf massively OP tanks like the Fap-Mobile KV-1S and Hellcat and now this fucking turn based strategy game shit… WTF.

    The Xbox version of WoT has the right idea. Keep the game the same but just make small improvements to the game experience. Weather effects, a steady supply of new tanks etc. They are not wasting their time with fucking command and conquer style shit or HD textues which make the game not only look worse but run worse as well.

    War Thunder is knocking on your door WG and their game is getting better and better all the time. This last week alone I’ve logged more hours on Ground Forces than WoT and I can only see that gap getting bigger as time goes on.

    • i’ve stopped playing wot altogether ever since a week before WTGF OBT started(did about a week+ in CBT), i got hooked since the first battle.
      even their ARCADE mode is insanely better than the shit arcade wot mode, and simulator is insanely satisfying!.
      i dont see my interest in wtgf waning or my interest in wot reflourishing

  58. Well i have been playing wot from 7.4 patch(if i remember correctly where there was not -/+2 MM :P)
    back then the game looked like Shit but! it was freaking enjoyable with it’s issues but it was fun
    i remember spending more then 6 hours playing wot and dont even bother cause i had fun even on loses
    now i forced myself on a break(actually dumped wot) cause
    1st the latest patches are a TOTAL FAIL
    2nd What ThE FUCK is wrong with the playerbase????
    ok ok it;s a F2P BUT that doesnt mean that people that should act like complete ASSHOLES and say o it’s a F2P deal with it WG should become more strick and HAVE the fckng report system fixeD!
    before wot become such a Famous MMO and grow that large it is now
    cases of wishing cancer/toxic braindeads and these wonderfull stuff wasnt often spoted and the random battles chat was better and even add more to the whole feeling of the game
    and lastly i think
    they are streching to ways that isnt nessecarry for game until they fix
    Lag FPS and these kind of stuff and improve the gameplay and maybe do something about the freaking caps where it’s a Siren calling Come to us Fuck the others that are trying to do dmg come and have some nice shiny points
    also engine needs to be Changed
    back when they plan to do wot Big World seemed to be ok now with those many more numbers well i wonder how it holds and doesnt goes boom also introducing it with Havok oooo well prepare for crazy ass bugs now
    Map should be better and not in the name of balance with 3 main routes
    and Listen to the god damm comunity sometimes it can help to many issues cause they play the game all the time
    finally Historical Battles needs his own maps so you can give players a motive to play them cause right now what is the reason play stock tanks in the same maps as random ones???
    But i am sure the last wont happen cause they gonna say it needs money and stuff

  59. Stop looking over at Gaijin’s yard and trying to copy what they are doing and make your own plan and adjust it to your own engine’s possibilities and your resources. Focus more on bringing the game to its roots and how was it before. Don’t mess around with graphics if you know there is a big chance it will be buggy and end up in a failure. Players want smooth game with fun gameplay that will attract them. You know. Sometimes the simplest way is the best way.

    • Don’t think players will return after it returns in 8.11, although Arty was bugged in that patch…..

      Still they need to removed the 2nd fake German TD line and replace it with another historical accurate one.

      • “Still they need to removed the 2nd fake German TD line” stop there, they dont need to replace anything, they ned to start removing tanks, not adding them.
        “more is not always better”, period, and in WOT case, it’s always worse

      • Although if they are going to do a massive overhaul fixing the fantasy and broken Arty system could make more ex WOT players in ground forces come back to WOT.

        • doubtful, even if they remove their fake unhistorical retarded paper tanks AND remove arty altogether, the fantasy broken shit spotting system and arbitrary “gameplay” limitations REMAIN.
          those will never be fixed, hence WTGF will always be better with real optic LOS.

          what better “spotting system” than:
          “is enemy tank in your LOS” if yes “then you can see it with your fucking eyes”, period.

          compared to the convolutarded wot system:
          if the tank is in your LOS but game arbitrarely decides some random “camo factor” is below your “spotting threshold” which is based on your “viewrange” then enemy tank VANISHES from existance.
          Addendum: tanks can shoot you whilst in that invisible state
          Real #legit there…, very fun gameplay

          • Looks like someone has problems with grasping the basics of the game hence the butthurt. If WoT didn’t had the gameplay it has it would never became as popular as it is. Stop whining about invisible tanks and adapt or gtfo to WT. Where does it says you can’t play WT for realism and WoT for arcady fun.

            • you have not the slightest fucking idea what you’re yapping about.
              i havbe more grasp of wot in the tip of my dick than you in your entire fucking body

              the basics of wot are fucking broken, PERIOD.

              i dont need “arcady” fun, it was all we have so we had to fucking endure it, and be pissed ALL games, all the time, raging nonstop all the fucking time, it’s not fun, it’s like forced labor

              • You really are a retard, are you? The man just told you don’t need to play the game if you don’t enjoy it. Learn to fucking read.

                • apparently you’re the retard here.
                  and he’s not just telling me to go play WTGF, he’s impliying that i’m “whining” about invisible tanks(very realistic and historical feature!, romulan cloaking tanks!) and that i dont knwo the mechanics(which i know way more than he does) and that i need to “adapt”. those are stupid taunts from a stupid player, period.
                  why dont you go adapt to having a knife put in your belly, “stop whining and deal with it”, same kind of retard answer he gave

              • WOT has turn into another Call of Duty game, the only players who support it now obviously don’t play it because of historical tanks. We are probably better off leaving this game and going to WTGF.

            • Sorry but us historical tanks supporters prefer realism and WOT is turning into a joke now that WT has tanks. You can stay there if you like but we are leaving.

    • Yup, super HD models shouldn’t be done. Correct models and maybe something in between what we have in the current HD models and the new models would be a good idea.

  60. If we could have some sort of lobbies with tanks respawning (like all of Valve games), that’d be great. Faster gameplay, faster at learning your mistakes, prevents Camp2Win…

  61. Modes added that also need a clan structure and often Tier X’s seems a pointless variety for best catered for as it is. Tier X team battle feeding non existent gap.
    3v3 5v5 options might get players not already busy with existing modes. So nowt for them.. Making company games viable then layering other stuff would be a more stable direction, rather than losing a mode through lack of interest so saturating area that couldn’t fill one mode.
    The balance was handled so well for so .long (an old WoW player can see that comparison makes WoT nothing short of stunning compared to whole arena seasons broken from start to finish every time for example), so more tolerant of this fumble than most, though tankers whinge worse than druids did..

    Incidentally, 5 man platoons being re-opened as the plan would be a nice small but concrete step that lots of folk would be happy with, and would as a by product make larger, and more stable player groups to AFTER THAT not before, start adopting new modes and altered dynamics.

  62. Thanks for the summary of the situation as you see it. I agree with your assessment as to what they should be doing.

    I do find it silly that a historically based game is putting in so many tanks that could not be produced due to mechanical flaws (i.e. they couldn’t figure out how to make the auto-loaders not jam; the gun couldn’t work in the turret due to its size; the turret couldn’t fit on to the hull; etc.) That being said, if they want fantasy tanks, they should have at least waited until they had put out all of the tanks that actually saw production.

  63. Is drive space really a problem in this age still? I could see if you had one 125-250gb SSD and that’s it in your system but multi TB drives have been around for years.

    Personally im all for them spending all year upgrading the engine as prettier graphics is really just icing on the cake, the core updates to the engine allowing for havok can give way for new game-play features beyond just looking prettier.

  64. For me WoT was best before patch 8.6, after that (not only because the artynerf) it become worse and worse

  65. I want to play all of these other game modes but none else plays them and unfortunately there in lies the problem

    I CAN NOT understand why random battle is not random. I would expect it to pull tanks from Random to assemble teams for the other modes likes historical.

    This would fix their issues and if plainly obvious

  67. they have no idea what to do next. AND THAT IS GREAT FOR THE PLAYERS!

    You have to understand that no developer is an all-knowing god who delivers perfect content. Now they got WT GF to go against, and they are throwing random ideas to the wall (players) and see what sticks. This is great for finding new awesome ideas, I would love if they go even more crazy, with weirder battle modes, etc. Sure, i will not like most of them, but that is the point of trying new things.

    A stagnant game is a dead one imo. A game that tries many things will, sometimes, find things a lot of people enjoy.

      • probably not, but that is not what i am hoping for. I am hoping for is for them to keep trying new and interesting ideas, and use the ones that the players seem to like.

  69. Client is one side of accumulated problems. But Server issues are the second and for me most significant problem.
    Servers just can’t do their jobs. To many balancing and toooo many helps for wallet ignorants.
    If there is someone who still think that is MM isn’t skill based and just skill and “RNG” desides winners – JUST TRY TO PLAY ACCOUNT FROM SOME KID OR TOMMATO FRIEND.
    U will see how works MM, REAL camo-factor, REAL penetration etc…
    In the end, now we have frustrating fixed arcade game with laaaaaagish server.
    To many managers thinking about cash-flow… THIS IS PROBLEM

  70. *In a JFK manner* I say just improve the Random Battles and balance out the tanks!
    Okay, yeah, I like how they keep adding tanks (despite being almost the same, like you said), maps, graphics (allowing it to be more playable to owners of weak-specced laptops), and practically all over content but isn’t it time that they try to focus AWAY from the tanks and start to look INTO the community and players?