My main problem with World of Tanks is that various external rewards and score systems are getting in the way of me having inherent fun with the game. For example I just finished a game with my Chinese premium light tank, the Type 62. The game was an absolute blast! On the Sand River map I managed early in the game to sneak into a very central cluster of bushes from which I had an excellent scouting position. So excellent in fact, that I could even fire on tanks without them seeing me. I ended up killing 3 tanks, dealing twice as much damage as my own health. Which is pretty awesome for a light tank, and got me to the top of the team score list, plus earning me 41k credits.

And that is where the good news ends. Unfortunately the rest of my team didn't have such a good game and we lost. As a result, I didn't get the reward I was looking for, the Chinese New Year celebration token, which requires a win as well as a top 10 team score. I also didn't get the reward for the "Choose your difficulty" missions, because for light tanks that only counts assisted damage, not damage I deal myself. For my WN8 score the high amount of damage was good, but in general WN8 undervalues light tanks dramatically by not counting assisted damage, so playing a light tank generally lowers my WN8 score. And of course by playing a premium tank I am not advancing any of my tank lines to higher tier.

So I would clearly be better off without all those external rewards, just concentrating of playing tanks that I have fun with. But of course these days most games are so built around a flood of external rewards, that they are very hard to ignore. So in spite of a great game, I end up being disappointed about the rewards I missed out on. While rationally I understand that, the Pavlovian conditioning is hard to overcome.