I was watching a video on YouTube by LemmingRush in which he was playing a tier V tank in order to advance in a new tech tree; he said that as a very good player who is usually playing tier X tanks, playing at this low tier was basically cheating. Well, that "cheating" argument might be more valid for people who play thousands of games at even lower tiers, because they not just have better skills, but also better crews and gear than their opponents. But overall the comment reminded me that in general in World of Tanks, as you progress in the tech tree to higher tiers, you meet more and more skilled opponents.

Measuring skill is pretty much impossible. The best tool we have is the WN8 rating, which basically measures how much damage you dealt on average in all your past battles, compared to an "expected" value for a given tank. My WN8 rating is just below 800, which isn't good, but isn't terrible either. Now in World of Tanks you get double xp for your first win of the day per tank. Thus playing a lot of different tanks gets you more overall xp than playing the same tank over and over. Normally that xp on the other tanks isn't so useful, especially if those tanks are already fully researched. But due to my specific history of having received in the past free gold, and now being easily able to afford to buy gold when I need more, converting this xp from the wrong tanks to free xp which can be used for the tanks I really want to play is no problem for me. I usually wait until there is an event which gives a better exchange rate (35 xp per gold instead of 25 xp), and when I did this last week I had half a million of free xp. (Of which I spent some in the subsequent "get crew xp for half the free xp cost" event.) Anyway, because of this I tend to play tanks of different tiers. And I have a mod that shows me the sum of all WN8 rating of all players of each team. Thus I know that if I drive a mid-tier tank (V to VII), my own WN8 rating times 15 is 12,000, about equal to the WN8 rating of my 15-man team. At lower tiers my WN8 rating is higher than the team average, and at higher tiers my WN8 rating is lower than the team average.

Which brings me to the question of whether I am playing in the wrong league / tier. While I play different tiers, I mostly concentrate on the tanks I am trying to "level up", and as I said yesterday those are tier VIII and IX. I thus frequently find myself in tier X games as bottom or low tier tank, being outclassed both skill-wise and gear-wise. If you were a mediocre soccer player, would your best strategy be to play a match with Manchester United, or would you be better off playing in the league that corresponds to your skill?

Thus I am considering abandoning or postponing my "fill the Russian tech tree" project, and starting to play tanks of a different nation instead. That would get me playing lower and mid-tier tanks much more, which is probably more appropriate for my skill level. Do you have a recommendation which nation's tech tree has good tanks for mediocre players? I'd be most interested in tanks that have guns with comparatively good penetration, because I am really bad at knowing about all weak spots of all enemies and being able to reliable aim for them.