Wargaming is experimenting with the matchmaker, leading to more battles in which everybody is the same tier or there are only two tiers instead of the normal three. Unfortunately that mostly reveals a design flaw of the game: When tanks meet each other front to front, with a bit of angling, side-scraping or hull-down tactics, most shots bounce of tanks of equal or higher tier. I am currently playing Russian heavy tanks, and I have several tanks that wouldn't be able to damage the same tank in the turret. You die to shots from the side when you leave cover, but you can't do much while in cover. Unless of course the enemy is of lower tier, or less well armored tanks.

This is what I also observed when watching the (not so frequent) videos of good players as bottom tier heavy tanks on YouTube. The trick is to stay well away from the areas where the other heavy tanks are, because you are just cannon fodder there. In spite of being slow and inaccurate, you are better off pretending to be a tank destroyer or medium tank and go play in a different corner. World of Tanks considers all damage to be equal, you don't get more points if you are in a "fair fight".

I'm handicapped in that respect by having grown up before there were online video games, and by still playing tabletop role-playing games. Sitting around a table with friends, there is a value to playing nice, playing fair, because the social penalty for being caught playing unfair or cheating weights more than the win. Online that consideration isn't true. If your status symbol is a WN8 rating, and the game doesn't count who you won against, you'd better be bottom-feeding and seal-clubbing. Heroically holding the side against stronger tanks counts for absolutely nothing, even when it is strategically the right move.

I think the design flaw is that a frontal confrontation between two tanks of different tier in World of Tanks is so all or nothing. The weaker tank just doesn't deal any damage at all. It is much worse than let's say two fighters in D&D of different level fighting each other, because the weaker one there would still do a good amount of damage.