The "American Challenge" event finished yesterday on the European World of Tanks servers. The basic premise is that you can get a premium tank for free if you grind a large amount of missions during 10 days. The grind has 10 stages, and each stage is harder or grindier than the previous one. Quickybaby, a World of Tanks YouTuber/Twitch streamer and top level player tried the previous challenge on his free to play account, and it took him 60 hours. Not a casual-player friendly event, or is it?

As it turned out, I kind of misjudged this. I completely ignored the event, and concentrated on the Top of the Tree event instead. But then I noticed that I was getting stage rewards from the American Challenge event from time to time. Because while the Challenge is a grind, it isn't an *extra* grind. No, if you just play for some other purpose, or even just for fun, as long as you are using at least a tier VI tank, you slowly accumulate progress towards the American Challenge.

At the end of the Challenge yesterday, without actually having done anything for it, I was at stage 7 out of 10. Which means I got 7 packs of stage rewards without any extra effort. And then I realized that the event was even better than I had thought: While you need to finish all 10 stages to get the premium tank for free, each stage counts for a 10% discount. So I ended up buying that TS-5 premium tank for 70% off, which made it really quite cheap. And its a really good tank, a bit slow and cumbersome, but with very good frontal armor and gun, which makes it an excellent face-to-face brawler.

Which brings me to a sidenote regarding armor in World of Tanks: It works better than the math would suggest. I realized that while playing through the French heavies Top of the Tree event, because I found that these lightly armored French heavies are worse than the math would suggest. Whenever an enemy had the choice between shooting me or shooting the tank next to me, that enemy would choose to shoot me. That is a consequence of the reward system of World of Tanks, both the official one and the inofficial WN8 rating system: They both reward damage dealt above anything else. If you fire a shot at something heavily armored and don't penetrate, you just took a big loss to your credits earned, xp earned, and WN8 rating. So the logical consequence is that everybody first tries to shoot anything that has light armor before aiming at anything well armored. In terms of game design that is bad, I would say the reward structure of World of Tanks is pretty bad. But if you have a heavily armored tank, it is an advantage.

I will still try to finish the Top of the Tree event this month, as I am already at tier IX. But overall it turned out that the American Challenge was actually the event that gave me a tank that I will continue playing. The French tier X heavy is probably not going to be played much, and I already sold the tier I to VIII ones, and will sell the tier IX once I got to X.