Progress in World of Tanks revolves around tech trees. You start with a tier I tank of a nation, and work your way up the tech tree up to tier X for several different tank types. At each tier and type you need to play the tank a while to gather the necessary xp for improved tank equipment, and then research the next tier of tank. Invariably you thus end up in a situation where you have done everything you need with a tank and could move on to the next. But what do you do with the old tank, keep it or sell it?

Short answer: No

Long answer: World of Tanks is a fun game, and can be played for free, so you might want to try it out. However you need to be aware that it is an ageing PvP multiplayer game, which is definitely in decline. There are very few actual new players in the game now. You will constantly fight against people who know the game far better than you, and have amassed as sorts of advantages over you in the form of better equipment or better crew. You basically can't get a fair fight. And if you would really want to invest yourself in the game and get as good as the current players, you'd have to take into account the declining server populations. Especially if you live in North America, where the servers are already pretty empty.

I was playing several tier VIII games this weekend, and noticed that in several of them the average number of battles played per player was 30,000. And several of the players with lesser number of battles played had suspiciously high win rates and WN8 ratings, suggesting that they were second accounts. Me, with my 10,000 battles, am still considered a n00b. Even in low tier games I meet players that have played far more battles than I have, and many of them in low tier tanks, trying to get high ratings by preying on less experienced players.

While technically World of Tanks is better now than it was 8 years ago, with better graphics and features, the lack of new and casual players, and the lack of game mechanics that would separate players by power, pretty much tipped the game over the edge. It is unlikely that it will ever "revive" and suddenly gain large numbers of new players. If you played before, you might want to play again now. But getting into the game now as a real new player would be painful. I'm not saying that "World of Tanks is dying", as it will probably still be around for a number of years. But the era where I would with a good conscience recommend World of Tanks to a new player is certainly over.

It is said that familiarity breeds contempt. That can actually be useful as a strategy when you feel that you are too in awe or afraid of something: Studying that something to become more familiar with it will usually deflate that awe or fear. Now since I have restarted playing World of Tanks and am using the XVM modpack, I had been somewhat intimidated by WN8 ratings, seeing how serious some people take them, and how they are used to judge other players. And now I studied them, became more familiar with them, and considerably less impressed.

My WN8 rating on my main account in World of Tanks is around 790, or "orange" in the color coding system. That is labeled "below average", and just one step above the "red" of what is generally considered bad players. But just like in scales of income, there is a huge difference between "average" and "median", the median being the value at which half of the population is above and half is below. If you look at statistics from sites that follow this, you will find out that orange is the mean WN8 rating of the players on a server at a typical point in time.

Now of course when I play a game, especially a competitive game like World of Tanks, I would like to get better at playing it. And the XVM modpack as well as various player comments in chat or the forum made it appear as if WN8 was a measure of skill, and if I wanted to improve my skill, I needed to improve my WN8 rating. However once you look at ways to improve your WN8 rating, you end up realizing that improving your WN8 rating and improving your skill are not exactly the same thing. WN8 mostly measures the average damage you deal in your battles, and that depends on many other things than skill. For example in World of Tanks it is totally allowed to have several different accounts. And one of the Twitch streamers I follow has a main account on which he spends money, and another account on which he deliberately spends no money or gifts at all, keeping it purely play for free. And there is a huge difference in WN8 between those two accounts, although his skill is obviously the same.

Believing that WN8 ratings can be manipulated and depend on factors other than skill, I decided to do an experiment. I have a second account with just a few hundred battles played. So I decided for some time to try and maximize my WN8 ratio on that account: I am playing tanks that are likely to deal good damage compared to their expected damage values. I play relatively low tiers, because for WN8 it doesn't matter whether you hit a stronger opponent or a weaker one, it just counts pure damage. And I play tanks with good equipment and good crew skills (for which the recent addition of crew books really helped). Most importantly I only play very few different tanks. After doing this for like two weeks, I am already at 900 WN8, and I can reliably every day play a number of games with an average WN8 of above 1000. So if I continue this for some more time, I will end up having a "yellow" WN8 rate. Which would in common belief make be a "better player". I could do the same on my main account, but with already 10k battles played there it takes much longer to shift the average.

There are actually quite a lot of players you meet that have a second "reroll" account and proceed with the same sort of stat padding exercise in order to have a higher WN8 rating. Which just shows how little WN8 rating can be correlated with real skill. My WN8 manipulation exercise showed me exactly what I did "wrong" on my main account to end up with that orange, "below average", skill label: I played mostly light tanks, often more in a scouting role than in a damaging role, and while this scouting is extremely useful for your team, it doesn't count for you WN8. I also climbed through various tech tree lines, unlocking many different tanks of different types and nationalities; that is really bad for WN8, because when you get a new tank it doesn't have the best equipment yet, nor the best crew (I usually didn't sell the lower tier tanks or retrained the crew). And while switching from one tank type to another, or even from one tank of a type to another tank of the same type with somewhat different characteristics, you tend to need a period of adjustment of tactics during which you don't perform quite as well.

In short, if you play World of Tanks in order to maximize your fun, you are hurting your WN8 rating. If you want to maximize your WN8 rating, you should play with very little variety, play for personal benefit instead of team benefit, and ideally go "seal clubbing", exploiting the lack of knowledge and equipment of newer players at low tiers. That is not to say that really good players don't have high WN8 ratings, it is just that the reverse isn't necessarily true.

Now I am not going to uninstall XVM. It is still very useful to know whether the tank behind that rock has a player with a "red" or "purple" WN8 before deciding to push around that rock and engage him, or to know whether one side has a much higher average WN8 than the other for deciding whether you should play aggressively or not. But I am now much less in awe of WN8 than I was before, and want to rather play for fun than for increasing my WN8 on my main account. That probably means that my main account isn't going to be "yellow", but seeing what performance I have with bad tanks in bad matchups I am pretty confident that I won't fall to "red" either. Suddenly the fact that the average WN8 is hard to budge if you played 10k battles is an advantage, I can fool around without taking a large hit.

I would love if World of Tanks had a rating system that is less prone to manipulation, and which corresponds better to skill, but that is outside of my control. Right now the way to go if I like to play a scout is just to ignore the WN8 rating.

I spent €100 on a "Fort Know" special offer in World of Tanks this month, giving me 12,500 gold and 12.5 million credits. I used the gold and credits on a few projects I have, testing out crew books and playing through the Italian tech tree. And it struck me how this purchase was at the same time exaggerated and normal, being both expensive and cheap. And how that relates to the weird economy in which we live in.

Games in general are cheap. The price of a top of the line console or PC game hasn't change much over the last few decades, its still around 60€, no inflation adjustment. And between stores selling used console games and Steam sales on PC, you can often get those top games a bit later for half the price. Furthermore a game with the features and graphics of a decade ago would today be sold as an indie game for under €20, and there are some excellent cheap games around. In other words, €100 buys you a lot of game today.

However this pricing is somehow linked to an overproduction of games, and an outdated concept of games as being toys for children, which need low prices. The customers for games on the other hand are getting on average older, and with that often more affluent. €100 is a lot of money if you need it to pay rent, buy food, or get your washing machine repaired. However once you earn enough money to have no more problems paying for all of these necessities of life, the 100 Euros become "discretionary income" that might be spent on things like a nice dinner with your spouse. And if you look on what people spend their discretionary income on, €100 is not very much. There are a number of hobbies and sports in which €100 doesn't get you very far. If you wanted for example to take up skiing, buying the equipment and going on a ski holiday for a week once per year would set you back thousands, and you'd get a lot less hours of enjoyment out of it than from a computer game.

When I was young the idea that if I would study hard and work hard I would have a good chance at financial success was still very prevalent (and it sure worked out for me). The idea isn't all that popular anymore, and prospects for young people are not quite as good anymore. But if you add some additional constraints (e.g. study something useful, not whatever you like best), there is still a strong correlation between effort put in and reward gotten out of the economy. You can still work hard to become let's say an engineer and end up being among the 10% top earners in your country. Now of course the top earners pay more rent, maybe eat more expensive food, and drive more expensive cars. But overall the percentage of what you spend on the necessities of life goes down when your earnings go up, and that leaves an increasingly large part for that "discretionary income", which you can spend for the not-so-necessary stuff in life. Walk through a high-end shopping mall, and you'll see store after store filled with expensive stuff that nobody really needs, but which is nice to have if your interests are in this area and you can afford it. And we are not talking top 1% vs. bottom 99% here, already at the 50% line the mean US household has a discretionary income of several thousand dollars a year. It is just that the discretionary income goes up much faster than overall income, and so €100 represents very different things for people on different positions on the economic scale.

All this to say that I can drop €100 on virtual tanks without batting an eyelid, and I feel as if that isn't all that unusual. The very fact that various online games sell you something with a €100 price tag suggests that there are customers for these things. But I know that for other people the idea of spending €100 for some virtual stuff sounds absolutely preposterous. And I don't blame the game companies; they just adapt to this economy of inequality, where some people have to play for free because they are short of money at the end of the month, while others can spend €100 easily. If you wanted to change that, you would need to change the way that the capitalist economic system distributes the wealth it creates, and that wouldn't be a very easy task. Complaining about sparkling ponies in online games is just complaining about one minor symptom of the economy, the root causes go much deeper.

Different people have different reactions to Pay2Win schemes in games. Some rage-quit, some just accept it as sign of the times. My usual reaction is wanting to try it out, to see how good/bad it really is. And then I have the excuse that I'll blog about it. :)

That brings us to World of Tanks, the new crew books, and the Chi-Ha tank. Or tanks, rather, as there are two of them which are pretty much identical, except that one is a Japanese medium tank and the other a Chinese light tank. Just shows how arbitrary the classification between medium and light tanks really is. The Chi-Ha is a tier III tank, and tier III is in my opinion the tier where the game actually begins. Tiers I and II are very random, and battles are over too quick. Tier III is good for testing purposes, as you never get to see tanks two tiers above you, and the frequent battles in which you are top tier are all on just two maps: Abbey and Himmelsdorf. That makes tier III relatively good for testing things out.

The other reason I'm testing out crew books at tier III is view range. At tier III the typical view range of most tanks in the battle is relatively low compared to the size of the battle map. The Chi-Ha tank not only has a good base view range, but more importantly for this particular test has a dedicated radio operator. So with crew books I can boost my view range via two crew members, the commander and the radio operator. The overall effect is that the boosted Chi-Ha can reach the maximum spotting view range in the game, 445 meters, using binoculars. And then some if you add premium consumables.

While there are other tier III tanks with even better view range, they are either slow to get into position, and/or have inaccurate guns that can't really fire that far reliably. The Chi-Ha not only can get into a good position early in the game and spot enemies at long distance, he can then also shoot them with reasonably good accuracy. And that long before the enemies can see the Chi-Ha. Which overall enables the Chi-Ha to act as the "invisible tank", shooting enemy tanks that can't shoot back because they don't see him. And that even without the help of bushes, like on the railway tracks in Himmelsdorf.

Of course that doesn't happen in every game, because you never know which way the enemies are advancing, and how aggressively they are about it. But on average I am doing extremely well in my Chi-Has. Yeah, I got and boosted both of them, so I can keep playing one when the other is stuck dead in a long battle. Compared with my usual performance I can say that this "paying to win" actually works, I am doing better in these tanks that I boosted with crew books than I am doing in other tanks. In the Chi-Ha the effect is very noticeable. While the crew books certainly also improve the performance of any other tank, the increase might well be less in other cases, and it is harder to notice a few percentage points of improvement. But crew books definitely improve your chances to win.

World of Tanks was patched to version 1.5.1 this week. And one of the new things are crew books. Now you get one of the smaller crew books per nation for free, and you can randomly get others as rewards the same way you can get the recently introduced blueprints. But what has far more impact on the game is that you can buy large crew books for credits. 2 million credits buys you a crew book that would raise a totally new crew directly to have one full skill. 6 million credits for three books gets that crew directly to two skills and working on the third. And that is pretty huge, it would take you hundreds of games to level up a crew this high.

Now credits are supposedly the common currency of World of Tanks, available both to free players and players who pay for the game. However the game is balanced in a way that free players tend to be somewhat short on credits. With a premium account earning you a lot more credits per fight, plus added credits from a daily mission and the "reserve stock", and added credits if you play with a premium tank, you can see how credits are a lot more abundant for paying customers. Also you can buy special packs like "Fort Knox", which gives you 12.5 million credits plus 12,500 gold (which theoretically you could convert into another 5 million credits) for €100. So the stereotypical "wallet warrior" can spend €100 and get the crews of three different tanks to two skills each.

Why is that important? Well, the first skill you'd take for everybody would be brothers in arms, which when everybody of a crew has it increases all the basic skills of the entire crew, so the loader loads faster, the driver drives better, the gunner shoots more accurately, etc.. Then as second skill you take sixth sense for the commander, which is extremely useful for knowing when to pull back, and useful stuff like camouflage, repairs, or extended vision skills for the other crew members. In short, a tank with a two+ skill crew will perform significantly better in battle than the same tank with a lesser skilled crew. So crew books are actually "Pay2Win", increasing your chance to win battles, not just letting you advance faster down some tech tree. That is somewhat unusual for World of Tanks, they were just about to nerf the other Pay2Win aspect of the game, premium ammo.

Crew books further expose the fundamental problem of game design World of Tanks has: The matchmaker considers two tanks of the same tier and type as being equally strong, regardless of player rating, equipment, crew skills, or any other stuff. Sometimes you get lucky and in a 15 vs. 15 random battle everything balances out more or less. But often it just doesn't, and you have one side with better players driving tanks with superior stats against newer players with stock tanks. I don't like those games, even if I happen to be on the stronger side. Walkovers are boring.

We had originally planned to do a "zero" session of Zeitgeist, in which I explain the setting to my players before they generate their characters. But we had a lot of time Sunday afternoon, and creating a 1st level character is fast, so we already started playing. Good that I had already prepared and brought the prologue adventure. Why prologue? Well, the first real adventure in the 5th edition version of Zeitgeist starts at level 3. Normally I'm okay with a campaign not starting at level 1, but because this world is so different from the standard D&D worlds, I thought it would be better to play a short adventure that introduces players to the world and to the modified story I prepared for the campaign.

In my 4th edition Zeitgeist campaign we played up to the early parts of adventure 3, before I noticed that the rest of adventure 3 wasn't great, and adventure 4 was just downright impossible to prepare and play. But the start of adventure 3 has a cool dungeon, the Ziggurat of Apet, and so I recycled that one for my prologue. I placed it on Axis Island, which is one of the important locations of adventure 1. And as adventure 1 starts 7 years after the Fourth Yerasol War that was fought around Axis Island, I made the prologue about the end of that war. The players are a squadron of soldiers in the war, which gives a better explanation of why they are working together than "you meet in a tavern". :)

So the players fight for the kingdom of Risur, which uses magic, against the kingdom of Danor, which is in a magic-dead zone and uses technology. Risur is losing the war, because mages run out of spells faster than cannons run out of shot. The king of Risur ordered his army to be equipped with these newfangled firearms, but the soldiers aren't well trained with them and get constantly beaten by the Danorans. At the start of the adventure the players are defending the last fortress on the island, Fort Henry. But the Danorans managed to get a cannon across the bay and the fight is again going badly. However fate intervenes with a strange shift of reality: Suddenly the players see themselves and the whole battlefield shifted to a parallel world, the Shadowfell, where the dead rise as zombies and it is constantly raining under a grey sky. The shift lasts less than a minute before the battlefield is back in the real world, but it wasn't just an illusion: The dead *have* moved, and everybody is soaking wet from the rain. And so is the Danoran's gunpowder, so the constant firing has ceased. The group of players is led by Sergeant Stover Delft, who now leads the group on a sortie to capture the cannon. Simple fight against the Danorans who are now reduced to use their muskets as clubs.

After the fight I gave the group the xp for level 2 (I don't think playing level 1 for long is fun), as well as handouts from the satchel of the Danoran lieutenant. Apparently the Danorans are interested in a nearby "ruined temple", the Ziggurat of Apet. Now one of the reasons why I wanted to play this campaign again is that for the 4E version I had the battlemaps for all the encounters printed as posters. Only campaign for which I did this, because printing a poster costs between 10 and 20 Euro, and I needed like 20 of them, and found that to be a bit expensive to use them just once. So now I am recycling the battlemaps, including the one for the Ziggurat of Apet. But of course for a dungeon that means that the players see the layout of the dungeon unless you cover stuff up with post-its. So I said that one of the papers was a map the Danorans made of the Ziggurat, which nicely explained why they "knew" the layout. They also found a chart of the planets, explaining the role of the planets as elementary planes in this world. And they found military orders (paraphrased, I didn't create a real handout for these) that said that Danor was interested to take Fort Henry because of a "secret project" regarding the Ziggurat next to it.

So for their valor in capturing the cannon in the battle, the player squadron with NPC Sergeant Delft is being sent to explore the Ziggurat and find out what the secret Danoran project is. In the first room they find a hidden chest, and their sergeant orders them to stand back, while he gives the chest a kick from the side to trigger any potential needle traps from the lock. However the trap is of course a mimic, which nearly bites the sergeant's leg off. So the group needs to explore the Ziggurat without their sergeant (which was the purpose of that encounter). First room is one of the highlights of the dungeon, and puzzle room in which colored switches make bridges and barriers appear and disappear. They figure out the correct sequence and make it through the room.

In the next room there is a strange bronze device, touching which closes the door to the puzzle room, so that they now need to find a new way back. The device seems to be a sort of planar map, showing how the Feywild and the Shadowfell are connected to the Prime Material Plane. The device works like a sort of mechanical calendar, showing when there will be portals between the worlds. The axis that connects the Shadowfell and the Prime Material World is shown to be, you guessed it, at Axis Island, so there is apparently a permanent portal there. One room further, after killing a few zombies, the group discovers the corpses of some Danorans; they lie dead on a pentagram inlaid in gold on the floor, which they apparently damaged to recover the gold. The group can find out that the pentagram was some sort of seal, but it can't be repaired. Then they come to another room, which apparently holds the portal, a bubbling surface of black witchoil, which against all probability is vertical instead of horizontal. Before entering the room, they decide to first explore the way back to the entrance.

That turns out to be a very good idea, because the way back to the entrance is lined with several traps. The traps have an elemental theme, and can be identified by symbols engraved in the wall that correspond to the chart of planets they have. For example the trap with the symbol of the first planet corresponds to the plane of fire, is a fire trap, and can be deactivated by using fire on the symbol. They find the way out taking only a bit of damage, and having deactivated the traps now go back to the portal room. However approaching the portal triggers the portal, releasing an endless stream of regular and large zombies from the portal, as long as anybody living is in the Ziggurat. So they have to flee, which is now much easier, as the traps are deactivated. They make it out alive, transport Sergeant Delft to Fort Henry, and find that Risur has evacuated the fort. They follow the army to the evacuation point, find the army already gone, but get picked up by a clipper the king sent especially to rescue the "Heroes of Fort Henry".

At this point we stopped the session. The players could level up to 3, and in the story there is a 7-year gap until the next adventure starts. I'll talk about fleshing out the characters during that period in another post.

Wargaming announced that on the test servers you can try out the proposed changes to premium ammo. In a great example of obfuscation the change to premium ammo is that premium ammo doesn't change at all; instead everything else changes. So instead of lowering the damage of premium ammo, tanks get higher hit points, and regular ammo gets higher damage. The overall effect is the same, but it looks less like the nerf it really is.

I foresee some unintended consequences of this. One is the WN8 rating, because in the formula damage is the biggest factor. Basically the formula tries to measure your "skill" by dividing the damage you do to the damage that the tank usually does. Deal more damage than the average and you are a good player, deal less damage and you are a bad player. The idea never really worked, because it ignores lots of other contributions that a player can have to a win for his team, most noticeably spotting and assisting. But if you increase the hit points and basic damage of all tanks, you also increase the average damage with which to compare your performance. So all the battles you fought *before* the changes will look as if you had done rather badly, and everybody's WN8 will drop. The more battles you have fought in the past, the harder it will be to get back to your previous WN8 rating. A "reroll" account, where an experienced player starts over with a fresh account or has his account reset, will have much higher WN8 rating than veterans of equal skill who keep their accounts.

Now not everybody cares about WN8, and because it isn't an official Wargaming rating, the developers might just ignore this problem. Another unintended consequence however will be harder to ignore: Tank balancing. So tanks in World of Tanks simply have guns with relatively low penetration. So the use of premium ammo isn't the same for different tanks: I have tanks which never use premium ammo, because the regular ammo is already good enough and cheaper; but I also have tanks which *only* use premium ammo, because the penetration with the basic ammo is just too bad, and the gun not accurate enough to reliably hit weak spots. Tanks that had to rely on premium ammo previously will effectively be nerfed. And that includes a bunch of premium tanks, while previously the policy was to never nerf tanks that cost real money. Somebody who spent 100 Euros on a Pz. II J will not be very happy if his expensive tank is now effectively nerfed by 25% compared to the other tanks.

I won't play on the test servers, as I don't really have the time for that. But I will keep watching the premium ammo development, because it could change World of Tanks very much. Maybe mostly to the better, but there will be some collateral damage. 

I have an Amazon Prime subscription. I like it, because it gives me another Netflix-like video streaming service with a different selection of films, bundled together with free fast shipping from Amazon. So I have been subscribed to Amazon Prime for years. World of Tanks I have only been playing again since Christmas. And since the start of this year, World of Tanks has been in a partnership with Twitch Prime: If you have a Twitch Prime subscription, you get World of Tanks goodies every month, in so-called care packages at the last day of each month.

Now up to then I didn't have a Twitch Prime account. Before World of Tanks I never watched Twitch. However since then I found that some Twitch streams of World of Tanks are more interesting to me than YouTube videos, because the YouTube videos are carefully selected "best" games, and edited. A live Twitch scream shows you that even a top ranked player sometimes makes stupid mistakes, or ends up in a very bad team and loses the game. I feel I learn more when I watch a good player in an average, un-edited game than when I watch him in this once-per-week game in which he manages to kill 10+ tanks. But as you don't need a Twitch Prime subscription to watch games on Twitch, there isn't really a good reason to pay money for Twitch Prime.

The good news is that I didn't have to. Because Amazon owns Twitch, and if you have Amazon Prime, you get Twitch Prime for free. Which means that because I have Amazon Prime, I get the monthly care package in World of Tanks for free. In the latest care package, Echo, there was something special: A tier 7 premium heavy tank, the King Tiger (captured). Apparently that only works as long as you are subscribed to Twitch Prime, if you cancel that subscription you King Tiger becomes inaccessible. But that is obviously not a problem for me anyway, because I plan to continue subscribing to Amazon Prime regardless of World of Tanks. So now I have a rather nice heavy tank, with a good commander, Hank "The Tank" Morgan, and a bunch of special missions this month to get oodles of experience points and build up the rest of the crew. While the previous care packages had useful stuff like consumables, a bit of gold, or a day of premium account, getting a premium tank is way more valuable. And all that for free, if you already have Amazon Prime. Nice!

I own 85 tanks on my main account in World of Tanks, and that is just a fraction of the around 500 tanks that are in the game. So one of the most fundamental questions in the game is "which tank should I play next?". And the answer to that is complicated, as it very much depends on what you want to get out of the game.

One simple answer is provided by the tech trees. Today is the first of June, and a new "Top of the Tree" event is starting. If you are interested in Russian tank destroyers, and I must say they aren't a bad choice anyway, it would be a very reasonable choice to play whatever tank you have that is highest in that tech tree. That way you get some added bonuses and advance faster towards the Object 268, the tier 10 of that line. So, as I already have the tier 9, the Object 704, I will surely play that one several times a day for the next month, until I reach the 268. (And yeah, I know, the Object 268 Version 4 might be a better choice, but that line doesn't get the added bonuses).

I just had what is a "good game" in my Object 704. I placed top in damage with 2,773 points of damage caused, 2nd in xp at 797 xp base (6,291 xp with various bonus multipliers). However that performance just got me a Mastery Badge "Class 3", which is the lowest mastery badge. There are a lot of players that are far better than me in tier 9 and 10. I seem to be okay at hiding in bushes, but when I play tier 9 or 10 medium or heavy tanks, I usually get massacred. The XVM mod suggests that the average WN8 rate in these games is about twice of what mine is, so I always feel as if I am playing in the wrong league.

Now no tier is immune against having to face players that are way better than you. Some excellent players play low tier tanks, a practice called "seal clubbing", because really new players don't stand a chance against a good player with a good crew and fully equipped tank at low tiers. But the average of player skill is lower at lower tiers. So the art is to find the right league. So unless there is a special event that pushes me to playing a specific tank, I usually choose to play between tier 3 and 7. While the average WN8 in these matches is impossible to predict, usually it is around my own, so the games are challenging without being hopeless. It also appears to be the best choice for improving my skills: While when I started World of Tanks again my WN8 was dropping, it has now stabilized and is going up again.

One of my favourite tanks I discovered while playing through last months "Top of the Tree" event. I never got to the top of that tree, I gave up at tier 8 because I didn't like those British medium tanks all that much. But I had enormous fun at tier 3 with the Cruiser IV, which ticked all the right boxes with me: It is fast enough, and has good burst damage with the Bofors cannon, so I can play the tank aggressively. But as a light tank it also has good camo rating and spotting, so where necessary I can hide in a bush and ambush the enemy. I like to drive forward quickly at the start of a battle and hide behind a bush or corner, laying in wait there for some enemy who doesn't expect an opponent that far forward. Then I empty my magazine quickly into him, and get the hell out of Dodge. Great fun!

And that leads me to the other possible way of choosing which tank to play: Ignoring the events and tech trees. It is perfectly feasible to find your favourite tank, and just play that one. Well, ideally you find two favourite tanks, because then you have something to play if you die early in a battle and need to wait for the battle to finish before getting your tank back. And the big advantage of this method is that there is no reason to spend money if you just want to play those one or two tanks and already have them. World of Tanks can really be Free2Play, if you want.