I'm back home from holidays. Which also means that I am back on a PC and can play World of Tanks again. I deliberately didn't take a laptop on holidays, to take a break from the game, but now I am eager to return. And is if to celebrate my homecoming, World of Tanks is running an event called Homefront.

Homefront is one of the few ways to play World of Tanks against AI-controlled bots. In this particular version a team of 5 players defends against multiple waves of bots. The players don't bring their own tanks, but get to choose one of six possible teams of 3 (in a few cases 4) tanks. You select which tanks you want to start with, and when that tank is destroyed you can take another one, until you run out, or you defeated all enemy bots. At the end you get "front" points as well as "division" points for the team you chose. Collect a number of points and your division levels up, giving you better tanks and a few other rewards.

Of course due to my holidays I missed the start of the event. So now I only have level I divisions, while many other people are already at level II or III. And the matchmaker doesn't care, and just puts me into groups with players playing those higher levels. That sucks both for me and for them, as the enemy strength is based on the strength of the strongest player team. So I constantly am the weakest player against enemy bots that are too strong for me, and I'm dragging the team down. I'd rather have a slower matchmaking that puts players of the same level together.

What annoys most people is that you can't play Homefront all that often. You get only 2 fuel per day automatically (and I got them even when not logging on), plus you can earn another 2 fuel per day with easy missions, plus you get some bonus fuel for leveling a division up. Overall you can't get more than 84 fuel, so you can't play Homefront more than 84 times. And you would need to play very, very good to achieve all rewards of the event in those 84 battles. However I would say that if I had started from day one, it would have been possible for me to get all the rewards of one front, east or west, but certainly not both fronts. Being late, even that is probably not possible any more. But it should be possible to get the three divisions of one front to level II, and thus get the camo rewards.

I don't really like that you can spend gold (that is to say real money) to level a division up to level II or even III. If they absolutely wanted to monetize this event, Wargaming should just have sold fuel. The people who spent money of level III divisions early ended up being unhappy, because they were always in games with lesser level team mates, and ended up losing all the time. And because the divisions only exist during this 12-day event, spending money on that team seems a bit of a waste.