How many arrow does it take to kill a level 1 wizard in D&D? The answer is that it depends very much on which edition of D&D you play. In some editions a single arrow kills a level 1 wizard, in 4th edition you'd need like 4 or 5. That makes a huge difference to tactical gameplay. And that is not just true for D&D, but for all games which have attacks and hit points. Like World of Tanks. If you change how many shots it takes to kill a tank, you massively change the game.

On the latest Sandbox test server run, Wargaming is doing exactly that. By changing the number of hit points that tanks have, and the damage of various ammunition types, the overall effect is that it will in future take more shots to kill a tank. At lower tiers, much more. Lightly armored tanks being one-shotted by a single shell from a derp gun doesn't happen anymore. And regular tanks with regular ammo trading shots takes a bit longer, or much longer at lower tiers. If this is implemented on the live servers, that would massively change World of Tanks into a very different game. And I think, for the better.

In many cases today, World of Tanks battles go too fast, because a lemming rush from one team rolls over the weaker flank of the other team. More shots needed to kill tanks slows down the lemming rush, and gives the defenders the time to move tanks to the attacked flank. In other cases today, World of Tanks slows down to a crawl, because tanks are in very strong defensive positions, and the attackers feel that if they advance, they will get obliterated before getting a shot off. Again, more shots needed to kill a tank resolves this problem. If you know you can withstand a few more shots, you can be a bit more heroic in advancing.

Besides making the game itself better, the changes might actually also be beneficial with regards to some behavioral problems. Most World of Tanks players use a mod called XVM that displays the stats of players. And that results in some players "stat padding", that is playing in a way that maximizes their WN8 stats, for example by targeting new players in low tiers. The way WN8 and XVM works is by using a database of lifetime statistics of damage dealt, and comparing the damage a players deals to the average of all players playing the same tank. If you change the hit points and damage dealt of all tanks, all the statistics accumulated before the change will be incompatible with the statistics generated after the change. And because the changes are complicated, you can't use a simple adjustment factor to make the stats before and after compatible. So probably XVM will have no choice but to exclude all the old stats from the calculation. Which will simply evaporate all the effort some people put into stat padding. So hopefully the practice will become a bit less common.

Personally I wouldn't mind a stat reset. When I first played World of Tanks, I wasn't playing it very seriously. Since I restarted, I am making more of an effort to play better, and in consequence I do play a lot better than before. But because my stats are an average of old and new, my WN8 is rising very slowly, being dragged down by the thousands of battles of the past. A lot of people with that problem just "reroll" and start a new account, but I don't want to lose all the tanks I already have. Stats are not *that* important to me.

The only negative news about the changes is that they will be slow in coming. The first changes to ammo have been discussed months ago, for AP and APCR ammo. Now HE ammo is reworked. HESH, artillery, and a few exotic ammo types still need to be reworked. And so, probably, will some tanks: On the European servers Wargaming is currently selling a KV-2R with a Warhammer skin, but that tank relies very much on its derp gun. By making those guns much less effective, some of the tanks that rely on them are right now a bit useless, so Wargaming will need to do something to make them useful again. Otherwise the people paying €27 for a KV-2R now and getting it nerfed to uselessness a few months later would justifiably complain.