Tobold's Blog
Saturday, October 19, 2019
 
A new World of Tanks?

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.

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Comments:
Reading posts like yours has put me off playing returning to WoT. I played briefly years ago and enjoyed it but if I returned I would be starting over as a noob and the prospect of being repeatedly farmed by more experienced players doesn't thrill me. Do you think wargaming could fix that?
 
I think the maximum they could do would be to implement the above changes, including the complete stat reset, in a big marketing push for for “World of Tanks 2.0”. If you could get a big enough influx of new and returning players, the game would be a lot better for all of them.
 
A stat reset doesn't remove the incentive for old timers to farm newcomers. Could they not rejig the rewards to make it uneconomic for old timers to play at lower levels?
 
Purely in-game it *is* uneconomic for old timers to play at lower levels. The only reason people do it, is to pad their stats in the unofficial but widely used XVM mod. I would think that a stat reset makes that less attractive. You wouldn’t know if it won’t happen again. Why spend many hours padding a stat which then gets erased?

Furthermore a large influx of new players would dilute the influence of stat padders, you wouldn’t meet them in every game.
 
Are artillery shots nerfed too? when i played the only point to playing arti is to one kill a tank. losing that ability would make them redundant imho.

Cirop
 
Artillery and HESH haven't been changed on the sandbox server yet. No idea what will become of them. Artillery has been nerfed more than enough, in my opinion. Other players hate to be hit by artillery, but I think that games without artillery would be far more inclined to camping, which would be much worse.
 
(a) I think far fewer players use XVM than in the past. When you use XVM you can set it to show your who else in the team has it, and I notice fewer with it in 2019 than in say 2017. (b) the only stat that really matters in a PvP game is win rate. That is the true metric of what you personally bring to each team (c) New player experience has changed radically recently. It is now possible to play in protected status all the way through to obtaining a tier VI tank. (d) Artillery is an abomination in a tank game based on movement, and the harder it gets it's damage nerfed by the new changes the better. Artillery should be a support role, either producing temporary stun nerfs (as at present) delievering smoke screens to mask allies, or delivereing star shells to unmask enemies. It should do even smaller amounts of damage than it presently does in gameplay. I find players far more willing to camp in games with two artillery per side, whereas they are much more willing to get out and manouvre and fight when there are no artillery in matches.
 
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