Holiday seasons are a big deal for games that make their money from purchases of in-game items. People play more, and feel more generous, so revenue tends to go up. So what is happening in World of Tanks, in general and specifically for me? Glad you asked!

Patch 1.7 just came out, and it was a non-event. It basically contained only two changes to the game, of which one (selling crew directives for credits) isn't really interesting for anybody, other than being another small brick in the Pay2Win wall. The other change is slightly more interesting, the anonymizer: In future you can play under a randomly assigned fake name, which makes it impossible for anybody else in the game to see whether you are a n00b or a veteran. As the new players were sometimes harassed in chat for being new players, and the best players were sometimes "trophy hunted", I can see why Wargaming would want to put that feature in. But of course it to some extent breaks the XVM mod everybody uses. And not all the uses of the anonymizer are really honorable, I've seen platoons of seal-clubbers hiding behind anonymity in low tier games. The really interesting change to the game, which unfortunately wasn't in the patch, is the complete change to hit points tanks have and damage that different types of ammo do, especially high explosive. Which, again, will break XVM as an unintended consequence. It remains to be seen if that mod can survive this double whammy of attacks. Right now the modders changed the mod so that if it detects that you have been using the anonymizer, you are blocked out from receiving data from XVM for 12 hours.

Somehow in the code of patch 1.7, but only starting this Friday, is the Holiday Ops event. That event does have parts where you can earn bonuses as a Free2Play player. However it also has lootboxes, which are only in the game during the holiday season. And unlike other games, lootboxes in World of Tanks have a rather high minimum content, 250 gold, which alone is worth about 1€. So if you buy a stack of lootboxes, you are pretty much guaranteed that the overall value of what you'll find will be worth more than what you paid. You still might be angry that you didn't get that one double-barreled tank you wanted, but it isn't like some games where you might spend a hundred bucks and receive nothing of value. Knowing that this would be coming, I didn't buy any gold recently, and will buy a stack of lootboxes. Some of the tanks that can be in them I already have, but in that case I'd get a rather generous compensation of over 10k gold. And I'm certainly not going to spend more than I want on the hope of getting one specific tank, I'm not much of a gambler.

The reason I re-started playing World of Tanks last Christmas was spending the holidays at my brother's house and realizing that he was still playing. As I will spend Christmas at his place again this year, I'm planning to bring my laptop and maybe we can play together while in the same room (we did play together in platoons sometimes over the year). Unfortunately that laptop is so old, it still had the original World of Tanks from 2011 on it, together with Windows 7. So I spent like two days to install Windows 10, update Windows 10, and to download and install World of Tanks. It now works, for small values of "works". With low resolution graphics and many graphics options turned way down, at least the game is running more or less smoothly. But it just doesn't feel the same on a 15" laptop screen in low resolution, compared to a 27" desktop screen at high resolution. But I'm not even sure it would look so great on a newer laptop, and I'm using the thing too seldom to be motivated to buy a new one.