I could have imagined two possible setups for World of Tanks to work on Steam: One is to just have one game accessible to everybody old players and new, which maximizes the number of players on the server, and makes matchmaking faster. The other is to create a new "Steam" server, and only let new players via Steam access it, so that they don't get slaughtered so much by veterans. So which option did Wargaming choose? A hybrid that combines the worst of both worlds: Old players can't access their existing account via the Steam client. But new players on the Steam client are on the same server as the veteran players, and just get slaughtered.

World of Tanks is one of the least "new player friendly" games there is. Curiously, being a game in which your tactical experience and skill makes a big difference is part of this. You've all heard the old adage about a game being "easy to learn, hard to master". Well, WoT is that. It literally takes several thousands of hours to become good at this game. So even if there had been a separate Steam server, a veteran player with a new account (even somebody like me, who never got beyond medium skilled) would absolutely slaughter any new players for a very long time before they would catch up.

But with everybody on the same server, the new players not only face veterans that are skilled, they also face players who have grinded and/or paid their way to a lot of rewards. World of Tanks is clearly a game in which paying money makes you stronger in various ways; you won't necessarily "win" if you pay, but you'll do much better than if you don't. So what if the new players do the reasonable thing and concentrate on learning the game at the low tiers of the game? Unfortunately, many of the rewards like better crew or equipment can also be used on low tiers. And with a stupid third party system that gives you a score depending on how well you do, there are quite a lot of so-called "seal-clubbers" in World of Tanks: They get high win ratios by boosting a low tier tank with great crew and equipment, and then using it to slaughter new players (the "seals") in low tier games. That is where a separate server for new players would have come in handy.

So there you have it. This is why World of Tanks is getting bad reviews on Steam: Veteran players that are angry for not being allowed to use the Steam client, and new players that are just getting crushed by veterans who are both more skilled and far better equipped than they can be. This really wasn't a good idea.

P.S. Steam Charts shows only 3k players at peak playing WoT on Steam. Which isn't very much compared to the 100k to 200k concurrent online players on the EU servers. On the other hand, more than 1k players left a negative review already.

One more factor for the review bombing on Steam is that Wargaming strongly "moderates" criticism on their own forums. Some people clearly felt that this was their first opportunity to freely say what they think about this game on an official platform.