In one of the features of WoT 2.0, you can get a custom video made of your WoT history. That video said that I have been playing World of Tanks for 14 years. Well, not really. I first played World of Tanks 14 years ago. I have been playing World of Tanks for over a thousand hours, but there were a lot more years in which I didn't play the game at all than years in which I did play. The last time I played before WoT 2.0 was 5 years ago, and things have changed since then. My apologies if I am conflating changes that happened over those 5 years with changes that the version 2.0 introduced.

It is completely unsurprising that a 14-year old online game is well past its prime. There are no official numbers, but estimates from various sources, based on various data collected by players about players. When I played last at the height of the pandemic, there were an estimate 7.5 million players in World of Tanks, and while the pandemic slowed the decline, the game was already well past its growth phase. Before the release of WoT 2.0, estimated player numbers were down to 2.5 million, and we don't have numbers yet how much the new version was able to revive.

Declining player numbers not only pose a financial problem to Wargaming, the company running the game. It also poses a financial problem to a number of YouTube channels that have dedicated their channel to World of Tanks content. Fewer players means fewer potential viewers, which means less revenue from content creation. And of course the content creators each have their own idea why World of Tanks is declining, and frequently blame Wargaming for some decision or other. This is also somewhat typical for YouTube: If you run a channel for a game and don't frequently criticize the game, you will be seen as a shill. Also the occasional "World of Tanks is dying" sensationalist / controversial video is good for viewer numbers, as controversy gets more clicks than "this is fine" content.

So while Wargaming was mostly concerned how to monetize the remaining players, many YouTube channels were complaining about that monetization. That went as far as some channels organizing a "boycott", in which they wouldn't review the tanks from loot boxes. Unsurprisingly, Wargaming wasn't amused, and removed content creator privileges from the YouTubers complaining the loudest. Which didn't make the content on YouTube about World of Tanks any more positive.

World of Tanks has, and always had, a slower pace than other online shooters. Especially with heavier tanks at higher tiers and with players using terrain and cover well, a lot of shots simply didn't penetrate armor. Which kept tanks alive longer, and led to matches being up to 15 minutes long. Now on the one side, Wargaming felt that a faster game would attract more players. On the other side, Wargaming wanted to sell stuff to players, like premium tanks and premium ammunition. So over the years, power creep occurred: The tanks today penetrate armor a lot more often, due to players using premium "Pay2Win" features. In addition, one of the major changes in World of Tanks 2.0 is an "armor flashlight", that makes it easier for less experienced players to see where the armor of the enemy is weak and can be penetrated.

Between that, and the drive to get players back, or new players into the game, veterans of World of Tanks aren't happy: Too many people in a typical battle aren't very experienced, and play in a more YOLO style, which has become more viable due to that power creep. Thus battles are now much faster, often last only around 5 minutes, and feel very different to the more careful style the veterans are used to. Thus an increasing number of World of Tank content creators are just ranting about the game these days, which doesn't really help to promote it, and contributes to the downward spiral. Which also reduces their own viewer numbers. A video 5 years ago from Quickybaby about the best starting tech tree got 692k views, while an equivalent video from 2 weeks ago about which free tech tree to pick only got 255k views. It is pretty obvious that the World of Tanks ecosystem is not in a good shape. The game company and the content creators all make a lot less money than a few years ago, and often blame each other for that.

Undoubtedly related to declining player numbers and the resulting matchmaking problems is the fact that World of Tanks today has a lot more PvE parts than it had 5 years ago, when I played last. Today, unless you turn it off, your first battles every day are PvE battles against bots. And why would you turn that off, when you are more likely to win against bots than against real players, and you get full credits and xp for those wins, they just don't affect ranking. There are also a number of PvE events, and a badly defined "new player protection mode", in which new players are again more likely to face bots as enemies, or other newer players, and are protected from "seal clubbing", as the practice of veteran players farming new players for xp and credits was known.

But while the increase of PvE actually makes World of Tanks more attractive to me, I don't think I will play WoT 2.0 a lot. My loss of skill over the last 5 years not playing is noticeable to me, and once you have played at a certain skill level, playing at a much lower level isn't much fun. Getting back to my old skill would take a lot of time, would maybe not even work as I have gotten older and slower, and be generally not worth it. There are too many other games I could play instead which would be more fun.

Also announced at Gamescom, World of Tanks 2.0 launches in a week, September 3rd. I haven't played World of Tanks since summer 2020. While I did play WoT a lot less than I played WoW, I have over 15,000 battles played, so also thousands of hours. I had also gotten reasonably good at the game in 2020, after playing WoT frequently for a year and a half. But of all the computer games I have ever played, World of Tanks is the most skill-based. If I restarted playing this, it would take me hundreds of hours to just get back to the skill level I had 5 years ago, if ever. And because the game is so skill-based, playing it at a lower skill level would not feel good.

So I wouldn't go back to World of Warcraft, because I think I would be bored. And I wouldn't go back to World of Tanks, because I think I would be ashamed of my lost skill. I think WoW has the easier problem there. Wargaming, the makers of World of Tanks, also announced World of Tanks: Heat, which is basically a console hero shooter with tanks that move unrealistically fast. I don't know how well that will work. World of Tanks 2.0 I don't think will turn the fortunes of Wargaming around. The 2.0 label is fake, the new game still is 90% the old World of Tanks. There is new content, a new map, a new play mode, a new tier of tanks, and a controversial mode to "see" how thick or thin the armor of an enemy tank is at a given location. But most of the tanks, most of the maps, and most of the gameplay will just be the same as before.

The problem is, you can't actually change a skill-based competitive game too much, otherwise many of your existing players would quit, because the skills they trained thousands of hours for became obsolete. New players, or potential returning players like me, still can't compete in WoT 2.0, against the veterans. And World of Tanks isn't really a game you can play casually. So the release of WoT 2.0 will give a short-time influx of returning players, but I really doubt it will do anything to stop the slow decline of this game. Meanwhile World of Warcraft still has millions of players, because it is easy enough for a new player to pick up, and for most of the game it doesn't matter if somebody else is more skilled than you.

Now this player is rather decent. It is clearly a reroll account, as nobody gets this good with just 100 battles played. The 56% win rate is rather good ("green" color), and the 1321 WN8 is decent enough at a solid "yellow" level. You'd be okay seeing this player on your team.

Of course, you guessed it, both of these stats are mine, my main account and a reroll account. As I said in a previous post, trying to optimize the Battle Pass event in World of Tanks has steered me towards the tier and type of tank I feel most comfortable with, and I have the most fun with: Tier 6 medium tanks. At this tier I find World of Tanks challenging, but not frustratingly so, and I manage sometime to have a real impact on the game. So after playing mostly at that level for some months, I noticed that my stats in term of win rate and WN8 were going up constantly, but slowly.

Of course I wondered what my actual "current" stats are, that is to say what my stats would be if they weren't bogged down with 15k battles with lower stats. So I created a new account, spent a bit of money to buy two tier 6 medium premium tanks, got two more tier 6 regular tanks from the same two nations (as then you can use the same crew), and played the 100 battles XVM requires to calculate stats. So the good news is that I am playing better than the stats of my main account would suggest. The bad news is that it is nearly impossible to improve the stats of my main account, because the stats displayed are the average of everything, not "the last X battles". If I had played those 100 battles with an average WN8 of 1321 on my main account, my WN8 would have gone up only from 857 to 860. I would need to play 7,000 battles on my main account at this level to just increase the stats to the "yellow" level of a bit over 1,000. That is more battles than I usually play in a year.

While that reroll account was useful for determining my current level of skill (in as far as you believe that stats can represent level of skill), I certainly wouldn't want to permanently switch accounts just for better stats. There are lots of players who do, but on my main account there are 190 tanks, and I have unlocked more than that on the tech tree (I just didn't keep them all). Besides the tanks, the main account also has a nice selection of good tank crews, lots of equipment, and various other goodies that one tends to accumulate over the years. Those things are more important to me than stats, I look at my stats only out of curiosity. Still, I bet that if WoT allowed players for a 50 € "fee" to reset their stats while keeping everything else, they would make millions.

Having your stats go back to the day you started is really counterproductive to the idea that your stats somehow measure your skill. It is as if a "gear score" in World of Warcraft would represent any single piece of gear your character ever wore, instead of the current set. I understand why they keep the whole set of stats, so people can look at for example how often they drove one particular tank. But the third party organizations like XVM that calculate WN8 would probably get a more accurate picture if they could just look at the stats of the last 1,000 battles of a player.

After reaching stage IV of the Road of Berlin event, I thought about stopping. It took a bit over 20,000 points to get there, and a victory at tier III only gave around 66 points. The only reason I had gotten to stage IV was that there were multiplier bonuses x10 in the bundle I had bought. But I had run out of those, and getting another 15,000 points without a multiplier seemed too much of a grind.

This weekend the 4th map and final map of the event was released, Berlin itself. And it was announced that this map would in patch 1.9.1 be added to the regular game, random battles, which made it more interesting to look at. In addition they gave me five x15 multipliers for the event, one for each tank. And I had managed to pick up some tokens for more x15 multipliers by playing missions with tier VII+ tanks in random battles.

So I started the first game, got lucky that I immediately got on the Berlin map, got lucky that I was in a good team, and achieved a victory. So the Berlin map gives twice as many points as the other maps, times 15 for the multiplier, times 66 points, and suddenly I was looking at 2k points towards the 15k for stage V. Suddenly it didn't look so impossible anymore! So I played some more over the weekend, and in fact ended up finishing stage V and getting the Bounty Ventilation reward and a useless medal. Event completed, grats to me!

From a game design point of view, I found this interesting. One *could* have grinded the event without multipliers, and it would have taken bloody forever. But between the multipliers I bought in the bundle at the start of the event, the multipliers I got for free, the multipliers I earned as mission rewards in random battles, and the additional double points on the Berlin map, the event wasn't grindy at all. I only played as long as the event was fun for, not longer.

After playing the Road to Berlin event / PvE mode for a while, I realized a few things: The mode is fun, but not fun forever. And to get to at least stage IV for the reward tank would just take too many games if I was playing for free. Now I could simply have bought the reward tank, but I didn't want to completely skip the event, and I wanted to get the other rewards as well. So I paid (gold equivalent to €15) for a bundle that massively sped up my progress on the Road to Berlin: It leveled up all my event tanks to the top tier III, and gave me five x10 boosters for each of them. With that I was already able to reach stage IV today, no problem.

I might give stage V a miss, as it takes nearly as long as all the previous stages together, and I don't want to spend more gold on boosters. You can earn boosters in random battles, but unfortunately that requires you to do rather well in higher tier tanks, and it would take me a long time to earn those three daily tokens. You get one x5 booster per tank per day, but that would just give me about 1,000 points per day, and the last stage needs 15,000. It would cost about another €15 to buy enough additional x10 boosters to get to stage V, and all that for one bounty ventilation system. I can live without that reward.

I considered the bundle I bought as actually rather cheap, as it contained 30 days of WoT premium account, which alone already cost 2/3 of the price of the bundle. That is always the problem with bundles, it is very hard to judge the cost / value. I know a lot of people complaining about the "100 Euro tank", the Panzer II J. I have one, but I don't consider that it cost me 100 Euro. The tank came for free when you bought gold for 100 Euro, and I wanted that gold anyway. So is this a 100 Euro tank, or is it a free tank? Hard to say.

My main complaint about the Road to Berlin game mode is that it is only available for two weeks, but you are supposed to play hundreds of games in this mode during that time. I'd rather have a PvE mode that I play once in a while, instead of grinding it. With the bought shortcut I'm happy to have reached the point that I wanted while not playing more than I wanted. I might play a few more games once the new Berlin map is added this weekend, but otherwise I consider this event done.

While this post is about World of Tanks, some of things certainly apply to other games as well. World of Tanks this week introduced a new game mode, Road to Berlin. It is a PvE game mode, with 5 players fighting against AI bots. Compared to the previous attempt at a PvE game mode, Homefront, the new Road to Berlin is a huge improvement. There is a lot more variety, with currently 3, later 4 maps, and not always the same starting positions. The AI bots are playing a lot better than previously, and the matchmaking is also a lot better, not mixing players from different tiers anymore. Road to Berlin is actually fun to play! However, in the wider context of World of Tanks, there are still a number of problems with it.

Like most events in World of Tanks, you can get rewards in Road to Berlin. You gain points every time you play, and these points get you through 5 stages of rewards. As usual there is a way to accelerate the gaining of points by spending money, but that isn't really the fundamental problem. Rather the big problem is that the event requires you to play X games of World of Tanks in the Road to Berlin game mode, with X being a sufficiently high number to take up hours of your time. But while you do that, you are outside the usual World of Tanks ecosystem of random battles, events, and rewards. It is as if you would be playing a completely different game. Unless you have a huge amount of time to play World of Tanks, you can *either* play Road to Berlin, *or* you can do the monthly tankrewards event, the top of the tree event, the daily standard and premium missions, and a bunch of other stuff.

The beauty of playing the regular random battles is that they count for many different missions and events at once. You don't need to decide between doing the tankrewards event and the top of the tree event and the daily missions, you can do all of them at the same time. But events that require you to play a new game mode aren't integrated into that system, and suddenly you *do* have to decide. Well, you can play 3 random battles per day to gain 3 tokens per day that make you gain points in the Road to Berlin event faster. But otherwise the two games are just separate. And as the requirements for all events are set to require a significant amount of time, you suddenly would have to play twice as much to get everything. That puts up an inherent barrier against new game modes. And maybe that is why they never get transformed into anything permanent.

I do think that World of Tanks would be a better game with an optional but permanent PvE mode. Especially if it was designed to teach new players the game. It would be a huge improvement over the current method of letting new players play against veteran "seal clubbers" that pad their stats by preying on n00bs. But such a game mode can't be that separate from the general mission and rewards system, because otherwise it will just be ignored. Players go where the rewards are.

I am on the 45th and last stage of the Battle Pass event. And while I was originally very skeptical about the event, it unexpectedly led to me having a lot more fun in World of Tanks than before. It ended up being one of these "quests" that manage to steer a player in the right direction, towards more fun. Which is far from evident, so I would like to take the time to talk about quests.

The very early MMORPGs didn't have much questing. In spite of the name, you rarely did a quest in Everquest. A lot of players called it Evercamp, because the most efficient way to play was to "camp" the same location. After "breaking a camp", that is to say dealing once with a full group of monsters at a location, you would stay at that location and kill the respawns one by one, which was a lot easier than moving to another location with another full group of monsters. It is hard to imagine today, but back in the days you would go into a zone and shout "camp check" in general chat, and the players in the zone that were camping a location would reply, so you knew which camp wasn't taken yet. People would stay on one camp for hours, even days, until they leveled up and needed a different camp for xp.

The situation that we now consider normal, every zone having quest hubs and hundreds of quests sending you all over the place, was a novelty when World of Warcraft came out. The combination of quest rewards and a less deadly combat system made camping a bad strategy. You would gain more xp and rewards if you worked through the list of all quests in the zone. And that obviously led to you seeing a lot more of each zone. Quests were designed to make the game more varied and more fun, and for a time that worked. Today there are barely any games left which don't have some system of quests or mission system. And neither the intent nor the result is necessarily to make the game more fun to play. Quests can be boring grinds in an attempt to hide a lack of content, or they can steer players towards monetization options in a game. No wonder quests aren't as popular anymore than in the early days of World of Warcraft.

In World of Tanks there are daily quests and new events all the time. Some of them, especially the daily quests, are simply ignored. You just play whatever you wanted to play, and at some point by chance you fulfill a quest condition and get a minor extra reward. At the other extreme there are events like mission marathons, which with the promise of much bigger rewards entice you to change the way you play, usually trying to steer you towards playing a lot more than usual. In some cases an event requires you to play a specific tank, which is problematic if that tank is sub-optimal or just not what you like to play. Missions can also be frustrating if they require you to win battles: With you being just one player in a team of 15, it frequently feels as if it is way outside your control whether a battle is won or lost. You end up just hating your team mates.

The Battle Pass event is fortunately not very restrictive. It's main requirement is that need to be among the top 10 of your team to get any points. You get 0 points if you are among the bottom 5, 3 points if you are among the top 10 of a losing team, 5 points if you are among the top 10 of the winning team or among the top 3 of the losing team, and 7 points if you are among the top 3 of the winning team. With that system, how well you perform in battle compared to the rest of your team counts for more than whether you win or lose. Being teamed up with a bunch of idiots means that at least it becomes easier to be among the top 10 or even top 3.

But what ended up with me having a lot of fun with the Battle Pass event is that it steered me towards playing at the right tier for me. I have always said that if you plot fun over difficulty in games, you get a curve with an optimum. Too trivially easy is boring, while banging your head against frustrating difficulty isn't fun either. Somewhere in the middle there is a sweet spot, where the game is interesting and challenging without being frustrating. For me playing World of Tanks at the top tiers is frustrating. While reflexes are everything in World of Tanks, they sure do help, and I in my mid-50s can't compete with teenagers. I also didn't play World of Tanks for years, so I can't compete in experience and benefits from accumulated rewards with veterans that have played far more games than I did. While many game mechanics in World of Tanks push you towards playing at tier 10, the top tier, that is very far from the fun optimum for me. I am simply out of my leagues. I am doing a lot better in the low tiers, but that isn't very challenging.

The Battle Pass encouraged me to optimize: The requirement of being among the top 10 of your team resulted in me only making 2 points per battle on average when playing in the high tiers. With some experimentation I ended up finding an optimum at tier 6, where I am among the top 10 most of the time, I even am among the top 3 sometimes, and I end up with 4 points per battle on average. But this process didn't just optimize how many points I got, it also simultaneously optimized my fun: Doing well compared to the rest of your team feels like me having more of an impact. And because you can only earn up to 100 points with a single tank at tier 6, the even encouraged me to play a lot of different tanks, which again was good for fun. I made most of my points playing nearly every tier 6 medium tank in the game. Medium tanks were another optimization result: Artillery and tank destroyers are often too passive for me, heavy tanks are frustrating when your armor is useless against tanks two tiers higher than you, and light tanks are fun for scouting, but pack less of a punch than mediums.

I think that I have found my league, and that I will in the future play the large majority of my games in these mid-tiers. If a future event pushes me towards high tiers, I'll just opt out. Life is too short to play a game in an un-fun way for some measly virtual reward.

I use a mod called XVM in World of Tanks. It calculates a score called WN8 for each of my battles, and gives an aggregate score of my and the players I meet in battles (if they don't want that, they can use the anonymizer). The WN8 score has its limitations, like not counting assisted damage at all, and over-emphasizing damage over other contributions to the battle. But I still find it useful as a learning tool to improve my game. However, I don't obsess about it, like some people do.

In every game there are people who use the available scores as a source of self-worth. "Look at me, I am a better human being, because I have a higher score!". So a WN8 score is extremely important to some people, which is not always a good thing. Besides leading people into actually playing worse, more selfishly, and lowering the chance of their team to win, the most obvious thing is stat padding: If you play a lot, your WN8 improves; but that can take thousands of games, and your statistics are forever weighed down by the low scores you had at the start. And the further you advance along the tiers, the harder the battles become, which also tends to lower your score. So there are quite a lot of people who make a new account, and then systematically only ever play in low tiers. They have thousands of games on low tier tanks. That makes their stats look good until you look at the details. But it is bad for the game, because they are basically preying on new players, which makes World of Tanks a less good experience for new players than it could be.

So some people argue that it would be better if XVM and WN8 or similar scores were removed. While that is unlikely to happen, at the very least today patch 1.9 will kick off another discussion about stats: Patch 1.9 massively changes a lot of tanks, especially at lower tiers. They will get more hit points, thus survive longer, more ammo to be able to fire for longer. A lot of tanks will also be rebalanced, and the tech trees will be revamped. And all these changes will mess up the statistics. WN8 calculates you score by comparing your performance with an "expected value" for your tank. And these expected values will change dramatically, especially a low tiers. But the databases that XVM use don't hold individual values of each battle, just averages. If you drove in a tank before and after the patch, XVM can't know how many of those battles were before the patch and how many were afterwards. XVM just sees the average, and compares that to a new expected value, which I assume will be recalculated upwards.

In short, the more battles you did before the patch, the worse you will look in the statistics. Even the stat padders who spent countless hours to achieve a high looking score on XVM by driving low tier tanks will suddenly not look all that good anymore. If you want better looking stats, you will have to reroll again and start over. At the very least there will be some heated discussion with veteran players complaining that their 10 years of playing World of Tanks are now dragging down their statistics, because post-patch values will be much higher. Some people will certainly shout for Wargaming to reset all statistics in the database that XVM uses.

For me that will be interesting to watch, but I don't feel very affected. I don't care what my average WN8 stat is saying, I am more interested in stats for individual battles or sessions, and whether I am getting better or not. I simply won't compare my new stats with the old ones, and disregard the now somewhat irrelevant average. But I am interested in seeing whether this will lead to changes of the XVM mod.

Another month, another tankrewards event from World of Tanks. These go on for like 4 weeks (27 days in this case), and to get the maximum reward, a premium tank, you need to collect 3,000 points. As you get 100 points per day just for fighting one battle, you basically get most of the rewards for no effort, and just have to do a bunch of missions over a month to get the remaining 300 points for the final reward. Which takes some time, depending on how you tackle it, something like 10 battles in the top 10 per day (you get more points if you do more battles, or use top tier tanks).

Only this time I suddenly had 500 extra points in this egg hunt event. It is only April 8, and I already got 1350 points. Just showing up every day until the end will give me the final reward, and I can even miss a couple of days. Apparently there are easter eggs in the form of hidden missions in the game, and by pure chance I fulfilled one of them, killing an enemy by setting him on fire. That is a nice surprise, although I don't think many people will go out of their way to first find out what the hidden conditions are, and then change the way they play to get there. Basically if you do as I do, just play regularly and get lucky at some point, you already get all the points you'd ever need. It's nice for me, but somehow not much of an easter egg hunting event.

Two weeks into the 3 months of the Battle Pass event in World of Tanks, I just finished stage 20 out of 45. In other words, I am advancing much faster than I need to just finish the event with full rewards. And no, I am not playing World of Tanks all day. The reason why I am advancing much faster than at the start is a change of strategy: I am playing the lowest tier of tanks eligible for the event, tier VI.

While World of Tanks has no strict classification what skill level of player can play in what tier of tank, the best players often play in the highest tier, tier X, just because they don't have any progress on lower tier tanks left to do. And maybe because they like the challenge. In tier VI there are some top players trying to farm the less experienced players, but there are also a lot of mid-skill players like me. Which means that I am not totally outclassed right from the beginning of a battle.

For the Battle Pass event you only get points if you finish in the top 10 of your team, regardless of whether your team wins or loses. I heard an explanation that this is to prevent bots from farming points. However in a typical tier X game there are so many players that are way better than me, that it takes me on average 16 games to get points 10 times. And not only do I not get any points in the other 6 games, I also never get the additional 2 points for finishing in the top 3. When I play tier VI, it takes me on average only 12 games to get points 10 times, and I sometimes get maximum points for being in the top 3.

Now the tanks of tier VI are limited to how many points they can earn, each tank only 100 points, or two stages of the Battle Pass. However, once I get to the 100 point maximum, I get another 15 bonus points, so I need to play only 20 tanks to make it to stage 45. Including those bonus points, on average I get about twice the points per game on tier VI than on tier X. And the tier VI games, where I am basically playing in "my league", are a lot more fun than the tier X games, where I am "out of my league" and frequently am not able to achieve anything. So even if I don't have enough tier VI tanks that still need to gain xp for the next tier, I prefer to play at that tier.

Do not think that I take the coronavirus and the possibility of a global pandemic with accompanying recession lightly. But the fact is that up to now there are 154,800 people infected, 5,762 people dead, but hundreds of millions of people affected by a coronavirus-induced change of lifestyle. In my case that means working from home for probably a few weeks, and cancelling a lot of business travel. With the somewhat weird effect that over the past and coming weeks, there will be hours which I would ordinarily have spent travelling or driving to or from work, which I will now spend at home. While there is a very real possibility of me falling ill, or even dying, and my net worth diminished significantly due to the stock market crash, in the quality of life department I would say that my situation improved. A pandemic is never good news, but it helps to look for a silver lining.

Not only has my work/life balance improved towards the life side, the coronavirus also affects what I do with my free hours. I will spend less time meeting with friends and doing activities that require groups of people at the same location, like playing Dungeons & Dragons. And I will spend more time at home, playing on the computer. And that affects how much time I can plan to spend playing World of Tanks, and how I see the Battle Pass.

First of all it turns out that I was wrong believing that you need to be both time-rich and money-rich to get the full Battle Pass rewards. What I hadn't seen before is that you can actually buy stages of the Battle Pass for money. And you can do that at the end, so if you are a few stages short of the final goal, you can buy that. Second, I probably won't even need to do that. An hour more per day playing World of Tanks will probably be sufficient for me to get to the 45th and last stage. It is day 4 of the Battle Pass, and I'll reach stage 6 today. Okay, that is with the added progress from the weekend, but overall 45 stages in 90 days doesn't appear all that daunting anymore.

The hardest thing was having to leave my World of Tanks comfort zone. It is a lot more fun to play at a tier where you are at least average or above, compared to the other players. But the Battle Pass is skewed towards higher tiers, so I have been playing a lot of tier 9 and some tier 10 tanks. That is probably too high for me, especially all those battles where my tier 9 tanks faces tier 10 opponents who are both better players than I am, and have tanks with much better stats. But one of the "featured" tanks of the Battle Pass is the Object 277, a tier 10 tank I don't have, but I do have the T-10 tier 9 tank leading towards it. So right now, grinding some tier 9 tanks makes sense, even if that means that I don't reliably finish in the top 10 in each battle, and thus make less points for the Battle Pass. The alternative is dropping down in tiers, but to get any points you need to play at least tier 6, and a tier 6 tank can overall only get 100 points, while the Object 277 can get 1,000.

The good news is that while the high tiers are a lot harder, I still do reasonably okay. That is to say that my win rate and WN8 rating still go up. In other words, the skill I gained by playing World of Tanks often over the last 15 months makes up for the higher difficulty. If there would be a stat reset, my stats would look better, they are being held down by the thousands of battles I played when I was still playing less well.

While you could perfectly well play World of Tanks while completely ignoring all missions, there is always some event going on in which you can earn extra rewards and progress. So, why wouldn't you want to get those extra rewards? However, more and more these events fall into one of two extremes: Either you get a reward for just showing up, or you get a really good reward if you play World of Tanks excessively.

World of Tanks today had the first of seven "black market" sales. At exactly 5 pm CET every day for a week a limited number of one rare tank go on sale, some for gold, some for credits. For example today you could buy a Lansen C for 8.5 million credits. If you were there at exactly 5 pm, because at 5:02 the 12,000 copies were sold out. And I don't think this is a good idea.

Obviously some of the demand for black market tanks comes from their rarity, so the very limited number of copies sold is part of the appeal. But if they are sold out in under 2 minutes, the demand obviously far exceeded the supply. Wargaming could easily have sold two times or five times more, without exhausting demand. And even if they would have sold an unlimited quantity the whole day long, but just that one day, it wouldn't have affected the "rarity" much. So it seems to me they left a lot of money on the table.

I didn't buy the Lansen C, although I easily could have. For a Free2Play player who doesn't want to spend any real money, the offer was interesting, because there aren't many ways to get premium tanks without money. And the Lansen C is a decent enough tier 8 premium, which makes good credits, because the shells are cheap and deal good alpha damage. But as somebody who regularly spends money on World of Tanks, I already had better tier 8 premium medium tanks. In fact there aren't many premium tanks left in World of Tanks which I really would want to buy. The E25 maybe, but what are the chances that I will get one?

This brings me to the point which I really dislike about the black market: People were complaining about the luck involved when buying lootboxes for Christmas (World of Tanks doesn't have lootboxes during the rest of the year). But the lootbox event went on for a month, and the rarest tanks had an about 1% drop chance. So the largest available bundle of 75 lootboxes for €100 was far more likely than not to contain all the rare tanks. Seeing how the average content of those lootboxes was worth easily twice the cost, I didn't even consider this "gambling". It's more like buying a raffle ticket at the church fete with a guaranteed prize; the prize might be not exactly the one you were after, but you don't go home empty-handed. Getting a tank from the black market to me seems far more luck-based than the lootboxes. It was lucky that I was actually home at 5 pm, often I would still be at work at that time. And quite a lot of people who wanted that tank ended up not getting one, because of either technical problems, or being short of credits and the offer gone before they could sell another tank to get the money. It seems to me that a lot more people are coming out empty-handed from the black market event than from the lootbox event. If by chance Wargaming sold the exact same rare tanks from the lootbox event in the black market, the average player's chance to get one from the black market would be far lower than from the lootboxes.

Combined with the uncertainty of which tank will be sold when, my chances of getting the tank that I want are pretty slim. Maybe it won't be on offer at all. And if it was, I would need to be there at 5 pm, and then everything would need to go exactly right for me to be one of the lucky few who could buy it. That to me seems to be a pretty shitty way to sell virtual goods.

In World of Tanks there is currently a "Tankrewards" event going on. These events are slightly different, and weirdly so, from the usual events in that you gain points in the game but then need to visit a website to redeem the rewards for these points. In the EU the external site is called Tankrewards.EU. You can probably figure out the name of the site for the other servers. :)

The event gives you a bit over 3 weeks to collect points, and gives you up to 4 tiers of rewards if you reach 3,000 points over this period. Tier 3 is at 2,000 points, and as you can get 100 points per day for just playing a battle, tier 3 can be reached with very little effort, as long as you play every day. Tier 4 is not so much more difficult, but you will have to do other missions to achieve it: There are 9 missions every day, asking you to win a game and be in the top 10 with a tank from each tier from 2 to 10. Tier 2 to 7 missions give 10 points each, tier 8 to 10 missions give 20 points each, for a daily maximum of 220 points.

Not wanting to overoptimize this, I just tried to get as many points per day as my playtime allowed me, up to now. I just reached tier 3, and with over 10 days to go I can get tier 4 just by playing a single battle every day. But the exercise of going through all tiers to try to win a battle in the top 10 really drove home the point of how different the game is at the different tiers. It is a lot easier for me to win a battle in the top 10 at lower tiers, and quite hard to do so at tier 10.

Now statistically 10 players out of the 30 players in a battle are in the top 10 of the winning side; so on average you need to play 3 games per tier to fulfil the mission condition. However that assumes a player that is completely average at every tier. In reality an average player like me has a slightly higher winrate at lower tiers, and a much better chance to be in the top 10 of his team, so at low tiers I need on average maybe 2 games to do the mission. At the top tier my winrate is slightly lower, but my chance to be in the top 10 is much reduced, so I need on average maybe 5 games to do the mission.

The most frustrating part is the impression that I have very little influence on whether a battle is won or lost. Now top players like Quickybaby argue that it is up to you whether you win or lose. However Quickybaby has a winrate of 60%. That to me suggests that he didn't influence the 40% of games that he lost. And a very bad players (and in one notable exercise a player who just went afk in every game for testing purposes) have a winrate of 40%, I would think that another 40% of Quickybaby's game would have been won with or without him. So a great player has a positive influence in only 20% of his games. And an extremely bad player has a negative influence on 20% of his games. If you draw a curve between those two extremes it becomes obvious that anybody in between influences fewer of his games. Even if every game had one player "carrying" it for his team, that would be only 3.3%, one player out of 30. Even if I imagine I "carried" every game in which my team won and I came top on experience and damage, that is not more than those 3.3%. Thus the frustration when I play well, and my team loses anyway, and I can't get my mission done because of it. Fortunately the event doesn't require me to get full points every day.

Although I already had all of the new tanks, I bought another 75 lootboxes in World of Tanks for €100. Why? Because I had calculated that this would be a cheaper way to buy WoT gold than the regular price, or even the frequently available discounted bundles. I ended up with over 60K gold, or €200 worth. Plus 5 million credits, 53 premium days, and 14 garage slots, or roughly another €50. Its going to last me for several months. And as I am reasonably confident that I will still be playing this game for a while, the lootboxes weren't gambling at all, but rather a complicated way to get a heavy discount on stuff I would have bought otherwise.

The reason why I pay several hundred Euros per year for World of Tanks is that it enables me to play without having to grind. I'm okay with that. I can afford the money, but I haven't got the time for grinding. And in the end every game needs some people like me who are willing to pay, just to keep the lights on. Free to play is an illusion.

I probably overdid that lootboxes event I talked about in my previous post. That has to do with the fact that I can't buy lootboxes in Belgium, I need to ask somebody from another country to "gift" them to me. So, buying a few for testing and then some more over time would have been complicated. Instead, I went for the big bundle of 75 lootboxes for €100. But I had underestimated the generosity of Wargaming, and ended up with a bigger haul than I would have thought. Here is what I got out of 75 large lootboxes:

• 6 tanks (actually it was 10 tanks, but 4 of them were double and got converted to gold)
• 10 garage slots
• 5 styles
• 5 female crew members (including the 4 snow maidens)
• 38 premium days
• 44k gold
• 4.3 M credits
• Enough decorations to easily get me to Festive Atmosphere level X
• The rewards for getting Festive Atmosphere level X, including 660 national fragments

Note that the gold alone is worth €145. And I did get lucky and got the two rare new tanks, including the double-barrelled one. After using my decorations, breaking up the excess decorations into shards, and using the decoder to get the 4 large decorations and a bunch more random ones, I am now also at +30% more credits for the remainder of the event. So I am pretty happy with my lootboxes. Were they strictly necessary? Certainly not! But sometimes I should spoil myself. :)

In other news, I turned the Anonymizer off again, because XVM blocks you from seeing other people's stats if you do. I think this is a first: I know of a lot of game companies that will ban you if you use a mod they don't allow, but this is the first time the makers of a mod ban me because I used a game feature they don't allow.

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.

Today in World of Tanks the Renegade Challenge starts. That is a so-called mission marathon, where by doing a series of daily missions over 10 days you could receive a tier VIII premium tank for free. At first glance that looks like a fantastic offer for Free2Play players, as tier VIII premium tanks are the best money-makers in the game. However, as many people quickly remarked, the challenge to get this tank for free is basically impossible.

There are two versions of the challenge, one called "commitment", the other "mastery". For the "mastery" challenge you need to do things like being the top tank by experience earned, or similar achievements that generally only the top players can achieve. And even those very good players will have to grind, as the last mission for example requires them to be the best player in the team 25 times. That takes hours, even for the best World of Tanks players. For the "commitment" challenge you need to accumulate base experience points in tier VI - X tanks, while being among the top 10 of players in your team. That is doable even for mediocre players like me. However the amount of base experience you need is staggering: 251,000 overall, of which 50,000 alone on the last day. Getting 1,000 base xp in one game would be considered a great game, even by a good player. If you come in on 10th place in a game where your team loses, you might only get 100 base xp. My statistics say that I get 480 xp per game. Assuming that I can make top 10 in at least 2 out of 3 games, I would need over 1,500 games to get this much base xp, of which 150 games on the last day. If the average game lasts 7 minutes including queues, I would need to play for 90 hours over 10 days, of which 17.5 hours on the last day. That isn't going to happen.

So, is this Renegade Challenge absolutely useless? Only if you are a Free2Play player. Because in previous mission marathons, if you did for example 5 out of 10 missions, you had the option to buy that reward tank for 5 times 10% = 50% off. And because the missions get harder, I can do the "commitment" missions 1 to 5 in a quarter of the time that 1 to 10 would take me. And I don't need to finish a specific mission on a specific day, for example if I don't do mission 3 on day 3, my play time on day 4 will first finish mission 3 before starting mission 4. So the goal of doing half of the missions over the 10 days boils down to 17.5 hours overall, roughly 2 hours per day. And I don't need to do or achieve anything special, I just need to play World of Tanks with any tier VI or higher tank, and not completely suck.

So, I'm setting myself that as a "Half-Renegade Challenge". I'll try to reach at least 5 missions, and then buy that M54 Renegade tank for half price. Which is still a good deal for me, as the tank is pretty sweet, except for the big weakpoint on top.

In World of Tanks one of the recurring XP Fever events started today. Among other benefits during this event you can also exchange excess xp and gold for free xp, which can be used on any tank to research modules or the next tank in the tree, at a better rate. I just exchanged 10,000 gold for 400,000 xp, and that is a lot. It is also unconventional, if you would go and ask for advice on the forums or elsewhere, people would tell you not to do it. So why do I?

I have been playing World of Tanks nearly every day since the start of this year. Unsurprisingly that has resulted me becoming better at it. I only have detailed statistics for the last 6 weeks, but during that time my WN8 rating went up every week, by an average of 4. As the WN8 is an average over all your battles, and I have 12k battles, the increase is slow. But the fact that it is going up steadily means that I am now pretty consistently playing better than I was before.

However I noticed that there is no correlation with my win percentage. I have been between 48% and 49% win rate since I started playing in 2011 (it's not 50:50, because a draw is basically a loss for both sides). In the World of Tanks community there is an everlasting discussion whether one should play to win, or whether it is better to play for your personal score, e.g. WN8. Quickybaby, probably the game's best known Twitch streamer, once took the time during a stream where people wanted to look at World of Tanks gameplay to show with an Excel table that the very best players have an average win rate of up to 70%, and the very worst players down to 30%; for him that proved that your skill had an impact on your winrate. Which at the extremes is certainly true.

But if you look at Quickybaby's own win rate of just over 60%, with him being quite good at the game, and playing to win, how many of his games did he actually influence? 60% win rate to me suggests that he didn't have enough influence to turn the other 40% of games into wins. And it would appear logical to me that this also means that of his wins, 40% would have been wins even without him trying. Only in 20% of his games, 1 in 5, did he have enough influence to affect the outcome.

Mathematically speaking, if the very best players have a positive influence on their win rate, and the worst players have a negative influence on their win rate, somewhere in between the curve must hit zero. And because skill is probably a Gaussian distribution, I would say that a vast majority of players are simply too mediocre to influence the win chance of their team in either direction. Me included. Playing to try to improve my personal score is the better option for me, because I have proven that I can do that. I am not convinced that I could play random battles without forming a platoon in a way where my win rate would be measurably higher.

Skill *does* have a marked effect on win probability, but mostly in the aggregate. There are mods that show you the sum of WN8 ratings of the players on each side. If one side has a significantly higher sum of WN8 ratings, it usually wins. But if the matchmaker puts you on the side with the lower skill, as a regular player you simply can't "carry the game" hard enough to make a difference.