4Game

Hi. I used to play wot quite a lot back in the day, but I haven't played it for years. I'm quite interested in game design, and I've recently thought about wot and its RNG aspect. I remember that I used to think that while RNG is an incredibly bad design, its removal would break the game. Therefore, I concluded, the game is fundamentally flawed, to the point that it can't even be fixed. But now, I think that I was very much wrong. So, let's get started.

Let's talk about randomness in 3 aspects of the game – damage, penetration and accuracy. Removing RNG with regards to damage wouldn't cause any problems, obviously. But pen and acc – that's different, at least most players would agree with that. So, what are the problems?

Perfect accuracy could make it impossible not to hit weak spots, and coupled with a fixed pen value, it would make it so that you would either always penetrate the enemy tank from a given side or never penetrate it. But that's not really true. When it comes to accuracy, players can dodge enemy's fire by wiggling/going back and forth (which is what already happens). If we're talking about mid/long distance, there's also shell velocity – by the time the shell gets to the target, it's already moved away. What about fixed pen? That problem could be solved by implementing a mechanic that actually exists in real life. When a material is struck by a projectile, its durability worsens (which is also the case for tank armor). The armor value in specific parts of a vehicle could be lowered when getting hit (let's say, by 5 mms). So, if you were to face a tank with a 180 mm thick weak point, and you had 175 pen, you would have to hit that ws once before being able to penetrate it. As to the opposite problem – armor being too weak – large weak spots could be buffed in order to force players to aim for small weak spots, like copulas. This way, armor wouldn't become unbalanced.

What do you think about it?

I hope I don't have to explain why RNG is a bad design choice in the first place.