4Game

Hi redditors,

with the new Chieftain video/song from AwesomeEpicGuys, the current Clan Showdown and the comparison to the recent League of Legends Worlds 2022 I realized that IN MY OPINION competitive WoT is in a very poor state (and has been this way for much too long).

The great majority of competitive WoT matches and tournaments consists of a mix of Chieftains, 907s and 279(e)s give or take 1 or 2 EBRs and a few occasional CS-63s or E3s. In summary, a small minority of (reward) tanks are as dominant as they could be, which from my point of view:

1. greatly decreases the number of viable strategies in competitive WoT matches and hence
2. results in a rather disappointing/monotonous viewer experience (at least for casual players) and lastly
3. gives drastic disadvantages to younger clans/players without reward tanks in competing with "older" clans, whose members somehow got their hands on reward tanks 10 years ago, although they do not display a significant skill advantage now.

I know the comparison to League of Legends is somewhat flawed (i.e., it's a different genre, there are no "premium champions" in LoL and so on), but there is a reason competitive LoL is so successful for years and one should not restrict oneself from learning by their example:

1. In LoL, every player can receive any champion they want (although not all champions at once) without having to spend years inside the game. That is, if a player who started 8 months ago is to play against a player who started 8 years ago, the chances of them having the 3-5 good champions which are currently meta on their role are much higher. Thus, if a team of talented "newcomers" plays a 5 vs 5 against "older" players it comes down to skill and team communication instead of having grinded tank X years ago or not.
2. The LoL developer is generally pretty fast in recognizing unbalanced champions or items inside the game. In contrast, there are (reward) tanks in WoT which sit at 53% WR and more FOR YEARS without WG even touching them in any regard. I know this statistic is certainly skewed since more skilled players have access to these (reward) tanks, but I think there is no debate that Chieftains, 907s and 279(e)s are genuinely better than their tech tree counter parts by a large margin, as their pick rates in tournaments and CW suggests.
3. I know that the viable champion pool at the level of LoL Worlds tournaments is also much smaller than the actual champion pool but still considerably larger than the viable tank pool in competitive WoT, which is also due to the fact that no two players can play the same champion inside the same LoL match. So why not introduce limits on tanks picks in WoT, such as a maximum of N identical tanks X per team?

The amount of unrecognized (or willingly suppressed) potential in competitive WoT is just insane in my opinion.

Do you agree? I certainly missed some obvious and important points, but also didn't want to write a whole book here, so let me know.