4Game

First disclaimer, this is NOT a “WOT is bad, WT is good!” post. I am *NOT saying that War Thunder is an inherently better game, that is not the argument I am making and, honestly, I don’t think I’d agree with that statement anyway. World of Tanks and War Thunder both have their own brands of stupid BS that make both of them frustrating in different ways. With that out of the way though, my main point…

I’ve played WOT since closed beta testing in December 2010. I played the game religiously up until summer 2020 and I’ve completely stopped playing since holiday 2020. On the other hand, I first got into WT in 2016 on console and that has eventually come to the point where it is now my most played game on an average day.

For those of you who have also played both games, has anybody else felt just… a complete lack of interest or excitement for anything WOT does anymore? Like every announcement they make for a new line of vehicles or something is just met with boredom and cynicism? New tech tree? Oh boy, I can't wait to see how awful they make the tier 7 on purpose to get people to spend gold to skip it, and how much worse the tier 8 is going to be than the premium equivalent. New tier 10? Oh boy, cant wait for another autoloader or hull down heavy. New premium? Oh boy, I can't wait to see how stupid and broken it is. New tier 9 chieftain prototype? Lmao looks like they screwed over another potential tech tree line. Like, NOTHING is interesting anymore. I don't even think a Japanese TD line could bring me back at this point. The corridor gold spam meta is so boring and dumb, the bad game balance decisions for new stuff is so predictable, and it completely sucks the fun and joy out of everything I could use. It doesn’t matter how interesting or exciting the vehicle is on its own merits, the moment it gets thrown into the current map and game meta of WOT it immediately becomes annoying and miserable. I could be driving an AMX-13-57, a Maus, a JP E-100, a Badger, a CS-52, etc etc etc. It all oozes together into the same shit.

Consequently, I've been finding that WOT Blitz is a vastly better game than regular WOT. Don't get me wrong, WOT Blitz has its own problems too, but in that game there's no "drive down a corridor, hump a rock and then spam gold at someone's otherwise impenetrable turret over and over again" meta. The vehicles are much better balanced, the maps are much better designed, and gold ammo is actually balanced. I’ll rant about that another time though.

Like I said, WT has its own problems. I think CAS is actually just straight up worse than arty in WOT, and some of the game balance decisions Gaijin makes are every bit as bad as the ones Wargaming makes for PC WOT [like balancing German vehicles around braindead wehrbs], but WT still has a sense of growth, momentum, and actual genuine interest and excitement for new stuff. I'm excited to see new tanks in WT, to figure out lineups to make, or to see them try and fill in gaps for the minor nations. I just spent $60 on a new Chinese premium tank in WT because I was excited for it. A few years ago I would have been equally excited for the idea of getting the WZ-113-II or the WZ-114, but I’m just not, because I know I’d only have about 3-5 games with them before I get bored of them, driving them around in the corridor gold spam meta. This isn’t just me griping, over the past few years [and especially the last month] WT’s player population has been GROWING and WOT’s have been slowly declining.

Is anyone else feeling the same way? Or am I just jaded and miserable? I don’t even know what WG can do to fix this anymore, I would have loved a rebalance to gold ammo… ya know… a god damn decade ago, but I feel like the moment for that has come and gone. Maybe WOT on Console has the right idea with introducing modern vehicles in an entirely separate game mode, but I just can’t bring myself to jump into ANOTHER entirely separate tank game ecosystem. To that end, WG making wot console and PC entirely separate entities was maybe not a terribly good idea.