Observations of a 10 year player – Decline of a legend

Lets start out with the basic fact that I like WoT which is obvious by my 10 years of play. I love the quality of the maps and tanks models the fun of play, moving up the latter to higher verticals and playing with friends. Love seeing tanks I read about as a kid in realistic looking battles (though reality has little to do with WoT these days, use to be much better in the early days) All that is obvious to every one so I will not dwell on what is good but instead point out what I feel is demising if not destroying the game.

Pay to win: Now lets first acknowledge that WoT is a business and is out to make money which is great it allows their free to play model which allowed myself and many others to get into the game. The problem is the money making part of the game has wrapped into a beast that is alienating players. This pay for play can be broken down into two categories.

1) Gold rounds, I really get the need for them to have gold rounds for tournament play or level 10 play it has been that way for a long time but I am now seeing it more common in Tier 8 play which use to be the upper end heaven for regular players who love good competition but use regular ammo. This area allowed average players to develop skill that would move them up into the pay to play levels. This is disappearing and with it newer players. Perhaps an option to allow gold less rounds on certain levels of play or special times to allow this option. I know this is a hard sell as it is a cash generator but it hurts new players coming into the game so much that some action is needed.

2) Premium vehicles, This is the real problem area. A Premium vehicle use to be an average to good performer, never best in tier but a solid performer that would allow users to generate more experience and cash and it worked really well. Now they have turned into pay to win vehicles that are so over powered as to make the game far less fun to play. Now, I buy some Premium vehicles to earn more cash in a battle but I buy what I like not for power. when you have tier 8 medium tanks with stronger guns that some tier 8 TDs something is very wrong. This more then anything is ruining the game for a lot of people and caused me to take several multi month sabbaticals. This needs to be fixed premiums should be good tanks that have weaknesses like everyone else, not a god tank that dominates.

Power creep: This is a problem tied into the pay to play. A WoT keeps increasing the power of new Premium vehicles to draw new sales. Tanks that have been crowed pleasers and historical favorites become unplayable after long grinds to get them. I am happy to say I am starting to see them address this. The recent buff of the Tiger family was great and made these tanks, that actually were in war, competitive again. We need more of this, much more.

Russia Bias: This has been the longest running issue with the game. The constant Russian bias, they have to make them the best tanks almost all the time. When they accidentally come out with a great tank like the German Scorpion which was really nice to see, they have to come out with a Russian equivalent that is better, ie US-130. It is just ridiculous, they often use soft states that translate into real advantages in the game to help there tanks. After 10 years I am tires of watching shots defect off armor that is thinner and at worse angles then tanks of other nations who I penetrate regularly. Or, seeing a tank so flat that its gun depression should be 2 percent but in the game it is 8 percent, ridiculous. Early in the game they had a sand box for practice which they did away with because users were testing and spotting this in the Russian tanks. When a company makes a KV-2 a real tank killer there is something wrong and yes I know it is a game but it just gets tiresome. Russian tanks get the advantage of smaller size but none of the accompanying negatives like having a much high rate of critical hits, crew death due to the cramped interior or far poorer spotting due to the low silhouette and poor optics. it is their weakness but they ignore it. At the start the Russians had bigger guns but worse load times and poorer accuracy. A few years in they made a change in how dispersion is calculated which over night mitigated much of the Russian poor accuracy penalty. Time to let it go WoT, players would be far more happy with a balance across all nations.

Those to me are the big issues, are there other issues ya but they can be lived with and effect everyone equal. The above alienate groups of people which will lead to the diminish of a game growth. Just hope the owners of WoT are smart enough to see this before the decline becomes irreversible.