4Game

So I am now writing this as feedback as well as my script which I am going to use when I do my video about this topic.

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I already said my first impression over here and a lot of you where having the same opinion as I did judging from the upvotes. Now I want to look at why we have this huge gold spamming problem on live server and propose a "easy" / cheap fix. I am also planning on a bigger write up for a complete Ammunition rebalance which I would favour then what I am writing here. The Idea I propose here is just to do somewhat a "hotfix" until something better is found. Nevertheless lets have a look at the problem we have and what caused it.

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That moment when the new employee tinkered with a running system.

I want to explain how I feel about world of tanks right now. WoT used to be a working pen. Everything was fine. It wrote perfectly fine and was reliable. One day however the ink run dry and the new employee they just got into the company noticed it. He swiftly gets a new ink cartridge, screws the pen apart and exchanges the cartridges. After putting the pen back together he notices that the pentip simply doesn't want to come out anymore. He opens and closes the pen over and over, gets a new cartridge and exchanges again and again. This is what in my eyes Wargaming is doing right now. They sadly don't see that the clumsy new employee dropped the spring on the floor and it rolled under the desk. Without the spring, the pen will never work and sooner or later it will be tossed.

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I again do not want to make fun of WG or any of their employees, I just want to show you on an example how I feel, because that spring we miss for our wonderful pen to work is weakspots on tanks and to some extend corridor maps.

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I am going to focus here on Hightiers and same tiered games to not overload my post but I am pretty sure you all know what I am talking about when I talk about lack of weakspots. On T8 we got Defender, VK100.01P, on T9 tanks like Mäuschen, Type 4 Heavy to some extend and even post buff Tortoise and on T10… oh boy… T10 is an absolute clusterfrick. S Conqueror, Type 5 Heavy, 430U, 268V4 to just name a few and the most prominent ones. Those tank combined with the meta of brawling and face to face corridor combat engaged the gold spamming philosophy.

I won't be able to pen him frontally anyway so I have to load gold because there is no weakspot nor a option to flank.

Its really funny how precisely some tanks are engineered to that you are not able to pen them with standard rounds but you are able to penetrate them with a 50% chance if you shoot premium rounds. Here I am talking about tanks like Super Conqu or Type 5 Heavy. This is 100% not good game design in my eyes. Just because someone has a bigger wallet should not mean he has better chances on winning. This should be a fair game for everybody and right now, this is not the case.

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An example for a well balanced super heavy tank:

I might bring now the most unpopular opinion on the table but I consider the Mauerbrecher the best example for a great balanced armor model for the most part. I still think the MG weakspot is too much to handle and the turret front could need a buff too but that is now beside the point. Lets have a look at the armor model of the Mauerbrecher frontally and ignore the MG Weakspot, okey?

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As you can see, this is the model of the Mauerbrecher. Both lower plate and Cupola are weakly armored and can be penetrated by same and lower tiered opponents.

If we ignore the MG weakspot you can see that the Mauerbrecher has two distinct weakspots. The lowerplate and the Cupola. This means on an open field this tank can get shredded pretty quickly. The same comes true if it is a bad player which doesn't know what he does. So far all good. But if you are a skill full player and know what you do with cover, you are able to hide your lower plate as well as your cupola to get a pretty tanky tank which can bounce a lot of shots. THIS is in my opinion GOOD GAME DESIGN. It rewards map knowledge, because you know where to go to hide your weakspots and skill to know how to position yourself in general to hide the cupola. In an ideal world you can hold like this a flank and the enemy has to either push you, get punished by you, or search for another position to go and win the game.

If you decided to wiggle around and move a lot, it can get harder for your opponent to hit an exposed cupola and can lead to you being a very bouncy boy. But sadly this is often not the case. Not only is your turret face rather weak at 230mm thickness, meaning T10 opponents can pen you without a problem, but even same tiered opponents can pen your cheeks with standard rounds and easily with premium rounds.

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Not getting punished for shooting premium rounds

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This is now one of the bigger problems and I am glad to see that WG realized it themselves and even wrote it in their post:

Currently, a significant portion of players choose ammo type solely on its armor penetration. For them, this single parameter is what makes the difference between a basic and a special round.

Because we have tanks in the game with no weakspots you can reliable penetrate with standard rounds you just get the premium shell and spam it away. Shooting it left and right and the only downside is its much bigger cost. A lot of player just got used to:" Oh there is a Type 5 Heavy, gotta load gold to pen him" mentality. Which again defeats the purpose of skillfull play. Now I want to propose one of two ideas I thought up with inspiration of other peoples input. The one I propose here is a quick and dirty fix and should be regarded as a hotfix.

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The higher the pen gap, the higher the Damage gap.

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For the dirty and easy fix I want to propose a damage reduction on premium rounds equivalent to the pen gain they get. So for example if we look at the (HEA)T-54 we know that the prefered topgun has 201mm AP pen and 330 HEAT Pen. So now if we calculate 330/201 we get 64% increase in penetration. So now we change the Alpha with 320*64% = to 115.2 DMG. This could really encourage players to go for flanks and use standard rounds as their primary ammunition to not loose 64% DPM. Is this a heavy price to pay? Yes, but in the end this is what you get for a very strong premium round. Changing standard could also lead to a worse lose in damage of premium rounds.

Another example could be Chieftain( Taking example because it gets spammed in ranked :P) It has standard 270mm pen and with gold 322. So again 322/270 = 19% increase in pen and this would result in a new damage of 440*19% = 356.4

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Those are just two examples I wanted to show and I 100% know this is not the best solution out there, but it could be a decent hotfix for now.

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In conclusion:

Please keep lowtiers up to t4, they feel great on sandbox, but everything above that is super underwhelming and frustrating with the additional damage and HP. Is this solution I proposed perfect? Hell no and it is not intended to be. I am still just a random player and YouTuber which likes WoT, I am not a employee of WG. I still think as already said this is not the optimal solution. My optimal solution I will propose later this week. I want to propose a complete ammo rework as others also suggested where the player has to think what ammo type suits his enemy right now. All the ammo types coming with strengths and weaknesses. Even WG themselves said also that most people ignore other stats like overmatch and autobounce angles:

The other stats (like normalization, penetration of environmental objects, auto-bounce angle, and velocity) are often ignored.

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Nevertheless, just changing premium rounds will NOT help out and solve the problem we discussed earlier. WE NEED WEAKSPOTS ON ALL TANKS WARGAMING! So please look at tanks like 430U which have a foot thick cupola or type 5 heavy and give them REAL WEAKSPOTS. New players and old players will thank you for that.

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Thank you all so much for your attention. I am going to post this also in the Sandboxserver Feedback forum and I will gladly hear your opinions on that "fix". I can't stress enough that I see this as a hotfix and not a real overhaul! So please be patient for my real rework!

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Kind Regards

RagingRaptor

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Edit: Had to change some formatting. Also I am going to make a Video about this and try to talk about it. I personally can express myself better with speech and props then with text. I am going to add it when I am finished with it