I get the intention behind what WG did with the separate pool for newbies and adding AI bots for them to fight, indeed, I think it was badly needed to help with player retention because low tier was indeed a mess for new players, either unable to get a match because of lack of players or getting put against guys like me to smack them around.
But that does leave the issue, how exactly are the rest of us supposed to get any battles in our tier V and below tanks? Not just rolling the lowtier clubber machines like the Pzkpfw B2, what if a player decides to start a new line later on and doesn't want to use all the free XP to skip the first 4 tiers? If we're no longer allowed to fight newbies and we don't get any bots to fill the roster, what then?
This is definitely a problem. Just to test it out I tried to get into a match in my Pz B2 after the update, middle of the day on US server peak hours, about 5,000 players on which is at the high end on our server, and I got booted out of queue after 5 minutes.
You guys are gonna have to start rolling out the bots at low tiers for everyone, not just the newbies, on servers with populations that can't sustain low tier battles themselves among the more experienced players.