I just saw a replay and was reminded of how bad the default settings are and how much they likely hurt new players.
For example, the defaults are:
- Percent remaining for enemy health indicator, which is the most useless fucking indicator. This is misleading to new players who might be wondering why why they do less damage percent-wise to a TOG II than T67. Considering everything in this game is done based off HP, why not have HP display be default? If I have a 75mm gun that does 110 damage on average, then I know with HP display that a 72hp T67 is one-shottable while a 280hp TOG II isn't. But they're both 20% in percent view, leading new players to potentially make bad decisions.
- Vehicle model isn't on by default. This is beyond stupid, since so much of this game is about playing to your tanks strengths while playing to your opponent's weaknesses, but how can you know your opponent and do basic things like aim for weak spots if you don't even know what type of tank you're going up against?
- Standard fire direction indicators tell you next to nothing compared to the advanced ones.
- View-range and draw distance circles on the map aren't on my default.
- Enabling expanded mini-map features (which does such things as display last-known location of enemies) is off by default.
HP, enemy tank type, view range, weak spots, etc. are integral part of game mechanics, so why hide them from new players by default?