It's the time of the year again when delicious baked goods are abundant and the grind for mission rewards in world of tanks is in full swing.
As a long time player with a bland average 49%ish winrate I spent the past few weeks trying to increase my winrate above 50%, with some success: From tiers 7 to 9, playing competitive tanks only (no stock tanks or stinkers), concentrating on the same few tanks instead of playing all over the place and making sure to have at least 2 (if possible 3) skills on my crews, I managed to achieve 55-67% winrates per session.
Until the christmas event and the hunt for small boxes.
A lot of the missions are simply not (easily) achievable by what I would consider "sane gameplay".
Missions like "damage 7 different tanks in a single battle" can theoretically be done at any level, but in high levels people make fewer mistakes while reckless action is immediately punished.
Likewise the light tank mission "do damage to an enemy SPG" isn't easily done in high tiers – few artilleries play in high tiers and if they do it's not easy for a light tank to just slip through and do damage until late in the game, and by then you might have to race fast mediums – and you might still lose to your own pre-aimed artillery.
Doing those missions in high tier is hard, compared to low tiers: Smaller maps, more artillery, severly unblanced tanks.
Do damage to 7 enemy tanks in one battle – pick a Panzer B2 at tier 4 and just roll into the enemy team, shooting at everything. It's how I did that mission. Ofc I died and left my team without the top tier tank but I finished my mission even though the battle was lost.
Same with the light tank mission: Jump into a fast tier 4 light tank, sneak halfways across the map and once you spotted the artillery tracer make a yolo dash and start to spray and pray … a single hit will complete the mission and if you get blown up by the enemy team when you do it it doesn't matter – mission complete.
Those are just two examples but I think the point is clear:
Some of the missions given out by wargaming are directly detrimental to playing for victory.
The two example missions I mentioned above – when I completed those my session winrate dropped to 38%. For those of you who don't know, statistically if a player would sign up for battle and just let his tank sit there afk he would end up with a 43% winrate or so over the course of time. In order to go below that you would have to actively play bad.
So in order to complete my missions it was beneficial to me to actively play bad!
Under those circumstances any meaning to "winrate" goes out the window. Half the team might not even play the objective "win the battle" but try to do some "x crit hits" or something that can only be done if you are either very good or very reckless.
And between the winrate I can achieve if I play for the win (>50-60%) or just play for missions (<40%) winrate just isn't a good indicator for how well a player can play.
