So, World of Tanks, I play it, here's some criticism.

[Ulminati]

The AMX 12t is a very nice spotter, yeah. My only complaint is that it's a little long, so sometimes your barrel will poke out a bush and give you away. The gun elevation/depression is also downright arse.
My favourite spotter - BY FAR - is the tier 5 kwan Chaffee.
It's small, it's speedy, gun will pen arty and mediums in the side. Even most heavies in the rear if you fire APCR.
It'll even 1v1 an AMX12t or AMX1375 on open ground, since the gun is fairly accurate on the move unlike theirs.

The subsequent kwan spotters (and the sister line) are a bit of a let-down. You get slightly better guns. But in return they're a lot wider and don't accelerate nearly as fast. With worse camo rating and same spotting rang eon top. From a scouting perspective, the tier 6 and 7 is a straight downgrade. Tier 8 has a (fun) niche due to its hilarious derp cannon. But for strict scouting, nothing beats the Chaffee. For scouting/fighting hybrids, I'd pick the french due to their autoloaders. I kind of want to go deeper into the german scout tree, but the Aufkl. Panther look slike such a pain to grind through. I'm not sure I'll bother. Even if the Ru looks hilarious.

 

[Norfleet]

I was a couple of missions away from Chi Nu Kai yesterday with 6h on the mission timer. Zoomed in in TD, sniping enemies. Some retard from my team is butthurt I'm in the spot he wanted to be and drives in front of me while I'm firing. Ammorack, teammade dead.

"Your account has been suspended for 24H for killing a teammate"

Sounds like a ripe opening for a troll exploit, drive like this intentionally and get people banned.

 

[Haba]

That's why I have the mod that prevents me from firing at allies. Unless they are blue, hohihi.

 

[Ulminati]

I have that mod. Doesn't work when teammate jumps in front of your shot. Shot fell near the edge of the scatter circle and the mod only triggers if your corsshair is over an ally.

 

[Shadenuat]

Ru is not bad but sadly scouting with X's is a pain in the ass. The IX and X medium tanks are as fast, sometimes even faster than Ru (BatChat has better horsepower to weight ratio) and they will ololo rape your ass the moment they see you. It's less dangerous and frustrating to play against them on AMX 13 90.
LTs somewhat have their place on levels 4 to 6. Then it's just rape for you. The view range differences becomes null. It's not like spotting KVs on Chaffee.

 

[Haba]

9-10 meds just have way too much view range. And even some heavies. Always a joy to be out-spotted in a Bulldog with full camo crew.

But then again, I've long since given up passive scouting in high tier lights. Opportunistic damage dealing all the way. Hell, I get more spotting/assist damage in my VK 45.02B...

Spoiler

WoT, WoT never changes. When I scout with all my talent, light up 12 tanks from the enemy team, several times for minutes... I end up with 1-2k assist damage. Some TD's even intentionally wait for the enemy to stealth so they don't have to share the XP. r00fles!

 

[Ulminati]

Just 22 days intil Armored Warfare, eh?

 

[Haba]

Pretty much.

WG is getting desperate here: https://eu.wargaming.net/shop/wot/?...=home-page&utm_content=premium-shop&item=1273

On EU, all tanks bundled with useless gold and premium time to inflate the price, as usual.

But the catch? They are actually better than normal versions of the tanks.

http://tanks.gg/en/wot/cromwell-b#tab:details.compare:cromwell

I have to admit, I am tempted. No matter how much I hate WG.

 

[Destroid]

Enjoy your p2w game.

 

[Haba]

This is complete p2w, no doubts about it. The tanks are good, they earn a little bit better credits and extra XP and they come with free BiA like the female crews.

Naturally the matches itself are still complete shit. 10 games today, 2 wins. Top 3 in every game, even when most of them were bottom tier.

 

[Ulminati]

WAit, what? The new tanks give free bros in arms?

 

[Ulminati]

Undead Phoenix being the white knight true gentleman that he is bought me the new cromwell. It's pretty good. The extra traverse speed makes it a lot less fustrating to drive at speed. It's just a shame you can't fit a vertical stabilizer. Our first victory was on himmelsdorf, where we cashed in ~2k damage each by shooting tier 7 heavies brawling on the hill. With the extra bonus mission fo rnew tanks, my crew neddted a nice 12564 xp each, putting their second skill at 56%. And yeah, the new tanks come with 100% crews that all have BiA. They're not *quite* as good as the female drivers, since BiA on these guys counts as skill #1 and makes skill #2 slower to attain.

 

[Haba]

It is zero skill like the Sisters in Wardrobe. You can't drop the skill and if you get 56% from 12k exp then that's already telling enough. The crew exp counter mods just bug up with those, thinking that you have 100k exp right off the bat.

 

[Ulminati]

Oooh. Even better than. Pay2win 2 the maxxx.

 

[Haba]

Also, why does a Russian tier 2 prem tank come with a tier 4 gun (64/121mm pen)? When everyone else gets tier 1 guns. Hell, my T-15 has only 42/74mm and sees tier 5...

...this game.

 

[Ulminati]

Russian

All you need to know.
The devs are huge vatniks.

 

[fizzelopeguss]

Not played in 2 years, any changes?

 

[Haba]

Probably gotten worse.

 

[fizzelopeguss]

lol you finally given up? weren't you playing this a retarded amount?

 

[Haba]

Any amount is retarded, when it comes to WoT. I still do play it occasionally, but I have to say that I hate it more and more by every day. Which is more than a shame, since technically it could be a fun game to play (especially if you removed artillery...). But when I have to go through 29 shit games to get one fun carry, there is simply no point. It is just a complete and utter waste of my time. I'd pay good money to only have balanced games with intelligent people, but unfortunately WG's model is to force people to trudge through endless miles of shit.

But hey, only 160 games to unlock a new tier 9 tank! Surely that'll bring the fun back to the game!

 

[Ulminati]

The main problem isn't artillery (although artillery has a ton of issues).
It's that everyone and their horse uses gold ammo once you hit higher tiers. Especially in tier 9-10, if you're not loading gold you're gimping yourself hard. It's the difference between only being able to pen the commanders hatch and being able to pen everything on frontal armor. If they lowered the damage output of APCR/HEAT by ~20% there'd at least be some decisionmaking on whether to leat AP or gold. As it is, you're only firing regular ammo if you're low tier or poor. ~75% of the pens in my hitlog when I'm not rushing out are premium rounds. If WG.net werent' such greedy soviet fucks, they'd remove the extra cost of gold ammo, rebalance it so it had a clear drawback rather than beign a straight upgrade over AP. And then rebalanced the armor/penetration of all tanks to take this into account as there are several tanks that will be unable to do anything without gold atm. (EG: T32 with the same top gun as its tier 7 predecessor facing tier 9s and 10s).

Arty is - literally a crap shoot. It's rarely fun to play. You're waiting 20-40 seconds to load a shot. If you have to move your aiming circle, you're waiting 11 seconds to aim. Even fully aimed at a static target, RNG still fucks you over half the time and you miss for 0 damage. Then once in a blue moon, when the stars align and you get a clean shot at someones side, they get utterly wrecked out of nowhere and bitch about arty, even though you spend most of the match doing everything right and still not scoring any hits.
The obvious solution that WG.net somehow refuses to do is to make arty feel less random. Make it more accurate, aim faster, shoot faster - but also do far less hp/module damage. That way it's not nearly as fustrating for the arty player. And regular players won't have all their shit ruined out of nowhere. The first arty hit should hurt somewhere in-between being shot by a medium tank and being shot by a heavy tank. If people fail to move and receive another 3-4 hits, then it's their own dumb fault.

Oh well. 2 weeks until armored warfare. I'm ready to migrate if Obsidians offering is halfway competent. I'd be willing to switch to warthunder too if I had some codexbros to play with. But it seems all my tankmates love HP bars.

 

[Haba]

Like said, bad players are the main issue. Also most tanks are paper tanks, so gold doesn't matter that much, not to me at least.

Artillery has no reason to exist in a game like this. Take a high alpha tank and aim your shots and you're guaranteed to ruin at least one player's game with minimal effort and no risk to yourself. Won't be fun and will not provide a challenge. Also gets hilarious when you start having better stats: I am constantly being focus-fired by three artillery when I drive my bottom tier jap paper tanks or fast scouts. Enemy loses the game and I get an "enjoyable" game where I either get utterly wrecked or then spend the match hiding in in arty-safe locations where I can't contribute myself.

I'm not convinced that faster firing low damage tanks would be much of an improvement - we already have those in the game. They are more fun to play but still hardly contribute to the overall quality of the gameplay. I'd much rather remove them completely.

Just as an example: with tier 7 S-51 I can deal 2k damage with 1-3 shots. If I am driving a tier 8 STA-1, I'll have to work a lot to even deal my own HP's worth of dmg. If S-51 was firing faster but hitting softer, I'd have to click my mouse more often, but I'd be still completely safe and without the need to relocate more often than once per match. While with STA I'm still exposing myself to return damage every time I peek the hill. Hell, even with RHM I'm forced to think ahead and relocate if I want to deal that 2k dmg.

 

[Shadenuat]

Russian

All you need to know.
The devs are huge vatniks.

Please. The best tech tree is american. Even massively OP, unfair and annoying soviet TDs from ISU line became contested heavily after new german TD WaffenFucken line.
Soviets have a lot of herp derp shit to kill newbies. But so do americans, germans and even british. I think the only Serious Old Boys High Tier stuff soviets have an edge in are medium tanks with unobtanium-made turrets (T-52 and beyond).

But it seems all my tankmates love HP bars.

HP bar is a good design for such a game where you can "play" with armor and gun depression and maneuvers (shitty map design notwithstanding). It's that or Quake with railguns oneshot gg buy next game.
It just has has to be variative. "Empty" and non critical parts when damaged should not make tank lose HP or lose very little hp. Hitting modules and crew should make tank lose more hp. Hitting commander's cupola should just break it and cut your field of view but take almost no HP. Like that.

 

[Haba]

Now this is why I play WoT <3

Spoiler

The intelligent discourse.

Love the fact that I would've lost money with no prem account (no gold shells fired).

Also, 25% win rate today. YAY!

 

[Ulminati]

Also, 25% win rate today. YAY!

And yet you still have 191x the Weekend Special mission. Step 1 is admitting you have a problem bro.

 

[Haba]

Trying to grind to the top of the tree discount. 60k exp to go... I promise this will be the last tank!

 

[DarkUnderlord]

Unlike Haba, I'm actually able to admit that I enjoy WoT.