Introduction
Call of the Dragon is a missed opportunity. The theme is great. I love seeing an event themed around Chinese Lunar New Year. The decals are great, the decoration is fantastic, and the event loading screen is easily the best loading screen in the game by a country mile. Plus, it doesn’t have the predatory gambling boxes which was one of my biggest complaints about these types of events in my 2023 in review thread, so that is great.
Those are all secondary prizes and changes though. The main prize is what makes Call of the Dragon a missed opportunity, not only because of the prize itself, but also because of the conditions for obtaining it.
The problem(s) with the Object 292
The Object 292 has 2 issues with it, one of which is specific to this event.
The issue specific to this event is that it is not Chinese. This is an event themed around Chinese Lunar New Year. Everything from the decals to the decoration to the loading screen to the name of the event itself is themed around China. So what nation is the tank for? The USSR…
It feels like such a missed opportunity because China has such cool event vehicles. There’s the Jaguar MBT prototype, the ZTZ99I which is a ZTZ99 with MANPADS on it, and if they want a vehicle that fits the description of, “Turret with a gun way bigger than what is supposed to be there,” there’s the BW120K which is a ZTZ59-2A with a 120 mm gun on it.
All of these are event vehicles that could be given to China, a nation severely lacking event vehicles that since its introduction 4 years ago, has only gotten 3 of them.
The second issue is the Object 292 itself. The only 152 mm gun-armed MBTs we could have gotten for the USSR were the Object 195 and Object 292. The Object 195 fires the Vacuum 1 shell—a shell far too powerful for the current game. Therefore, until we are at the stage where we are only 1 tank away from the T-14 Armata, there will be no 152 mm gun-armed MBT in the tree and even then, there will be no option for a 152 mm gun-armed MBT below BR 12.3-ish. That makes the Object 292 a missed opportunity to give the tree something truly unique and interesting. It could have been the next Object 775 in terms of uniqueness. Do I hate the Object 292 as an event prize? No. It’s unique and interesting, but it should have been in the tree.
The problem with obtaining the Object 292
The issue is twofold. The first is the actual score requirement. 45K every two days is too much for most people. I can manage 45K, I’ll be fine, but this isn’t about me. I dislike exclusivity, everyone should be able to get event prizes within a reasonable amount of time. 45K is too much for the majority of people. It’s not awful, the crafting events were much worse, but it is too much for most people. I believe that 30K should be the most for an event, 35K if they really want to push it.
The second issue is that you need a full 750K score to get the coupon upgrade for the Object 292. That is insane. It’s clear they want to increase market prices, but a full 85% increase from the 405K score you need to get the Object 292 is crazy. For anyone who previously used these events to be able to make money rather easily to be able to buy things like premium account time when it is 50% off, that is no longer realistic by any measure.
How to fix the next event
The first thing is that the score required has to be reduced. 30-35K at most for the stages and no more than the amount of score required to complete all of the standard stages for the coupon upgrade. It would be even better if they cut the coupon upgrade mechanic altogether and just made coupons themselves tradable again without a coupon upgrade.
The second thing is that the event vehicle needs to fit with the theming. This is something I am quite confident they will be doing going forward, at least for the most part, but it is an issue with Call of the Dragon.
Bigger than any of these though is that we need longer breaks. In the game’s new event cycle the standard breaks are 2-3 days. That is not enough. We already need 2-3 week breaks between Battle Pass seasons. Adding this on top of it is not okay. We need 2-3 breaks between BP seasons and 2-3 week breaks between events. They have said that they have a nearly month-long break planned over the summer. That’s fantastic (assuming there isn’t something else shoved in there), but we need more breaks closer to that length. 2-3 days is simply not enough and it will quickly create burnout for a lot of players, especially collectors like myself.
Conclusion
It’s sad. Call of the Dragon was an opportunity that so easily could have been seized and made its full potential. But instead, we got this. I feel loath to make another criticism post considering that my post on improving the BP was partially criticism, my post on the problem with new independent trees was entirely criticism, and my year in review post criticized the game at great length, because I really love this game. I’ve even found some of its events to be quite fun. But what has come with Call of the Dragon is not okay. The Object 292 being a not-so-great choice I can tolerate, but the requirements for it alongside the lack of breaks just accelerate the game’s burnout loop even further. This was a chance to do something great, but it was, for the most part, squandered.