Gaijins way of balancing stuff is - lazy and archaic

Game Discussion General Discussion
67

The algorithm they use is inherently flawed because for whatever data they put in, it never considers the actual stats of the vehicles it’s balancing. This is what leads to those hilarious situations where identical vehicles are at wildly different BRs in different nations. Who else remembers the German M48 being 7.0 while the American one was 7.3. And then they wanted to move it down to 6.7. I remember.

If I had to guess, they do absolutely no stat normalization on whatever statistics they’re using. The most basic version is just to compare the winrate of a player to their winrate in a given vehicle. If you see a vehicle with a 40% winrate, that’s an issue. But, if you then look at the stats and notice it’s primarily being played by players with a 40% winrate, then it’s clear there’s no actual imbalance there. Same on the flipside, 60% winrate players achieving a 60% winrate in a vehicle indicates near perfect balance.

Additionally, Gaijin needs to do more to help teach players how to play the game. The current level of tutorialization in game is laughable. No wonder many new players struggle with how to use energy fighters, when the game never teachs them what they are, how they work, which are which and how to play them. When a new player unlocks a new vehicle, outside of googling for guides, how are they supposed to know what to do with them? The stats window is needless complex, offers severals stats not useful to anyone, doesn’t make any useful comparisons to other vehicles you’ll be fighting, and doesn’t even tell you what basic playstyle to use.

This way, we might see an actual solution to the longstanding problem of minor nations with overall better player ending up with hilariously overtiered vehicles, and major nations having the opposite problem.

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68

in all fairness, Russia pumps out a lot of tanks and tank designs. US is the same but with planes.

69

All good - except you don’t actually know whether Gaijin is doing that or not… because no-one except them knows didly-squat about what they use and what they don’t.

70

I’m just interpretting it off what I can see happening. The only explanation for them attempting to put identical vehicles at wildly different BRs is them looking at stats with little to no objectivity. “Vehicle X fell below (arbitrary stat limit), therefore we need to lower it’s BR” and vice versa. Without taking any of the important context into the equation. I can’t fathom how they’d come to the conclusion that identical vehicles need different BRs otherwise.

Speaking of the M48 situation, I do remember one part of that where Gaijin came out and said (Well, told Oxy) that the German M48 was performing 4x worse than the American and Chinese M48s, despite being very slightly better than them. Indicating that yes, they do just look at vehicle performance alone and are quite happy to ignore all context and allow a BR gap just based on the stats alone.

I wonder if on some level if this is intentional? Like, it’s a fairly obvious at this point that the average new player will likely gravitate to one of the three major nations, which in turn lowers their relative player skill compared to minor nations. Is this their way to help raise major nation win rates? Again, I’d point to the woeful tutorials and lack of player direction as the main culprits for why newer players suffer so, but this is certainly easier.

72

M24 should definitely be 4.0 at least, I’d probably wait to see how it fares at 4.0 before pushing it to 4.3, but I think it’d also be okay at 4.3 as well.

AMX 13 F11 should definitely not be above the M24, Same gun and shell, but no stab, not much faster, less gun depression, no reverse speed. no .50 cal for planes/light vehicles. its definitely less effective at the same job as the M24, I don’t really see any reason why it shouldn’t be 3.7, or if above that, it should be at least 0.3 lower than the M24.

73

Glad you adopted my take on M24.

74

I didnt read your take on the M24, I’ve thought it could be higher for years.

The reason being that these are my stats with it:

shot 2024.02.05 20.28.05
shot 2024.02.05 20.28.051864×101 37.8 KB

With about 80% of those games were using it first spawn in a 4.7/5.0 lineup.

75

Because for some reason France and other small nations have a majority of good players using their vehicles which leads to stupid situations like the M24/AMX FL11 and TPK/BTR-ZD

76

I main japan, trust me, I share the pain and suffering.

1 Like
77

haha, propietary information? Are you saying that my own gameplay data is somehow a trade secret that should never fall into the hands of the competition? That’s nonsense. Countless games reveal their winrate data to the community. Transparency has never resulted in a negative impact, unless you want to be lazy with game balance devolp. You should see how popular https://www.op.gg/ is

78

AMX-13 FL11 is correctly BR’d, but M24 is indeed under-BR’d.
And TPK & BTR-ZD are obviously correctly BR’d. TPK having far more ammo which matters more against aircraft.

79

It is what in some motorsports series you would call balance of performance.

See it from their POV: the ideal situation for Gaijin is two teams go into a match with 50% odds of coming out on top. The logical conclusion follows organically from that premise.

80

I feel you. The top tier is decent though, but we all suffer the minor nation treatment.
For some reason Sweden gets all the love and intersting vehicles.

81

Again, very interesting point of view except it’s based on your own experience which seems pretty limited…
EVERYONE uses the BTR as a tank destroyer just like half of all anti-air that perform simply better against tanks. TPK can’t do that. BTR can tank some of the rounds an aircraft will throw at it, TPK can’t do that. I could go on but i’m tired.
And even if you’ve played only againt aircrafts, the front of the TPK is a huge problem as competent pilots always fly low.

82

Yes this matchmaking is horrible. And how they balance vehicals is wrong. They should just go by eras and stop making stuff not work likes its suppose to by nerfing to create balance or put planes at a way higher Br than it should really be. Also they need to stop putting all the players who die easiest on one team. I cant say its balanced at all.

83

Who else remembers the German M48 being 7.0 while the American one was 7.3.

This had everything to do with historical MM that resulted in UK + US stomping the shit out of Germany that fought 7.7 games with a Leopard 1, M48s and Tiger lls against full 7.7/7.3 enemies, whilst the UK lineup at 6.7/6.3 are the same vehicles that are now 7.7, as they were armored, lolpenning and stabilized vehicles dunking on everything.

The Caernarvon was the most played vehicle in the game.

The German M48 fought vastly stronger enemies than the American ones did, which mostly fought Tiger lls, something that was even explained by Gaijin.

84

its been an entire year and lookie here its still like this

1 Like
85

I never completely bought this line of reasoning. To start, why was it exclusively the M48 that suffered this problem? The premium German M47 remained at the same BR as it’s American counterpart all throughout this time, even being broadly similar to the M48 in overall attributes.

Additionally, it’s not like this lineup was particularly weak, between the Leopard 1, M48, BMP-1 and eventually the Marder 1. They also had arguably the best SPAA at this tier until the M35/55 was introduced, as well as arguably the second best CAS. Yeah, the British were stronger, but the Germans had what was widely considered to be one of the best 7.3 lineups in the game during this period.

We also never saw the inverse, American vehicles being dragged up well beyond where they should be on the backs of the supreme British lineup of doom. The American 6.7-7.7 lineups have been remarkably stable, with only the T92 being moved up (and somewhat recently, as I recall). Outside the big global decompression that happened a while back, that is., which from memory only hit the American M48 and M60. Not really a comparable shift to trying to put a tank 2 BR notches under it’s identical clone.

I have a theory that Gaijin only said that because the average German player was just straight up doing worse compared to the American one, and there was no way they could announce this without leading to a bunch of toxicity around “X main bad”. So they had to try and come up with an explanation that would satisfy. But there are other possible explanations.

One point Oxy brought up is the fact that it was relatively new, and therefore mostly being stock ground (with the infamously bad APCR stock grind). This would have tanked it’s stats even with all else being equal.

The other obvious explanation is a lack of player training. German players coming to the M48 would be mostly used to tanks like the Tiger, Panther and Tiger II, and would be relying on a punchy, damaging gun with solid armor to back it up. That’s how the game has effectively conditioned them to play.

Meanwhile, the analogues in the American tree would be the M26 and M46 (and possibly the M47 is players decide to grind it), tanks that play very similiarly to the M48. They even share practically the same gun. Even earlier tanks like the Shermans emphasize the hybrid brawling/flanking “jack of all trades” gameplay the M48 requires.

Simply put, the average American player will be much better prepared to use the M48 than the average German player, who’s experiencing an entirely different playstyle than they’ve been trained to use. Something that could be solved by better tutorialization. Or encouraging players to try multiple different lines, rather than “maining” one.

86

First, an unbalanced game brings more money.
Second, gaijin knows that the balance is garbage but they need this to gap players, so players wont gather together to protest.
Third, few gaijin players play the game so they have no idea about the performance of each vehicles.
Forth, what can you expect from a Russian company?

87

let’s see… XP-50’s airspawn removed (good), KV-1E to 4.3 (good) and KV-1S to 4.3 for no reason.(¿?)
Oh yeah also remember the T77 was added to fill the 2.7 - 4.0 US Spaa gap? and now it’s 4.0
that’s all the examples I know since I play around those BRs