IS-3 doesn't belong at BR 7.3

Russian players instantly complaining when their heavy gets moved to 7.3, t32 has been suffering at 7.3 for a while so cope

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The T32 doesn’t suffer at 7.3…

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Gotta disagree. The IS-3 is a monster and my favorite tank in the game and really ought to be moved up considering the recent BR changes. Same, though, with many currently 6.7 heavy vehicles that dodged the BR changes, including the Tiger II H, Jagdtiger, Obj 268, and T34.

Your average K/D of 1.0 or less per vehicle makes me doubt you have much clue how to use them o_O

My usual K/D with a good vehicle is 2.0. If it’s less, the vehicle is either not that great or I just suck using it. My IS-3 K/D is around 2.0 so it was perfectly fine at 7.0.

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KD doesn’t mean shit
I play more for the team than for kills ;)

I actually push objectives instead of camping sniping spots like some people might suggest.

Not very glamorous and doesn’t get me the most kills, but brawling it out is far more fun and helps the team more than just another sniping coward.

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And how does that make the IS-3 better than any other tanks you play?

Also you should try to help your team by killing more enemies.

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It actually does, at least for me

You should’ve seen his questionable takes in another thread, he seems prone to writing nonsense.

I’m amazed how people still can’t (or don’t want to) understand kills are what turns the mill in this game. That being said, if you are unable to make kills you will go nowhere, since everything starts with a kill.

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I’m fine with these moving up by 0.3 if several of the 8.0s also move up. Yes, a M4A3E2 shouldn’t face a Tiger II Sla, and in turn the Tiger II Sla should not face a VIDAR (again…). That would literally undo the decompression of late WW2 BRs that took place a while back, which was precisely by 0.3.

Which, I suppose, leads us right back to the usual argument that Motorola was so eloquently explaining a few posts earlier, which is that we don’t have enough BRs for all these tanks and we need decompression by lifting the BR ceiling. Otherwise, it’s only localised decompression, as compression spots get moved up and down all the time.

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I don’t know why they are still doing BR changes (at least for ground) every couple of months or so. The best they can do in the current system is to move “frustration spots” up or down, just to offer some relief to the previous “hotspot(s)” and to screw another BR range that might’ve been decently balanced before.

Every tier is bound to get their fair share of unbalance and compression, no one is safe.

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My guess is that the two processes are kept separate. They have some kind of content plan that includes the release of Rank VIII eventually, and the max BR ceiling is probably tied to this and other considerations. While the algorithm that sorts out the BR changes for them does so within the parameters and scope of the existing BR margins (0 to 11.7).

In a situation like this, a constant up and down yo yo effect for vehicles that cannot be effectively balanced at the current level of compression is exactly what you’d expect to see. Tank does good, algorithm moves it up. Tank does bad, it moves back down.

This is where Gaijin intervenes with soft balancing mechanisms to try and make the yoyo more stable. Sure this vehicle goes up, but we’ll give it faster reload, so it doesn’t do too bad this time and it doesn’t need to go down again in three months, something like that.

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I sure hope this is true, it’s the only logical explanation that isn’t “they have no clue what they’re doing”.

I’m against balancing of vehicles using stats like reload speed. You know something’s wrong in the BR system when you have to reach for such a decision.

I would like them to add new top vehicles at something like 12.7 and 13.0 for example, leaving 12.3 empty for our current 11.7s. This would empty up two BR brackets for stuff below top tier to move into, which is surely a huge step in the right direction.

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I mean, this would also be pretty bad. It’s exactly the classic type of compartmentalised “left hand not talking to the right hand” thing I’ve seen in plenty of IT professional situations.

Me too. Well, I suppose in some cases it is inevitable. The Sturmtiger is the obvious example but other vehicles also need special rule bending. Tanks without turret baskets should keep the turret still and pointed forward to reload, which would be a massive penalty in game. Others needed to depress the gun in order to load, etc.

I consider the handwaving of this stuff to be akin to repairing barrels from inside the tank, or using max turret rotation speed even when we’re going full beans. It’s a degree of arcadeification that helps gameplay, and since WT isn’t meant to be a simulator, gameplay always comes first, in my opinion.

But for the average tank, the situation is different. As an absolute last resort I’m also fine with slightly adjusting RoF up or down provided that it stays more or less anchored to IRL performances. Especially in tanks with no autoloader, you would expect different crews to load at non uniform rates anyway.

However, using RoF and access to ammo types as a widespread soft balancing tool is an implicit admission that the BR system isn’t working, as you said. The concept of it is fine. The implementation is not.

I think the chain of ad hoc decisions that leads you here is quite apparent. Adding content all the time allows MMOs to stay alive and keep people engaged. Adding more and more vehicles begins to overburden the original structure of game modes, mission types and maps, introducing more and more balance issues. The ballooning number of vehicles also risks diluting the player queue, and thus queue times.

Given this set of parameters, it’s “obvious” that your “best” move is to keep adding more and more stuff, while keeping the BR ceiling as low as possible, while using other non-BR means to mildly ameliorate the balance problems that the game expansion is causing.

I think WT should have never moved past Korean War era. Like Baum was saying in another thread, there’s basically an endless list of reasons why. I have to concede that I don’t know if this would have been good for business, but in terms of product quality, yes.

Now we are in a situation where legacy systems, unwanted side effects, and emergent properties of the game expansion have created this odd machine that broadly works as intended, is quite successful, but has issues that are hard to tackle without a shutdown. I don’t think it will ever be realistically solved.

I mean, look at us. Here we are, talking about raising the BR ceiling and total decompression, but a few weeks from now I’ll be rolling into battle with an M109 slapped in the same lineup as my Tiger E, three Panthers, and Ostwind II, against an enemy team that fields M-51s and Pragas alongside KV-220s and IS-1s… While also having M109s.

This isn’t to support historical matchmaking or anything, I don’t want that. Just to say that the side effects of that rapid expansion are irremovably embedded into the game now.

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Yeah, stuff like that should say as they are, but RoF is just a number not tied to anything else in particular. Surely, like you mentioned, some vehicles need a helping hand to make them viable, but for most vehicles BR adjustments should be more than enough to balance them out.

Concept is more than fine, we only need a handful of changes to make it great across the board.

It’s quite easy to forget some basic things when you preoccupy yourself with adding more and more content.
I would like to see something like a “rework” update(s) that happen x times per year, and as it’s name suggests, those updates would focus on rework of old and outdates systems, maps, etc.

I suppose those updates wouldn’t bring them money directly, but in the long run people would surely be much happier, thus could spend more cash on the game.

I think queue fines are more than alright at the moment, and also in my opinion they would be perfectly fine, from a player’s perspective, even if our current top tier is at 12.3 or something like that.
They keep adding a bunch of vehicles at various BRs and for various countries, so I think dilution shouldn’t be much of an issue.

True, but they have to acknowledge when it’s time for a hard decompression, since some issues can’t be resolved without it.

It’s hard to say what would happen if they decided to do that. I mean, they/we would miss out on so many interesting modern vehicles, which would be a shame if you ask me.
But, on the other hand, if they decided to add modern stuff, they should’ve adapted other aspects of gameplay to those vehicles as well. It was foolish to expect games with modern tech will work flawlessly on cramped, WW2 maps.

That’s like seeing professional basketballers play on a children’s court, with hoops at 2m of height or something like that lol. I doubt anyone would enjoy that much.

In the perfect world I think they should add indirect fire to SPHs and move them much higher. Increasing the maps in size should also go hand in hand with that.

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Agreed. Maybe once the race to the modern stuff is over there will be more resources for this, I don’t know. Of course different teams tackle different things, but that doesn’t negate the fact that there’ll be some spare capacity after we get to KF51/T14/Abrams X.

Yes, absolutely. I was just “talking from the hypothetical Gaijin POV” of wanting to add as many vehicles as possible, while lifting the BR ceiling as little as possible.

Fundamentally, WT has a coherence problem. It is no longer unified. It looks like an emergent property of a game, because it basically is. That chaos can have its own fascination, but I think they could have arranged this more elegantly; with a separate game like Enlisted, or maybe less radically, just with a separate game mode and different maps/missions.

This brings up an excellent point that another person raised in a recent thread: we have this WT paradox where we get more and more new features and tools in combat, but can’t effectively use them because the maps (and mission types) don’t change, or if anything grow even more restrictive.

Having artillery in the game that you can’t use as artillery is the perfect example of that.

Also, if they did as you say, we could have a proper niche for plenty of WW2 self-propelled arty and rocket arty as well, which would just be fantastic.

I hope they will, mate.

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I guess that race is totally dependent on declassification of documents that hold information about vehicle performances. Information about loads of modern stuff still isn’t available to the public, so they could very well use that time to work on, as you perfectly described it, legacy systems that really need an extensive look into.
Problem is, they could ignore this and just add a bunch of older vehicles instead, which leads nowhere.

At this point I think they’re using “muh queue times” as a scapegoat for something, but I don’t know what.
It’s not like we demand 20.0 BR, only a couple of additional BR brackets would be so helpful to the balance and would pose a minimal risk to their holy grail that’s queue time.

I think they’ve punched above their weight and now that’s taking it’s toll.
We have so many different vehicle types with different playstyles that aren’t being catered to. As we mentioned before, indirect fire for SPHs isn’t present, amphibious vehicles can’t use their swimming properties on most of the maps and now they are even shrinking the maps, which further limits the vehicles that are specifically made for long range engagements.
So many things got overlooked, it’s quite sad to see.

We would need total overhaul of the gameplay in order to fit in artillery, but as I said, I think they aren’t capable of doing that at the moment, just for the sake of like what, a dozen vehicles currently in the game.
They would rather let them directly shoot at tanks than doing so many changes, which leads me to believe they got well over their heads in this one and there’s no escape lol.

Perfect implementation of that idea would be nuts, but sadly, Gaijin isn’t a big enough company to pull that off.

Only thing we can do while we read endless “vehicle X curb stomps in downtiers”, “vehicle Y is unusable in uptiers” threads.

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I don’t think so. Some stuff we have in game at present would already require security clearances I very much doubt they have, and we also have some vehicles that are pure fantasy, like the 2S38 - yes, a prototype exists, it’s named the same way, but even if Gaijin truly had access to accurate performance data about this prototype, I doubt it would be allowed to put them in a videogame.

And you only need to look at how the T-series is performing IRL, compared to the game, to see how big the discrepancy gets even with extremely well known platforms.

So, I very much doubt having to make up stats will stop them.

Sure, but I doubt they have the same marketing appeal. We think about this from the perspective of the established players, but go look at their socials, or the promotional content they do with some YouTubers, a lot of it is geared around the cutting edge stuff. I don’t think missing WW2 designs - which would make people like me super happy - have the same marketing potential.

Or they’re genuinely unwilling to risk it. It would fit with their extremely conservative approach to many game features, like the mission types.

This is basically gospel. Nothing to add.

God…

I don’t know whether to feel amused or depressed. 😁

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Yet its fine that the Jumbo 75mm has to now fight Tiger II H’s which it cannot kill frontally and struggles to even kill on the side armor???

At least the IS-3 has a long reload, the Jumbo doesn’t even have that going for it vs a Tiger II H. Hell the stock ammo cant even reliably penetrate a Tiger 2 side armor at ANY range. Yet this is fine and somehow the Tiger E seeing the IS-3 is not?

This video actually shows quite well how the IS-3 is to use. It’s strong, yes. But it is extremely easily disabled.