And the main reasons are exactly how this game hasn’t really improved at all where it matters.
from 2017 to now, the balancing has only become worse, the grind worse and the whole game mechanics more frustrating than ever.
I just can’t enjoy playing top tier due to the mix of poor nation balancing with Russia dominating top tier for longer than the US and Germany did combined and without receiving actual nerfs or measures to keep them from curb stomping.
Uneven capabilities, gimped ammo and armor, poor spawn cost calculus favoring large lineups with meta vehicles and easy to spawn helicopters. Repetitive maps and too much focus on maps that either feel like Call of Duty cramped maps or League of Legends 3 lane maps. On top of a really repetitive map rotation that manages to spam the same maps multiple times in half a dozen matches.
Lower tiers are incredibly stale, surely it is nice and all to seal club newbies, but since Gaijin is focusing on modern vehicles, the WWII tanks are kinda forgotten, specially with the SL earnings being heavily nerfed. There is no much point in playing low tier as a SL printer as it used to be.
The balancing being done by statistics, which Gaijin doesn’t share, isn’t helping either. We have vehicles that are far better than everything in their ranks and equivalent BRs because they are premium, which results in a lot of sub par players having horrible stats with them because they skipped the learning curve they’d have if they started this game at rank I.
On top of BR compression and black-hole zones that make entire lineups nonviable because you are guaranteed to be constantly uptiered and fight not only tanks that completely outclass yours, but can also be spammed in quantity.
And don’t even get me started with the volumetric shells. By far one of the most frustrating things in WT. I thought that it would help with the BS penetrations and make armor viable again. But I was wrong, it made things worse. With pixel shells, hitting weakspots and gaps on armor was fairly easier and for that to happen it actually required whoever shot your tank to hit.
Now with volumetric, you can do everything right. You can shoot the side armor, you can aim at weak spots and you can shoot first. It more often than it should doesn’t matter, because a shell got caught in some poorly designed damage models and got eaten by side skirts, optics, MGs or armor overlaps that shouldn’t be added up. This just made things more RNG prone and frustrating, which completely kills the fun and skill play on this game.
And how Gaijin has become very anti-player. We could get Golden Eagles using Wagers, we could get some GE by starting the tutorials, the grind wasn’t so merciless and getting SL to afford purchasing higher tier vehicles just meant that you could easily play lower tiers to make some SL and then spend it. Which made sure that we could play lower tiers for the SL and high tiers for the end game, but now it isn’t really worth playing low tier due to the god-awful SL gains.
Also, the new forum structure looks awful. I hate it.