Player skill matchmaking and game balance are not correlated or related.
BR is literally only used for matchmaking. Sorry, I would have written all my posts differently if I knew that you were unaware of what BR was
Yeah because they’re not american pilots. Very nice logic you got there, definitely doesn’t make you look stupid.
If one team has better pilots, then that’s an advantage that you ignored earlier. So no, it’s NOT “literally worse in every way” because it has better pilots. So it is actually balanced just fine after accounting for this.
Exactly like ELO in chess balances for PLAYER SKILL and is then used for matchmaking, just like BR.
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Matches must be 50% win rate to be fun
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Player skill affects win rate
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Player skill MUST be accounted for in matchmaking.
[Obviously not an advertisement, sorry]
Or it would be played less. Not sure how that would impact things though.
If anyone is going to stop playing a slightly underpowered vehicle soonest, it’s going to be the most skilled players, who recognize it’s bad because they know the game well enough to accurately evaluate things. Whereas clueless bad players will keep playing whatever looks interesting or is in their tech tree, etc., blindly, without knowing any better.
So its % of bad players playing it would rise, it would as a result of this start to do worse, and go down in BR, balancing out the issue automatically.
The reverse is true for an “overpowered” vehicle: the best players will recognize this right away and flock to it, while clueless ones will not know any better. It’s % of bad players driving it will drop, it will start doing better and then go up in BR, canceling it out and equalizing automatically.
That’s assuming it’s a tech tree vehicle that people CAN flock to or not freely, premiums have weird other issues, especially rich people obscure marketplace ones.
Generally speaking the principle is sound. I still wonder about cases like this one, though.
When I was making my way through the tech tree for the first time, as an inexperienced player who barely knew how to tell bad from good, I read the wiki a lot, and immediately got the impression that the P was “problematic”. I had friends who were very experienced who were telling me it was not even worth spading. I believed in seeing for myself, so I did spade it. Didn’t much enjoy it, but well, I was still a noob. Moved on to 6.7, got the Sla as a birthday gift, and found it much better right away.
A bad player may not know why they keep dying in something and not in something else, but they do switch things around based on impressions…
That was when it was still 6.3. Now it’s 6.7 - actually, I don’t remember and I can’t check, since I’m away from home, has it been foldered in the tech tree with the H?
Anyway, I can definitely see rookie players avoiding this one, because it happened to me when I was a noob myself.
They still died in it those 17 times first before catching on, instead of 0 or 1 times just from a stat card and a test drive run. So they influenced the stats more than the experienced, insightful players (who are also even MORE likely to read wikis etc)
At the end of the day, SOME people ARE playing it, because I see them in my own games… If a vehicle somehow gets to the point where literally nobody plays it, then Gaijin can use it as a vehicle in a short list of ones for a “Pages of History” event, for example, to get an injection of data to double check, again.
They could even be more blatant if they want, and have overt “Featured vehicle” days for bonus reward %s, but that’s basically exactly what pages of history is already.
This isn’t chess. As you surely know, chess is a 1v1 game where you control each and every figure you have, so you have your faith in your own hands. Also, every chess figure type is exactly the same for each and every player.
That being said, you can’t balance entirely different vehicles on their WRs alone. Some noob driving a 11.7 vehicle in top BR games could easily have same stats in it as someone experienced driving even something like a 9.7 tank, but this doesn’t mean that 11.7 vehicle is on par with 9.7 one.
I mean, pro chess player could easily beat someone new with half of his figures, but no one would say his figures are OP, right ?
Regardless, Tiger’s faith is sealed, it’s BR doesn’t even matter anymore when new king is in town:
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I mean, yeah. Mid and late WW2 vehicles have been powercrept so badly that sometimes full downtiers are more dangerous to them than partial uptiers. I have zero confidence it will ever be fixed, and I’ve resigned myself to try and make them work anyway out of pure competitive stubbornness and spite 😛
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There are even cases when you and an enemy, both in tanks that can easily oneshot each other, bounce off of the other tank multiple times in a row, to the point where it’s just insane.
AFAIK Gaijin never claimed any vehicles were OP though. Upping a BR is not such a claim, because BR is not a measure of vehicle, never was. It’s a measure of “vehicle + avg team’s skill at that BR and nation + the pool of enemies they face + lineup context + interaction with the current map pool + anything else that affects win rate” all mashed together.
Id argue the opposite.
In my experience less skilled players tend to gravitate towards the stronger vehicles while those with more experience or skill or whatever you want to call it tend to favor the less powerful vehicles, which often tend to be more fun and unique, since they have the skill to still do well in them as opposed to worse/newer players relying on their powerful vehicles as a crutch.
As evidence I submit top tier winrates. Italy, britain, and france have lineups that are clearly worse than their contemporaries in russia or america but the minors hold statistics equal to (or higher than in many cases) these objectively better lineups.
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How on earth would they do that, why would good players shoot themselves in the foot either, and how would you have “experience” with this one way or the other? Do you spend 10 minutes after every game keeping meticulous spreadsheets of your match’s vehicles and players’ win rates etc or…?
Italy, britain, and france have lineups that are clearly worse than their contemporaries in russia or america but the minors hold statistics equal to (or higher than in many cases) these objectively better lineups.
That is not the same thing. A whole nation being “overtiered” is because all its players are better than average, which affects all tanks in the whole nation. The people are still playing the best tanks they know of, though, in their nation
Meanwhile, I present as counter-evidence: If you were correct that there was a POSITIVE rather than a negative feedback loop, then why isn’t every vehicle in game either BR 1.0 or 11.3? Why is the biggest jump in history I think 2 BRs for a vehicle in it’s time in the game?
Obviously there are going to be good players who are only playing the game to win matches and they’re going to pick the best vehicles to do so, but they’re a small subset of total players. You say it yourself here:
If it were mostly good players playing the best vehicles and bad players playing the worst vehicles, we would see much more extreme BR fluctuations. The few vehicles which have made those giant br changes like R3T20, type 87 rcv, sagitario 2, and EBR 1956 (outside of vehicles which get substantial buffs before moving like bmp-2m) are anomalies and tend to have some weird playstyle that is hard to balance. Generally things never move more than a full BR away from where they started.
Theres also weak vehicles that would be plummeting in br if they were only being played by the worst players for example Chieftain mk5, leopard a1a1, comet mk1, and cl-13b mk6. In fact Cl-13b mk6 is a particularly good example because it used to sit at 9.0, where people generally agreed it was already overtiered, but then a group of very good players all played the hell out of it and did very well and got it moved up to 9.3
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If it were mostly good players playing the best vehicles and bad players playing the worst vehicles, we would see much more extreme BR fluctuations.
No…? As explained earlier, that would lead to a self stabilizing system, the opposite of extremes. Because the worst players playing a bad vehicle = it goes to a favorable BR, and it’s NOT the worst vehicle anymore, so normal people go back to playing it. Run-away effect halted. Homeostasis achieved.
Its your hypothesis that leads to extremes, because your version if true would just keep accelerating in one direction. “It’s good then bad players play it” so it gets down in BR and gets even BETTER, so even WORSE players play it (by this bizarre backward logic) so it goes down in BR and gets even BETTER so even WORSE players play it, so it goes down in BR… so everything would get pushed super far down or super far up in the reverse. You described a runaway/snowball effect system, but we don’t see hardly any vehicles go on runaway snowballs.
are anomalies
Right, we don’t see this happening constantly. Which is evidence that your version isn’t what’s happening, since your version would make this the norm if it were true, not an anomaly.
Because bunch of skilled players decided to show gaijin that statistics based balance is stupid idea. Italy is not so popular nation, Cl13 is not so much popular plane. They played in squad, leaved matches on start if it was not full downtier, fixed fights. And it was enough to make it have very good statustics.
If the only people playing a certain unpopular plane are squad after squad of ace pilots, then obviously yes it must go up in BR to compensate for all the ace pilots that want to play it for some reason. Where’s the “stupid” part here? That’s exactly how it should be and is as intended… that’s the only possible way to get 50% balanced matches.
Otherwise whatever match had Italy at that BR with that plane would just be an auto win before the match even started. Also known as “unbalanced”.
This is a bug. Panther’s transmission IRL had ability to get less torque but more rpm on reverse.
so the problem then is getting uptiered all the time. not the tank being at 6.7. so…problem solved. stop uptiering weaker tanks all the time. the t-34-85 for example cant exactly face a tiger 2 either. the 85mm is using a shell that misses hte raw penetration power to really brawl with such tanks.