And we’ll still all play it because we have no other viable tank/aircraft sim on the same scale as WT. But the fact remains, we are settling for far less than we should be.
The meta is horrible, and there are many issues at play. To name a few:
- SPAA’s vs Tanks
- Light tank/autocannon meta
- Map design
- Poor balancing - premium greed.
#1 SPAA’s vs Tanks:
Very self explanatory, needs no explanation if you’ve played the game within the last three years. The use of SPAA’s vs tanks has leapt exponentially into the meta. It is incredibly common to see, in particular, some Gepard variants being first-spawned, radar undeployed, and rushed to a cap point. At any battle rating, these SPAA vehicles are dreadful to fight against. They are absolutely zero-skill, abuse glitchy mechanics, blind your optics completely, and failing that, track/barrel you and either kill you, or just stop you playing the game for however long it is until you’re saved, or killed. Immensely unfun - not so bad to deal with when it happens every now and then, but now it’s endless. I’ve front-penned an T-10M with Gepard AP. I’ve overpressured an Object 279 with a Chieftain Marksman HE round(35mm). And just today my IS-3 was front-penned by a Type 87 after one short burst, and one-shot me.
Why hasn’t this gameplay loop been addressed?:
- People who abuse them would cry
- Less incentive to play them, leading to an increase in CAS, which people despise
Notice how nobody has a problem with SAM launchers at top tier? They’re great, because they’re actually anti-air, not anti-tank.
Solution: hard-lock several particularly problematic SPAA to HE belts only, and fix the ridiculously buggy overpressure mechanic these 35mm shells have against tanks. If CAS becomes too dominant or effective, directly nerf CAS.
#2/3 - Light tank/autocannon meta, map design:
Light tanks are immensely dominant at almost every BR bracket, particularly 7.0+. This is due to poor map design where MBT’s are forced into constant close-quarter combat which they were never designed to do. MBT’s are intended to fight hull-down, where opponents aim for center-mass rather than spamming weak spots with two low-caliber darts per second being thrown at them. Such close quarter maps grandfathered into these higher brackets, which were originally designed in ancient periods of the game for low-tier, slow tanks with low-velocity guns, are simply not healthy for the way the game has progressed in these higher brackets.
These maps are fine to play on so long as there’s also a healthy rotation of relevant, long-range maps in the mix. There is nothing wrong with an 11.7 Advance to the Rhine, as long as you get plenty of the opposite. Light tanks in real life do not have a doctrine of zooming into the battlefield, flanking MBT’s at 10 meters and drilling them with darts. It simply does not, and probably never has, happened.
Solution: more high-tier specific maps. Much longer engagement ranges, make the game more fun at high-tier than ‘my turret rotates 0.1deg faster. You die’. We have laser rangefinders and modern darts, there is no excuse for maps not to be vast expanses. Just do it properly.
#4 - poor balancing/greed:
This is something that has become very blatant within the last couple of years. We, or at least I, don’t expect Gaijin to be saints who get everything right the first time. Or even the second. Sometimes not even the third. But when you see, for example, the T58 and BMPT-72 still wrecking their respective BR brackets with absolutely no reasonable adjustments(immense over-survivability on both vehicles, unrealistically so), there is no justification beyond Gaijin wanting these vehicles to stay in this state in order to make money. Is it unexpected that a company wants money? No, but you make it in a way that doesn’t ruin the game for everyone who doesn’t want to partake in it.
I don’t expect premium tanks to be bad, otherwise there’d be no reason to buy them. What I also don’t expect is for these tanks to be intentionally unbalanced to fuel sales. This is clearly the case with the 2S38, BMPT-72, T58, Ka-50 back in the day… and more. Premium tanks, with some exceptions, should mainly be sold with the idea of fulfilling a gimmick. This can be done while maintaining balance. It’s frankly just boring to die to these tanks, knowing the main reason you lost the fight is wallet diff.
Of course there will be backlash, plenty of people claiming skill issue, whatever. Ultimately I’ll still log in and play tomorrow. But I’m not alone in the fact I’m enjoying the game less and less, and eventually I’ll stop recommending it to my friends, stop spending money or caring about my premium account, and eventually stop playing altogether. You don’t have to care about me individually, just understand that I won’t be the only one so dissatisfied with not just the game itself, but the lack of being heard, so I decide to leave.
Gaijin make a heinous amount of money. They’ve done a great job with many facets of the game, and I don’t doubt it’s hard. But we should also be holding a much higher standard and be expecting far better.