While I’ve not been enthused by all the import/export vehicles recently, It’s given be a chance to take look at the relative capability/skill of different nation’s player bases. I think that look into these differences can tell us a bit about who is playing which trees, and what steps can be down to balance out the trees more effectively.
Thesis:
Minor Nations aren’t attracting new players and inexperienced players like the Big-3 Trees(Russia, Germany, and the US) are, which is skewing vehicle performance, balancing, player counts, profitability for the devs, and dev focus.
Methodology:
For this analysis I’ve compared the August 2025 K/D by nation for several identical, or near identical vehicles that can be found in 2+ nations. For the time being I’ve examined the Leopard 2a4, T-72A, M44, SK-105, M10, M18, T-55, and Leopard 1A5. I’ll make an expanded version of this down the line as well.
For each vehicle I’ve determined the overall average K/D for August 2025 (based on all total vehicle kills and deaths), and the K/D for each specific nation, then I’ve listed the variance from the mean by nation.
All stats come from statshark, for Ground RB in August 2025.
I’ve compared each nation relative to others for any given vehicle, and near the end of the post I’ve plotted Big-3 vs minor nation relative performance to give a visual impression of the issue with comparing at vehicles based on in game W/R or K/D as opposed to vehicle capabilities.
While I can’t seem to upload all my supporting work to this post, you can see it the subreddit here,
Below is an example of my work, use the M44 as it ha been placed in numerous TT’s. I applied the same methods to all the other vehicles listed earlier on.
Summary of Results:
Below is the placement of each nation into buckets based on performance about the mean. This means that for nations with multiple identical vehicles (ex. M18, Black Cat, “Hell” M18 - USA) I’ve calculated the aggregate K/D and used that to avoid clutter.
As shown above, the variance is generally normally distributed, and there’s even a normal distribution of Big-3 Nation performance on the left side of the bell curve.
The Issue at Hand:
While no analysis can be definitive, I believe that minor nations are attracting significantly more experienced players than Big-3 trees, which is leading to impacts on BR rating decisions AND more importantly, means that the minor trees are less profitable, hence getting less focus.
I’m concerned that with the current way BRs are determined and adjusted, minor nations are being left by the way side. I firmly believe that they need to take steps to make minor nations more appealing to new players so that they have a better blend of player experience in each tree.
Solutions:
While small changes like making one random rotating nation have a research boost every day could help distribute players better across the tree, at the end of the day it’s clear that minor trees really need increased focus and shouldn’t be made to be similar to other trees (like with France/BeNeLux and Germany/Switzerland effectively trading vehicle designs between the two nations).
At the end of the day I think a combination of steps need to be taken to address this issue, since single decisions rarely have enough impact on their own.
A few suggestions include:
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Adding a random 15% (or other) fixed booster every day to a random nation for each player. As there are more minor than Major nations, this should incentivize player trying minor nations (akin to the old days with the first win boost for each nation)
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Adjusting the “daily bonus to vehicle research” to cover all tiers below a players max tier, but with the same stepping impact, thus adding a slight incentive for players to go try other trees for a slight reduction in grind time
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Filling capability gaps in minor trees. There are a number of capability gaps in minor trees, like Chinese top tier support vehicles, French top tier support vehicles, the gap in Viable french line ups between 10.0 and 12.0, several gaps in the Israeli tree, etc, that make the trees less competitive and ergo less interesting to new players
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Minor nations (and their subtrees) have had several flag ship designs and interesting vehicles locked behind limited time events, like the EBR-1954, Turan, Toldi, EBR-1963, TOG II, etc. These vehicles are often what draws players to trees, and time locking them may dampen interest in trees.
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For many players, premium vehicles are there first experience in the tree and are used to show case tree potential, especially the top tier pack premiums. Unfortunately, some minor nations have been saddled with foreign imports as their premium vehicles (Octo, Christian II, etc) this means grinding these minor nations is just a rehash of some other tree, reducing the uniqueness of the tree. Adding domestic designs should help give the minor trees spice/a different feel
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Many of the subtrees are becoming less unique through both the insertion of import vehicles, and the loss of unique co-developed variants, giving new players less of a reason to grind through a tree that may be 20-50% repeats of what they’ve already seen. For example the Finnish and BeNeLux trees have only only one-two unique vehicles, which are low tier, don’t fill many capability gaps in their respective trees (none in the case of BeNeLux), and are almost entirely repeats from other trees. Additionally, minor trees are facing the loss of unique and interesting co-developed designs that reduce how unique they are and rob them of native designs, such as the 15 or so Franco-Swiss vehicles that may now end up in the German tree instead of where they belong in the French tree.
Further Research
I’m aiming to expand this examination into 15 or so more vehicles to better size out my sample, which should give better credence to these conclusions.
