In general: What is going wrong is that the mechanic is more of a tactical rather than a strategic weapon.
What I mean by that:
Actually, spotting should be a mechanic that only gives team members valuable information about enemy positions.
But what we currently have in the game is far too powerful for this task.
Because with this mechanic you can spot enemies and thus “track” them even though they are outside of your line of sight.
This is a problem because
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Realism: it is unrealistic that you can continue to track vehicles’ movements even though you have no view of them. The current implementation is therefore more of a mixture of reality and wall hacks.
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Balance: the enemy has no chance of escaping the spotting within the 30 seconds that he is spotted. This leads to an enormous TACTICAL advantage in a fight between a tank with and a tank without a spotting mechanic. The tank with reconnaissance mechanics can simply constantly reconnoiter the enemy and thus effectively track their movements and draw the attention of its own team to them, usually without the spotted enemy being able to do anything about it.
That shouldn’t be the job of reconnaissance. The actual job should be to inform the mates about enemy positions, it should be of a STRATEGIC nature.
You just need to spawn into lower high tier matches. Light tanks are the meta there. It’s easy to see by how many players play them. Sometimes most of the teams are made up of light tanks, no other type of tank is being played as much at these BRs.
So there is a significant imbalance between light tanks and the rest.
And that makes total sense because every time you can decide between a non-light tank and a comparable light tank, the light tank usually is the better choice just because of the (unrealistic) scouting mechanic.
My Proposal
Nerf scouting in the following ways:
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Don’t let it be possible to track enemies behind cover. Let only the “last know position” be visible.
In fact it would be really cool if popping smoke for example was useful in getting “unspotted” again. -
Marking only on minimap, not in field of vision:
Instead of the opponent being visible to everyone with a red arrow above their head, the information could only appear on the minimap. This forces the team to play actively and use the information themselves.
Maybe make the the red arrow only be visible the first ~5 - 10 sec. after spotting. -
Change the reward to strategic use: The current bonuses are cool, but they could be geared even more towards long-term planning. For example: If a scouted enemy survives for more than 30 seconds, the scout still gets a bonus for giving the team time to react strategically. This would shift the focus away from “quick kill” to “we use the info cleverly”.
Benefits of these changes
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It encourages more realistic and skill-based recon gameplay.
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It reduces the overpowered information advantage that light tanks currently have.
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It creates a more immersive experience where teamwork and communication matter more.
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It makes ambush and flanking tactics possible again without being immediately detected.
Light tanks in particular would benefit the most from this. Back when reconnaissance was not a thing or not used as often, flanking was much more effective, which made the game play much more varied, so that it did not only consist of direct confrontation like today (exaggeratedly speaking).
This issue is mainly an issue of the BRs ~7.0 - ~10.0. Within this BR range light tanks (not all of them but most) are significantly better than in the rest of the game.
