What people mean when they say "You didn't actually decompress". they DON'T mean "fix the whole game at once"

Game Discussion General Discussion
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I just watched European Canadian’s video on BR compression saying “Guys it’s fine, they can’t change everything at once, it would be too risky, it would be chaos”.

So even major content creators are confused about this, then, because that makes no sense, and nobody was ever saying to fix the whole game at once. Lots of other people must be confused too then, who aren’t professional War Thunder analysts, lol.

The game needs to be fixed in stages, yes, but EACH AND EVERY STAGE need to have the maximum BR go up, and also needs to have the entire list of vehicles in the game above the area that was worked on, go up by that fixed amount.

Otherwise your “decompression” just slams into the higher BR vehicles above the area you worked on and created a traffic jam / compression area that didn’t exist before.

One step forward, one step back = zero progress made.

In order to make one step forward, and no steps back, you need to make room for the localized decompression EVERY TIME. So the whole game above that needs to shift to make room:

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This is what people mean.

Nobody in those gray areas is having their game ruined, or experiencing any big risk or whatever. They are totally unaffected, because everything they see in battles above or below them also moved up by the same amount they did. Only the area Gaijin worked on (gold colored) is affected. So they would still be going in risk-managed phases.

But they’d be making room each time, so that they don’t create new problems every time (red area in diagram).

Gaijijn is doing it the bad, red colored way in the middle there. They should be doing it the correct, non-traffic-jam-causing way shown on the left and right.

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That’s just his opinion, much the same as this is your opinion.

I feel ‘creators’ fuel the concern because that’s what the ‘audience’ seems to want to hear, and that leads to issues in itself.

Much the same as people getting upset with me stating things confidently and pointing out options, and people not wanting to accept those options as valid because they don’t echo their want.

For example you about the Anti-CAS options available to you, going back and forth over and over with you trying to nitpick my response to merely keep it going.

This is very much my opinion, but I’m sure I feel confident enough that someone else will echo my sentiment, not that I actually need that reinforcement.

Many of these creators, do…

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It means they are comfortable with the status quo because they perceive an advantage (which is true) so anything that changes that, is a threat.

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TEC in general comes across as a very NON-selfish, NON-petty and emotionally stable and reasonable person. I don’t think he is saying that to defend some ability to stomp or something, lol, he says stuff all the time that is in favor of newbies and wouldn’t be in favor of himself, etc.

I do think he is simply mistaken/confused here about the BRs, in ways described above, not saying any sort of maliciousness or anything.

I hear similar things from lots of people here, on reddit, in game, other CCs, for years, who also generally seem to just be talking past one another, not part of some grand conspiracy to seal club better.

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He’s a “whale”. So he gives a pragmatic whale’s perspective on the game. Which is why I listen to his videos.
But he is also a whale, which means he can only perceive the game in the context that Gaijin has established from his position as a comfortable, high level player. And yes, they really like being able to seal club better.

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Okay well regardless, the thread isn’t really about TEC, it’s about clarifying a thing lots of people seem to get wrong. Including, crucially, Gaijin (i.e. not just explaining things between players, but the actual BR changing process is not proceeding logically in the first place. Worth talking about itself)

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Which is the problem. His “wrong” is not other people’s “wrong”. WT has a wide range of players. From the the crusty old gawds who have been around since the beta and know the maps better than the back of their hands, to the newb playing their first game, to everything in between.
Notionally, Gaijin would balance all those interests in the game, but of course, they have interest in pandering to whomever generated the greatest revenue. So therefore… WT as we know it.

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I have no idea what you’re talking about, frankly. “Balance” what? You haven’t mentioned any flaw or drawback or risk at all in what I laid out. What are we balancing against? Including Gaijin’s revenue, not just players’ interest.

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Gaijin didn’t state these BR changes are for the purpose of decompression.

I think the October changes are strictly balance and Gaijin is having an algorithm throw them out.

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Ideally we are talking about “balancing” the “game experience”, since, ya know, WT is a game. But the game isn’t the same for a high level player who has all the bells and whistles unlocked, the new player who has not. So the game is complex because not only do you have to “technically” balance the game rules for the things in the game, the planes, tanks, and boats, but also how it is related to the players. Lower level players are at a disadvantage the same as if you had vehicles of vastly different BRs matched against each other. Its “4D chess”. Which I give then grace for having to deal with.
But…
Gaijin handles the later, pretty much the worst I can imagine. It totally gives the shaft to new and… pretty much anyone who doesn’t just auto-buys everything they sell.
This is why I glaze over on the “waaa waaa waaa BRs” thing. Its a manufactured problem to distract from the fact that the whole thing is really badly managed.

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It doesn’t really matter if they planned it to be that or not. Even if it’s the algorithm alone, the algorithm is still then saying “Hey we need to move a whole bunch of tanks all in this specific range, away from one another.” So it is functionally suggesting a decompression pass, whether it “knows” that or not.

So just as explained above, this is likely to cause a traffic jam right above that, same as the human initiated version.

It’s a cause and an effect, and the solution is the same in both cases. The reason for the cause (algorithm suggested it versus human decided today is a nice day to compress) isn’t much relevant.

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Gaijin’s use of the algorithm to suggest BR change shows they are not concerned with decompression and would rather run the game on auto pilot.

It will, Gaijin does not care.

The algorithm doesn’t care. Gaijin doesn’t care or they wouldn’t have brought forth the suggested changes without adjusting based on prior feedback for decompression.

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? The algorithm will detect local areas of compression automatically, so “using an algorithm” =/= “not concerned about decompression” necessarily. I’m not following your logic.

It would not detect evenly distributed global compression, but it will detect and act on local concentrations of compression.

The algorithm doesn’t care.

Yes, it does, if for example the jump from 6.0 to 7.0 is more compressed than other areas of the tree, then various 7.0 vehicles will start to get 60% win rates, and 6.0 vehicles will start to drift to 40% win rates, for example, and the algorithm will care and kick in. That is what I was saying above: That this IS a decompression change, whether it was human initiated or robot initiated.

So the “move everything else above it up to make room for it” reasoning applies either way.

You could build that into the autopilot too, if you really wanted, so “wanting it to be on autopilot” isn’t really a reason either. It would actually be simpler than NOT having it in the algorithm (simply allow it to shift things above the top BR / don’t have a cap)

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They’re just messing around, nothing of what they are doing makes sense or achieves anything, this is like squeezing a balloon… the air just moves to the other side, and next update they’ll squeeze that side and the air flows back again, and then you squeeze both sides and the whole thing explodes, that’s where Warthunder was at years ago anyways.

They move up a bunch of vehicles and increase compression at higher BRs, the decompressed areas are still ruined by poor matchmaking and the usual neglect of lineups and nation matchmaking so the first wave was entirely pointless and maybe a few vehicles at BR 6 had a slightly easier time whilst everything else just suffers, like 7 to 7.7 being dominated by France and Russia as no one else has a lineup anymore.

Next they move things back up from 5.7 and 6.0 to face the same vehicles that were uptiered last time to negate those changes, and somehow there is more compression now with there no longer being a BR difference between the Tiger ll H and P, or the Tiger E now facing IS-3s for example, somehow the results of decompression is compression.

And now a whole slew of ridiculous BR changes based on horrible data, we had an event, we had a major update with new vehicles and changes, then another event and based on that they push through BR changes, when obviously events and major updates are going to influence vehicles performance.

And if that situation isn’t enough of a nightmare, the changes of vehicles in phases just ruins all future data, you move a few vehicles up or down, that is going to affect the performance of the other vehicles in the region, you add in a vehicle like a VIDAR, intentionally undertiered as usual because who cares about balance when there is money to be made, the VIDAR is going to affect the performance of all the vehicles it faces, by the time you want to move into the next phase of ‘‘decompression’’ all the stats are skewed from the previous changes.

You have to make BIG changes at once as all the current and future data is just pointless and it’s going to be an endless cycle as things will never be balanced when the small changes are going to alter performance over and over and over.

So really just the usual incompetence and ignorance that we’ve come to expect from Gaijin whilst some people pretend there’s a bigger plan behind all of it despite them not having shown any semblance of competency in the last decade in really any form, or any genuine care to improve the game beyond keeping it up at running at minimal cost to continuously farm money from a barely functional game.

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Source

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You don’t need a source for things that are evident by deductive logic. I explained an example already above:

if for example the jump from 6.0 to 7.0 is more compressed than other areas of the tree, then various 7.0 vehicles will start to get 60% win rates, and 6.0 vehicles will start to drift to 40% win rates, for example, and the algorithm will care and kick in.

YOU tell ME how that would possibly NOT be detected by the algorithm.

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image

Just an example, not saying this curve accurately represents the game

This red line would cause something roughly like this for win rates, an anomaly:

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Algorithm can detect then the blue anomaly, and will attempt to fix it (and mostly fail, if more room isn’t created for it to work with)

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I explained in my opening post how you can easily make small changes at a time, without breaking anything or any negative feedback loops. See the diagram up at the very top: by moving the entire block of vehicles above the small area you changed up by a fixed amount, that “Squeezing stuff around” effect does NOT happen, additional compression elsewhere does NOT happen, and yet you didn’t have to rebalance the entire game all in one go.

So no, “Working on small areas at a time” is not a problem at all, inherently. Doing it specifically the way gaijin is, is a problem, yes. But not in general, you CAN do small area changes at a time, without side effects. That was the whole point of the thread.

(and you should do it that way too, not just “can”, it’s less risky as a business)

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Your way is better than what they are doing, granted that’s an extremely low bar set by Gaijin, you’re still moving BRs around which will affect the surrounding vehicles, lineups and whatnot and impact the data before that gets addressed.

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You make it sound like an unintentional mistake, but I don’t think that’s what’s happening. My entirely uncorroborated personal impression is that the total BR cap, and the BR adjustments below, are part of two separate policies, as an emergent property of how the game is structured. Without the ability to lift the ceiling, which might be tied to where they want to release Rank VIII vehicles or might be over-protectiveness of queue times, all that is left for their BR-adjusting algorithm is to move compression spots up and down based on player performance.