Why is it the NORM to be uptiered?

Yup I posted similar data but the mods deleted the thread. I think I was full uptiered 87% of the time. Not just .3 or .7 uptier but a full 1.0 uptier.

The data I had posted disproved this. As mentioned in my comment above. Your argument would indiciate 25% chance of a full uptier. I have had days of say 20 battles with 98% full uptiers…

2 Likes

11.3 america air is terrible, its just 12.3, no other BR, you might mabye get your br or a downtier (out of 2000 games in my F4S it has happened 4 times, 4 out of 2000 games are my br/ a downtier) gaijin needs to fix

I have been collecting data on uptiers 70% min uptiers at best GRB

In have data that shows 90% uptiers, 70% at best, there are so many people complaining about it, i wonder who gets to benifit

2 Likes

Quantitative matchmaker. Max 4 players per team can be top BR in a match.

The bad: this makes downtiers rare. 4 players out of 16 = 25%, so you will only be downtiered one match of every four. This chance can be increased or lowered depending on external factors, like uneven distribution of player population at different BRs.

The good: if you’re in a full uptier from 6.7 to 7.7, only max four tanks on the enemy team will be 7.7, sometimes as little as one. Many will be 6.7, 7.0 and 7.3, so you can still have an impact.

And if you’re in a partial uptier like 7.3, you may even see players at a lower BR than yours.

That’s pretty much it. Take this information and use it to adapt your playstyle.

2 Likes

In theory, but not in practice because of the distribution of vehicles across BRs and the popularity of certain nations/vehicles.

For example, if you played 11.3 air about a month ago, it was closer to 90% chance of a full uptier.

Until GJN decides to do mixed battles with all nations v all nations, the match maker for RB will be intrinsically biased and flawed in my opinion.

All vs All would have several benefits. Not limited to:

  • Easier to balance vehicles, as player nation would be less of a confounder to vehicle performance, compared to how it currently is.

  • Quicker queue times

  • More balanced matches, as the number of good/bad/one death leavers would average out across both sides

  • A fairer probability of uptiers and downtiers

But apparently having “historical matchmaking”, where you fight Germany and Russia in the middle of Japan using British cold war tanks, is more important…

2 Likes

But it depends what are you playing… only vehicles that can lean back on their firepower can perform well in uptiers. If your armament is struggling and your own tier how it can perform in full uptier. Things like Jumbos are useless.
Also there are barriers like 7.3/7.7 when in full uptier you will face stabilazed vehicles with APFSDS and LRF or even thermals.

Yes you can do well in uptiers but when challange can be fun from time to time when it becomes norm it is not funny anymore but irritating. Add garbage map to the mix that forces you to fight head on and there you go 1DL in every match

2 Likes

Welcome to MMOs. Please enjoy your stay.

Games like these are built on ugly compromises. To simplify this in the extreme, the chain of logic goes something like this:

This is a game that you can’t play on your own. So people need to be around at all times. How do you keep them around at all times?

Because players have an expectation that if you press “to battle” you will start playing immediately, the most important feature for an MMO is a zero-second matchmaker. It will be the first step in keeping people around at all times (there are others of course but not relevant to this discussion).

This means you should try to make as many vehicles face each other as possible, even vehicles that are slightly worse or slightly better. Because this way, matches are assembled faster.

But you can’t overdo it, because people don’t like feeling like a punching bag. People who feel like punching bags quit the game eventually. Or at least the match.

You want to keep them around, which means you want everyone to ideally hover around 50% odds of doing well when they go into a match.

So you end up balancing vehicles by performance, which also allows you to have thousands of vehicles in the game and trust that they will “self-balance”, which is good for the devs because constant expansion is one of the ways an MMO stays alive.

The BR system is the solution to both these priorities. The 1BR spread makes you see more vehicles than you would if you just played “at your BR”, so shorter queue times, and it also brackets things by performance, so you don’t get clubbed on too often.

But there’s a problem, a +1BR match can be absolutely hellish if nearly everybody in the match is 1BR above you. How do we avoid that? Through quantitative matchmaking, so the match in theory never gets too lopsided.

Unintended side effect #1: most matches will be uptiers.

Unintended side effect #2: heavies are more BR-sensitive than other vehicles, so in an environment where most matches are uptiers, heavies will suffer and draw the short end of the stick.

That’s a shame. Trust me, I speak from personal experience, my favourite vehicles in this game are snipers, turretless tank destroyers, heavies. I am doomed to be non-meta.

Will it change? No, because it would mess with the priority that were at the start of the logical chain: player retention.

A single-player game would not suffer from this limitation, and would give you a more cohesive experience. But it also wouldn’t have 2000 vehicles, because the price point to justify that sort of development would not be sustainable. So, is the trade-off worth it? Is it worth to take the MMO negatives of War Thunder, to get all this stuff in exchange?

Only you can make this determination for yourself, because it’s a subjective preference thing.

Yes. That is a compression problem. It has a higherr chance of being fixed over time, at least, whereas quantitative matchmaking is extremely unlikely to change.

Sure. I play WT for fun, though, so that also takes care of itself. Sometimes, I have great evenings, sometimes I have a string of terrible matches and decide I’m not having fun, and so I stop playing it and go play something else instead.

Literally no reason to play WT other than have fun.

Could I wish the game was something else? Sure. But it won’t happen, because MMOs function a certain way. So I’ll take the positives and have fun, and when the negatives get too much, I just stop and play something else for a while. Problem solved.

1 Like

As you already said it`s a compression issue. So where is the difference between making the matchmaker Br 0.3 or increasing the BR of certain tanks or even group of tanks higher ?
I both cases the systems is designed in that way that you won´t meet the stronger tank.
Conversely i can argue that decompression leads to longer queuetimes as well, cause pool of tanks got smaller.

The simpliest and only reason for uptier is to create the need to reach better vehicles.
But here is the highlight: Gajin offers you a lot of bonues for real money to shorten the grind.
Nothing else. Gajin must earn money with a f2p game, but you need to keep that fact in mind.

The statement of longer queuetimes is just a lazy excuse that a lot of people are repeating like parrots.

Cough

At the most basic level: it gives you more steps to work with to balance vehicles. With a 1 BR spread, it’s four steps per bracket. With 0.3, it’s only two - one up, one down.

For existence of uptiers in general? Sure it’s a reason, but it’s not the only reason. There are others, like I already listed, and queue times is the one that was most prominent in Gaijin’s mind when the system was designed, I’m willing to bet. For no other reason than the thing all MMOs obsess about is the zero-second matchmaker.

For the frequency of uptiers? No. The reason for that is the quantitative nature of the matchmaker. If the 4-player cap was removed, uptiers would be less frequent, but when they happened, they would also be devastating. One should be very very clear about that tradeoff.

Just how the MMO industry works.

I’m convinced that the uptier is intentionally done on purpose and is financially driven. Some people are bound to get frustrated and throw money at the game in the hopes of negating these uptier. Eg. Purchasing a premium tank or plane to avoid the agonizing grind. Thus Gaijin makes bank. So why fix a system if it does what they want it to do?

Say it to Ariete and Leclerc players

1 Like

The LeClerc is one of the best tanks at top tier.
The Ariete is one of the worst. I don’t think they’re very comparable.

The LeClerc S21 (the best variant) is superior to all the Merkavas, all of the Chinese top tier tanks, the Arietes, the Challenger 2s (all of them), and I personally would also take it over a T-90M.

The Ariete is worse than all of these.

Nice troll … The best ? Why ? By its average mobility, low pen shell, low armor ?

please explain to me how throwing money at the game is going to stop uptiers?

It has better mobility than most tanks at top tier. So, I don’t know what you’re smoking when you call it average.

It’s got better armor than the VT-4A1, Challenger 2, Ariete and Merkava. And is more survivable than all of them and every Chinese tank.

Its shell is equivalent to Russian, Chinese, British shells at top tier.

And it gets a 5 second reload within a turret rack with blowout panels that stays 5 seconds unlike the Abrams 5 second reload which is gone once the loader gets hurt.

Get real.

Only 4 players on each side have full 1.0 BR higher tank in their lineup. So even full uptiers are not that bad. Meanwhile other 12 on each side have between -1.0 to + 0.7 BR

1 Like

I get full uptier in 100 of 100 matches!! I play like 15 matches 9.3 in a row and only have one 9.3 enemy and the rest is 10.3 (Leopard 1 vs M1 Abrams,… ) then i play like 20 matches 10.3 and also get min 11.0 to 11.3 enemys. And then i play 11.3 and guess what all enemys 11.7 tanks and mostly 12.3 jets. Btw. no nations have a aa in 11.3 against verry modern jets exept russia 2s6.

2 Likes

U.S. 6.7 matches are unfortunately pure 7.7 experience. I can’t count how many maus tanks I saw while grinding. either play full top tier or full reserve if you don’t want to get uptiered :/