Good day everyone,
At Tankfest this year, a few Community Contributors had the opportunity to ask questions with a couple of members of the WG NA team, discussing everything from communication between developers and players, overpowered premiums, and HD maps. Here are some of the key points of that Q&A:
– Part of the goal with the Defender and the Chrysler K was to build armor back into the game. This was accompanied by several changes to other high tier, heavily armored tanks such as the Maus and Type 4&5 Japanese heavies.
– While the Type 4&5 heavies will see some nerfs with the Maus, the Defender won’t be brought back for sale for a long time. At least not until some changes are made to armor mechanics.
– “The Chrysler isn’t as OP as some people are thinking it is. It’s just not meant to be shot from the front is all.”
– Even in the hands of lower skill players, the Defender 252 was overperforming. Particular issues where the turret and lower plate.
– Balancing tanks involves looking at simulated expected performance values, actual meta data from millions of battles. The issue with meta data is that you actually need battles, and to be able to interpret that data. Most of the time this is done right, sometimes it’s wrong, or very wrong. What happened in the case of super heavies is that data became less clear with the changes in armor, super-heavies , light tanks, and matchmaking all at once.
– The devs will be looking at overhauling the way they introduce tanks into the game and how tanks are expected to perform when they get here. While it won’t be perfect, the need is recognized for more balancing checks before introducing new tanks.
– The devs believe that the introduction of the recent high-performance premiums is the result of not communicating the ideas they wanted about making armor relevant to the game and bringing premium tanks on par with their tech-tree counterparts.
– While Sandbox has been successful in opening up dialogue between players and devs and gathering feedback in a development stage where things can actually be changed, the developers admit that it’s been difficult to get the right kind of feedback, and the kind of players at that stage don’t necessarily represent the average player, and matches in testing rarely play like battles on the live server.
– “The suspicion/anger about premium ammo is an underlying question of ‘Are you purposely designing the game in a way that forces me to burn loads of credits?’… We’re definitely not, but mathematically there’s you can find observational points in the data that’d make you question the sincerity of what I just said. So we need to take another look at it.”
– According to Slava, one of the biggest lessons learned from Ranked Battles is that the overall economy of the game needs to be looked at, and reworked. The player should want to buy premium tanks and time because it feels right, not being forced into it do to the game’s economy.
– The recent matchmaking changes have been working well in terms of gameplay, however there is need to rework the credit income do to the effect it has had on the amount of hitpoints, and thus damage, are available in battles now.
– The devs admit they made a huge mistake regarding communicating arty platoon changes. When given the choice between not implementing the changes, or letting select groups of players wreck the new system through platoons, they chose to remove the platoon option so the changes could move forward. What they failed to communicate was that they had planned on platoon system changes allowing one arty per platoon in the future.
– Also on the note of communication, the devs admit that they needed to emphasize that they had always intended bonds (and thus Improved Equipment) to be available outside of ranked battles in the future.
– On Ranked Battles, the developers emphasize the point that this was just an experimental mode and will be subject to changes in the future, particularly involving the logistics of ranking up.
– The new MM changes also introduced a new map logic, hopefully cutting down on seeing the same maps in quick succession during sessions. This also treats map variants (ie. Ruinberg & Winter Ruinberg) as the same map. This has led to a huge reduction in the number of repeat maps according to developers data.
– Once HD maps are introduced, WG will begin looking at tweaking and possibly reintroducing old maps, as the HD maps have the map team bogged down currently. As well as new maps, and possibly introducing maps from Console.
Those are the highlights. For anybody who’d like to see the full stream, you can view it on the World of Tanks Facebook page here.
Make armour relevant by just buffing t10 HT and introduce semi-P2W t8 prem doesn’t make armour relevant. If they really want to do that, a massive overhaul has to be done.
Few of the t8 normal HT(King Tiger, 110, KV-4 e.t.c) is just obsolete thanks to the new t8 prem HTs, even the less stronk ones still has better armour than the old t8 HTs…..
WG, is not just a communication problem, there’s not enough planning and double checking is done before shxts get to live servers.
“– According to Slava, one of the biggest lessons learned from Ranked Battles is that the overall economy of the game needs to be looked at, and reworked. The player should want to buy premium tanks and time because it feels right, not being forced into it do to the game’s economy.”
At least it didn’t take few years for WG to realise this…..
I feel that the devs generally have the right ideas but are very slow to implement these into the game. This is probably due to changes being bogged down through multiple departments (legal, financial, administrative, etc) before being approved.
Seeing all the stuff that goes through the sandbox and supertest, I’m pretty sure the devs are plenty capable of quick adjustments to the game if they changed the patch/update aproval methodology.
yeah, ok but reworked in what way, which direction? mmmmmmm I´m scared. Poor tier VIII.
Damn those stronk tanks!! Damn them to hell..
I think hidden mmr would be a better system. Where one does not really know what makes you rank up/down and forces everyone to just play better.
Also, HOW DID IT TAKE THEM THIS LONG TO FIGURE OUT THAT MAUS, TYPE 5, 252U, CHRYSLER WERE OP?? Seriously. They have on numerous occasions said that they were not over-preforming, and now they do? And why have they waited until the Maus has 55.85% winrate?(vbaddict)
Jesus Christ it’s like the company is operating with more delay than the Mars curiosity rover.
Blow me, the Maus finally can hold its own against the soviet bias hover tanks, and that makes it op? Fuck you
Oh, it can more than hold it’s own. A 56% winrate is not acceptable on any non-premium tank. (907s and stuff will) Grow up. That’s the most single most stupid comment i’ve seen to date.
No, fuck you.
Holding your line isnt the same as pressing 2 and spamming apcr at everyone with one of the most armored and best dpm tanks.
It should have a normal/comparable to equal tiers dpm, and close quarters accuracy.
However accuracy is fucked up so you end up with a heavy tank which is as accurate as the real life Leopard 1 and a Leopard 1 ingame which is as accurate as a kv2.
It’s not just the ‘Soviet hover tanks’, Einstein. When tier 10 TDs of all nations have trouble penning the damn thing from all angles, don’t you think it might possibly be considered OP? Hmm?
And don’t bring your personal experience into the argument.
VBAddict shows that the tank is over performing to a ridiculous degree, the devs admit that it’s over performing, so trying to defend the vehicle is just stupid.
So it’s not OP, because it can now take on other tanks that are also way to strong compared to their peers?
“Don’t bring your experience, muh W I N R A T E S have been to the battlefield since the dawn of time”.
Backing up a reasonable cause with a fucking asinine argument, what the fuck is wrong with you exactly?
So nothing on how broken especially the t8 games are? Figures.
Tier 8 will be viable to play, if they buff DPM’s. A lot of Tier 8’s have worse dpm then tier 6’s and 7’s. The gap between tier 8 and 9 medius is enormous.
Too all of the things they have said in this stream, I’ll believe it when i see it implemented and not before.
– “The suspicion/anger about premium ammo is an underlying question of ‘Are you purposely designing the game in a way that forces me to burn loads of credits?’… We’re definitely not, but mathematically there’s you can find observational points in the data that’d make you question the sincerity of what I just said. So we need to take another look at it.”
((As they remove the p2w 105mm 330 heatbatchat people are flipping the fuck out because 278 is not enough lol) I just love how people are full of i Dont like p2w and bitch that they are removing the p2w shells… Make up your fucken mind you sheep.
That change didn’t even show up on my radar to be honest. I rarely use heat in most of my tanks evenin ranked battles. I’m just worried that they are going to make it a watered down 50/51. Currently the bat chat takes so long to load,aim,and then unload I find it not very fun to play. Have much more fun in my 1390 to be honest. Understand the heat spam issue though. Ranked battles all anyone shoots.
There are always two sides. Generally you only see one because it takes a step in the opposite direction for the other one to get butthurt.
Its kinda sad to see all the unicums crying… but if its for the sake of rebalance, im with it.
Next, rebalance the TVP50/51.
In which world does the bat chat have over 270 pen…lol…
Also it is APCR so it loses a lot more over distance and less normalisation so effective penetration is actually one of the lowest among all tier 10 tanks.
And just while we are here stop rating a tank based on one single parameter. It’s idiots like you who WG end up listening to.
How about you mention that on average most players do less than 2 clips of damage. How on average only 2-3 shots per clip actually penetrate. Don’t believe me? Check worldwide stats…picking and choosing just like all modern day media…sigh.
Nothing wrong with the batchat. But everything is wrong with gold ammo on all tanks. Not just the batchat. By far the most broken thing in this game right now is gold ammo.
Small factions that each have loud voices when they get upset about something.
Nerfing a tank does nothing to address the underlying, fundamental issues with the mechanic itself. You are paying them money to have readier access to a round that is objectively better. That is, by definition, p2w, and making the round worse on one tank doesn’t change that the mechanic itself needs to be reworked.
Problem is it’s – in WG hands – absolutely inconsistent change. I don’t think pen reduction is a bad thing, but it needs to go with full overhaul. Not just “hey, let’s shit on BC penetration while we do some other stuff with the tank” but they still have 99 other tier X tanks, that keeps the old pre-rebalance pen. WTF is this logic?
One point you are missing also is, why not nerf the other mediums that have 330mm of heat pen as well. I am just looking at it from the perspective of, why just one and not the others.
Some do have the right to complain about it. It would only be fair if they nerfed them all.
At least they know taht sh#t is f#cekd up (offspring). I hope they will improve on the subjects they mentioned. Only if i would not get mad by just reading this 😀
MM is still broken. Had a match where one team had 5 blue players 2 yellow and the rest were green, the other team had 3 green and the rest were orange, yellow and 4 red. Needless to say it was a 15-3 lopsided match.
I dabbled in Ranked battles, had one night that I raced right up to 3 stars with only 2 losses during that time. Then I played the next week and struggled to even make it to the first star in 5 battles because the teams were so bad. I kept ending up 4th on the losing teams. Many of the players on the teams had failed their way to tier 10.
There seems to be a policy decision to ignore predicted per-player influence on game outcome in match making, only taking predicted per-tank influence into account.
This is so because then the team with most good players often beats the team with more bad players. Just like how it works in any other team sport – the better team wins.
At least that’s how I imagine them to think about it.
“The Chrysler isn’t as OP as some people are thinking it is. It’s just not meant to be shot from the front is all.”
BULLSHIT
It’s not bullshit. It’s just brown matter from the arse of a bull.
Since it turns faster than some lights… yes, fuck you wargaming.
Just saying it’s bullshit is useless. I complete your comment:
Its bullshit because the very high track/turret traverse speed combined with very good hp/t ratio makes this thing impossible to flank. Even for lights. It can turn so quick that you always have to face its front
It wouldn’t be OP if 75% of the maps weren’t corridor brawlfests…
“The suspicion/anger about premium ammo is an underlying question of ‘Are you purposely designing the game in a way that forces me to burn loads of credits?’… We’re definitely not, but mathematically there’s you can find observational points in the data that’d make you question the sincerity of what I just said. So we need to take another look at it.”
OHHH REALLY THE RECENT INTRODUCE RANKED BATLES COMES TO MIND WEN IT COMES TO CREDIT SPENDING….
– According to Slava, one of the biggest lessons learned from Ranked Battles is that the overall economy of the game needs to be looked at, and reworked. The player should want to buy premium tanks and time because it feels right, not being forced into it do to the game’s economy.
THATS A SHITTY ESCUSE FOR THE OVERPRICED TANKS/ PACKS BEHING SOLD SPECIALLY ON THE EU SERVER
A lot of us don’t care what they intended for bonds – we don’t want improved equipment. Full stop.
So WG is slowly figuring things out. The recent armor buffs were pure cancer, the Defender and Chrysler are ebola to the middle tiers, ranked is nothing more than a way to make credits disappear, and now they say communication has been lacking lately.
The funny thing is that it took us 5 whole minutes to figure out all of that. Why did it take them five whole weeks to do the same? Too busy with the waste of effort known as HD maps perhaps.
sandbox wasn’t irrelevant…people complain on sandbox about heavies been to powerfull with armor buffs, with penetration drop from 50 m, with the nerf distribution of shoot in target and penetration nerf of regular ammo….but wg is not listening…they buff the heavies, they are berfing penetration (see the batchat expected nerf) and also introduced stun mechanic that people hated so much…
They say they are listening to community but in fact they don’t.
And don’t worry premium tanks are good at the begining 1 month or so, then they are nerfing them quietly by nerfing softstats…par exeple Defender ammorack now cracks like a fireworks, wz 111 gun after they hd-it was superb and now is still old shit…
Maybe WG will learn the lesson from Armored Warfare with armor….there all players have gone from tier 10 after they shoot eachother all day long without penetrating eachother.
People are playing for dealing damage and to kill the enemy not to ding them, so in order to do that they will shoot premium armor at any hour and at anytime when they’ll meet the new buffed heavies…
They should publish the numbers of premium ammo fired after “the encrese roll of armor in the game” and the number befor that….
I bet that now premium ammo is fired 3-4 times often than before….and wg should tell us how much money they did from premium ammo and encrease roll of armor afaire…
Batchat is an exception.
You dont need that 330mm heat to spam while having better viewrange and being as small as its light counterpart.
Same could be said to the TVP50/51, its shouldnt have those softstats with an autoloader. BALANCE IT.
Thanks for the transcript, not everyone is able to watch this stream. But still wonder if they will start balancing premiums vehicles like they done in WoWs, where the changes applied to everyone. I mean balancing E25, premium scouts and of course defender… I don’t care if they won’t sell it again, I care for those roaming and ruining random, team and clan war matches..
Also their excuses for “bad communication” are extremely childish and inappropriate, the feedback was there. They could respond, but they done it now, after inner discussions and decisions.
Personally all my expenses i use it WoT are from the WoWs and WoWp store.
There are way more OP vehicles than the E25. In fact it is barely even OP at all.
Premiums scouts are what the rest of the scout should be like. Instead of nerfed pieces of shit.
They wont touch E25.
For example, have a look back to the e26e4 nerf. They even had to offer a full gold refund.
And type59, which is totally obsolate didnt’t toudched through the past years
“Part of the goal with the Defender and the Chrysler K was to build armor back into the game.”
Lel. WG too hypocrite to admit that the problem of armor not working is simply prem ammo… Prem ammo that breaks the game.. So what’s the solution to bring back the efficiency of armor?? Implement OP armor premium tanks to break even more the game !!
“Part of the goal with the Defender and the Chrysler K was to build armor back into the game. This was accompanied by several changes to other high tier, heavily armored tanks such as the Maus and Type 4&5 Japanese heavies.”
Wow. Talk about using the wrong method of putting back armour in the game. Want armour back into the game, NERF/REBALANCE premium ammo. Not putting in tanks that force others to use MORE premium ammo and screw balance in tier and tiers below these vehicles.
Good to see WG has acknowledged the overbuffed heavies and the premium ammo situation.
At this point I along with many of my friends, don’t give two shits from these worthless devs who don’t deliver on their promises. This game is on a decline thanks to their stupidity, they can all go fuck themselves.
“matches in testing rarely play like battles on the live server.” well dugh there is not premium ammo, or very very little of it and its bought for gold. this fact is a marked contrast to the general lack of skill required to push the 2 key in live random battles. Anyone that plays a sport or hunts knows your practices like you play. In other words, if the developers want the SB to be better they need to open up gold ammo, OR EVEN BETTER limit gold ammo in live games like it is in the SB. Otherwise its apples and donkeys.
Bring Port back in HD and i will be a happy camper
– Part of the goal with the Defender and the Chrysler K was to build armor back into the game. This was accompanied by several changes to other high tier, heavily armored tanks such as the Maus and Type 4&5 Japanese heavies.
How about the standard equivalent of these broken tier 8 premium heavies?
IS-3 has much weaker upper hull than 252, but the rest of the armor is similar.
T34 is the slowest compared to T26E5 and Chrysler K, but its armor is the weakest. Even the turret front is weaker since it has a large hole behind the gun mantlet and turret roof is thin. I wont talk about T32, since it has cons from both T26E5 and Chrysler K but no pros, other than the turret front armor
If WG wants to strengthen armor, do it on all well armored tanks at the same time, not premium first
“Balancing tanks involves looking at simulated expected performance values”
Either WG is made of retards or they think that players are retards.
Either way i dont see any good in that.
I’m no mastermind, but i can “see” how a tank will perform based on data with a decent accuracy.
I think that WG needs to stop to act like their players are retards. We know everything, we still play, but as they say: if you pull to hard, the rope is gonna brake.
We ALL know that OP premiums were a quick and nasty way to make a lot of money. I agree that a company needs to make money, no one works for free.
Every single day, beside some little variations based on opinions, 95% of players are keep complaining about the same issue.
Dear WG, you want to keep make money? You want the game to be fun?
Dont piss the actual active and good players, they are the ones to keep the game alive.
We agree that morons who dont know how to play need to be somehow happy about the game and their performance or they will stop playing.
So they were only trying to ‘make armour more relevant’ when introducing the Defender and the Chrysler? So how come they did not make the armour of regular tanks such as the Tiger II more ‘relevant’? Sounds like bullcrap to me.
“Part of the goal with the Defender and the Chrysler K was to build armor back into the game. ”
i still find these counterintuitive when the game still has premium shells. Armor won’t be brought back into the game until premium shells are completely and thoroughly removed from the ecosystem since they completely negate the function and presence of “armor”
They are either the most incompetent devs in the world or they are just downright lying.
It takes one look at the the Patriot, Defender, Skorpion G and Chrysler K to determine undoubtedly that they are completely broken. A fucking tomato could tell them that easily just by looking at the stats ingame. But somehow it just flew over their heads? Yeah, right. I bet Kisly is enjoying all the dollar bills that pubbies throw at him for a new monthly roflstomp machine. But they definitely can forget about my money, not spending a single dime on this crap anymore.
It looks like lying…
The problem i see at least in NA servers is that WG, are scaring away players with the last changes to the game.
The tanks we used to love, they re not longer the same anymore and we have to rethink how to play, and the ones that don´t want to, leave the game.
In NA servers the amount of players are lowering IMO, and the new ones don´t stay long.
and I love the game and feel sad about it.
“The recent matchmaking changes have been working well in terms of gameplay, however there is need to rework the credit income do to the effect it has had on the amount of hitpoints, and thus damage, are available in battles now.”
Never read such a bs.. so 3 minute games at average is seen as a positive effect on gameplay? Can’t really talk about tier 10 but tier 6-9 games are a lot less fun since there are top tier lights in every match complety dominating the game.. fu.