World of Tanks

[Simon_Jester]

Given that you're assigned to battles largely at random, you have pretty much a 50% chance of being on the winning side even if you do absolutely nothing in a match, because having one tank more or less isn't likely to have a decisive effect on the outcome. The odds of winning if you are an 'average' player is only going to be altered by a few percentage points by your participation.

Often you will destroy one enemy tank, sometimes you will be destroyed without getting a chance to fight back very well, sometimes you nail two or three, once in a long while you pull a Top Gun performance and singlehandedly turn the tide of the battle. All told, most battles one participates in could have been won without one's own actions, though it might have been harder.

Only if you're a really great player, or a good player consistently platooned with other good players, or an average player in a really good tank that is consistently matched against things that have trouble killing it, do you have much chance of persistently affecting the outcome of battles time after time. Which is what it takes to increase the odds of winning by 10 or 20%.

Or that's how it seems to me.

[xthetenth]

Given that you're assigned to battles largely at random, you have pretty much a 50% chance of being on the winning side even if you do absolutely nothing in a match, because having one tank more or less isn't likely to have a decisive effect on the outcome. The odds of winning if you are an 'average' player is only going to be altered by a few percentage points by your participation.

Often you will destroy one enemy tank, sometimes you will be destroyed without getting a chance to fight back very well, sometimes you nail two or three, once in a long while you pull a Top Gun performance and singlehandedly turn the tide of the battle. All told, most battles one participates in could have been won without one's own actions, though it might have been harder.

Only if you're a really great player, or a good player consistently platooned with other good players, or an average player in a really good tank that is consistently matched against things that have trouble killing it, do you have much chance of persistently affecting the outcome of battles time after time. Which is what it takes to increase the odds of winning by 10 or 20%.

Or that's how it seems to me.

It all really depends on who's in what tank. Coffee and I are both unspeakably vicious in our Pershings. He's got a 67% win rate or something, and I've got a 64% one, and I can tell you I've definitely earned mine, and from what I've seen he's earned his. My T25 is similar at 68%. The Pershing is great for making people make mistakes and I get 1.4 kills a game in, while the T25, I just average 1.5 kills a game in, and deal 1.9 times the damage I take. On the other hand, my M4A3E8, I dealt .88 times the damage I took, and I only won 39% of my games.

I think the top half or so of the tanks can impact a game. The top tanks can lose it by underperforming, and the second tier of tanks can win it by overperforming and doing stuff like getting the top tanks to do stupid things that get them killed ineffectually or chopping out their support. If you consistently underperform and rarely overperform, your stats will show it after a while.

That said, a few percent is a relatively large margin until you hit the level of either awesome or egregious failure for a person's overall stats. The guy who's rated as the best player in the game is at a 61% win rate overall. There are definitely better, the best is 79%, but it falls quickly to 73% in the top ten for the whole population and 67% in the top 100.

[Simon_Jester]

Yeah. In my case, I suspect I persistently underperform because of hardware problems- but unless you're the biggest thing in the match and your presence is vital to your team, that doesn't actually hurt your win/lose rate much, or at least doesn't knock it noticeably below 50%.

It's one reason I don't platoon with people even when it's feasible to do so- I know damn well that in a large fraction of all matches I have to be written off because of my graphics locking up, so I don't want to be the indispensible man to anyone.

[Mr. Coffee]

Next time your on look up AngusMcAWESOME and we'll go play a few, Simon.

[Simon_Jester]

OK, I'll do that, Coffee. Again, screen name's Simon_EZ8. Currently I'm playing an M4 with the 105mm, and a T-28 in preparation to get myself a KV. But if I'm just sitting there getting my ass kicked, it's because my laptop locked up. Slow to load, crashes, et cetera.

Lag and FPS are actually pretty manageable most of the time, it's the graphics freezing up entirely and killing the program that screws things up.

When I bought the laptop, I wasn't looking for game performance, and boy does it show.

[Mr. Coffee]

Just to make sure... You're on the North American server, right?

[Simon_Jester]

Unless I really fucked up the "what continent are you on" question and nobody told me, yeah.

[Zinegata]

I now have 75K XP out of the 100K needed for the T32. Yay.

On the subject of win rate... an average tanker should strive to at least hit the global average win rate for the particular tank they're playing. Not all tanks are created equal. The Pershing has a nice global win rate of around 50-54%. By contrast, something like the T1 Heavy consistently clocks in at 46% wins.

If you do slightly better, then you're probably better than average. If you do significantly better (i.e. 10% or more, like our two vicious Pershing players here), then you're probably really good. Somebody who has 56% wins on the T1 Heavy is far more impressive than 56% on the Pershing.

On the subject of the US line... it will depend on what you want later in your career. The Jumbo leads to the US heavy line, while the E8 leads to the US medium line. Both are excellent lines to pursue, albeit the US medium line is statistically better.

Finally, on a personal level, I would say map knowledge is the single most important skill you need to learn first above all others. It's often the difference between winning a match and losing one to a single scout that got past the defenses and capped solo.

[Nephtys]

Alright, well. I finally managed to get out of the A20 thanks to these 5x XP bonuses from this weekend. The T34 is a whole new beast! That 76mm gun it comes with sucks something terrible, but the T34-57 is such a wonderful change! I managed to actually kill a damaged KV-2 today, and it was like a breath of fresh air, after 3 tiers of bounced shots and suicidal scouting.

Toying around with the US Tank Destroyer line too. Is that much good? I'm entertained by the 2nd-tier one, and how it blasts apart poor low-end lights. Do they get worse in relation to their opposition too badly?

[Sir Sirius]

Toying around with the US Tank Destroyer line too. Is that much good? I'm entertained by the 2nd-tier one, and how it blasts apart poor low-end lights. Do they get worse in relation to their opposition too badly?

The high end US TDs T28 and T95 are agonizingly slow. The slowest TD I've played is a stock Ferdinand and that was a painful ordeal, but even a stock Ferdy is faster then a fully equipped T95.

Russians will be getting T-44 and T-54 based TDs in the future, I bet those are going to be a hoot.

[Thunderfire]

Alright, well. I finally managed to get out of the A20 thanks to these 5x XP bonuses from this weekend. The T34 is a whole new beast! That 76mm gun it comes with sucks something terrible, but the T34-57 is such a wonderful change! I managed to actually kill a damaged KV-2 today, and it was like a breath of fresh air, after 3 tiers of bounced shots and suicidal scouting.

Toying around with the US Tank Destroyer line too. Is that much good? I'm entertained by the 2nd-tier one, and how it blasts apart poor low-end lights. Do they get worse in relation to their opposition too badly?

The T-34/57 is a nice tank against tier 3-6 opponents. It lacks damage and penetration against higher tier opponents. The US TD are great. They are always among the best tanks of their tier.

[Broken]

I have not gotten very far in any TD line in release. I clawed my up to a fully upgraded Ferdinand in beta and with the last gun it was a beast. Have not touched the German TD line in live so far, my TD experience is thus limited to the Wolverine and SU-85. Both are interesting, but even if I was still an active player, I doubt I would grind them up much further. I just find TD's too limiting, although the big gun is nice.

The 5x weekend was very nice and let me get a bit further in my trees. I currently sit with 25k free xp and 3.3 million silver in the bank; 20k xp to the Patton, 19k xp to the American T34 (a shitty tank I plan on getting mainly for the free upgrade and extra premium), and 15k xp to the GW Panther (I hate arty, but was willing to grind this up via daily double xp wins. Just so that I would know what I was talking about when bitching about SPG's). I'm also around 55k xp to the IS-3 and 100k xp to the E-100. I have enough gold left over for more then a month of premium playtime. I just can't be bothered to get on and do anything.

I am a pretty average player overall, but except for 5x weekends and similar deals I think I am about done with this game now. I don't find the lower tiers of tanks that engaging to play with and the high tiers I enjoy suffer from almost requiring premium account status or grinding credits on a premium/low tier tank. Since I refuse to give WG anymore money until massive changes are done to rein in arty and I don't have the time/will to grind in my lowe, that puts the last nail in this game's coffin. While I have had many good times in this game, the balance is simply lacking (high-end game play revolves almost entirely around avoiding SPG fire zones/trying to kill SPG's to the point of ignoring enemy tanks at times) and the lack of game modes is a killer (I can only play capture the flag so many thousands of rounds). I have no real interest in World of Warplanes, but am quite interested in World of Battleships. So who knows, maybe I'll be a regular on a WG server sometime in the future if I can get into the WoBS's beta or when it is eventually released. But with Battlefield 3, Skyrim, and SWTOR all coming out before the end of the year, wargaming has basically lost its hook in me and my wallet.

[Simon_Jester]

Is artillery still that bad?

I have never had serious problems with artillery; I am far more likely to be taken out by another tank than by artillery fire, although it does happen. Then again, I don't play high-tier tanks, since my highest are 5 and 4 respectively.

[xthetenth]

Is artillery still that bad?

I don't really think so. It mainly hurts heavy tanks and tank destroyers, and in the case of the former, they can use plenty of cover to avoid arty fire, and in the case of the latter, concealment is key anyway, plus, cover is still viable with a bit of care.

I have never had serious problems with artillery; I am far more likely to be taken out by another tank than by artillery fire, although it does happen. Then again, I don't play high-tier tanks, since my highest are 5 and 4 respectively.

Higher tier arty gets a lot more potent but it becomes increasingly less capable of ruining a medium's day. Heavies need to worry, but if they didn't they'd be running roughshod over a lot of things, with similar guns to tank destroyers and a whole heap of armor and HP.

The US TD tree is amazing early on, and is generally quite solid. I generally find the US has some of the best tanks in the game, and the TD line is no exception. Here's my opinion on the US TDs against their German and Russian equivalents:

2: The T18 is massively superior. The main thing that can penetrate it frontally till tier three is the tank destroyers, and that howitzer is almost a guaranteed one shot kill.
3: The T82 is excellent, very fast and mounting a tremendous cannon that is liable to get one hit kills, although the Marder also has a vicious gun, and the SU-76 can mount a DPS machine gun, the T82's 57 can surpass that while being far faster and more mobile.
4: The T40 is solid. Not excellent, but solid. It gets the same gun options as the Sherman a tier earlier, and they're very good, but it's the Lee as a TD, so it isn't as maneuverable as I'd like. It doesn't have the armor of the Hetzer, but it gets better guns and a huge gun angle, and I don't think the SU-85B stacks up. I also think the -85B is the one I remember for being one of the worse stock vehicles in the game, miserably slow with a tiny weight capacity spare on the suspension.
5: The Wolverine is excellent and a DPS machine, but the StuG and SU-85 are also brilliant. The turret is nice, since it allows for more options on how to orient yourself in cover rather than having to turn out of cover and give a nice long window of time to shoot it.
6: The Slugger rocks. It handily beats the JagdPz IV, since the latter is a miserable tank with way too low pen a gun, and the SU-100 is stuck with some very slow aiming, inaccurate guns that do less dps, although the 122 has nice alpha. It also has occasionally bouncy armor and the advantage of a turret.
7: The T25 is the best TD in the game. My opinion, sure, but it's crazy fast, the mantlet is big enough you'll bounce more than the Jagdpanther, and the 105 is vicious on that quick a platform. The SU-152 hits hard but it tends to die when it opens fire.
8 and 9 I'm not as qualified to talk about, but I've driven the Tier 9s once each, and the T95 is brutal. You need to take care of arty, and it's viciously slow, but with something to keep your flanks clear it will kill anything it runs into. All the Tier 9s are very powerful vehicles though.

[xthetenth]

Oh awesome, they're adding the matchmaker changes they were talking about in the next server restart. The short version is that when you get into a tank, you'll only get the lowest matches possible, and as you accumulate more matches in that tank, the maximum tier will increase to its current max. So the only change is that matches will be easier until you get experience and hopefully the upgrades in a tank.

On the point of people influencing battles, I was running with one of the guys in one of the top clans, and him actually taking it half seriously led me to play pretty much up to his level. We played about ten and lost one. Most of them I was running a Pershing and he was in a Tiger II and we ran roughshod over people. If with good tactics you can take two damaged tanks up against five intact ones and win, you're liable to win a battle.

[Simon_Jester]

I suspect coordination plays a huge role.

If you try to do the same thing alone, you're just a speedbump to the enemy attack force, and as a rule there are enough idiots salted into a given match that if you try to convince people to go along with you, they'll ignore you or bicker. Unless you play at the very top of your game and manage a Top Gun that turns the tide of a battle, you're not going to be decisive alone, which means that your side's strategy is decided by the default behavior of a shower of uncoordinated random people.

Two or three people cooperating can have strategy. If you're talking with one or two other people who are on board with your plan, you can all go off and do something like "find a defensible position and hold this pass," thus blocking an enemy force that would otherwise have punched into your rear and snapped up six or seven of your side's vehicles piecemeal. I've seen that happen a few times.

Having one guy in a Pershing, no matter how good he is, shift the odds of winning the fight for his side from 50% to 60% is tough for me to believe. Having two good players in a Pershing and a Tiger II who coordinate do the same is actually fairly easy for me to believe.

[xthetenth]

I suspect coordination plays a huge role.

If you try to do the same thing alone, you're just a speedbump to the enemy attack force, and as a rule there are enough idiots salted into a given match that if you try to convince people to go along with you, they'll ignore you or bicker. Unless you play at the very top of your game and manage a Top Gun that turns the tide of a battle, you're not going to be decisive alone, which means that your side's strategy is decided by the default behavior of a shower of uncoordinated random people.

The two tier V tanks I poached at the start of the decap fight halved their capping force, itself a rather large deal. So is killing one of my opposite numbers, a Panther II to no damage because I held a much better position, and helping the fight in that alley of doom go significantly faster would have helped a lot in a cap race. Add in getting a decap shot on a T-34-85 and a Pershing twice each, and that hurts them a lot in what would likely have been a cap race. Yeah, it's not a dead certainty without him as the hammer to my anvil, but it's a big contribution.

Two or three people cooperating can have strategy. If you're talking with one or two other people who are on board with your plan, you can all go off and do something like "find a defensible position and hold this pass," thus blocking an enemy force that would otherwise have punched into your rear and snapped up six or seven of your side's vehicles piecemeal. I've seen that happen a few times.

Coordination is huge, of course. I die stupid and alone in my Pershing occasionally when I run solo, and that's gone at the start with company. I also don't know for sure there's a Tiger II heading up the alley so flanking it is a good idea.

Having one guy in a Pershing, no matter how good he is, shift the odds of winning the fight for his side from 50% to 60% is tough for me to believe. Having two good players in a Pershing and a Tiger II who coordinate do the same is actually fairly easy for me to believe.

If I rush back and decap, I'm responsible in large part for the win. If I manage to lure a heavy a tier higher than me to its quick death at the hands of a firing line in return for a single shot, I've done a considerable amount of damage to their team, especially if I go on to hurt other tanks. If I can take a higher tier tank's attention and trade damage even with him while my team either kills him or wins the firefight with him pointed at me, or plow shot after shot into him and kill him in return for very little damage, I've contributed to the win, especially if I do more nefarious things later. Now granted, coordination helps, but I tend to run my T25 solo a decent fraction of the time, and it performs admirably as well. Also, my overall rate is 66%, I won 9 straight today, 5 with that guy, and 4 with Seffs and his Panther II. Also, yeah, the Pershing is a good enough tank that if you drive it well, it can go hulkmode with reasonable frequency.

[Simon_Jester]

I'm not knocking your game skills here, X; I'm just noting that coordination makes a huge difference.

Playing solo, I've seen plenty of cases where the herd charges off in one direction and leaves some other obvious approach to their base completely naked. Even if there's enough firepower around to fend off the fast-cap and arty-kill brigade when they come roaring by in light tanks, it doesn't do a lot of good if heavy armor shows up a few minutes later to do the same thing.

Unless your tank-handling is just insanely good, you probably can't do anything about three or four comparable-strength tanks coming your way, not reliably. Sometimes it works out that way, even I've managed to get Top Gun once or twice after all, but it won't happen every damn game unless you're really good.

If you can do that reliably, and you're that good, then sure, your presence could singlehandedly elevate the odds of winning the battle by 10% or more. But it seems to me that you'd see a lot more cases where two or three good people in a platoon who all figure out what needs doing and add 10-15% to the team's chances by plugging a hole the herd of random kiddies missed, than cases where a lone wolf improves the odds of winning that much.

Of course, to do that, the platoon has to know their stuff better than a lot of the kiddies (myself included sometimes) who die "alone and stupid," as you say. It's not a question of just coordination or skill; it's that with coordination, you merely have to be good to change the odds of winning to 3:2 in your favor, whereas without it, you have to be fantastic.

[xthetenth]

I'm not knocking your game skills here, X; I'm just noting that coordination makes a huge difference.

Oh, I'm well aware, and I'll be the first to point you to the M4A3E8. I'm running an overall 53% win rate, gotta balance it out somewhere.

Playing solo, I've seen plenty of cases where the herd charges off in one direction and leaves some other obvious approach to their base completely naked. Even if there's enough firepower around to fend off the fast-cap and arty-kill brigade when they come roaring by in light tanks, it doesn't do a lot of good if heavy armor shows up a few minutes later to do the same thing.

I've died that way more than once, I've bailed my team out once or twice holding out for a long while, but that's reasonably rare.

Unless your tank-handling is just insanely good, you probably can't do anything about three or four comparable-strength tanks coming your way, not reliably. Sometimes it works out that way, even I've managed to get Top Gun once or twice after all, but it won't happen every damn game unless you're really good.

Yep, you just have to hope that you manage to make those guys' day harder on them enough that your team can do a better job on their weak flank.

If you can do that reliably, and you're that good, then sure, your presence could singlehandedly elevate the odds of winning the battle by 10% or more. But it seems to me that you'd see a lot more cases where two or three good people in a platoon who all figure out what needs doing and add 10-15% to the team's chances by plugging a hole the herd of random kiddies missed, than cases where a lone wolf improves the odds of winning that much.

Yeah, I'm not sure how much I've platooned in it, but I've run it solo a good few times without nuking my win rate. It's my favorite tank after all, so when I'm running something random, it's likely to be it. What I drive in a platoon is more likely to vary based on what the other guy plays, after all. Also, given a generally constant rate of platooning, I see a much larger advantage from those tanks. I blame it on them being terrifying gods of war. I only have a 53% overall even with half my games platooned. Then again the guy I was playing with has a 63% but he platoons a ton too.

Of course, to do that, the platoon has to know their stuff better than a lot of the kiddies (myself included sometimes) who die "alone and stupid," as you say. It's not a question of just coordination or skill; it's that with coordination, you merely have to be good to change the odds of winning to 3:2 in your favor, whereas without it, you have to be fantastic.

Yeah. I'll buy that. Without platooning, companies and CW, I'd think 54% would be a very good win rate (and the game would be dead, but I digress). However, I have seen some folks who show great ingenuity in plumbing the depths of awfulness, so the bottom end could very well get deeper.

[Simon_Jester]

Habitual suicide-scouts might well have an associated win rate below 50%- because by mindlessly charging and dying, they reduce their team's numbers without meaningfully contributing to the battle, even by killing opposing enemy light tanks or distracting the heavies.

I would expect an average win rate below 50% for myself just because of all the times my client locks up and thus I am physically unable to contribute to the battle- but since nearly half of all battles will be won without me anyway, it wouldn't be a lot below. I don't feel like checking what it is right this minute.

[Agent Sorchus]

Playing solo, I've seen plenty of cases where the herd charges off in one direction and leaves some other obvious approach to their base completely naked. Even if there's enough firepower around to fend off the fast-cap and arty-kill brigade when they come roaring by in light tanks, it doesn't do a lot of good if heavy armor shows up a few minutes later to do the same thing.

This is one of those reasons I swear by the KV-1S rather than the sluggish KV-3. In so many of my matches if I had the 44kmh of the 1S I can reasonably be close to one side and delivering 122mm rounds at longish range and still be close enough to the base to rush back and hold off 2 or 3 heavies with much gusto. With the KV-3 not so possible even if it has some of the stats for a better tank. (Of course right now I have the 3, but that is just so that I can eventually exploit it going up a tier. Eventually)

Does anyone bother with looking for the chat channel? I've been putting up sdn as channel and never see anyone on or any pre-made channels.

PS: I am interested in CW but have no clan so does anyone have a Clan that could use a Tier 6 driver?

[Simon_Jester]

For myself, I'm a habitual non-chatter.

[Zinegata]

I'm generally too busy shooting stuff to remember the chat channel.

[Force Lord]

There is an SDN chat channel, made by PeZook, though right now I can't remember the name.

[Vanas]

It tends to appear now and then, called 'SDN', whether made by Scorchus or PeZook. I lurk when I remember, but I don't seem to be on when most are.

Back on the largish discussion above: I'm only really learning medium tanks still, when platooned with xthetenth, and I'm an inherently cautious driver, especially when driving a medium that's bigger than a fair few heavies on the field. But, having people in a platoon who're calling targets and (better than that) giving advice is a real boon.
Still, the Panther II isn't a Pershing and vice-versa. Me trying to do all of the stuff that he can do would be redundant and vice versa. I've got a gun with better penetration and fire rate, bolted to a tank that's bigger, faster, slighly better armoured but distinctly less good in a brawl owing to a slow turn rate and it's vast slab sides.
It's all a learning curve and I've no doubt the Panther II's 70% win rate is going to dip over time. But, having fun, taking it half seriously and just finding a vehicle you enjoy is definitely worth it both for enjoyment and for coming away happy.

I still like my Tiger II and the other barns, but I'm slowly coming around to the idea of this medium lark. Besides, it's so much harder to ram things in the King Tiger.