This report comes from WG Fest, the first-ever global gathering for those who keep World of Tanks and the Wargaming universe close to their heart! A lot has been going on, and we didn't want tankers who couldn't make it to Moscow to miss anything. That’s why we’re bringing all the latest news to you in a single article: from a small look at what’s just arrived through to a lowdown on what’s ahead for World of Tanks. There’s a lot in the works, and lots more on the way, so let’s get started!
Premium vehicles that rolled out 5–6 years ago, and were perfectly fine in terms of combat parameters back then, often underperform in the game as it stands today. In Update 9.15, we set out to fix that. Since then, 18 vehicles were rebalanced. This made them more on par with their respective tiers. We'll continue to listen to your thoughts on Premium vehicles and tweak them in future updates.
Here's a handy summary of the changes made from 9.15 to 9.17:
Work on the game’s core mechanics always keeps the developers busy. Rest assured, we have great things in the pipeline, including—of course!—new vehicles. They will be designed to boost gameplay diversity with new tactics, alongside incorporating your feedback and respecting the historical stats. Here’s a sneak peek at just some of them:
National Tech Trees change and grow as World of Tanks evolves. This growth often happened with little change to how they relate to each other regarding historical authenticity and stats. As a result, some are no longer relevant in the game as it stands today. In 2017, we’ll be putting things right with a series of tweaks to the very structure of several national Tech Trees:
Over the past year, we’ve been working hard to address your feedback on the matchmaker and fix well-known issues, including, for instance, getting ranked in the top/middle/bottom of the list an uneven number of times. We won’t just be tweaking matching—we’ll be overhauling its very core and the template system, so that it fits better with the game as it is today.
The improved matchmaker design will balance teams according to a number of templates (e.g., 3/5/7: three vehicles at the top of the list, five in the middle, and seven at the bottom). And one important factor comes to the forefront here: with a vehicle roster as diverse as that in World of Tanks, you are free to choose any tank in your Garage. We wouldn’t want to limit your choice. Therefore, the variety of vehicles waiting to get in a battle is different in prime time and periods when fewer players are online. To prevent excruciatingly long queues, the matchmaker may sometimes create two-tier or even single-tier battles.
Fewer easy wins and quick losses (these are usually caused by the uneven distribution of vehicle types between teams): In the future, the matchmaker will spread vehicles types across two teams more evenly.
EXAMPLE: The current system might balance two teams with five TDs against six heavy tanks. The enhanced system spreads vehicles across the teams so that both have TDs and heavy tanks. Though this doesn’t necessarily mean there’ll always be equal numbers of identical classes (e.g., a team with three TDs/two heavy tanks against a team with three TDs and three heavy tanks).
Global rebalancing is hard to implement and get right, but we are committed to moving forward on this front. This past summer, players and developers tested a few different balance setups on the special Sandbox server. We can’t thank you enough for answering the call and helping us with feedback and suggestions!
The second Sandbox kicks off in 2017. Unlike the first, which featured massive changes to vehicle roles, and more, stage two will be divided into two phases, each introducing selective changes for you to test. This time, we’ll continue fine-tuning features that showed good results during summer testing.
Currently, the penetration stats and great accuracy of top-tier TDs and medium tanks allow them to hit and penetrate well-armored frontal projection, even at long range. We’ll be tweaking their penetration stats and penetration loss over distance mechanic, as well as accuracy stats for all other tanks, to raise the role of armor and make it more fun to play heavily-armored vehicles.
For artillery, we’ll continue testing the “stun/shellshock” feature. We improved it a lot since the first Sandbox, so it's different from what some of you saw this summer. Also on the docket in this phase are aiming improvements, including the introduction of an alternative aim similar to Battle Assistant. The UI will undergo a few improvements as well and will provide you with important information about the stun: duration, radius, etc.
You're likely eager to hear what else is on the way, and we have more exciting news inbound. Stay tuned!