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All you have to do is luck out, really. One good match in a tank that nets you like 1500 XP gets you a lot of credit.

This may be because you're being compared to all the people who own that tank but don't drive it very often. Or own it but eternally banzai-charge into nothing and get killed without getting a high score. I don't know.

Unless I'm getting it wrong, the mastery badge is about averages, so a guy who only drove his E8 once and got 1500 XP in it will be on top?

Or not. Bah. Who cares, my ego is satisfied.

Also, in another story of an insane fluke: I blew up a 60% KV-1S with a single shot aimed at the turret ring (though not with the E8). It was a good day!

I think the mastery badge is about peak scores.

Simon_Jester wrote:I think the mastery badge is about peak scores.

It's your peak score compared to the average scores of everybody else, so it means essentially nothing.

Ah-HA!

So all you have to do to be an "Ace" is to have your best day be equal to the average of the top 1% of players...

I doubt that. I've basically established that the T-54 bar for ace badge was hovering around 1900. While possible, I doubt that a full 1% of players are getting 1900 xp a match in that tank. I think it's relative maxima. Namely the sort of shiny that can be accomplished by a reasonable level of skill and excessive play, and gained by good play so the former can tell themselves they're the latter.

It actually works by the top 1 percent of games played. So out of every game played, 1 in 100 games is going around getting a Boeler's Medal, and wrecking all in their path. It makes sense. I've scored at least 6 or 7 games breaking 2000 XP in a Tier 7/8, so why not the same for a tier 9?

I thought it was based on the top percentiles of games played that week.

Interestingly, if that's the metric, then a large number of incompetent players operating a particular model of tank in a particular week would drive down the average and lower the bar for entry into the mastery badge category. Sometimes, you seem to get a mastery badge for no reason: I have a mastery badge on my Wolverine, which I didn't even like or keep for very long. I just had one half-decent game, and I guess everyone else driving a Wolverine sucked that week.

I believe that is the full criterion, yes. I'd be really interested to see if the stuff that the newest players tend to drive like tier ones for countries that haven't had a new tree in a while have the lowest bars to entry. It's probably that and tanks "everyone knows" are overpowered that tend to attract a lot of bad drivers running them consistently.

Speaking of mastery badges, finally got one in my Patton with a 2215 xp round where I had four kills and got a scout, a sniper and a confederate as well as lighting up a T95 and T28 as they got rained on by arty. I love my Patton, and can't wait for the T10 version.

Speaking of that, apparently they'll be trying to get a test server up this week. If you want to quickly and painlessly get up to a tank you want to try or see if a tank you're on the tree for is going to be fun, that's your best chance.

The most experience I ever got in a game was 2092 in my IS, although I had the Ace mastery badge on the IS long before that. I have other tanks which are more powerful: better penetration, better armour, more speed, higher tier, etc, but I haven't managed to equal that score on any of them. In fact, I haven't cracked 2000 XP on any other tank in my garage, yet I've scored over 2000 XP three times on my IS. Go figure.

The Tier 7 heavies seem to me to be... unusually effective in matches where they're at or near the top. More so than heavies of most other tiers.

The IS is probably a really good tank to get high XP rounds in, I seem to remember when I had one that it tended to do really well when it did well. I think a lot of it is that it has a gun that has a very large amount of damage per shell, a high refire rate and a good amount of speed balanced out by a lack of armor. That sort of tank lends itself to hitting from unnoticed places and quickly ruining enemies so it can rake in XP if things go well. In fact, my stats agree with you. It's one of the three tanks I've cracked 2300 in, which are my Tiger (P), my best at 2536, which got there mainly because I was having a really good game and then I permatracked a Löwe with shots to its drive sprocket and took it out from full from one of the best bits of firing cover I've ever had in the game, my Type 59 which I've played well over twice as much as any other tank and am really good in, and the IS which I drove early in the game when I was comparatively worse and never even got a top gun in. I definitely think that that tank is prone to outstandingly good rounds more than most.

I also very strongly agree with Simon. The Tier 7 heavies are the boundary between seriously wonky heavies with notable flaws and really capable ones that show the direction of the rest of the tree (except for the french, that happens at tier 8 for them). Tiers six and seven also encompass the single biggest jump in pen in the game, so there's a lot of stuff only one tier below that can't do too much to a tier 7, which really helps it be a great top tier. For example the US medium and heavy trees both jump 40mm in penetration from 6 to 7, but then only jump 20 and 0 respectively from 7 to 8.

Tier 7 tanks all have unique properties and MM that make them capable of having EXTREME amounts of influence on a game.

All of them have excellent guns for their expected opposition. All of them have enough armor to be (if utilized properly) effectively immune to tier 5, and extremely resistant to Tier 6. And the IS has the speed and mobility to play like a big medium and get to great spots on the map. The T29 has that utterly invulnerable turret that'll let it 1v6 the enemy and win, given a slight incline. And the Tigers are kinda is the worst of the lot, but they've got a super accurate gun that fires shells that're practically free, so take what you can get I suppose.

Nephtys wrote:All of them have excellent guns for their expected opposition. All of them have enough armor to be (if utilized properly) effectively immune to tier 5, and extremely resistant to Tier 6. And the IS has the speed and mobility to play like a big medium and get to great spots on the map. The T29 has that utterly invulnerable turret that'll let it 1v6 the enemy and win, given a slight incline. And the Tigers are kinda is the worst of the lot, but they've got a super accurate gun that fires shells that're practically free, so take what you can get I suppose.

The tiger P has huge frontal armor that can let you duel any other tier 7 and win at anything greater than close range which is huge if it's top tier, and the Tiger is a very punchy, fast firing sniper machine that actually has worthwhile armor when it's top tier if angled properly. A tiger in a good position can change fights a quarter of the map away and its acceleration is good enough to actually be able to do that with some regularity. The Tiger twins have my best average xp for match of the tier sevens. Then again I was a better player when I played them.

I enjoy playing my BT-2, but quite often I see other tanks moving oddly and try to shoot enemies trough houses or mountains, or they simply shoot in the air all the time. I can't decide if it's a bot, a total noob or a small child. (The kid of a friend of mine play WoT and is 8.)

My question is: How does a bot behave? How can I distinguish between a bot and a noob?

There are no bots in WoT. Most likely what you see are people with horrible lag. If your ping goes high enough, you can get really wierd shooting effects. I had it happen to me in my AMX 40 once, a Stuart was circling me, and everytime I got a shot off, the lag jumped up and the thing was already past my shot.

EDIT: Then again, sometimes you get idiots who just randomly shoot off shells. You can't tell if they are idiots or noobs though, if you are playing at Tier 2 it is probably both. But the point above stands, there are no bots in World of Tanks, just people who are occasionally idiots.

Hm. I think I found my problem: After getting the still not hugely impressive 128 for the E-75, I've really kind of maxed out. The E-100 isn't really my ideal and my EU account is languishing down at T4 yank tanks. Though the M6 Compensator amuses me, even if I've no idea what to do with it.

So, back to the Panther for a bit, I think. Just scoot around and stop giving a damn about massed loss streaks.

Skywalker_T-65 wrote:There are no bots in WoT. Most likely what you see are people with horrible lag. If your ping goes high enough, you can get really wierd shooting effects. I had it happen to me in my AMX 40 once, a Stuart was circling me, and everytime I got a shot off, the lag jumped up and the thing was already past my shot.

EDIT: Then again, sometimes you get idiots who just randomly shoot off shells. You can't tell if they are idiots or noobs though, if you are playing at Tier 2 it is probably both. But the point above stands, there are no bots in World of Tanks, just people who are occasionally idiots.

I play many tiers, but like BT-2. A bot can be controlled clientside, so how can you say there are none? Besides, WG threatens to ban people who use bots and you can complaint about bots ingame, so I think they exist. That aside, horrible lag and idiots can make the tanks do weird things, but when I see tanks drive aimlessly around and shoot at random, I start to wonder...

Well, when I talk about bots I mean (in this case) tanks that are computer controlled, with no interaction from an actual person. As far as I know, there are none of those.

Now if people can make and control bots, then yes, that could be a problem. And I would start wondering too, if people acted like that when I played.

EDIT: And to clarify, I mean AI bots. Like you would get in say Halo or Call of Duty.

Skywalker_T-65 wrote:Well, when I talk about bots I mean (in this case) tanks that are computer controlled, with no interaction from an actual person. As far as I know, there are none of those.

Now if people can make and control bots, then yes, that could be a problem. And I would start wondering too, if people acted like that when I played.

EDIT: And to clarify, I mean AI bots. Like you would get in say Halo or Call of Duty.

Me too. Tanks controlled clientside by programs without human interaction, like this. (found by Google)

Hmm...in that case I won't be any help in telling them from normal players. I didn't even know you could do that...

I seem to recall a review in the SA thread talking about WoT which mentioned one bot that had a waypoint system and that the main flaw was that the thing would get really sketchy if its waypoints were blocked. However, I've found that for every bad move a bot would pull there are players who can think of much worse. They're probably shooting into the air for chuckles or to get a rough idea of their reload time. Is it bad that I think it'd be a barrel of laughs to see whether I can customize the thing to give a better than 50% win rate?'

Also, vanas, if you want to laugh and be panthers together, just ping me and I'll probably do it if I'm free. I'm actually starting to close in on the Panther II: Panther Harder, so an excuse to drive panthers is good.

Noticed an interesting thing yesterday: I no longer feel like whimpering in a corner when the matchmaker puts my Easy 8 in a match with half the enemy team composed of Tier 8+ heavies ; It's not a situation I like, but I feel confident that I can do some good even in such a lopsided game. And the results seem much better than the last time I was on a WoT spree, too - either the game was rebalanced for 7.4 or I finally got good enough at the game

I don't die nearly as much from artillery, no longer panic when I see a Tiger, T29 or even a T34 heavy rumbling in the distance, and can reliably target weak spots on a whole lot of tanks.

Plus I learned not to get into sniper duels with PzIVs

You're just in time. I've heard a really interesting set of rumors about the next patch. The T-28 is losing the 85mm. The Su-85 is losing the 107 and getting a better 85. The T-34-85 is losing the 100mm and getting a better engine and a rebalanced top 85mm along with the T-43. The reasoning I've been seeing is that those tanks' main positive is a better ability to uptier compared to their peers, so they've been rebalanced to fit better in their tiers. Why is this? Apparently they're narrowing the matchmaker spreads on the tanks to one tier up or down. So it's looking to me like the tier sixes are going to see tier eights at a maximum rather than a hilariously powerful average for the match. I'm really hoping that those rumors pan out as well as I'm hoping, I'm looking forward more to that about as much as making mediums and TDs straight up clan wars viable.

A rebalanced matchmaker would be very good for WoT, although it still doesn't solve the problem of high tier arty which is the main reason I haven't touched my account in a couple months or so. In fact, it would probably make my M103 and E-50 matches even worse since arty would be in an even smaller pool. I just got too sick of doing everything right (everything except the holy mantra of "hump a fucking rock" anyway) and then losing a quarter of my health and 3 or 4 modules when some tier 7 or 8 arty "misses" me.