World of Tanks Mark 2

[xthetenth]

I've never understood that line of reasoning. Even if it's true that all the terribads come out on weekends, they're on the other team too, so it wouldn't affect your winning in any way.

It increases the chance of teams being irreparably bad. There's a sort of critical mass of bad that always invokes murphy's law at the worst time so you'll die unsopported and then people will mess up the easy win you gave them.

[The Vortex Empire]

Sure, but the the exact same thing will also happen to the other team just as often. On average you shouldn't win less.

[Jub]

It also means a three man platoon of good players can dominate even more than usual.

[xthetenth]

When a lot of top level play is based on analyzing the course of a battle and affecting it at the key points an unpredictable battle really hurts that. Also, with the win rates a purple platoon gets, anything that goes 50-50 like that is a serious issue for keeping win rate up. Even a platoon of 55%ers is going to be negatively impacted.

Add in that a lot of these things come from pubstars without understanding context compounded by a healthy dose of confirmation bias and you get things like this.

[Skywalker_T-65]

I don't think its to the point where good matches are 'impossible'. Just in my experience, I end up with way more fail teams than typical on special weekends. Especially x5 ones.

Probably a side effect of none of my tanks (save maybe the KV-4) being able to carry a team.

[The Vortex Empire]

Victory!
Battle: Westfield Thursday, May 09, 2013 7:21:08 PM
Vehicle: T-54
Experience received: 1,957
Credits received: 86,307
Battle Achievements: Radley-Walters's Medal, Pascucci's Medal, Top Gun, Sniper, Mastery Badge: "1st Class"

6,741 damage. 8 kills. Only Master Badge 1st Class. Goddamn is this thing OP.

[Vendetta]

Wins / Battles 25 / 39 64.1%

Avg. / Total Exp. 843 / 32 885
Credits total 265 812

If 5x brings out this kind of fail, can I have it more often?

Also, a free day of premium meant that that's profit. In my Centurion 7 all day. I know, right?

[xthetenth]

So I brought out my tier 4 arty that I've driven about five times, load gold for best results and this happened.

Victory!
Map: South Coast
Date: Saturday, May 11, 2013 4:00:54 PM
Vehicle: AMX 105AM
Exp: 8,010 (x5) + Credits: 35,442
Achievements: : Top Gun, Defender, Master Gunner, Mastery Badge: "Ace Tanker"

I'm helping (artillery get nerfed)!

3,476 damage because I clicked on red tanks super good. In a tier six match.

Here I am making it look easy (because it is)

[Hawkwings]

Tell me about the other match you played where your entire team done derped and a single medium came in and wiped your entire side's artillery. Or the other match where you couldn't hit anything all match and no-damaged bounced everything you hit. Or the other match where you couldn't contribute at all because your team rolled over the other side too fast.

Not saying that arty can't have great matches, but there's a lot more variance and you rely on your team a lot more. The best match for an arty is when your team is only slightly worse than the enemy, and you can make the difference. Oh, and gold shells obviously help a lot.

[xthetenth]

Actually there was a tier 8 match where my team derped cataclysmically (how do I shoot a Ferdinand?) before that and a wide park I almost managed to salvage against three tanks solo with like four kills. In the tier 8 match I managed to pretty much solo an Indien Panzer, and in the wide park one I started off with two oneshots and had a permatrack kill on a Churchill III later in the game as if that's fair.

I sure do like being able to nearly out-dpm tanks of the actual maximum tier I can ever see.

[Scottish Ninja]

So I met the Chieftain today at Cantigny. My friend asked about how the M60 was gonna be introduced but flubbed it by saying "M60 Sherman" and got glared at. There was some talk about Russian perspectives vs. American perspectives on tier gaps in matchmaking, and how Americans can get turned off of the game, and the point that Wargaming expected Warplanes to be a bigger hit in the US but keeps finding that more people want Warships instead, something that our group agreed with. The museum also had a few outdoor tank exhibits that we were free to climb about on so we dorked out on those for a bit. Some mentions of "World of Tanks 2.0" coming in the future which is supposed to take advantage of an upgraded BigWorld engine for larger map sizes, longer sight lines, bigger teams, and multicore support among other things.

[Xess]

So I tried to log on and the site didn't work. I then went to reset my password and the site won't let me do that either. I get the link to reset it but it just keeps going back to the "click here to reset password" page. I am not impressed Wargaming.

[White Haven]

Multicore support. Wow, it's like...it's like it's 2005 again, back in the days when that was something new.

[Simon_Jester]

As long as they don't sacrifice compatibility with low-end computers: that's my big concern, because I am NOT buying a new laptop just to run World of Tanks on, and if this thing were any lower-end it wouldn't play the game at all.

[White Haven]

I definitely see where you're coming from, but nothing that wasn't a Celeron* sold in the last, eh, probably 7-8 years has been single-core, so I just end up staring at gaming developers who just keep forging ahead with single-core design and then act surprised when they have performance problems at times. Not saying that's the case in this particular situation, just that it's a pattern I've seen way too often, games that end up CPU-gated for performance that aren't designed for anything made after the Pentium 4.

[Simon_Jester]

I definitely see where you're coming from, but nothing that wasn't a Celeron* sold in the last, eh, probably 7-8 years has been single-core, so I just end up staring at gaming developers who just keep forging ahead with single-core design and then act surprised when they have performance problems at times. Not saying that's the case in this particular situation, just that it's a pattern I've seen way too often, games that end up CPU-gated for performance that aren't designed for anything made after the Pentium 4.

I don't much care about single-core or multi-core or anything else. I'm just single-issue on the game's ability to run on low-performance machines.

[Temjin]

So, I'm really starting to hate the Churchill VIII. It's got great armour and an okay gun, but that's all it has going for it. It's slow as fuck, it has a football field worth of hull in front of it's turret, and it's armour don't mean much when it's not top tier. This tank has my worst win rating out of all my tanks. I feel like I'm letting my team down just by driving this turd.

I'm sure I've had at least some good games in it (even though I can't remember any right now) but it's such a fucking chore to drive it. At this point, I'm only driving it when it gets a bonus to experience, so at least I won't have to drive it that fucking often.

[Nephtys]

Churchill VIII is really the low point of the Brit Heavies... every tree seems to have a 'free XP sink' deliberately thrown in, with the possible exception of US Mainline Mediums.

[The Vortex Empire]

I wouldn't even call it well armored. The rather large, easy to hit lower plate everyone aims for is paper thin. It's just a bad tank in general. Slow, bad armor, and mediocre at best firepower.

[The Infidel]

Sometimes, lots of arty can be fun. Nice, soft targets.

Victory!
Map: Live Oaks
Date: 13. mai 2013 20:50:06
Vehicle: IS-3
Exp: 4 035 (x5) + Credits: 26 204
Achievements: : Pascucci's Medal

[Vendetta]

I wouldn't even call it well armored. The rather large, easy to hit lower plate everyone aims for is paper thin. It's just a bad tank in general. Slow, bad armor, and mediocre at best firepower.

The lower plate isn't particularly thinner, but it is flat, like the rest of the front. You have to angle the Churchill 7 like Jesus.

The real problem is that against many tanks the QF 77mm just isn't good enough unless you're going to use APCR regularly. Churchill 7 is the only tank I've used premium ammo on, because every time it got into tier 8 games it was just pain and uselessness.

Fortunately, the Black Prince is miles better.

[Vanas]

At this point, I would love to lose a match. just lose one, after a decent fight that doesn't leave me wanting to tear the heads off of the drooling fuckwits I'm lumbered with.

Seven consecutive curbstomps. We're not losing, we're being utterly annhilated. Watching all my team's heavies drive in one by one into a hill that was covered by TD was a particular highlight. What's wrong with these people, and why do I get stuck with them?

[xthetenth]

I blame the 5x for making horrible players remember the game.

I had a game where three separate heavies were firing HE. One T32 ended with about 50 damage and no kills, and I watched an IS-3 and IS-6 duel with HE. In his defense, that IS-3 loaded HE after I bounced two shells in my T69, but bouncing shells consistently off a medium is never a defense.

Wound up way less than 50% in a platoon of good players running possibly the most overpowered tank in the game. Thanks for not knowing how to click red tanks guys.

[Vendetta]

Meanwhile I've been running a pretty solid 60-65% over the whole x5 weekend, I didn't have any really good x5 games, but overall performance has been strong.

[xthetenth]

Let me get home and I'll post a replay of a near 7k damage game in my E4 where because I'm not terrible enough to have gotten penned while punching through an E-50 and E-75 I'm some sort of terrible camper with under 900 (effish I suppose, and when told not to pretend he has XVM, he decided to claim that was my non-company stats, as if they're separately tracked).