Lost lands

Pearl River, Dragon Ridge, Province, Hidden Village, Severogorsk, Komarin, Northwest, South Coast. I miss these battlegrounds in World of Tanks. All withdrawn and no longer playable in public random matches. I have fond memories of playing them. Even Port. 

Unbalanced? I don't know. What I do know is that I'm bored seeing the same few maps pop up again and again. I'd like some variation. A little variation is better than a little imbalance. Or how would it be if Wargaming.net were to tweak these maps to ameliorate them, rather than ditching them.

I wonder if I'll ever miss Overlord and Stalingrad, though. I doubt it.

Toxic Tankers

It seems that especially on weekends, an especially toxic strain of tankers infests the World of Tanks. They complain about their own team, rage and curse at players who don't play the way they deem correct, and often give away to the enemy the position of players they feel deserve to die, even though it's at the expense of weakening their own team's chance of winning. Of course, usually all this is after their own tank's destruction.

You may remember South Park's take on people with anger management issues (episode T.M.I.): angry men's members are smaller than average, and that's what they're really angry about. But there's no point in reminding tankers about that unless you're trolling them.

In fact, this kind of  angry ranting in WoT is not helped by Wargaming.net's response to it, which is basically to ignore it. They believe that their in-game reporting tool and automated response is sufficient. It is not. What wargaming.net expect is that if people are rude, enough people will report them during the game that their automatic tools will realize that and penalize the player. There are two things wrong with that:

• Lack of reporting
• Lack of feedback

Let's look at the first of those: lack of reporting. If a player is cursing and swearing at his team-mates, many players who would like to report the player at that point cannot do so because they're far too busy controlling their tanks and trying to avoid getting killed themselves. In the heat of battle is the wrong place to be reporting. Moreover, reporting players for inaction is problematic, because the player might be simply watching through gun-sights at a spot he expects an enemy to appear at. General inaction can only be thoroughly evaluated after the battle.

Lack of feedback is the next problem. There appears to be no benefit in reporting players. They never seem to receive penalties. Maybe they do, but how would anyone know? Lack of feedback leads in turn to the first problem: lack of reporting. Why bother reporting when nothing ever seems to be done?

Finally, Wargaming.net will no longer follow up on reports of player rulebreaking that you raise out-of-game on their support website. Even if you support such a complaint with a replay of the match in question, their customer support agents will take no action.

Meantime, player misbehaviour worsens. I've taken to changing my "General Settings" to disable battle-chat. At least I don't have to listen to the ragers. But then I can't tell if they're giving away our positions to the enemy.

Blaugust, Day 1.

Cosmetic items and paying for power

Gevlon has a very interesting article on what defines a "cosmetic item" in a game. While I generally agree with much of this I have a few reservations. The value of "cosmetic" in Gevlon's definition is one that won't affect anyone's gameplay. Gevlon goes further and suggests that this is the basis on which we can determine if a game is pay2win*. If an item affects somebody's gameplay it is a pay2win game.

Whilst I can agree with that, I don't think it is sufficient to determine that a game is play2win. There are items that may not affect my gameplay that nonetheless increase the power of other players competing with me.

To take an example, let's look at premium tanks in World of Tanks. Premium tanks are acquired in one of two ways: usually they are bought with cash, either directly through the web-store, or indirectly by buying a currency called gold through the web-store, and buying the premium tank with gold. The second and more unusual way is to win the tank by completing an in-game time-limited mission (for example, I won a ToG II by completing a mission called Togtober last October. Most dedicated players were able to complete this mission: it wasn't onerous, only time-consuming. However no new player can ever complete the mission, because the closing date is past). Most premium tanks aren't available in this way.

My premium tank may be no better in a particular match than your standard tank, and will not change your gameplay, but I have two extra advantages that I bought with my premium tank:
1. I earn extra credits, so I can afford more credit-bought premium ammo than you can (all else being equal), and
2. I can share a crew between my premium tank and a standard tank, thus training that crew twice as fast as  you can train your crew - I mean that I'll have one well-trained crew capable of crewing two tanks, to your two half-trained crews (or well-trained and untrained) after an equal number of matches.

Of course, in-game, you won't know whether my crew was fast-trained, gold-trained or simply normally-trained. You won't know if my premium ammo was credit-bought after a long grind, credit-bought after a short grind in a premium, or shop bought. And you won't care. You'll never meet me again, and it won't change your gameplay - driving a premium tank doesn't signal any level of competence or damage-dealing ability to other players, and plenty of non-premium tanks carry premium ammo**. The tank itself is nothing special in battle. Nonetheless I buy myself power when I buy a premium tank, which seems like a cosmetic item. In itself it is not more powerful than your standard tank. It gives me a little more power than you over the course of several matches, but that is irrelevant to you, because we will only meet once in battle.

See Hetzer Forever for more on that.


* Syncaine makes the point that it's more exactly pay-4-power. I think we can all agree that this is what we mean by pay2win.

** Of course, premium ammo is a clear non-cosmetic pay2win item. My point is that the premium tank seems like a cosmetic item, while also being pay2win.

Paying to lose

As I mentioned in "Plexing Warcraft", in EVE Online, paying for a powerful ship doesn't necessarily mean you become a powerful player. I'm learning the same lesson in World of Tanks, where my latest RMT purchase is the E-25. It's a light, fast, "tank destroyer". I put that in quotes because in fact, its accurate gun doesn't actually do a lot of damage per shot, though it does penetrate well, and has a fast reload rate. Anyway, I bought it for reasons of envy. Everybody else seems to have one, and they are in almost every battle where their tier is allowed. So much so that wargaming.net has decided to withdraw them from sale before every tier 7 battle becomes 15v15 E-25s swarming over each other.

So I bought one while I still could, and now I'm learning the hard way what EVE veterans know. I've paid for a tank that I don't know how to play. Its high speed makes me want to rush forward and spot. I seem to die very fast in every battle, though sometimes I grant you it is fun weaving between enemy heavies as they swing their guns in my direction, trying to swat the fly that's buzzing around their faces.

All the same, I've got to find a better tactic. It reminds me a lot of the ELC AMX, another tank that I can't play. Let me try playing as a sniper instead of as a scout.

Hetzer forever!

In World of Tanks, I passed a new milestone yesterday: 10,000 battles completed.

And appropriately, my favourite tank, the Hetzer, fought and won the 10,000th. Go me!

So what have I been doing for 10,000 battles? As you can see from my ratings, I'm a pretty average tanker. And I've mostly been using low tier tanks: there doesn't seem to be any advantage in advancing to higher tiers, as the tanks are much more expensive, and so is the ammo, and you can still be facing opponents two tiers above you. Well, up to tier 9, anyway, when only tier 10 is above you; and tier 10, where nobody is above you.

Tier 5 or 6 tanks seem to be a sweet spot for earning credits (for non-premium tanks). In fact VBAddict shows that the top 10 tanks are all in those two tiers, so there really isn't much incentive to go into higher tiers where net income is lower, or even negative.

It's taken me two years to understand what I should have been doing with my premium tanks. Every now and then, wargaming.net holds a World of Tanks event where the prize is a premium tank Premium tanks normally can only be got by spending real money to buy them. You buy an in-game currency called `gold` with real money, and then you can spend that gold on buying in-game items. Premiom tanks can only be bought with gold (not with the other in-game currency 'credits' that you can earn by playing the game), and so are often referred to as "gold tanks". I've won a fair few of them now. The latest such event was Togtober, and that would net you a British heavy TOG II* premium tank if you completed it. It was while I was trying to earn it, that a clan-mate happened to mention that there is no penalty for putting crew from similar tanks** in a premium tank. That's when it clicked.

Let me first explain that crew members are trained for a particular tank. For instance, if you look at my Hetzer commander in the picture above (Stabsfeldwebel Krammer), you'll see that he's trained to 105% in the Hetzer (the 5% boost comes from some extra equipment I've added to the base tank model: "Improved Ventilation"). If I were to take Krammer, and put him in another Tank Destroyer (my Marder, for instance), he wouldn't be as effective. He would suffer a 25% penalty due to being unfamiliar with that machine, so he would be effectively at 75% (+5% if I were to add improved ventilation to the Marder). Crucially this penalty is NOT suffered if I move him to a premium tank**

Once I realized this (two years is all it took), I knew at once that I should never give my premium tanks their own crew. I should always put crew from other tanks into them, because I can transfer them from their main tank to the premium and back again at no penalty: the premium tank becomes a training vehicle. I immediately kicked out all my premium crews, and put a bullet in the head of most of them. From now on, my TOG II* is dedicated to training my British heavy Black Prince crew.

Sadly, most of my other premium tanks were light tanks, and I'm not really a fan of light tanks, except at tiers 1 and 2. So the next thing I did was to review the tech-trees for every nation to look at what premium tanks were suitable for training purposes. And of course, I came across the Russian tier 5 heavy tank, the Churchill III***. This tank was ideal for training the crews of my Russian heavies. It's rock solid. Slow moving, but hard to penetrate, and with a decent gun. It can stand toe-to-toe with most tier 5s.

Then I took a look at American tanks, and bought a tier 5 heavy T14. I'm not so comfortable with this tank - my play-style doesn't suit it. It's more nimble than the Churchill, the gun is decent, but the armor is a little thin. Faced with a KV-1, it had better run! Now that I write this, it seems obvious that I should play it more like a medium tank. Anyway, the good news is that I now have three heavy premiums for the three nations that most of my heavies belong to.

The German tree faces a disadvantage, though. Firstly, it has no tier 5 heavy premium tank. In fact its first premium heavy is the tier 8 Loewe. That doesn't concern me too much, though, because I prefer the German TDs. But there is no German tier 5 premium TD, either! The first is the Tier 6 Dicker Max. Tier 5 premiums cost 1500 gold (the currency that is paid for with euros or dollars). Tier 6 premiums are more than double that, at 3200g. So I'm going to hold off buying it until it's on special offer.

Up until now, I've been spending gold only on garage slots and barracks bunks, since these (and gold tanks) are the only items you can't buy them with credits. All the so-called "gold" ammo (APCR and HEAT) that I have was actually bought with credits, not gold. But with the purchase of the Churchill 3 and  the T14, I have officially gone pay-to-win.


* I've no idea why the Tog II* has an asterisk in its name, either.

** No penalty, as long as the vehicles are the same kind. So Tank Destroyer crews can be moved to premium Tank Destroyers and suffer no penalty, but will suffer a penalty if moved to a premium Heavy Tank, for instance. And obviously, they have to be of the same nation.

*** Lend Lease

World of Tanks Cheat Codes

Gevlon is writing a fascinating series of articles this week on how wargaming.net is (in his opinion) cheating World of Tanks players (for reasons that are not clear to me). But this article isn't in response to that series, rather it's in response to something a commenter said. Let me give you a little background. Gevlon started his latest series because he found that a pair of articles that he wrote months ago - accusing wargaming.net of cheating - was getting loads of hits, a year after he wrote them. In fact, they are the most visited posts on his blog. He opined "I think they resonate with something my readers found themselves". Commenter Ted Atchley had a counter-hypothesis:

The two pages are getting lots of hits because people are seaching Google for "World of Tanks cheats", looking for a cheat code or something similiar for the game.

Well, that resonated with me! So I thought I'd test that theory. Here, I provide no interesting theory about wargaming.net, nor do I provide any World of Tanks cheat codes. Such things don't exist. I simply provide a page that will catch people googling for such cheat codes, to test Ted's counter-hypothesis. I'll report back with the results in a few months' time.

Seal Clubbing

I came across this term for the first time a few days ago, while trying to find the formula for WN7, which sites like noobmeter.com use for rating World of Tanks players. The term is used to describe experienced players who deliberately play in low-tier tanks to win lots of battles against noobs.

As a casual noob myself, I'm perplexed by this. Surely the whole point of the World of Tanks matchmaking system is to prevent battles where inexperienced players are pitted against experienced players? If I remember back to my early battles, everybody in the battlefield was a total noob. We would be shooting at each other, driving into each other, rushing across the field in Malinovka, doing everything noobish in the book. But as I improved, so did the quality of the rest of my team, and so did the quality of our opponents. Rushing was not so common, and when it was used, it was a deliberate scouting action by a fast tank that hoped to survive, rather than an attempt to overwhelm our enemies. That's as it should be. I was no longer a total noob, so I wasn't matched with total noobs.

Now, after 3000 battles at an "adjusted avg. tier" of 2.47, according to noobmeter, I never find myself in the same battle as "seals" (noobs relative to me), nor do I find myself in the position of a"seal" being clubbed by somebody with a lot more ability than me. I find myself in battles with people of about the same ability as me, with their tanks at the same level of improvement as mine. There is no way that I could get into a battle against genuine noobs, and there's no way a player with much more ability than me would end up in the same battle as me. After 3000 low-tier battles I cannot recall any examples of seal clubbing.

So what's going on? Why are the World of Tanks forums so full of talk about seal clubbers? How can they really exist? Is it, in fact, mainly a term used by players at the top tiers to denigrate play at lower tiers? Or have I noobishly misunderstood something?

Autocannon

Is it my imagination, or have tanks with autocannons started doing more damage since release World of Tanks release 8.4 came out, a few weeks ago?

You know what I mean by autocannons, don't you? Those guns that fire bursts of small shells in rapid succession. Their penetration is usually almost as good as the regular gun for the tank, but their damage is a good deal less. Their accuracy is also less, so the shells spray out like from a sub-machine gun rather than a sniper's rifle.

Up close they are deadly: they can pump all shells from the burst into you, and usually their high rate of fire means they can keep hitting you while you try to line up a shot - disrupting your aim and often causing you shoot over or under them.

At range, however, it is my recollection that they used to cause much less of a problem. For a start, usually only one shell from the spray might hit you instead of all of them; and I got the impression that their penetration dropped more rapidly at range. That would make sense: a small projectile slows down more through air-resistance than a large projectile.I got used to ignoring autocannons hitting me from afar. The shells just bounced off, and didn't even rock the tank much - so didn't affect aiming as much.

Since release 8.4, though, I have the impression that their penetration doesn't drop off like it used to. I'm getting killed by them. Shells that used to bounce off are now blowing me up. In WoT, nothing is more embarrassing than being destroyed by a Leichttraktor, especially if you can't even see him*.

I tried swapping the guns on a few of my tanks to try out the autocannon for myself, to see if it feels different. But the problem is that I can't remember how it felt to use an autocannon before: I never liked the Leichttraktor, and always got tanks with 'proper' guns on them. So I've no means of comparison, except as a target! What I can say, is that when I earlier dismissed the, it was before I learned how auto-targetting worked. Now when I'm using an autocannon, I've learned to target my opponent, then right click to lock on to him before shooting, so that my gun automatically follows him as I circle around him. That's made using an autocannon more fun for me. But not enough so that I've stuck with it. My play-style is not naturally to rush into the thick of things, circle-strafing and using my speed to get me out of trouble. So I replaced my autocannon with bigger calibre guns again.


* well, almost nothing. Drowning yourself or falling off a cliff to your doom are still more embarrassing. Also, last night some guy killed himself (but not me) by ramming my KV-1. That was pretty funny!

What is free experience for? A KV-1, of course!

I think you can probably guess what happened next after Friday's post, More Fun with Tanks. The clincher was double crew XP over the weekend. So I consigned my T-46 to the dustbin of history, and got a KV-1 by spending my free XP for the research. Then I noticed that the KV-1's engine can be upgraded to the same engine the T-28. That was the nail in the coffin for the T-28 as well, and I sold it, cannibalized the engine for my KV-1 and finally bought the StuG III. I trained both crews to 75% and set off to do battle.

Both fared pretty well, despite not having any module upgrades yet. The Sturmgeschütz is very fast: too fast for a tank destroyer! I keep getting too far ahead of my team; you would think I was playing a scout instead of front-line support. The KV-1 has the opposite problem: too slow. Still, both are good fun. I still need to get the hang of them, though. Once I've played more matches with each I'll be in a better position to evaluate them. Still, at least I never have to look at the T-28 again.

More Fun with Tanks

I've been slowly changing the tanks in my garage. When I last mentioned World of Tanks, I'd just bought the AMX-38 because it was on sale, and spurred on by the fact that it kept killing my tier two tanks when I met it. But since then, I haven't met a single AMX-38 in a tier II or III battle. I'n not surprised. Probably everybody who bought one has since sold it. They're rubbish when picking on somebody their own size. I sold mine. I suppose I could have got an AMX-40 instead, but I didn't. Instead, I fell for wargaming.net's next sale item, the Valentine, which of course was on sale for Valentine's day. I quite liked it, a solid enough tank, with a reasonable gun. I played it quite a bit, but in the end, I didn't love it as much as I love the Hetzer.

Envy was the reason I got the Hetzer. Every time I met it in battle, I'd found it impervious to my shots, and it could kill me as if it were swatting a fly. And it has lived up to its reputation. I love it. But against higher tier tanks, as I noted, I have to carry a couple of expensive premium shells (2800 credits per HEAT shell, compared to 60 credits for normal AP shells) if I need to be sure of damaging them. When I'm in a life or death battle with a tier 5 tank, I load a HEAT shell and pray he doesn't kill me before it's ready.

Not against KV-1s, though. I never use premium shells against them. They just bounce off the Russian KV-1, as if they were tennis balls. When I see one of these monsters, I "run away, little girl, run away". Wilhelm Arcturus had the same experience in his French B1. Just as envy brought me to the Hetzer, the little green monster has been whispering to me "you should get a KV-1". This is why my garage is not still populated with tier I and II tanks. Envy is leading me upward. I don't know why I give in, because I know that there's a tier VI tank out there that will make mincemeat of the KV-1, and will in turn be eaten alive by some other tank. I know this intellectually. But my lizard brain tells me "Get a KV-1. I want a KV-1".

I held out against the lizard. You see, I've already got eight tanks I like in my garage, and I've no space for more. There was no tank I wanted to get rid of to make room for the climb to the KV-1. That was, until last weekend's special offer: half price garage slots.

Until now, I've been a freeloader in World of Tanks, playing for free, happy to accept my role as target practice for paying accounts (not many of them in tier II battles anyway). I've never minded not having gold tanks, and as I can get premium ammo with in-game credits rather than gold, I've the same opportunity to use them as everyone else. And I don't need a premium account for the extra XP, since I've never minded "levelling" slowly. But two things I need are more garage space, and more barracks space; and they are only available for gold (and gold is not available in-game). But when I saw last week's offer of half price garage slots, I couldn't resist it, and bought 5500 gold for €19.95. Then I bought two garage slots. One for the KV-1 (and its predecessors) and one spare (eventually for my StuG-III)

Then I started working my way up the Soviet tree. The MS-1 I already had. In fact it's my most successful tank, after the Hetzer. The next in line was the T-26. I got this as a throwaway tank. It looks and feels just like the Vickers Mk. E Type B which I already have. I paid as few credits as possible to get to the next tank in the tree, the T-46, which then filled my last garage slot. My plan was to level the T-46, then replace the T-26 with the tank after the T-46, the T-28. But once I had researched the T-28, and went to delete the T-26, well I had to fight one last battle with it. And in that battle, I killed five enemy tanks and changed the course of the battle. And that's with a crew who are 50% trained. They must have known their jobs were on the line. So the reaper passed over them as I looked for another tank to sacrifice, cursing myself that I hadn't bought more garage slots while the buying was good.

What about the T-46, then? I could just sell it and press on. But they were in no mood for surrender either, and in a battle in Province, killed 4 tanks and won the match by invading and holding the enemy base alone.

Well, I guess I could look at the rest of my stable. The American T-18 is great fun, but perhaps its time has come. I took it out for a last spin. In Mines, it captured the hill and rained death upon the enemy, until it stood alone against four others. The siren went, and I knew the enemy were in my base, so I came down from the hill and found two reds in the base, at 86% capture. That frontal armour is amazing! Downed both of those, thanks to the fast reload speed of the two-pounder gun (thank goodness I wasn't equipped with the howitzer that day) and then came across a third enemy as I made my way to their base. He left me with 5% health but he died. 

I knew the last enemy was somewhere near his base, because I'd seen him take out the last of my comrades from cover behind rocks. I'd waited to see if I could kill him, but then came the siren and I had to leave him behind. Now I decided to approach from the island, which is the best route for protecting side armour when you get near the base: there are plenty of rocks to provide cover as you motor forward. Fortunately he'd stayed near his base, and was skulking behind some sheds. I poked my nose over the flag circle and started counting down the win. He was in a bad situation. He had to come out or lose the match. As my proximity detector told me he was behind the sheds, I guess his told me where I was, and he deduced that I could tell exactly where he was, so he knew he couldn't surprise me. He'd just have to come out and hit me before I could hit him. He came out. I hit him. He blew up.

That run of good fortune continued all morning. Each tank, when faced with the chop, reminded me just why I loved it. In the end, though, something had to give. And it was the T-26. I reflected that it was just the same as the Vickers in handling; and I had spent the minimum on it just to get past it; and I could easily buy another at any time; and the crew were only at 50% anyway. So the T-26 went out the door, and the T-28 came in.

The T-28 is the last tank before the KV-1. But the research costs of the KV-1 are 13500 XP, plus 1050 XP for prerequisites. That's a lot of battles. So I got the crew trained to 75%, in expectation of being in the T-28 for a long time. But now that I'm in it, I don't really think much of it, and I'm considering using my accumulated free XP to go directly to the KV-1. After all, when will I ever get better use for the free XP? I'll think over it for a few days, and see if I can find something to love in the T-28.

Current tanks:

Hetzer
Vickers Mk. E Type B
Hotchkiss H35
Valentine
PzKpfw 35 (t)
T1E6
T18
MS-1

T-28

T-46

Death penalty in World of Tanks

The death penalty in world of tanks is a near-perfect death penalty. It fulfils Nils' requirement that the perfect death penalty be a extremely effective deterrent, but completely harmless when it does occur. Also it is a"clear-cut" penalty, to use Nils' term. Of course, he doesn't really mean clear-cut (i.e. clear and obvious), that's just his German English. He means that it once it happens, it's over, and has no lasting effect (for instance by leaving you with a loss of experience, or a loss of a crew-member, or something like that).

While driving your tank, you absolutely want to stay alive. But once you die, you forget about that battle immediately and skip on to the next one in a different tank. Battle.net are even kind enough to let you know that the crew is still alive ("This tank has had it. Everyone get out!"), for people like me who worry about the welfare of NPCs .

It has two very minor flaws:
1. Sometimes the death penalty isn't quite as effective a deterrent as it should be. We've all seen tanks rushing towards the enemy and certain death alone, in the hopes of winning a scouting achievement.
2. There is an aftermath for people who like to keep on watching the battlefield to see how the game pans out. I do this often. In this self-inflicted situation, the dead tanker can see what's happening, but not contribute much. It can be a pleasant aftermath if you are able to help your team win by keeping them informed of each-other's position (by a flaw in the game, dead people can see all their team, living people can only see those in radio range. But dead people can still talk on team channel). It is a painful aftermath, though, when you realize that the guy you thought was defending your base is actually AFK! I stop watching games I've died in as soon as I've used up my 5 reports/day on these AFK tanks. Otherwise the pain is too great!

Tank Changes

I thought I'd get rid of the Chinese tanks and make space for a StuG III, but it didn't happen in the end. Instead I found myself getting blown up by both the tier two Vickers_Mk._E_Type_B and the tier three Chi-Ha, the first because of its excellent damage, and the second because of its excellent penetration. I'm loth to get a Chi-Ha, because it will end up fighting tier 5 tanks, against which it will be useless, but I was happy to get the Vickers, which has turned out to be a great choice for me. Like the Vickers Medium Mk I that I sold last week, it can peek over the top of the wooden fence at Malinovka; it has can do decent damage though not as good as  the Medium Mk I; but it has better armour than the Medium Mk 1. So I ended up not selling my Chinese tank to make way for the StuG

I said just a short 24 hours ago that I'd like to try playing the Marder II A bit more to see if I could get to like it again. And then there was a sale of French tanks, and I sold the Marder and bought an AMX-38 instead. This was another tank that kept blowing me up in Tier 2 battles, but it turns out that it mostly seems to get me into fights against Tier 5 tanks, which it can't penetrate. More seller's remorse.

Just for the sake of posterity, I think I'll list my current tanks:

Hetzer
Vickers Mk. E Type B
Hotchkiss H35
AMX 38
PzKpfw 35 (t)
T1E6
T18
MS-1

Tank destroyers

I mentioned some time ago what great fun I've been having with the big derp gun on my Hetzer in World of Tanks. I still love it! I since went back and tried the Marder II again, as I'd promised myself (I dumped the British Medium 1 to make room for it). It's okay, but I don't love it. It's a great improvement over its predecessors, but after the great big gun on the Hetzer, I just don't really like the choice on the Marder. What seemed like reasonable damage when compared to the Panzerjaeger is just not exciting compared to the Hetzer. Maybe I've just got the wrong gun equipped. Also, my aimer seems pretty slow. I'll keep the Marder for a bit longer and see if it grows on me, but for now, it's just not hitting the spot. I said that I was going to get the StuG III after the Hetzer, but I'm afraid to, now, in case it does for the Hetzer what the Hetzer did for the Marder!



Meanwhile, in what is probably a case of sellers remorse, I'm sorry I sold the British Medium 1, because it had a pretty good gun for tier one, and also because (unlike most tier one tanks), it can shelter behind the wooden fences in Malinovka, but it's high enough to have the gun peeking over the top. You might not think a flimsy wooden fence is much defence, but believe you me, it is! The reason is that the fence hides the whole body of the tank, so you only have to be careful about hiding the turret behind bushes to be well camouflaged. Tanks that just sit in bushes can think themselves camouflaged, while in fact they may be unintentionally showing a bit of skirt. Secondly, unlike a bush, once you are spotted, the body is still shown as being unhittable, so enemy tanks aim at your small turret rather than your big prow, and are likely to put shots over your head. And thirdly, the body is shown as unhittable because in fact it cannot be hit while the picket fence is protecting it. Now it just takes one hit to blow the picket fence to kingdom come, but that's one hit you don't take, and it gives you time to haul ass once you've been spotted.

Anyway, for now that tank is gone.

I didn't mentioned in Hetzer Heroics that I had an artillery piece (or only mentioned it obliquely). Well, I had. An SU-18; a Russian piece of junk that hadn't the range to hit two thirds of the map and only tickled what it did hit. And only held 20 shells. I can't tell you how many battles I ended up in a scouting role with that tin can, simply because I ran out of shells. Anyway, I upgraded it to the SU-26. This was an improvement: better range, more room for shells, and a better gun, when I finally got it fully upgraded. All the same, I think that artillery is not for me. I'm glad to have played them, to get the insight into how they work and how to avoid getting hit by them, but I'm happy to have sold it.

And what I got in its place made me glad to be alive! The American T18, which I threatened to buy in Pay to Win, is finally in my stable. And it's everything I had hoped it would be. It's reasonably speedy and mobile. The frontal armour is great; enemies really need to get close to penetrate it. It has a couple of guns which pack a punch, and it behaves like the Hetzer in miniature, in many ways. One thing that puzzles me, though, is my choice of gun for this tank destroyer. Like the Hetzer, it has a howitzer that packs a real punch but reloads slowly; anything it penetrates it kills; but if it misses or ricochets, the enemy has plenty of time to outflank me and hit me from behind. And its accuracy is not such that it always hits, and its penetration is not something to write home about. Alternatively it can be equipped with a  two-pounder gun that has great penetration, and fast and accurate rate of fire, but doesn't do anything like the amount of damage the derp gun can. I assumed I'd want the derp gun, since that's what made the Hetzer such fun to play; but it turns out that I'm more comfortable with the two-pounder, for reasons I can't explain, because I don't quite know them, myself. Perhaps it's the slow speed at which the howitzer projectile leaves the barrel. It takes quite a while to reach its destination. I'm not sure if its much worse in that respect than the mighty Hetzer, though. Perhaps its the type of battles a tier two tank destroyer gets involved in. I don't know. Anyway, for now I'm experimenting with both guns.

Chinese tanks have arrived

Release 8.3 of World of Tanks has arrived, and with it the Chinese tanks. Frankly, I don't give a damn about the Chinese tanks, but all the same, wargaming.net gave me a new "Chinese" Renault NC-31, the tier one tank introducing the range. I played it a few times and hated it. I'll play a few more to see if it or its successors are any fun once they're elite, but at the moment, I think the best thing about it is I've got an extra garage slot. I think I know what tank will be getting sold to make way for my StuG.

Pay to Win

One common complaint about World of Tanks is that it's a pay-to-win game. Premium "gold" ammo (i.e. ammunition paid for with gold, the in-game currency that costs real money to buy) penetrates armour better than normal ammo, so people buying gold ammo have a better chance of killing you while your shots are bouncing off them. Gold tanks are already elite status (i.e. have already been fully upgraded, so you don't need to research better modules - such as new guns - for them), and allow you to 'skip' tiers. (you can buy a tier 5 elite tank without having to research your way through tiers 1-4).

I understand that the developers have to eat, so I don't mind them selling content, but selling wins is  little harder to stomach. In this case, developers make money from people buying gold, paying to win, on the understanding that we who play for free are there be blown up by paying customers to make them feel mighty. We who play for free are not players, we are NPC mobs. We are the content, as Gevlon says. At the low tiers, happily, there are not many pay-to-win customers.

I actually don't mind gold tanks, though I have no desire to buy one myself. It's a way of skipping tiers that you might not enjoy playing, to get to a tier you DO enjoy playing. Tobold, who covered this 18 months ago, also mentions another big advantage of gold tanks: their repairs costs are much lower at the highest tiers, so they can be used to build up silver credits to allow their non-gold tanks to pay for their repairs.

There are plenty of other uses for gold that I don't mind. Fore instance, expanding the garage and the barracks, so you can keep more tanks and more crew on call (just in case you haven't played World of Tanks, let me say that the only advantage this gives you is more variety. You can't actually take several tanks into battle at once). I did this in Star Trek Online, paying for another character slot in that excellent Free-To-Play game. As I say, I understand that developers need to make a living.

All the same, I've been most unhappy with the idea of gold ammo. This really is Pay-To-Win rather than pay-to-overcome-inconveniences. It's an intellectual/philosophical problem for me, not a day-to-day problem, because mostly at low levels people don't have gold ammo. It's really mostly in clan warfare that it's de rigeur (and there, everyone has it - so levelling the playing field).

So it was with pleasure that I read a small line in the Winter Resupply Special Offer news on the World of Tanks website:

Up to 50% discount on premium ammunition
With gold or credits, obtain better ammunition for less!

What's that? Premium ammo is now available with credits? - the currency you earn in-game through good play! It's pretty expensive: 800-6400 credits per shell normally. But at least it can now be had through in-game play. Tobold knew about this last October, but I only discovered it last Friday.

Not only is the high-penetration 'gold' ammo now available for credits, it was on sale for half-price over the weekend! I'd saved up nearly 500K credits to buy the STuG III and its upgrades, but I immediately spent half of that on gold ammo, buying a couple of hundred rounds for a range of my tanks. I even considered spending some more on shells for the STuG III, even though I don't own it, yet.

The gold shells have particularly made a difference for the Hetzer. As I mentioned last time, when fighting tier 6 tanks, my shots just bounce off, and they usually one-shot me. Now I carry two gold shells into every battle, and if I have a shot at a tier 6 tank from the front (i.e. driving straight towards me), I reload with a gold shell, and hope he doesn't hit me before it's loaded. Once it loads, it has a good chance of penetrating and killing my opponent, and I live to fight another day. I still have to hang back and try to identify targets of opportunity at long range; but with 2 gold shells, I can often escape what would otherwise have been certain death.

Another place where gold shells have made a difference: tier 2 American T18 tank destroyers are almost impervious to shells from tier 2 tanks from the front (in fact, I'm thinking of getting a T18, myself) They're the only tier 2 vehicle I fear on the battlefield. But they too are susceptible to gold shells. Against most other tier 2/tier 3 tanks, the gold shells are mostly a waste of money. Normal armour-piercing shells are sufficient.

Obviously, you can't use only gold shells (unless you are buying them with gold). Each shell costs roughly half the prospective earnings from the battle, so in-game winnings aren't sufficient to pay for a full complement of them. But it's good knowing you have a couple tucked away in the magazine.

Hetzer heroics

I'd a nice time over the Winterveil festival. Not a lot of guildies around, so no guild events. Same story with my raid team: we've basically taken 3 weeks off raiding. That suited me well. I spent a lot of time relaxing and unwinding with my family in Earth Online, where the Christmas holidays were a lot of good, chillout fun. All the same, the weather was a bit miserable. We'd go out for walks and come home wet and cold (can you believe it? On Earth, rain and snow make you cold, which is a stacking health debuff that can actually kill you if you have it for long enough. Anyone who spent their time in Northrend wearing the Black Mageweave set knows how unrealistic that is). So as well as the usual eating and drinking and being merry, I spent a fair bit of time in the World of Tanks. The new physics engine is great! There are no invisible walls, tanks can drown themselves in lakes or fall down cliffs (and sometimes even survive the fall)!

My sweetest moment was when scouting in Province underneath the winding path above our base (at J7). From here, I can shoot at enemies going up the other winding path, above their base (they rarely seem to notice where the shots are coming from). Even better, it enables our snipers camping on the opposite hill to see enemy tanks above me, so they take a lot of fire without even seeing who's shooting at them; and it annoys the hell out of the enemy tanks above me, who can see me on the map, but can't shoot at me. Some of them get so annoyed that they try leaning over the path to try to get a shot; but I'm always tucked in tight, and generally ignore them for our snipers to take out, while I shoot up the opposite windy path. After one such duel with an enemy who spotted that I was shooting at him, I finally managed to kill him and looked up from my gun-sight, to find an enemy tank directly behind me, dead, vertical with his gun barrel in the ground and his rear in the air. A self-kill.

I've been playing World of Tanks very casually for quite a while, deliberately sticking to tier 2 tanks. This is great fun in light tanks, because you're usually fighting against other tanks in tiers 1 and 2, with only occasionally a tier 3 tank in your battlefield (tier 3 tanks are hard for tier 2s to damage, unless you do a lot of manoeuvring to bring yourself up behind them, or at least shooting into their side. Shots hitting their frontal armour usually bounce).

I've got pretty good at tier 2 tanking, and even when my side loses (which is 50% of the time), I'm usually near the top of the table for experience earned.

My style of play is not suited to scouting (rushing forward to detect enemy units for your team-mates to blow up, relying on great speed to avoid being hit). I prefer more static play. I can find a hidden spot from which I can snipe at targets our scouts light up, put on my camouflage netting, get out my binoculars and wait to kill tanks that can't even see who's shooting at them. So I thought I'd probably enjoy artillery; but it turns out that artillery play is a different game altogether from sniping. So I next tried tank destroyers. I chose the German line, beginning with the Panzerjäger I. This suited my playstyle well, but there are two problems with it.

Firstly, the problem with tier 2 tank destroyers is they are in a different battle tier to other tier 2 tanks. The World of Tanks matchmaking is a complicated affair that picks teams based on a battle tier. Tanks from different vehicle tiers can end up in the same battle tier. There's a simple-looking (in fact over-simplistic) chart on their wiki that covers it. But what is hidden in this chart is what decides what battle tier you go into. From the chart, you can see that a (vehicle) tier 2 tank destroyer can end up in battle tier 2 or 3, the same as any other tier 2 tank. Well, it aint so. My Panzerjäger nearly always seemed to end up in tier 3 battles, specifically Prokhorovka and Ensk, fighting tier 3 tanks.

The second problem with the Panzerjäger is that it has no turret, and it's gun has a firing arc of -10°/+10° That, combined with its so-so rate of fire, means that by the time you've fired and reloaded, your target has moved out of your sights (if he has any sense), and you have to resight him by turning the vehicle itself.

Putting these two problems together meant the Panzerjäger wasn't the greatest fun on earth. I could lie in wait for enemy tanks, but when I shot at one, I was unlikely to kill it outright, unless it was already damaged. In fact at long range my carefully-aimed shots were likely to bounce right off their armour. Meantime, if they've spotted me, they can one-shot me, since I'm in an open-topped tin-can. If they miss, they've plenty of time to move off, forcing me to rotate using my tracks, which knocks out the aiming for a couple of seconds and undoes the camouflage cover of the netting and whatever bushes I'm in. So the actual rate of fire is far less than the quoted rate, and survival time once spotted is on the low side.

Meantime in my lumbering French tier 2 Hotchkiss H35, I'm fighting tier 1 and 2 tanks. I can play the tank destroyer in them, and while I can't one-shot enemies, I can still snipe at them from camouflaged cover, rotate my turret to follow them if they try to run for cover, and if they get close, I can stand toe-to-toe with them in a firefight.

Rather than abandon tank destroyers altogether, I moved up to the next tier beyond the Panzerjäger, the Marder. This was a huge improvement, once fully kitted out. It's PaK26 gun can penetrate anything it might find itself up against, and deliver reasonable damage, its range is excellent, and best of all, it's firing arc is -32°/+25, so there's a good chance of hitting a target twice without having to move the tracks. This is more like it. But it's still an open-topped tin-can. Hey, if the next tier up was so much more fun to play, let's try again, with the Hetzer. That looks awesome. How many times have my shells bounced off that sleek beast? So I moved up to the next tier again, to the tier 4 Hetzer.

Each time you buy a new tank, it's initially a bit of a step backward. You've to learn its strengths and weaknesses, and upgrade its modules (the modules it comes with are always poor), so when at first the Hetzer seemed like a step down from the Marder, I expected it. The sloped armour is great, deflecting all but the highest penetration shells from the front. I read up about the gun upgrades available. The 10.5cm StuH gun (the derp gun) delivers a heap of damage but not great penetration and accuracy compared with the 7.5cm PaK 39 gun. The 7.5 seemed like the sniper's gun. So I researched and bought it, and got my Hetzer fully kitted out. But I still wasn't having great fun. The Hetzer just isn't great as a sniper, due to the poor gun arc, which I didn't think of when I moved up from the Marder. Plus, the 7.5 can't deliver much damage at range

I thought about moving back to the Marder, but first I tried out the derp gun. What a revelation! It has completely changed my style of play. I'm not a sniper any more. The 10.5cm StuH 42 is more like a bazooka than a sniper's rifle. Less accurate, slower to fire, but if you're hit, you're dead. This beast of a gun just blows away anything it penetrates. Since it's not great at penetrating thick armour at range, the best tactic is to use it as a blitz support tank, just behind the first wave of tanks, so that you can take on enemy tanks at close quarters and perhaps from the side or rear. This big gun usually sends anything it penetrates clean into orbit.

The downside of the Hetzer is that I can now face tier 6 tanks such as the KV-1S and M6. With their thick armour and heavy guns, they can easily swat me away. When I have one of these in my sights, the likelihood is that I'll be dead within the next ten seconds if he sees who's shooting at him.

But that's okay! The Hetzer is still storming fun to play. It gets into 2 types of battles, essentially: those in which it cuts through the enemy ranks like hot lead through butter (it's not hard to rack up 3-4 kills, 5-6 kills is not unusual even if the battle is eventually lost); and those where it's gunned down within the first two minutes by a tier 6 tank, and you skip on to the next battle in another tank. Plus it brings in loads of cash. I'm definitely not giving this one up!

Wouldn't this be great, though: imagine that in the 30 seconds before battle, after you've seen your enemies, you could change the modules on your vehicle to suit the fight you're about to go into.

I do want to go back to the Marder, though, which I think I should have played for a bit longer before moving to on. Despite its poor armour, I enjoyed the sniper style. I have a British Medium 1 in the garage that's not yet got a good crew, and doesn't really play any differently from the Hotchkiss I mentioned earlier. I think I'll dump it for the Marder.

Also, though, I want to get the next tank destroyer after the Hetzer. Only great things are said about the Sturmgeschütz. I fear another of my tier 2 tanks will have to be scrapped to make way for it.