In between fun family time, as Spring has finally arrived to our neck of the woods, the start of soccer season for my son and myself, and work, I did manage to pound out a decent weekend of the 2nd anniversary of World of Tanks. I caught an hour of the Livestream on Friday morning, which was quite entertaining, though my name was not called when they handed out five Type 62’s and a MadCatz gaming headset (just as well on the last one, I have not had good luck with MC products in the past).
I decided after my musings last time that I would stick with mostly tiers 7 and 8 and try to refine my skills, though I did pull down 5x’s for the ST-1, for the sole purpose of cutting down on the free XP I would need to go ahead and unlock the final gun on it, which I think will help tremendously. That also helped with credit influx for the weekend so I could make all the purchases I wanted to. I had two primary goals: finish up the Comet and purchase the Centurion while it was on discount, and finish outfitting my tier 10’s with equipment while it was discounted as well. Then there were some smaller secondary things I wanted to be doing – unlocks for some individual vehicles I’ve been working on and so forth.
And I have to say that overall it went pretty well. There were certainly some lopsided matches that were very frustrating, in particular Saturday night seemed to be hideous, and I eventually gave up. But there were also quite a few matches where I was on the team that cleaned up. In this respect my experience was not unlike Wilhelm’s as he pounded his way to through the weekend or Mrrx’s as he cleaned up in his Tier 8 heavies. Those matches seemed to be so cathartic for players there was a certainly bloodthirsty edge to tracking down and wiping out every last tank. Some of those were so lopsided I was in the thick of fighting (and my dad as well, who rolled with me some) and we came out unscratched.
I’ve always assumed that these lopsided matches were the result of people who don’t normally or regularly play coming out of the woodwork to try and get some quick and easy leveling done, but that didn’t seem to be the case. Having my limited version of XVM up showed that there were quite a few “reds” (very low efficiency score players) in many of the matches – some of whom were so new their stats weren’t recorded yet (accounts probably not more than a day or two old). But there were also plenty of high score, veteran players mixed in as well. And their placement seemed to have no effect on the battles. Perhaps with extremes colliding, its hard to good players to effectively utilize their skills, while new players act as a wildcard element that is hard to account for. I was on one team with a platooned group of purple, unicum (top .01%) players who had over 50k battles experience between the three of them, and we got absolutely steam-rolled by a team that had plenty of “below average” players. I also note here again: efficiency scores are not the be all end all indication of a players skill. I always take it with a box of salt and this weekend was no exception – there are plenty of good, smart players whose score doesn’t reflect what they are capable of in a match.
So, anyway, long story short, thanks to some of those lopsided matches, like the one above, I do now have my Centurion ready to go. With the release of 8.5 in a week or two here, I have enough XP saved on the 3002Db to move immediately into the IndienPanzer. So I will have six tier 8’s to run, including my two premiums. By the time I finish all those up, hopefully I’ll be ready to dip my toes back into the world of tier 9’s and 10’s. If not I’ll keep running my Type 59 and T34 until I do. If nothing else, it will get me plenty of credits for buying the new tanks.
This weekend, those matches did get me all the equipment I needed as well, so overall the weekend was a great success. And as frustrating as it is, WoTLabs.net says I actually did pretty darn well over the 7 days (most of which was played over this weekend). So maybe the frustration is in the eye of the beholder.
And perhaps most exciting of all to me, I’ve been wanting to get that elusive TWR score up, so I’ve been a bit more bold in my matches, pushing a little to try to make a bigger impact on the game, and so even better, for me, than new tanks and gear, my TWR stat is up almost a full point to 49%.
But if there is one thing that I regret – its not pulling the trigger on buying the KV-5. Yes, it is big and ugly and has glaring weak-points, but perhaps because of that, I wanted it for the challenge of learning to play it and seeing how I could do with it. But I just couldn’t bring myself to spend another $44 on a third tier 8 premium. Maybe next year, because I am already regretting not buying the big lug.
Harbinger Zero 
After a dozen matches I am pleased as punch I bought my KV-5 (Somehow I lost my post about it!). If the opportunity arises again you should consider it. If you’ve already got two, however, I can understand being reticent – that is a sizeable chunk of money just on premium tanks.
Thanks for making me feel better about passing up on it, lol. Seriously though, I am glad you are enjoying it. I think I will grab it next time. I do have two, but the Type 59 is the only one I purchased, I got the T34 for free when they made the US line changes. So a third is not out of the question. On the flip side I am a fan of the IS6 and JT88 as well. Eyes are bigger than my stomach I’m sure, but at least with those two there is always the test server…
What mods are you using in the above screenshots? In particular, what is your ‘limited version of XVM’ and what is giving you the hit/damage info at the top near the fps/lag info? I haven’t explored mods, as I’m still fairly new to the game, but additional information in the UI is always useful.
I use Clan Nether’s ModPack, however, it doesn’t give me its full utility, I suspect because XVM is not compatible with .Net4 framework, which is what I run. Basically, I use XVM Lite (no % chance to win info) configured to give me Win6 rank percentile, total battles, and player win % in the tab view, colored coded for basic efficiency ratings. The gives me, at a glance, a general idea of how veteran and “good” a player is at a glance. In addition the ModPack comes with “overzoom” mods, allowing greater zoomout and in than normal, upgraded crosshairs and reload timer for both arty and regular tanks, upgraded map icons (I can see at a glance if its a heavy or tier 10 heavy, td or tier 10 td, etc), and that hit/damage counter, which is the best part of all.
Dealing damage is really the key to having a good game and leveraging wins, and a mod is the only way to track that. Even if you have nothing else, that would be a good one to have. Generally the goal is to deal at least as many damage as you have hitpoints. That is skewed for scouts and arty of course.
I’ll see about doing a post this afternoon on it. Its very easy to install and utilize. Most modpacks are simply unzipped into the “res-mods” folder in the appropriate update folder (8.4 right now). XVM is a little trickier in that it requires installation of the Dokan library as well, but that is not all that big a deal.
I’ll look it up. Thanks!