Recapping the Weekend of Tanks

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.

 

Chat text censored because *nobody* needs to talk like that…

 

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.

 

Comet: not as bad a tank as most people think.

 

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.

 

Green: better than my average, Red: worse than my average

 

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.

 

Wish I had taken down this player’s name, he knew how to play the KV-5 to its fullest potential.

WoT Second Anniversary Extravaganza

I was wondering when they would release it and what it would consist of.  And its a doozy.   In summary:

 

5x Experience gain on first win, all consumables equipment (thanks BlueFletch) and training/retraining 50% off.

Tier 8 premium tanks:  15% discount to purchase

Tier 8 tanks:  %30 credit income increase,  %30 discount to purchase

Tier 7 SPG:  same

Tier 5 medium and heavy tanks: 100% credit income increase

Tier 5 light tanks and SPGs:  50% credit income increase

Gift Shop Packages:   The return of the KV-5 and the Type-62, as well as some hefty discounts (only $85 for a year of premium status)

 

All this starts at 6:30 AM Pacific time Friday*.   Remember that because of the way the server resets happen in the evening here in North America, if you can skip playing Thursday evening and instead play in the afternoon/day on Friday, that will get you an extra 5x bonus (Friday before reset, Friday, Saturday, Sunday).

 

* Except the Gift Shop packages, which for some reason start Thursday night (11pm Pacific) and run to Saturday night (11pm Pacific)!

Pondering Win Rates

So in a recent developer Q&A, SerB, head cheese for World of Tanks, stated that the only “stat” that they considered an indicator of skill was overall win rate.

 

Clearly, there are some good arguments both for and against that.  On the one hand, in a matchmaker that is not skill based, its easy to get one a roll of knuckleheads.  My scores over the last sixty days have been in the 1500+ category for both basic efficiency and Win6 – yet, last night, I lost 6 matches in a row, and none of them were even close.   In one match I died without doing any damage at all.  On the other hand, I can understand the argument that good players will overcome bad ones, or will have the ability to (at least on occasion) “take over” a match.  I’m not in a place where I can do that consistently, but it does happen sometimes.

 

So I’ve been pondering my win rates.  The North American server average currently sits at 48.95% according to WoT Labs.  So looking at my stats, I’m in pretty good shape.  My overall win rate is 51.01%, even after last night’s debacles.  So that is good.   And I am clearly comfortable in a lot of my tanks.  Many of my battles are wrapped up in tier 8 tanks, because of my main premiums and because of how the XP curve tends to work.   So here is how that looks:

 

 

Pretty good eh?  Almost all of these are above the server average.  That’s pretty good.   And I am comfortable and confident in tier 7-8, whether I’m sitting at the top of the rung or on the bottom facing tier 10’s, I have a good idea of where to go and what to do.   But clearly, there is a weak point in my game.  Something bringing me down, or my average would be a lot higher.   And its pretty easy to find where that gap is:

 

 

And this picture sums up why I haven’t applied to any Clans yet for Clan Wars, something I have some interest in doing.  At tiers 9 and 10, my game is a mess.  And at some point, I just can’t blame that on teams of morons.   Its me.   I have no idea what it is either.  Do I tense up?  Are there just better players out there?   There is, at the high levels of the game, what seems to me a greater chance of running into platoons of good players.  Sometimes these are from one clan, sometimes they are allied clans.   In one match last night, there was a platoon of three unicums (top .1% efficiency), all of whom had win rates hovering around 70%.  Its hard not to feel like the game is over before it begins.  So I am wondering if my problem here is just that I am mostly a solo kid running in a platoon world.   There is a reason platoons are limited at three – and even there, they can themselves “take over” a match, sometimes even when the individual players aren’t all that skilled.

 

And then there is a little known stat that XVM has been pulling up lately – TWR.   I’ve read several translations of the Russian on the calculations of this stat, and as best I can tell, its an attempt to “normalize” your win rate by accounting for just such scenarios – what is the overall quality of the other team versus yours?  Now take that out – and assuming a level playing field, what is your win rate.   And here my numbers drop:  I stand at 48.18%.   Which XVM helpfully colors as orange.  Which is its universal symbol for “bad but not terrible.”  In other words, if both teams are equal, I will lose more than I win.  Ouch.

 

And I do kind of get where that comes from.  I seem to do far better supporting a good player than “leading” a team by being that good player.  Maybe I’m just not there yet skill wise – at 5,600 battles, I am still wet behind the ears in the grand scheme of things.   And there are two ways to fix that, as I see it.

 

One, I can put my nose to the grindstone, especially with my tier 8’s, and just try to watch and learn.  For the time being, shelve my 9’s and 10’s, until I feel more comfortable in my abilities in them.   I can use the test server (when its not so insanely overloaded) to work on those 9′ and 10’s between updates, honing my skills off the books.   Then I can apply to a good clan and have the resume to be accepted.

 

Two, I can go ahead and join a clan now.  I probably won’t get into the clans I would most like to join, as I don’t have the skills yet – but a decent clan would provide me with some training and comfort level, and of course, allow me to play more in platoons than solo.  Then if I feel the desire later on, I can always apply to another clan.

 

I’m torn at the moment on which to do.   Input is welcome and invited.

ST-1 Cometh

So I was finally able to cull down the heard of tanks in my garage.  I’m almost done with the SU-100, and I finally scraped together enough cash for the ST-1.  While I’ve played it a bit on the test server, which is what convinced me to go this route, I did have some second thoughts about dropping that 160,000+ Free XP to leapfrog over the KV-4.   But I bit the bullet and did it anyway, and I am glad I did.

 

Incidentally, this is why I play the test server.  It is a great chance to try out those tanks and their respective lines (as well as potential premium tank purchases) to let you know if you are headed in the right direction.   What could be worse than grinding for months only to find the tier 9 or 10 tank you were looking forward too is just not fun to play?

 

 

Initially the ST-1 doesn’t give you a whole lot of thrills.  Stock its slow and the gun is a leftover from the previous tiers.   Its not until you stick the giant bobblehead turret on it that you can get the really good gun, and its one of those tanks where you can’t even do that until you upgrade the suspension.  But all that overlooks the strength of the ST-1, which is really in its well-angled and thick armor.   While only 140mm thick on paper, the angle gives you more effective thickness and makes it tricky for people to break through without well aimed shots.

 

 

Those gouges on my front plate are from direct hits from an IS-6, SU-122-44, and IS (all 175 pen) and a Pershing (180 pen) before finally taking a hit from an T-54 (219 pen) and an M103 (264 pen).  And those last two still left me with plenty of my 1900 HP left.    I also found that I was an instant threat – not something I am well used to in my usual role as a medium tank player.  As soon as I appeared on the scene, enemy tanks scrambled to react to my presence.  Firepower was diverted, positions shifted, artillery fire was lifted from other places to target me.  I found that I didn’t mind.  A little creative dancing and thread, along with the damage I was putting out, actually helped my team in a significant way.  Part of that was that I didn’t arrive along the same axis as the rest of the team.   The map was Highway and I entered the city from a different sidestreet.  Though I was alone, the split angles and the fact that I’m so slow the main force had already engaged created a bit of a distraction that my team mates used to good effect.

 

All that is to say, it gave me a new appreciation for the role of heavy tanks and what can be done with them with a bit of team work.   Usually my job is to pick them apart and find their weaknesses, or dance around them.  Being one was a nice change of pace.   That sounds a bit like I haven’t played heavies before, but I have.   Its more that the heavies I’ve played at top battle tiers previously, the US line, are not exactly fear inducing.  The T34 was the tier 9 tank back when I was doing that line, and it was junk on wheels – no armor and a mediocre gun.  Nobody was scared of it.    The ST-1 is another beast entirely.

 

 

So, I have no complaints about the initial outing.   And I’m looking forward to getting to know this tank even better.

 

Out of Ammo

So I took a break from EVE this weekend to duck into World of Tanks and take advantage of the sale on camouflage and try to make more progress towards finishing the SU-100 and earning enough cash to buy the ST-1.  And I ran out of ammo.

 

You see, my hunch is that the real limiting factor for progression in the game being regular credits is a whiff of design genius.  Grinding cash is more difficult than grinding XP to advance.  And so to lower that difficult ramp you can subscribe to a premium account, buy a premium tank that gives you a built in bonus, or pay a severe premium to directly convert real cash to in-game currency.    Not only that, but the amount of currency you need is directly tied ot how much you are playing – its a scalable resource.  The more you play, the more lines you open up, the more tanks and equipment you can advance, the more silver you need.  But then if you are only playing a little in one line, there is less to buy – and far less incoming to buy it with!   The end result is a nice smooth variety of options to get you the new shiny you want, all of which are useful regardless of whether you play the game casually or hard core.

 

Yes, that’s real. No we can’t have one. Unless Wargaming gets really desperate for cash of course.

 

And the move to make premium shells available for silver – well, all that did was open up a new sink in an already thinly stretched resource.   It was a profitable move for Wargaming, while looking to be generous.  Very coy.  And in some respects, very admirable.  Smart companies are rare, and the success is to be applauded.   But how smart are they really?

 

There is currently a bug in the game that kicks in an interesting way.   If you have your tank set to auto-reload after a battle, and you shoot yourself out of premium shells, sometimes the computer will buy the new shells using Gold – even if you had the drop down menu set to regular silver credits.  I’vehad it happen to me, so I can verify this.  Wargaming claims it is a bug and they are working on fixing it – but, it seems like good conspiracy fodder.

 

After all, your choices for avoiding the bug are interesting.  First, you can hand load your shells after a battle.  This can be tedious, and even veteran players can forget to reload between battles.   So even smart people like me can end up in situations like this:

 

Fix bayonets?

 

We lost by the way.   I rammed the capping T71 a few times, but it wasn’t enough, and they ended up finishing off our two wounded tanks that were capping before finally hunting me down and killing me  (bloodthirsty apparently).    I started the match with just 5 regular AP shells, along with my standard load of 5 HE shells and 5 premium shells.  The end result is that it cost me a lot of silver, between the lost potential earnings, and having to reload premium shells I wouldn’t have otherwise had to fire to give my team a sporting chance.   Just to save some Gold, that probably would have amounted to between 25 and 50 cents of real money.

 

And of course, the other ways to handle this would be to stock at least one more premium than normal to make sure the bug doesn’t kick in…but then how often are you tempted to use it to sway a match?  Or you can just not use premium (difficult to get away with, now that everyone is using them).  Or you can roll the dice on losing some Gold on occasion.  Great.

 

That’s not to go full on conspiracy bore and claim that Wargaming implemented this bug on purpose.    Realistically lets face it – too much work for too little return.   But I do wonder if it will be one of those bugs that lingers for a long time, never seeming to get fixed, since it doesn’t really hinder game play (the above lost battle is, after all, my fault for forgetting to reload)  and is in fact in some way profitable for them to leave in the game.

 

The bug has already survived one patch.  I’m betting the over under on this is about three patches.   So I’m going to say it will be 8.6 before it gets fixed, may 8.7.   So put a bookmark here and check back later.  Maybe I will win a cookie.

Finally Getting the Hang of the SU-100

I think I’m finally getting it.  Its not a front line tank – it’s a “right behind the front line” tank.  Last night I followed the big boys around a few times and did pretty well.  I occasionally had to use a gold shell to get my point across, but with tier 6 tank destroyers that is not all that unusual.

 

And since they can be bought for gold or credits, maybe I should just start calling them “premium shells.”

 

I ended up knocking out a Comet from long rang with a blind shot and a Type 59 with another blind shot.  That’s when I started getting the “hacks!” accusation.  But honestly, if you aren’t going to move after someone lights you up – what can you expect?   Still, calls of “hacks!” are a good indication that you are doing fairly well.   I still adhere to my personal belief that you really need around 100 battles to learn the ins and outs of a particular tank, but at least I can tell that I’m warming up!  Also, not long after that, there was this:

 

Craving Elephant

This is my problem with World of Tanks.  It indulges my alt-itis in ways that other MMO’s could only dream of.

 

Courtesy of http://wotlabs.net

 

So I’m reading my RSS feed finds here at lunch, and Overlord puts up another of his interesting archive posts, this time a letter about the Ferdinant/Elephant Tank Destroyer.  Someone in the comments asks if any of them were ever beaten head on.

 

Which leads my memory banks to an episode of Tank Overhaul where they restored one of the two surviving (there were only 90 originally) models.   That one had been taken out by a very lucky or very skilled Sherman (or M-10) hit to the drive sprocket, forcing its abandonment.   But of course in looking for that video just now….and in watching them talk about the behemoth…I want one.

 

Tank Destroyers were something I was not initially interested in within the game.   As you can see from the stats above, I am mostly a medium tank kinda guy.  I prefer balance and utility, hit and run, tactical superiority, and all that jazz.  But in the last thousand battles or so its become more of an interest for me.  I’ve tried the French, German, and US lines.  But, Eerly tier TD’s are – well, they are difficult.  At low tiers, penetration and rate of fire, two of the strenghts of most tank destroyers, are something common to all tanks.  So you are left with thin armor and, often, poor mobility.   And at tier six, I think tank destroyers are almost universally underpowered.  The lone exception may be the upgraded ARL 39, which boasts an impressive gun.   So really its not until end game that things get good.  And I didn’t know that until I started tinkering around with the T30.

 

And it turns out, so long as I’m not playing French Tank Destroyer’s, I’m actually not bad with them.  Though there is apparently a trick to the SU-100 that I haven’t learned yet, because I’m lagging behind there.

 

Courtesy of http://wot-news.com/index.php/stat/single/us

 

So even while I continue to grind the SU-100 with less and less enthusiasm, I’m looking ahead to how I can work a Ferdi into my already tight gaming schedule…

 

Hopefully it won’t look like this when I’m done with it either.

Cleaning Out The Garage

So, having determined that I want to spend some time in EVE, and with my brother and his lovely bride getting the itch to start our little triumvirate again, only this time through the lands of Middle Earth, I decided it was time to wrap up a few grinding and leveling projects in World of Tanks.

 

You see, right now World of Tanks is my main “MMO.”  I play STO once a week or so, same with Vanguard (and my Vanguard enthusiasm is waning – more on that later).  But almost all my time is spent on tanks.  So I’ve expanded the list of lines I’ve been working on.  In my more casual days, I would be working on leveling two lines at once.  These days its rare that I’m working on less than five.  So I’ve got to cut it down.  Fortunately, I’m close to a stopping point.

 

 

I’m currently working on five tanks.   My two favorites are probably the IS-3 and the Comet.  Both are very different playstyles, but are enjoyable.  I also have a long way to go on both.  So I set them to “reserve” status.  I still run my premiums at least once a night as I save cash towards my ST-1 (still 2m shy), and will do that when I have time.  So that left three tanks in my “primary” area.

 

 

Fortunately, all are pretty close to done, and for two of them I have no further plans at the moment.

 

M26 Pershing – 18,000 XP left to go

The Pershing has been a great tank.  It is a medium tanks player’s medium tank.  Everything you want in a blend of mobility, firepower, and toughness.  I hold my mastery badge for it, and I do fairly well in terms of XP/dmg/kills in it, though my win rate is only average.  The pause here is more resource oriented.  I would eventually like to cap out the line, because I am a big fan of the M48 Patton.  However, the tier 9 tank between here and there, the M46 Patton, is one that is very underpowered at stock.  And to upgrade it, you need 50k XP for the gun.   And to put the gun on you need ~25k  XP for the upgraded suspension….and so on.   In other words, not only will I need *another* 3.5m credits to buy the next tank, I’ll probably need another 100k or so free XP to grab all the upgrades I want right out of the gate.   Its doable, but its back burner.   So I’ll wrap this one up (I can hopefully finish this one off by end of the weekend, especially with the just announced x3 bonuses we have for that time period.   And I can come back later down the road.

 

VK3002(DB) – 15,000 XP left to go

The VK is a long time favorite of mine.  I think that (in game at least) it is superior to the vaunted Panther in every respect.  It is fast, has better angled armor, and mounts the virtually the same weaponry.  So when I got it last year, I used it to unlock both the Panther (since untouched) and the Tiger (which I also kept).   However, the word on the street is that this tank will unlock the much anticipated second German medium line, which will terminate in the Leopard 1 or at leas the Leopard prototype.   Generally the jump from tier 7 to tier 8 on medium tanks is somewhere between 80k and 100k.   So my goal was to grind this one up to at least 80k, so that when that second line makes an appearance later this year (Summer is the current word), I will be able to hop into it fairly quickly.   I had some trouble grinding this one until I switched back over to the 75L70 gun, instead of the “upgrade” which is the short barrel 88.  Its a playstyle thing, but I prefer the higher rate of fire, better accuracy, and stronger penetration of the 75.  Since I have done that, I have seen my average damage per match go from 500-800 to 1500+.   So, the grind here got a lot easier, and I should have it done over the weekend as well.

 

SU-100 – 25,00 XP left to go

I’m not a big fan of this tank destroyer.  But I am a fan of where the second USSR TD line goes after this tank.  Mobile TD’s with accurate, fast firing guns.  So this one is slow going.  Particularly since the gun upgrades on this tank are less than exciting for someone headed to the second tree.  I could unlock the upgrades, but it will double the XP and time needed to finish this guy up and buy me nothing later on down the line.  I may grind this one as far as I can this weekend and then either shelve it or use a (hopefully) small amount of free XP to finish it off.  It will mean delayed gratification, because I don’t really want to start the good part of the line when I won’t have time to really enjoy it, but overall its a small price.  And as soon as I do finish one of the others (IS-3 probably) I can always rotate it in.

 

So that will leave me with a fairly clean garage for dailies.  I can just run IS-3, Comet, and premium until I get the cash for my ST-1, when I can swap it into rotation for the premium.   After that, who knows.

I Am Evolved

So while I was out of town last week, a package arrived with my name on it.  And inside was the shirt that certifies me as evolved – and as a tier 10 tanker.

 

Who has one thumb up and is wearing the Evolved t-shirt? This guy…

 

The shirt is great.  It wasn’t my first pick, design-wise, but I admit it looks good.  And the material itself is relaxed and feels good.  You can’t see it from there, but on the back just under the collar is “World of Tanks Roll Out” in the usual logo/font.  And the timing of the arrival is great as well.   WoT is one of the few games I can play when I’m on the road, and it just so happened that it helped fill my evenings and one sleepless night last week.    So you can scratch one more off my tier 10 garage list:

 

“Where does the driver sit?” you might ask. And that would be a good question.

 

As you can see, I decided I had a pretty soft spot in my heart (and sweet spot on the trigger) with the T30, so I held onto it, taking the effort to grind out the extra two million credits I would have otherwise gotten by selling it off.   The E4 has a smaller crew, so one of the team will be staying on the T30, while I will probably move over the 100%/1st Skill enabled crew from one of my three Shermans (M4, M4A2E4, and M4A3E8) to ensure that it at least continues to have a decent camo level and access to Sixth Sense (which seems critical to TD usage at high levels).

 

Next on deck is to…grind out more credits.  I am skipping the KV-4 (to the tune of 166,000 free xp, about 2/3 of what I have accumulated), and I already sold the KV-3 (which I’m kicking myself for, I really enjoyed it), so I need about three and a half million for that.   I’ve coughed up about a million of that so far, mostly of a nice run with the T34.

 

After that…well, I have not played my T62A or my T100E4 at all yet.  I have the crews at 100% – but I am missing the modules.   At lower tiers, I don’t usually bother.  But some of those are too important to ignore on top tier vehicles and matches.  Its a safe bet that every tier 10 out there has a gun rammer on it if nothing else, meaning that everyone is shooting 10% faster than you are.  Not a good thing.  And you can see that reflected in my pre swap-over tier 10 T30/ post swap-over T110E5 stats – they are well below the rest of my averages.  I’m determined to do better with my other tier 10’s, and this means being prepared.  The cost will run somewhere between 700k and 1.8m depending on the tank (I intend to gear up my tier 8 premiums as well), but I think it will be money well invested.  And will give me something to work towards as I blow through matches in the IS-3 and ST-1.

Invisible Tanks and Other Frustrations

So, while some people had a great weekend with the experience multiplier in place, me…not so much.  I lost around 20 points off my efficiency rating and twice had to simply quit the game and go find something else to do.   I think my win rate over the weekend was at 40% or below.

 

And even my good matches were a bit on the frustrating side.  Case in point:

 

Warriors…come out and playay! ::tinkle tinkle tinkle::

 

Yea, that’s right, there are three of us staring at the capture zone (my sight mod called the range as 212m when the tank finally did pop into sight, a half a minute after this), and I don’t know about the other two, but I have a maxed out crew.  I assume given their stat lines they probably did too.

 

Also notice that the enemy TD to the north has just popped up.  Riddle me that.   A camouflaged TD, in the woods, fires a shot into the back of a TD racing full speed away from him, from around 280m, and gets spotted.   Three of us, stationary, facing the target, doing nothing but looking for an extended period of time, and we can see nothing.

 

Now, I think I get how spotting mechanics work.  At that range, we should have had three separate checks rolling (one for each of our tanks) each second.  If he had everything maxed out and a camo net to boot, we probably had, at worst, an 8 or so % chance of succeeding on those checks.  Now its been a long time since I’ve done statistics, but I think at some point we should have “gotten lucky” (like we clearly did with the TD).  Long story short, since it was an encounter battle, we had some time, so we shuffled positions to get closer and someone (finally) landed a successful check.

 

Really though, the mechanics do work in a fairly realistic way.  The only true shortcoming is that the coefficient for camouflage only hinges on the variables of moving and firing.  If an enemy stops moving and firing, even if they are out in the open, even if they have been visible for a long period of time, if they are far enough away (dependent on their crew and equipment), its entirely possible for them to disappear.  And *that* is what will drive tankers wild.  And that is entirely possible within the game mechanics.

 

The other frustration actually has a solution as of this morning – at least in theory.  Some players have had issues with NVIDIA graphics cards causing the game to crash.  Sometimes every match.   Sometimes multiple times a match.  It has made the game unplayable for me on my beast of a desktop, which is why the screenshot above looks a bit natty.  Drivers are usually the issue here, but we’ve all updated numerous times, putting in tons of support tickets, starting raging threads in the support forum, only to get occasional minor acknowledgement that there might be an issue.

 

And then today, buried in the announcement about the public test server for 8.4, is this fine little nugget:

 

Important! NVIDIA video card dirver versions 310.70 & 310.90 may cause client crashes & FPS drop-downs. It is recommended to use driver version 306.97.

 

Well thank you Wargaming.  That only took since update 7.5 to tease out of you.  Granted, I am taking this with a box of salt.  Some of the individuals troubleshooting on the forums have worked so many driver attempts its maddening.  So to think that this will solve the issue entirely is a bit optimistic.  Still, its a move in the right direction, and we don’t always get those from game companies.   So I’ll take them where I can get them.