World of Tanks

[WayAbvPar]

If you ever play 5 minutes with me you will have no end of material for mocking, I can assure you.

You saw my performance, or lack thereof, tonight in my Churchill.  Not my finest hour.

That was my career best match with my SU-85B, since I was at base mopping up for our utter failure on the north flank (Never go north on Sand River! See Engels? I listen!). I had 3 kills and 3 or 4 more damages before I went down in a blaze of mediocrity.

[kildorn]

Man, the KV-4's weak spot is even easier to maul than the KV-5's.

[apocrypha]

I've just noticed the name of my Type 59 commander.



 

[Engels]

My 59 loader is called Ximen

[Ginaz]

Two of mine are named Wei.

[Merusk]

One of the crew on my M-6 is crosseyed.   I can't remember but I think it's the gunner or the driver. Always gives me a chuckle.

[WayAbvPar]

I have both Ting Wang and Ting Kong in my 59.

[Nebu]

Is it me or is the algorithm on the XVM mod flawed?  I was looking at my stats and quickly realized that my rating was quite low due to the fact that I primarily play low tier tanks.  Since damage per battle is pretty heavily weighted, my rating value will always be low due to the decreased damage of the lower tier tanks... and don't get me started on bouncing shells off of tier 8 tanks in my tier 4's. 

[kildorn]

For whatever reason I thought XVM was less weighted towards damage done, but really really rewarded capping and scouting. I've never actually run it however, so I'm not sure what the hell it reports for me compared to my actual stats.

[satael]

For whatever reason I thought XVM was less weighted towards damage done, but really really rewarded capping and scouting. I've never actually run it however, so I'm not sure what the hell it reports for me compared to my actual stats.

http://wot-news.com/index.php/stat/calc/en 

[apocrypha]

Yep Nebu, XVM heavily favours high tier players for that very reason. And yeah, it does also over-value capping & base defence, so people game it.

I've seen people shooting team mates in the cap circle so that they can get a higher cap %. I've seen forum posts where people admit to (and I'm not fucking kidding) starting a new account and just rushing up one line to get to a high tier tank as fast as possible in order to try and get themselves a really high XVM rating.

It's mostly useless now for assessing how good someone is, but it can still give you an idea if someone is really, really bad. 5k matches, 40% win rate, 450 rating - that's gonna be someone who most likely dies within 2 mins of match start. 10k games, 300 rating.... probably a bot!

[WayAbvPar]

If someone has more than 3k or so games and has rating of under 500 as well as a sub 45% win rate, they are either a bot or a child. Or just REALLY bad at tanks. I have seen as low as a 31% win rate (in 3k games!). That isn't just bad luck getting stuck against stacked teams, that is you doing everything you can to prevent your team from winning.

My rating should be out of the red by next week. I still have tons of little tanks I play a lot, so that drags it down. As I play bigger tanks more often, I will obviously do A LOT more damage. Did work my win rate up over 51% again, so that will be green as god intended.

[Ginaz]

I finally got my rating up over 1500 yesterday in 8400 games (and 40 kills to go to get to 10k, go me).  Not sure what it is now after playing some of the new French Tds and game modes.  I seriously do not like the one where one team attacks and the other defends, usually from on top of a hill.  Very hard to win as an attacker.

[angry.bob]

I have both Ting Wang and Ting Kong in my 59.

I paid gold to have the first three crewman in my Type 59 to be Wang, Hang, and Lou. There was no Low or Lo option.

[WayAbvPar]

Money well spent!

Anyone play today after the patch? Curious about the new game modes. Going to ignore the new tanks for now...have more doubles than I can finish as it is.

[Tmon]

I finally got my rating up over 1500 yesterday in 8400 games (and 40 kills to go to get to 10k, go me).  Not sure what it is now after playing some of the new French Tds and game modes.  I seriously do not like the one where one team attacks and the other defends, usually from on top of a hill.  Very hard to win as an attacker.

Assault mode is especially painful when you are in tier a 2-3 match and you are on the attacking side.  Everyone is rushing the french td/arty tree and not bothering with upgrading anything but guns and tracks so spotting range is horrible and most spots occur out of radio range so they don't benefit the team.  Add in slow as molasses tanks and the defender wins about 98% of the time.

[kildorn]

The new french TDs are so horrifyingcute though!

[Merusk]

Good to see patches bring out all the bad players in this game as much as other MMOs. 

I can count on one hand the number of games tonight where greater than 50% of my team lives past the 3 min mark.

[Ginaz]

Good to see patches bring out all the bad players in this game as much as other MMOs. 

I can count on one hand the number of games tonight where greater than 50% of my team lives past the 3 min mark.

Yeah, its been pretty bad today.

[angry.bob]

Yeah, people rushing up the trees combined with people not bothering to treat the two new play modes differently than the standard mode has made for a baby-killing clusterfuck of frustration.

[kildorn]

Part of the issue is that adding TDs and Arty means those two dominate the lower tiers. And stacked TD/Arty in either of the new game modes just sucks (8 low tier TDs do not an assault force make, and neither do they cap points well)

That and there are a whole MESS of TKs today.

[Merusk]

After last night i think I'm going to take a few days off and let things shake out.   It's not like I'm close to upgrading any tanks soon and playing was Sooo damn frustrating.

Tier X TDs hanging out on a defense map but not pointing the right way (Oh.. the T-29 spotted 8 enemy players.. in front of me?  I'm going to shoot at this guy hiding behind a hill across the map AND huddle next to these other 3 TDs so their arty can hit all 3 of us)

Arty that seems like it's just gotten back into the game because 'oh French, maybe I won't suck now!' (No, still fired off 1/2 thier ammo and hit nothing.)  and the aforementioned "Lol zerg rush" players.  Bleh.

Plus I didn't realize how much I enjoyed my sight, damage model and sniper scope mods.  None of which are working in this patch because they changed something on the backend.   Hell, I'd take just a numeric countdown mod for reload.. I can't stand the standard reload circle options anymore.

[WayAbvPar]

Work aggro + signing refi docs meant I could barely play the last couple of days. I sneaked down to the office and checked the patch out for 45 minutes or so last night. Felt very weird starting some of the maps in totally new areas. Obviously the strategies haven't worked themselves out yet, but wow- some people just have no concept of playing as a team. I think the teams with platoons will really start to dominate the new game modes until the general public catches on (if they ever do).

I too felt naked without my mods! Hope XVM gets patched soon.

[Ginaz]

I actually broke down and bought the IS-6.  My OCD about playing all the premium tanks kicked in, though I have no intention of buying the new German TD prem. unless it goes on sale.  Anyway, the IS-6.  Its basically a KV-3 with the bouncy armor layout of an IS-7.  Everything about it is almost the same as the KV-3.  Same speed, maneuverability and firepower.  The gun is almost identical to the top gun the KV-3 has  It can rip apart anything tier 7 and below but will have difficulties damaging other tier 8's and pray that you can catch tier 9/10 tanks from the side or rear.  That being said, its not horrible.  It does bounce a lot of shots, very similar to my experience with the IS-7 in that respect, and you can damage and kill everything you encounter if you play smart.  Its not a tank some noob can buy and start playing, like some of the other prem tanks.  I've actually done fairly with it so far, having a win% over 60% and averaging over 800xp per game.  Lets see how that plays out over the next 100 or so matches.  Right now, I would say if you are looking to buy one of the tier 8 heavy prems, I would still go with the Lowe over this.  In fact, I would buy the T34 before the IS-6, too.  It just isn't worth the money they're charging right now.  If they dropped the price to around what they're charging for the KV-5 then I think the price would be fair since its a better tank than the KV-5.  I already bought the Lowe last year (when it was MUCH cheaper) and had the T34 given to me when the US heavy line was changed so I have those two in my garage as well.  They have much better earning potential than the IS-6 simply because they can do so much more damage.  What I find fun about the IS-6 is that it requires you to use every bit of skill and knowledge you have to make it work.  We def. won't be hearing any cries of it being OP like the other prem tanks and I think it will be a fairly rare sight precisely because its not seen as a pwnmobile IWIN tank.

Edit: Just checked my KV-3 stats.  I had a 64% win rate in it, which bodes well for the IS-6 since they are both play very similar.

[apocrypha]

New French arty & TD's seem to follow the model of the rest of the French tanks: fucking horrible low tiers, probably badly overpowered high tiers.

New maps are good, especially Airfield, I like that one a lot. Good mix of open areas, plenty of cover from arty, multiple approaches to each base. Only had one game on Widepark and I was in a pathetic, shitty shit shit tier III French arty so I spent most of the match marvelling at how slowly it moved and how short a range it had and then what a useless gun it had. Piece of shit.

New game modes were fine up until about 3pm when all the kids got out of school and it descended into a tard-fest. Some of the maps are hilariously unbalanced for them though. Assault on Prokorovka - team on the hill wins, end of.

XVM is already updated - http://code.google.com/p/wot-xvm/downloads/list - but they forgot to put a config file in the mods folder of the zip so you'll need to copy one over from the xvm-docs folder again.

Built-in server-side crosshair is good, one less mod for me to install :)

[satael]

Prokorovka assault is hilariously unbalanced imho (almost too easy as a td right now)

[kildorn]

The assault maps seem to be a lot of "we are going to make you assault the position you usually flank and avoid if enemy held." I've mostly lost as defense when my team decided the objective was to capture the red 1 instead of defending the easily defended points.

Lower tier french TDs are all I've played with so far, and they're pretty terrible even if the UE 57 is the most adorable tank ever. The guns are shit, the armor is shit. This seems to change in the mid tiers and they suddenly get crazy pen values that will let them punch above their tier a bit. I've been spoiled by playing the newer US TD line though, having actual turret traverse is actually an amazing soft stat.

[angry.bob]

My S40 is fully upgraded and it's pretty good. It's accurate as hell and loads fast even with a 76% crew. Plus it's got the gun declination of the old US tanks before they changed them.

[Ginaz]

Well, 50 games with the IS-6 and I have a 60% win rate, 44% survival, 56 kills and avg. xp of 815.  The gun really is the biggest issue with this tank but I do bounce a lot of shots so it does have some brawling potential, even with higher tiers provided they can be flanked and hit from the sides and back.  Good luck penning anything tier 8 and up frontally.  Overall, its a tank that makes you work for everything you get.

[Engels]

I LOVE my tier 3 french TD. U R Doing it Wraang.

[kildorn]

The t3 is the UE 57, right? Cute tank, shit gun depression (like, old 12t kind of shit gun depression), but hilariously cute.

I think the S40 is just a half assed Hetzer.

[Sheepherder]

Not having turret traverse is a big loss, since it means you absolutely need to grok when and how to use lock hull to make a camo net work.  But the French TD's are fucking tiny, and that's sort of a big deal too.

[Engels]

I have never used lockdown on TDs ever. Camo net works as soon as you're still for a few seconds. The wee icon lights up all green like.

[Nebu]

Any mod recommendations?  I have over 1000 matches and never tried any. 

[Tmon]

I have never used lockdown on TDs ever. Camo net works as soon as you're still for a few seconds. The wee icon lights up all green like.

It comes in handy when you have a narrow range of traverse and want to look at something not in your immediate field of view and don't want to lose the cammo bonus.  You can also hold down the right mouse button the look but if you let up by accident your TD will slew to the sights.