World of Tanks

[WayAbvPar]

I have gone downhill the last week or so. I think it is from chasing the 60 kill mission (taking risks to get the kills instead of staying alive), and then from doubling ALL my tanks in order to get the 50k XP day of premium. I end up playing tired and just trying to get a shitty double, since that is more XP than a well played regular match most of the time.

I have also run into some shit luck. Like being stuck in a tier 5 match against camador and 2 -G- cronies. My team was up 12-4 and lost 15-12, with that platoon getting 14 kills. I was last to die, but it didn't mean shit. I had just a hideous run in that tank (S35) trying to double it. I think I was 1-8 or 1-9 yesterday. I was playing it reasonably well, but it is highly dependent on a decent team to win, and....yeah.

[Merusk]

Look at you guys trying for the big missions.  I have no fucking chance at those.

Last night it took me 3 1/2 hours just to get the 15 wins mission.  At one point I was told "Carry harder" when complaining my team had been whittled-down to 5 of us in 3 mins.  Because apparently I can kill (11) tier 8-10 enemy tanks in my T71. I just suck too bad to do so. 

I just gave in and started spamming matches with premiums and low-tier things that won't cost me too much repair cost, dropping out before the countdown timer was finished.  I have enough tanks I can do that forever.  That netted me 6 wins in another 30 mins, and I got up to 11 after 45 mins of spamming that way after going 2w-10L  the first hour.  It still took me until 11:20 to get the last 4 wins without spamming tanks.

If I gave any sort of shit at all about stats I might be livid.  As it is, fuck it. I got my 150k.

[Furiously]

Another amazing thing you can do. And I just discovered this, is not be the one guy who solo covers a flank.  Go with the zerg, you're probably going to do more damage than getting blown up. Or get to somewhere you can snipe into the cap.
If you are trading shots with a tank, run away.

Both of these have lead to me not dying as much. And a tank with 1 hp can still stay back and blow shot up.

[WayAbvPar]

I am stupidly stubborn about undefended flanks. I should just drive away from them and do my best to get my shots in until we get capped, but I am overly competitive. If I hold the flank just long enough, we can still win! 

[angry.bob]

Because apparently I can kill (11) tier 8-10 enemy tanks in my T71. I just suck too bad to do so. 

Win rate is an accurate indicator of player skill. 

[Nebu]

Win rate is an accurate indicator of player skill. 

You realize that, over a large sample size, we all get the same amount of crappy teams.  The statistics are pretty easy to explain.

[Brolan]

Win rate is an accurate indicator of player skill. 

You realize that, over a large sample size, we all get the same amount of crappy teams.  The statistics are pretty easy to explain.

Yup:  "The only constant is you"

[apocrypha]

Is there an echo in here?

 

[Amarr HM]

I am stupidly stubborn about undefended flanks. I should just drive away from them and do my best to get my shots in until we get capped, but I am overly competitive. If I hold the flank just long enough, we can still win! 

It makes sense to do this in a lot of cases, especially when you see your team making a hard push one side and their team making some sort of push your side. If you can hold the flank long enough, you could actually play a major part in winning the match.

[Tmon]

I am stupidly stubborn about undefended flanks. I should just drive away from them and do my best to get my shots in until we get capped, but I am overly competitive. If I hold the flank just long enough, we can still win! 

It makes sense to do this in a lot of cases, especially when you see your team making a hard push one side and their team making some sort of push your side. If you can hold the flank long enough, you could actually play a major part in winning the match.

In the long run following the zerg in those cases leads to more XP and Credits.  Usually a lone tank is barely a speed bump.  TDs are slightly better but it still comes down to one gun against many and it takes a lot of luck to win that battle.

[angry.bob]

It makes sense to do this in a lot of cases, especially when you see your team making a hard push one side and their team making some sort of push your side. If you can hold the flank long enough, you could actually play a major part in winning the match.

This never works. Like ever. It used to sometimes work if the person was in a Maus or IS-7 where people could shoot you all day long without doing damage. Since they've made premium rounds cost credits? You'll just have people blasting you with premium rounds from every direction.

[angry.bob]

Yup:  "The only constant is you"

Just like in shooting craps!

There's a reason why no other team activity uses team win rates as a metric for an individual player's skill. Not one. Anyplace. And there's huge money involved in that crap. If it was valid it would be used. If you know of another competitive team activity that rates individual player skill on team win rates please let us know. If you can't you should really think on why not. I've seen the "mathematical proof and stats" threads that "prove" it's valid, but the premise of them is always, always fatally flawed. In stupid fucking ways like 14 win rates that stay the same and 1 that goes up representing a "skilled" played, then declaring checkmate when the team's probability of winning goes up the higher the "skilled" player's win rate goes up. No shit, really? This also assumes that MM is actually random, which is pretty established that it's not. According to their patent it's not and it's not intended to be.

When there's a way to use only the stats from some of these "elite" players when they're doing random, solo pub play I bet a lot of those stats drop.

[Abagadro]

Heh. If the scary "patent" worked the way people claim it does (which I don't), then a higher win rate would be even MORE impressive as that mechanism supposedly tries to force you to a 50 percent win rate by subsidizing rates below that and penalizing rates above that.  

It's pure statistics. You have a normal distribution of the type of team you get over a decent enough number of matches with your skill as the only constant independent variable. It would be the only statistically significant influence over the dependent variable (win rate).  

How about this, please to explain my 54.25% win rate. I have over 28k battles. Of those I have 151 (newbmeter now tracks this) company battles so I am not using that to buff it up. I have played maybe 400 clan wars battles (and that doesn't help win rate either as those are some of the toughest battles you will face and I will bet my win rate is actually pretty low in clan wars batles).  I also rarely toon. I like jumping around in tanks and therefore don't like waiting around after I die for my toon to finish up.  So I would roughly estimate that 24k of those battles are solo random battles. I also don't specialize in high-end tanks to try to get an advantage. There are exactly FOUR vehicles in this game that I have not unlocked.  So, why is my win rate well over 50 percent? Magic? Luck simply cannot account for that much variability over that many number of cases.

Yes win rates can be buffed and manipulated but if you see someone with over 8k battles with a high win rate, it is because they are good. Even if you think that this is being bolstered by tooning with good players or companies, THIS STILL SHOWS THAT THE PLAYER IS GOOD because otherwise other good players would not play with them.    

If you play this game at all it is also just painfully obvious. Take a look at any after battle report and look at the players who did well and who sucked. Almost invariably the players in the match who actually did something will have +50 percent win rates.    

Win rates are a good indicator of skill.  You can make the case that a 60 percent player is not necessarily better than a 55 percent player as there are factors that can affect that other than skill, but a 55 percent player will universally be better than a 47 percent player.  Guaran-damed-teed.  

[Furiously]

We could also agree that some tanks have an advantage in games? If I take my M4 with the deep, I can pretty much guarantee I'll get three kills most matches. If I take out three tanks my team has a two tank advantage. I'm going to win more matches than I lose when that happens. Now granted I sometimes run into a kv-1 who blows me up. But 60% of the time I historically and hystarically blow them up.

Also how does this patent work when I platoon?

[Abagadro]

The top clans don't look at win rate (they use dmg/game, kill/death ratio and kills/game) to separate out the really good players, but those all correlate very highly with win rate.

[Furiously]

Unrelated, I got my M53/55 last night. Talk about a fun arty to play. It's like the batchat of arty. I can zoom around and set up shots I couldn't dream of in other arty. And a 30 or 40 second reload isn't horrid.

[Abagadro]

We use those in CW over the 92 because of those two factors.

[Amarr HM]

This never works. Like ever. It used to sometimes work if the person was in a Maus or IS-7 where people could shoot you all day long without doing damage. Since they've made premium rounds cost credits? You'll just have people blasting you with premium rounds from every direction.

Game starts, you notice your team derp rush on one flank.
You are in a high tier tank/td of some sort and you quickly position to hold an obvious choke point with decent arty cover.
A few enemy tanks come your way, you fire off a warning shot, they stop to assess the situation.
After a minute they might deduce you're alone but can't coordinate a push so send in tanks 1 by 1 which you pick off.
Or maybe they don't use maps and just sit there holding their horrible positions. There's a small chance they are actually good players and you are fucked, but we all know that's unlikely.
Now your useless team overwhelms (barely) with superior numbers, or dies horribly in which case you were totally fucked anyway.

Basically every second game, the other games you're with the derp regiment who won't coordinate a push, amirite?

[Amarr HM]

There's a reason why no other team activity uses team win rates as a metric for an individual player's skill. Not one. Anyplace. And there's huge money involved in that crap. If it was valid it would be used. If you know of another competitive team activity that rates individual player skill on team win rates please let us know.

That's cause there's no sport in history that randomly drops Sunday League players in with Professionals on a game by game basis.

I guarantee if they did you would see the professionals having higher win % cause they can fucking carry the Sunday League players to victory, your sports arguments are totally bullshit in video game world, so shut the fuck up with the ridiculous sport, team game analogies.

[Merusk]

Yeah, League of Legends totally uses raw W/L as their main criteria!

Same as Starcraft random team matches!

 

[Amarr HM]

Counter shitty analogy: Poker, over large sample sizes skilled players can push the Win % in the right direction based on good play and decisions. Go on bad runs, go on good runs. etc. In poker Win % is the only stat that really fucking matters.

Win % should never be the main criteria, hopefully no-one here is saying that.

[Furiously]

I'd love to see the next version of Win whatever take company/clan wars battles completely out of the equation as well. (As well as win rate.) Would be nice to have them make a post explaining exactly how the matchmaker picks teams too.

[Sir T]

I would really REALLY like them to stop including that stupid "Win chance" statistic with XVM stats. I've lost count of the times I've had to bolster my team with sheer personality because one fucking idiot is crying that we can't win because we only have a 30% Win chance or even a 50% win chance. It works in my favour a lot because the enemy players will get cocky and play like idiots in matches they "cant lose," but people play like zombies in games they "cant win." Besides the thing lies like hell, I've seen 20% win chance matches be blowouts.

XVM itself is great, but a lesser gripe is XVM stats. A "red" player could have the game of his fucking life" and a "high skill" could have a complete derp moment. I've had people laugh at my advice because "My Stats" say I'm shit. Its ridiculous.

As for holding a flank alone, never works in the age of premium ammo. Ever. The enemies will charge and blow the crap out of you and then wind up in the base. I've been that guy all the fucking time but tonight I decided it just was not worth it. All you guarantee yourself is an early death.

*edit* And oh yeah, I've heard that the average win rate in the game is 48%. Individual win rate is the worst way to measure someones skills and deep down everyone knows it. For example, I have a win rate of less than that, and yet I score 70 to 80% of my shots hitting fairly consistently these days.

[Tmon]

One of the Devs mentioned in a Russian chat that they were considering letting people hide their stats from other players and the API.  I'm kind of looking forward to that, mostly cause I get really tired of the idiots who use XVM to create self fulfilling prophecies of defeat or who rag on the folks who don't have the correct color indicator for being scrubs and useless noobs.  I'm a firm believer that anyone with a WR of less than 48% who has more than a couple thousand matches sucks at the game, but I don't really care that they are in a match with me.  I mostly only look at someone's stats when they call attention to themselves by raging about how they always get on bad teams and that no one ever supports them, blah blah blah.  Most of those guys tend to be sub 48% in my experience.

[Sir T]

As for the missions, aside from the 15 wins I don't do them much. I started the "kill 20 tanks on X Y and Z" but I realized it wasn't much fun and I was taking stupid risks charging for kills. However on the Euro server this weekend there is a 25000 reward for 5000 damage done in a game, that carries over. So I got out my AMX 50 120 as it was suddenly very affordable to be in tier 9 matches! Multiple 3000 damage matches later I had completed it 9 times! Ching ching!  

[Abagadro]

I've heard that the average win rate in the game is 48%. Individual win rate is the worst way to measure someones skills and deep down everyone knows it. For example, I have a win rate of less than that, and yet I score 70 to 80% of my shots hitting fairly consistently these days.

Hit ratio means very little. You have a kill/death ratio of .5. You are statistically a net negative to any team you are on.

[Sir T]

Always nice to contribute. 

[Merusk]

See, THAT is legit criticism.  Folks do look at raw W/L ratio and weigh it too heavily.  Dam Taken/ Rec'd and Kill/Death are better stats to measure by.

On the XVM bitching side; it was hilarious earlier this week when people started mocking me for my stats being in the shitter after my "Just spam tanks and drop-out for wins" (Which, btw, is a terrible mission since you can game it like that.)

I think one comment was "how the hell do you get an ELO that low with 10k games?"    Both games someone decided to give me shit, I proceeded to get more kills and be the top tank in, including one in my T34 where I got Top Gun.  Hilarious.

[Abagadro]

See, THAT is legit criticism.  Folks do look at raw W/L ratio and weigh it too heavily.  Dam Taken/ Rec'd and Kill/Death are better stats to measure by..

They are highly correlated though.  I don't know why this is so hard for people to understand.

Sir T: .5 kill/death 47.7 win rate
bob: 1.0 kill/death 49.3 win rate
Engels: 1.36 kill/death 52.92 win rate
me: 1.82 kill/death 54.25 win rate
ammar: 2.64 kill/death 62.8 win rate

See a pattern?  This is not "luck." It is not a fluke.  It's a reflection on how well people play the freaking game.

[Sir T]

Except for scouts, which generally don't directly kill much but enable other people to kill people. And sapotting damage is one data point that is not released by WG on battles, incidentally.

Guess what I've played a lot of  

And in any case what was my kill to death ratio today, when I was running around in my tier 9 heavy a lot before i was platooning lower tiers with my clan members to help them level lower tier tanks? 0.91. So yeah.

In any case, speaking of scouts and moving on from yet another stats discussion, Tazilion has posted some very interesting posts on how wargaming is deliberately  fucking over scouts and light tanks in the game.

http://tazilon2003.wordpress.com/2013/08/31/the-war-on-scouting/

For the last year or so, Wargaming has been at war with Scouts – and they are kicking our ass!  It apparently isn’t enough that Clan Wars dropped Scouts as viable tanks long ago; no, Wargaming wants to nerf them into total irrelevance.  It seems to me when the player base completely eliminates an entire class of tanks from the “end game”, giant red flags should go up at company headquarters signaling to them something is drastically wrong in the World of Scout.   Apparently, in Russia, red flags mean “pile on”.  It isn’t just the multitude of nerfs Scout tanks have endured, but changes to the game and maps have hit Scouts from all sides at once.

First, Mediums began to gain abilities only Scouts had.  Their View Ranges became further than most Scouts.  Then, their Top Speeds began equaling or exceeding those of the Scouts, as well.  We now have TDs and Arty which can match pace or beat Scouts in a drag race.  Yet speed has long been held up as one of a Scout’s best defenses.  When bigger, better gunned and better armored tanks go just as fast as you do – and see just as far –  what is a Scout to do?  Soviet Mediums even manage to somehow hide better than many Scouts.  ”Historical accuracy” has given way to fantasy propaganda in Minsk.

The non-stop nerfs to Scouts is rapidly becoming something of (infamous) legend.  The T-50-2 lost some of its crazy agility.  The VK 28.01 got nerfed in a huge way.  This made sense when viewed in context of moving the tank into a role as a Tier VI grind through Scout, however, the nerfs have continued.  Its performance, equipment or ammo has seen nerfs in 4 straight updates, despite it having one of the worst recent Win Rates in the entire game.   Many Scouts have seen tier increases without adequate performance increases.  Recently the T-50-2 has been removed from the game entirely and replaced with a horrid excuse for a Scout, the MT-25.   The T-50 has inexplicably seen its top speed severely reduced, making it a joke of a tank.  But, it isn’t just performance parameters for Scouts that have been nerfed.

Perhaps just as devastating to Scouts is what has been happening to the Maps.  Update after update, as maps are changed, they are made less and less Scout friendly.  Ensk, South Coast, Arctic Region,  Fjords, Prokhorovka, Redshire, the list goes on and on…  Hills are lowered so any tank can see over them.  Bushes are made smaller or holes placed in them.  Rocks are moved, reduced in size or bushes at their ends removed so they can no longer be used as places from which to spot.  At the same time Scouts are being made relatively or literally slower, their hiding spots are being slowly removed from the game.  If you can’t go faster than the competition so you can’t Active Scout and you can’t hide anywhere so you can’t Passive Scout, what the hell  is a Scout supposed to do?

Even the nerf to Arty indirectly nerfs Scouts.  Scout rely on direct and indirect fire support to kill targets they see.  When one diminishes the effectiveness of indirect fire support, one nerfs Scouts.

The blows from the Nerf Hammer continue to strike from all sides. The big mystery is WHY?   Why is Wargaming deliberately taking an entire class of tank and rendering them useless in the game?  The myriad dedicated supporters of the game who drive Scouts deserve an answer.

That was before my beloved VK 28.01 got ANOTHER 2 degree nerf to its turning in 8.8.

And another day

http://tazilon2003.wordpress.com/2013/09/06/wargaming-please-respond/

Wargaming – Please Respond!

It has been a year or longer since real Scouts (you know – the Light kind you made originally to act as Scouts) appeared with any regularity in Clan Wars.  Since then, you have steadily introduced high level Mediums that see farther, go faster, have better armor, and better weapons than Scouts – and frequently Camo just as good when stopped.  You have totally removed any reason for Light Tanks to be used in Clan Wars.  The Win Rates of the vast majority of Scout tanks now rest in the bottom reaches of overall Win Rates when you look at 2-week and 1 month numbers.

Win Rates for Scouts are abysmal.  The player base refuses to use them in Clan Wars.  What other red flags must raise up for you to realize the nerfs you have made to Scouts and the changes you have made to maps and game mechanics  have put Scouts  OUT OF BALANCE  with the demands the game places on them?  Why have an entire class of tanks which is unsuable in the end game?

What do you plan to do to rectify the situation?

Thoughts?

[Ginaz]

See, THAT is legit criticism.  Folks do look at raw W/L ratio and weigh it too heavily.  Dam Taken/ Rec'd and Kill/Death are better stats to measure by..

They are highly correlated though.  I don't know why this is so hard for people to understand.

Sir T: .5 kill/death 47.7 win rate
bob: 1.0 kill/death 49.3 win rate
Engels: 1.36 kill/death 52.92 win rate
me: 1.82 kill/death 54.25 win rate
ammar: 2.64 kill/death 62.8 win rate

See a pattern?  This is not "luck." It is not a fluke.  It's a reflection on how well people play the freaking game.

Win% isn't the best way to determine skill but, like you showed, when you combine it with other stats there is often a correlation.

Ginaz: 1.79 k/d 53.07% win rate

My K/D is higher than engels and so is my win%.  My K/D is less than Abagadro's and so is my win%.

Any patterns emerging for people?

[Ginaz]

Except for scouts, which generally don't kill much but enable other people to kill people. And sapotting damage is one data point that is not released by WG on battles, incidentally.

Guess what I've played a lot of 

And in any case what was my kill to death ratio today, when I was running around in my tier 9 a lot before i was platooning lower tiers with my clan members to help them level lower tier tanks? 0.91. So yeah.

Yeah, scouts and arty can skew your K/D, no doubt about that.

[Abagadro]

Guess what I've played a lot of  

8 of your top 10 tanks played are heavies.   

And a .91 k/d ratio doesn't exactly disprove my point.

I don't mean to pick on you specifically but I'm getting a bit tired of people who seem to be in complete denial of simple math.

[Sir T]

What would it have been if I had kept going on the tier 9 and working on raw damage because that includes the time I was platooning on lower tiers in tanks I don't like much or are stock as shit. That was my point, it it does throw your think out of whack. Hell my k/s ration is better than what you said generally in any case these days. And it's amazing how a simple change in what tank I'm driving will throw your example out of whack. If I could drive a bat chat what would my k/d be like? Or the faster firing highly armored American autoloaders?

You can poke flaws on any number, but simple win rate is the worst metric you can look at to see how good someone is.

[Abagadro]

Forget it. It's like talking to creationists.