Tuesday, 14 July 2015

Insider speaks: Cheating, Corridors, Artillery and others

Hello warriors,

here's a new batch of info from the Insider - what's cooking in Wargaming? Let's find out! As always, the Insider info comes without guarantees but it shows some insight into how WG folks are thinking.

- some WG devs were amused by the WT Calliope premium tank (video), calling it pure pay to win
- as 9.9 closes by, a friendly reminder by the devs: as soon as 9.9 hits, don't go running around with mods, wait a couple days at least till the modders make them work again. Even if old mods work, using them may lead to unexpected crashes to desktop without warning. In such cases, it's the mod fault, nothing WG can do, but players tend to blame everything on WG - and when proven wrong they feel like "it's a personal attack"
- Japanese users have been making their own mods and do not release them (for their personal use! and it seems none of them are cheating related) (Insider: "insert stronk sense of honor")

Cheating in World of Tanks

Clan wars are already under investigation for users that use cheat mod packs - RU that is and NA to some degree. EU is still in the middle of what one of the devs calls "a reprocessing purge" (or in more humane way  a "reeducation program"). But it'll get there. Furthermore, anyone into e-sports must remember, no mods, no scope stuff, no overhead camera, tracers or magic OTMs - you must play pure and unmodded 100% vanilla game.

However China is reportedly having the largest amount of "cheat packs" users in the game, almost 1.9 per match. Last time it was checked, EU holds a calculated 0.44 estimate of cheaters per match and NA has a 0.46, SEA holds an unimpressive 0.6 (best is Korea with 0.2). In China it's the Chinese partner that does and it's very lax. RU server has around 0.45-0.56 cheaters per match.
 
 
The Insider:
 
"So, how do you interpret these numbers? In China it's almost guaranteed at least 1 player will have a cheat pack installed in every match, and it's most likely there will be 2 players with cheats, whereas in EU you may find a cheating player roughly once every 4 matches, same on NA and RU. In fact, its somewhat scarce, we're talking that 1 out of 120 people actually use a cheat, but its six times more likely you'll find someone running with cheats in china. It's interesting to notice that the cheating users are somewhat on parity on most clusters so next time you hear "lol WG EU sucks", be glad you arent in China."
 
Kanonenjagdpanzer
 
Kjpz will have one more round of rebalancing before replacing the 8.8 JT, the tank had some problems with the gun since it doesn't have premium matchmaking so the gun will certainly be buffed. It is not sure if penentration will be revised for both its regular (200mm pen) or premium (260mm pen) shells, test showed the tank being quite mobile as intended and with good camouflage. The extra round of testing was completely intended from the beginning.
 
SerB
 
SerB is communicating on the internal channels:

Q: "Japanese tiger?"
A (SerB): "Wallets will open"

Q: "Will you take us around the universe?"
A: Only if you get on my horse :)

(The Insider: I think hes making a reference to the "get on my horse, my horse is amazing" song)

On corridor maps:

Dev1: With that troll logic even a map so well liked as Himmelsdorf is technically a giant corridor, it's stupid to label a map corridor considering all maps have choke points.
Dev2: The term "corridor" didnt exist until someone streamlined it, now every map that's disliked its a "corridor"
Dev3: Blame map, or team/platoons/autoloaders (yes thats a trend now)/foreign players (another racist trend from NA server)/or the game but never ever ever will they actually blame themselves for lack of skill
Dev1: If we followed every single players whine there'll be no game at all!!  And when it all comes down crashing they will never admit it was their mistake and since they arent entitled to responsibility they'll just dart away
SerB: Be glad we never listen to them :)

Highway
 
Highway changes got rolled back because the north area became "a golf course" and instead of making dynamic gameplay, players kept hopping between rocky mounds like frogger. Arty was useless there and kemp bush was stronk there, so strong that in tests, the map had the longest matches of all the rotations, so south city was used as the bargain point to win - the map will get more changes to the north (possibly to expand the houses there to make it a small town thus preventing "frogger" syndrome and snipe "kemp fest")
 
Artillery changes

At some point a long time ago, arty was considered to be changed altogether for assault versions of tanks, (just as the long shelved branch that would lead to the Sturmtiger) that fired only HE at close range with high alpha (KV-2 style), but all the preliminary work flopped, the tanks were too weak in armor and mechanics to work and the actual use of 105mm derps kinda made the tank concept redundant. The developers hated it, so did the employee testers, thus the project was scrapped.
 
Arty rebalance is still underway, high ROF/low alpha is a no (devs: "we don't want more FV304's") in fact, there is a lingering analogy between AW arty mechanics and the FV304, as they both have low alpha but can fire frequently and would be an annoyance. At high tiers, nobody would take artillery into CW and in fact almost nobody takes it to stronghold matches/T6/T8 because the allied bombing consumable actually replaced it and didn't take a slot for a tank. In the end, rebalancing arty also means an overall HE mechanic rework, several draft changes have been presented.
 
Stress inducing tanks

WG doesnt take"stress inducing tanks" for granted as a balance factor - ie: Chi-Ri is a very difficult tank to master and one of the most player unfriendly - the top spot goes to the Churchill TD and then AMX40), however its top autoloading gun its a redeeming factor, but it still requires knowledge on how to use. The devs warn: Japanese heavies will be stressful tanks to drive.

Following that logic that means these tanks would need a buff! Thing is that experienced players simply free exp past these tanks and almost nobody plays them to have substantial data. Because of that, only certain amount of players will use these tanks. If you want a tank rebalance, start driving an AMC 40 in large quantities enough to WG to notice (dont forget to lose on them)  :)

Example: the French B1 its overly buffed (almost like 150% buffed) and its a monster whenever it's facing anything around its own tier and below, and the only thing maintaining the tank win rate in check is actually facing off against high tiers. WG refuses to give it premium MM because it'll make the tank extremely OP (refer to the B2, that thing can't be nerfed since it's a premium but already holds a rocketing global winrate amongst its users)

 Devs on Xbox One quality

"We like it a lot, but they take a route (a development route) that's not our own, eventually they came up with their own tanks (French Chaffee etc), and we're very interested in their graphical tech regarding weather. However, the very same formula cannot be applied to WoT PC because theres a huge hardware disparity between users. A console is the same hardware across the globe, but a PC is humongously heterogeneous across all users with different configurations and settings, (from ancient PCs to cutting edge hardware) and we rather finish off what we have in our hands (introduce all tanks as HD, finish the remaining pending tank lines, rework maps that aren't well liked, introduce destructible physics engine, etc) before including a new feature that could possibly cause issues, cutting off players due their configuration is the worst idea in financial/loyalty/playability terms and 9.0 was testament to that."
 
 

 

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