Things are very quiet so took the day to rest, read a book (David Fletcher's "The British Tanks 1915-19") and compile a new Q&A which Slava was very kind to provide. I've also noticed your excitement over Swedish vehicles and have an article written by SP15 about some very interesting designs, I believe that will please you. :)
Short message for Russian blogs/pages: You translated my last Q&A completely wrong and created misleading information for your community. Please if you have any questions, don't be shy and contact me over ritastatusreport@gmail.com , I don't mind help on clarifying things for you!
Here it is:
The ingame report system came under criticism lately. Would it be possible to give other players compliment like in Warships? Also some kind of karma for your stats like in Warships would be nice. Just to add some positivity to the game and the community.
Good idea, why not. But that’s not going to solve the problem of negative comments ingame - the reason for those is mostly huge gap between good players and not so good.
For MM improvement I'd like to see 2 things. Tier 3 and below never seeing a tier 5 tank and never seeing a battle more than 1 tier above or below.
We plan to simplify 1-4 tier gameplay, this one will probably be included.
Could you ask what will become of super high alpha tanks like jaegeroo, waffen and death star?
Alpha damage will be reworked (less dmg per shot), WT100 needs a replacement badly. HESH shells should have their own separate game mechanics
"And no MM improvement?!"
-"Yes there would be MM improvement. What kind of Improvement are you asking for?"
Personally, I like to see the algorithm be optimized to better balance out tank types and tiers between teams.
Far too often I see teams which either have: A) a huge numerical benefit in terms of the nr. of heavies they get assigned, thus creating an gulf of HP and firepower vs the other team. Or B) lack the above, due to mostly consisting of meds and turretless vehicles. Thus can be easily outplayed in terms of HP + firepower diff between the teams.
Players skill sometimes can make up for this, but that's a random occurrence.
"How about just decreasing the damage of prem. ammo by 50% .<snip>"
-No. Rebalancing prem ammo is okay tho. Things like 420 pen HEAT will have to go away.
Can Slava explain on this? It is a bit contradicting to read 'no' followed by 're-balancing prem ammo is okay'. What did he have in mind, what direction?
In which direction should we, us players, be thinking in regards to your vision on how this is could be rebalanced?
“Personally, I like to see the algorithm be optimized to better balance out tank types and tiers between teams.”
Not types, tank roles, yes - e.g. every team needs a scout, check or - every team needs an ambush TD on that map, check, things like that are planned but there is another idea that would work together with better role MM - there should be several ways to win a map. On bad maps we have a single spot that basically defines the outcome of the game, so if you need to defend it - heavier team has an advantage, if you need to capture it - faster team wins. That's bad map design, you shouldn't win by default just because your team has more meds and the map is decided by capturing certain hill and that’s it, no other way to win, we need to avoid such a mistake.
On rebalancing gold - gold ammo should be better, but that doesn't always mean better penetration. How about more damage per gold shot? or super powerful HE shell? Let’s say you have a JPE100 with 299mm pen, superpowerful gold HE would be useful so you can kinda cosplay FV183mm. 420mm HEAT? Well, that’s certainly nice unless you’re on a receiving end of said HEAT.
Another example - some kind of a sniper tank that has regular ammo and gold HEAT.
What about replacing HEAT with subcaliber shell with a lot better speed? Say, exchange 330mm pen HEAT with 310mm subcaliber that flies at 1500m/s? So you still have a better gold ammo yet it allows you to snipe better for the price of less pen compared to old HEAT
On the smoke screen subject:
Apparently even KV-1 had smoke emitters installed (not the version working with exhaust, just a smoke grenade attached to the tank)
I also promised one of you, "Hans vonLuck" that would ask a clarification to Slava on the Crew Skill idea that we talked on the Cyprus Meeting:
Well there will be grindable skills such as repair or camo and active skills such as clutch braking for example. Grindable skills work passively, sixth sense for example you do nothing to use it but active skills you need to manually activate, they would work for a short period and there will be a cooldown. Let’s say you can use clutch braking skill to gain gun stabilization for 20 seconds, next time you can use it is in say 5 minutes so you have to pick the right moment, let’s say some kind of engine overload, 20%+ acceleration for 20 seconds - if you need to get close to a TD or if you need to climb an important hill, etc, use it.
Things like master of ramming will go there as well so at some point we plan to convert the skills and crews, there will be just one entity called the captain or commander or leader, something like that.
