World of Tanks

Right, so a couple days ago I downloaded and installed the free to play World of Tanks. I did not enjoy it. But, figuring I had nothing but time to lose, I decided to perservere through the early games in order to unlock the different specialized tanks. I didn't really enjoy those either, but a bit of cursory reading explained that the lower level tanks are just bad in general, and the higher tiers are more fun, so I continued to perservere. And oddly enough it actually was true - once I got to the third tier Soviet artillery, I found that I was quite literally having a blast.

For those who don't know much about tanks, there's a lot of them. Possibly hundreds of different chassis types, and thousands of variants ranging from long range mortars to quick skirmishers with machineguns. The game is broken down into five specific types - light scouts, medium skirmishers, heavy brawlers, ambushing tank destroyers, and long range artillery, and everyone starts out stuck with the worst light tanks in the game until they get the basics down and grind out experience to unlock bigger and better ones, which is when the game actually starts to get interesting. I suppose it's a necessary evil, as light tanks basically counter everything else if they can close the gaps, so learning how they move is an essential defense for the bigger vehicles. Personally, I started grinding down the Self-Propelled Guns line. The distinction between these vehicles and actual tanks are that SPGs are a gun with a vehicle built around it, while everything else is generally vehicle with a gun. In WoT, this means they're the artillery pieces that hide somewheres on the battlefield and rain down fiery death, destruction, misery and rainbows on everything that moves. The hiding part is essential, since they're so poorly armoured that they explode if an enemy unit so much as looks in your general direction, but made up for the fact that they can generally cause that same level of explosiveness on anything that your own scouts can find for you.

It's very much a team game. The old Rock-Paper-Scissors mechanic features quite strongly, with every individual tank type having something it's great at, and something it's got no chance in hell of defeating alone. Heavy tanks can take down a light tank in one shot if they can hit it, but they aim and move so slowly that it's perfectly possible for a scout to rush past and then circle them, taking them out with a lot of weaker shots while dodging fire themselves. This is where mediums come in - tougher than scouts, with bigger guns, but almost as fast. Tank Destroyers are exactly that, hard to see with massive front armour letting them ignore most shots from light and mediums, and mostly shrug off heavier guns, while also having very strong weapons - but they have no turret, so have to slowly turn the entire tank to aim, meaning they're best off hiding behind some trees and firing at long range. Artillery are similar, with no turrets and extremely strong guns, but they can't move as fast, and don't have the armour - but they can fire at extreme range in an arc, letting them hit practically anything that their teammates can spot for them, so long as they're in a decent position to lob shells high enough to go over intervening mountains rather than hitting them directly. Since Light Tanks counter practically everything but Medium and other Lights, proper positioning and distribution of your team is extremely important, just like in an actual combat scenario - leaving the artillery completely unguarded ends up in them dying, leaving you with no cover fire.

Like with most War-based games, pseudorealism is the general category for game mechanics. Armour is particularly "realistic", to the point that it can actually impact the fun to be had sometimes. Thick armour simply causes weaker shells to bounce off or deflect away, causing no damage, but if the attack is too strong, it just goes right through the tank and causes nothing but a small hole, again resulting in no real damage. The key is using the right kind of ammo, Armour Piercing for most targets, and HE for either really tough or really weak opponents - HE will penetrate weaker ones and explode inside the tank, almost guaranteeing a kill, while at the same time it'll simply explode on impact if it can't penetrate at all, with the heat from the explosion splashing around and causing at least a little damage, if not much. Armour penetration is also limited by the gun on your tank - the lower tier ones really have no chance at killing the higher ones because their guns just can't get through the armour, except for artillery, which can drop shells on the top of the tanks where the armour is always very thin, and sometimes completely nonexistent. However, like in reality, there are weak points for every tank - doors, hatches, and most of all the treads are all poorly defended and ready to shoot with a relatively weak weapon. If you can blow the treads off a tank, they can't move very well, the gun can be damaged to reduce their ability to fire, damage ammo stores can explode, the fuel tank slows them down and catches fire, etc. Side armour is relatively weak as well, and rear armour is almost always vulnerable to shots, so a fast tank can still nibble a heavily armoured one to death with repeated shots in the back.

As you drive a certain specific tank, let's say the USSR's SU-26, the one I'm playing with, the tank itself earns experience. 5% of the XP goes to a central pool where you can spend it on any tank, and you can spend actual money to convert more to that pool, but generally the more you play the tank, the more XP you accumulate on it, which is spent on unlocking upgraded parts. The neat thing is that these things are interchangeable in some cases - my SU-26 has a radio upgrade that some of the best tanks in the game use, so I don't have to worry about unlocking it for them if I ever progress to the point of driving one. As you move down the tech tree, you might need to unlock specific things to then spend XP to unlock the next tier of tank; in my case, I had to research a very large and very powerful gun before I could spend points on researching a bigger tank chassis.

Where it falls apart, though, is in the monetization process, like most free to play games. In this instance, the biggest problems are super ammo, extra-strong tanks, and crew training that can only be bought for real money. The first two aren't quite so bad as the third, in that not many people use the super ammo since you're actually paying for each individual shot, and you can still counter the best tanks if you can find the weak points in their armour, though one medium tank killed two other mediums and a heavy tank just to get to me once, and the only way he managed was by being in a paid tank, but it's a Canadian design so I'll accept that. The way the crew works though, is that each tank has a number of crew members for any given job - a driver, gunner, spotter, loader, or radio operator. For free, you get them at 50% usefulness. Spending ingame currency gets them to 75%, but actual money can be spent to push them to 100% immediately, automatically making them twice as effective as anyone who couldn't afford the better crews, and giving you a massive advantage. You can train them yourself by just playing the game, but they only get around 1% per battle, and only if you survive it. Once they reach 100%, they can start learning a bonus skill, in the way of repairing the tank if it's damaged, putting out fires that might happen, and working on camouflage to make you harder to spot - the problem being that by the time you get to 100% and manage to start learning one of these, which also has to go up to 100%, the other guy's already way a head of you. You can also spend money to get ingame currency to boost your tank's stats with addon items, which take ridiculous amounts of grinding otherwise In short, you aren't paying for convenience (though you can do that too), you're outright buying an advantage over your opponents who can't afford to pay as much as you, which is one of the worst things a F2P setup can do - I can accept faster progression, which they also get for paying, but instantly being better than someone  in a game solely because you have more money is never a smart move.

Overall it's better than I thought it would be, so long as you can tolerate the early levels and occasional matchup you have no chance to win, but the amount of grind that looks to be on the horizon is troublesome. It's taken me something like 70 battles in the Tier 3 SU-26 to unlock everything it has, and almost to unlock the next tier which is 14000 XP. The XP gain doesn't change as you progress, but the later tiers are each an order of magnitude more XP to grind - from the tier 4 SU-5 to the tier 5 SU-8 is going to take 47000XP, beyond that 113000, then 185000,  and finally 311100. It's going to take thousands of battles to get even halfway to the best tank, and each one is able to take upwards of 15 minutes. If you lose, you get around 30 XP, so.. yea. During matchmaking it shows you how many of each tier of tank is currently available for the selection process - out of every player on the US servers, there are only ever two or three max tier tanks. That's around 0.0002% of the playerbase, which is incredibly pathetic.