Insider Talks: Huge chunk of Q&A (Action X, Gaijin, balance and more)

Hello warriors,

a batch of info from the Insider. What's cooking in Wargaming?

- Future game installers and launchers will now have the option to repair your game installation, in case something goes corrupt or a file is missing or someone messes up on the mods, the game will be downloading only the files needed instead of the entire client
- the new function of WoT installer would be able to tell if your graphics card's drivers are updated or not, this may only work with certain card makers
- Installer can now check if your PC meets the requirements to play the game, and if it does it can calculate and offer you the best client quality (SD or HD)
- following the success of the Xbox "moon battle", a new mode (also for Xbox) will appear, this time on Mars!
- the rumor that +/-1 MM was tested on Xbox is a complete fake according to the Insider
- it seems that the French Sherman Revalorisé will be a regular premium shop vehicle
- it's possible that the players will be able to test the Action X Centurion (FV4202 replacement) in 9.10 test. Whether it will be implemented or not depends on player feedback. If it's very negative, it can happen that the switch won't be implemented yet.
- developers are still trying to rebalance gold ammunition. There will be an internal test of gold ammo nerf (only internal test for now)
- ALL PC devs confirm and agree that its very hard to push changes in the PC version of WoT mostly because players' overall negative reactions to change ("damned if I do, damned if I don't), while Xbox changes and content are easily pushed and much more prone to be accepted, Xbox has not disappointed so far

Insider on the "Gaijin" scandal:

Wargaming legal and advertising dept. paid very close attention to the Youtuber scandal form Gaijin. What came from it was the following memo in abridged details: 

 

We'll let people publish their videos, and we'll simply let the community to decide about them, we'll stick to our official informative videos as usual.

 

Basically they will make sure never to harass youtuber publishers that can criticize the game, and instead will let the players decide if the video is right or wrong - just to give you an example, there are published videos from players where they are being banned, after shooting a teammate repeatedly, and cussing at WG for it, WG will not incur in these videos, because the players fault is evident and are being chewed out by other players. Other times, theres an evident abuse of game's mechanics (refer to Sela's ban due illegal mod usage) and WG will only stick to punish the offender but never beyond the game's jurisdiction.

 

However another "less amicable" side of the memo says that they won't shape the game based on streamers or Youtuber opinions regardless of how "vocal" they can be ie: (some guy who whined to no end when his Yamato got nuked by a barrage of torpedoes, made a page-long text on why carriers were bad, either way he got chewed by players). Another cases of this include Garbad, Murazor, UNICA, etc. but they will simply not perform any kind of action that could harm them, like, for example, delete Youtube channels or so.

 

Balancing vehicles

WG's main balance factor, despite what anyone says is NUMBERS and MORE NUMBERS, not whines (except when they come with fatal errors or crashes, etc) but it has one drawback:

As an example: T-34-85M usage is so low that there isn't enough data to actually process a buff on its gun (just like the Rudy), and it doesn't help the fact that unicums/blues drive the tank mostly, where they completely outperform the usual average, so in this case, the numbers lie because they dont represent a total overall. AMX 40 and Churchill Gun Carriage (tier 6 TD) is another example of this. In this case other balancing factors come to play, but that'll be disclosed in another post :)

 

 Japanese tanks

Dev motto: "Japanese heavy tanks are difficult to drive? Don't drive Japanese heavies, let the unicorns do that then."

Overall the stats of Japanese tanks are "average" and displays that actually more skilled players tend to play them than the usual, this will be expected on the heavy branch: "those who know how to use them will have a Maus at tier 5". However the STA-1 and the STB seem to be doing pretty well even in Clan Wars.

 

- Some devs and admins play WoT on normal accounts in RU/EU/NA, nobody knows it's them and even participate in Clan Wars, they don't have any plans on sharing their names to the world.

- Devs and admins don't get free stuff on their regular accounts, they have to pay for everything they want, but they do, sometimes, get a few freebies for 3 days premium time or small amounts of gold (500g or 1200g bundled, etc) about once a month, even codes for them to give away but wont use on themselves

- A dev used to stream in twitch as a regular player in EU server, nobody knew it was him, can you guess who it was?

 

- apparently, NA houses more purple players than EU/RU but they have a consequently smaller playerbase ratio, the larger it is, the fewer the number becomes, this doesn't reflect that "America is better", in fact RU seems to take the lead on this, despite having the largest number of tomato players out there, they have truly terrifying skilled players. At some point a coalition of 5 clans & subclans in RU almost took over the entire continent in a global map, the only closest to it were players from Sweden or Finland in EU where they managed to make a flag out of the Clan Wars map for a time.
- A dark day for Greece and Italy: seems like their economic situation got reflected ingame too, most of the income WG makes coming from Greek players has been cut in half, and so does their skill
- Darker for Germany and UK: German and British players now took the lead as the players with most ingame reports (insults, racist remarks, etc) in EU, that doesnt mean German/Brit = holocaust, it's mostly reflected by server behavior due vacation period and due some ongoing rifts with German clans against their peers in global maps, or just overall douches, "play fair and leave your holocaust at the door!"
- Polish players? they re STILL the ones with the least reports, now along Switzerland and Sweden, Italy and Spain! rejoice :)
- regarding some strange remarks in EU and NA forums saying ragequits and such: game's not dying, or having less players - if anything, the amount of players keeps increasing specially in NA and some parts of western EU and in a minor way in ASIA (however China reported a staggering increase as well), and doesnt seem to be in decrease anytime soon, "lol game is dying" is just a kids tantrum. And the appearance of AW testing hasn't affected it so far.
- The trend to blame non-americans for game losses in NA server continues to some degree. Insider: "the best I can say to them is: "folks, you are full of crap :), skill isnt relied by geolocation or birthright so stop spewing bullshit"

Oh and G anniversary bundles? Lots of discounts for all clusters are coming, Xbox  is having them on the 15th or so. And it seems theres gonna be the mandatory 5x weekend in all clusters, so be ready!