World of Tanks Video: Matilda


In this video, I discuss the capabilities of the Matilda Tier 4 British medium tank in a match with Tier 3-5 tanks.

The Matilda plays like a heavy tank due to its thick hull / turret armor and slow speed. It’s one of my favorite tanks as it is durable and the gun provides sustained accurate DPS with reliable penetration.

Tank specs and statistics:

  • Crew level: 100% training level (leveled up from 75%)
  • Crew skills: Jack of All Trades, 3 x Repair
  • Gun: QF 2-pdr Mk
  • Equipment: Ventilation, Tank Gun Rammer, and Gun Laying Drive
  • No gold ammo or consumables

Let me know your questions and feedback.

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Posted in Medium Tank, PVP, Video, World of Tanks

Competing as a Free Player in World of Tanks


World of Tanks (WoT) is a game that I had dismissed a couple years back, based on hearing from other players and Tobold the blogger that it was a P2W (pay-to-win) game. As it turns out, it’s a shame I hadn’t tried WoT earlier – it’s a fantastic game.

As a new player, I was very curious to see whether a new player could be reasonably competitive without spending any money. Therefore, I did not subscribe with a Premium account ($15 USD per month) and I did not buy any in-game gold.

After playing 775 battles up through Tier 5, here’s my take:

  1. Gold ammo, which you buy with real money, definitely gives a huge advantage. Gold ammo will penetrate (i.e. punch through armor to deal damage) almost any target you’ll face. However…
  2. Individual player skill matters more than anything. No amount of gold ammo or having a Premium account will enable a player to aim effectively, understand how to counter opponents, and work effectively with other players. WoT is a very high “skill cap” game

There are a few things you should I should mention, to contextualize my experience as a WoT noob:

  1. Prior to playing the game, I had not read up on the game (e.g. I didn’t read the excellent Wiki, any guides, etc). The only thing I watched was a video by SideStrafe, which got me interested in the game in the first place
  2. I have not played a PC-based FPS (first person shooter) since Quake, back before 2000. So I’m not an experienced shooter
  3. Over 80% of my matches to date have been as a solo player, not as part of a platoon (premade group)

So I basically went into WoT cold, without any meaningful knowledge about how the game worked, without much experience with shooters, and playing on my own.

Gaining experience without Premium is a slow process, and this in turn impacts the rate at which one can research / upgrade / level up tanks and crews. So without Premium you extend your window of being “undergeared” relative to your opponents. Would this be gamebreaking?

The easiest and most objective way to evaluate performance in WoT is to look at the rich statistics that are publicly available and the ratings systems created by the community.

In general, a player’s statistics tend to improve :

  • As they climb up the learning curve for the game, which includes understanding how to aim, where to aim, how to control their tank, how to use terrain, how the maps work, what the capabilities of tanks are, strategies and tactics, how to coordinate with their team mates
  • Upwards as they research and buy upgrades (guns, turrets, engine, suspension) for a given tank
  • Upwards as they mounted equipment for a given tank
  • Upwards as they level up the training for their crew to 100% for a given tank
  • Upwards as they level up skills / perks for the crew for a given tank, which are available for a crew member once their training level reaches 100%

Not surprisingly, new players tend to perform statistically poorly compared to more experienced players who have better tanks and crews, and I was no exception.

Here’s a screenshot from NoobMeter.com of my performance up through today:

NoobMeter snapshot from April 28, 2013, last 27 battles

You can see that there are 4 rating systems (NoobMeter’s Performance Rating, Efficiency Rating, WN6 Rating, and WN7 Rating). I won’t go into detail about the differences between the ratings systems, but what is clear from looking at my stats is that there has been significant improvement when you compare the Overall column with the Last ~7 days column:

  • Performance Rating: from 1502 (Good) to 1801 (Great)
  • Efficiency Rating: from 890 (Below Average) to 1050 (Average)
  • WN7 Rating: from 762 (Bad) to 1097 (Average)

You can see in the Recent column that my ratings dipped a bit over the past day, and this was likely due to my unlocking the Churchill 1, the Tier 5 British heavy tank. I played a few dozen matches with that tank before I was able to unlock the engine, suspension, turret, and first decent gun, and it was brutal. Prior to fully researching the tank, even when I was winning games my contribution was low from a numerical standpoint. For the Churchill 1 crew, I did acquire a 100% training level tank commander for 200 gold, as all players who changed their password were given 300 gold. I figured this was acceptable to use on a commander as that free gold was available to all players.

The most simple stat to look at for performance is Win Rate. According to WOTLABS.net, the average Win Rate is 49%. That makes sense, when you consider that that means the average Lose Rate is 49%, and that leaves 2% for Draws. One in 50 battles ending in a draw sounds about right to me. I did not cross the 50% Win Rate until ~620 battles, because I lost a lot of my first 200 battles, and even when I got the basic mechanics down, I was dealing with leveling up tanks and untrained crews at each new tier. My recent Win Rate has been ~56% for the 3 tanks I’ve been playing the most

  • Tier 4 M8A1 tank destroyer (215 battles, 51.2% Win Rate)
  • Tier 4 Matilda medium tank (191 battles, 56% Win Rate)
  • Tier 5 Churchill 1 heavy tank (67 battles, 56.7% Win Rate)

My guildees and I have been discussing what % of the player base has Premium and what % of the player base is using gold ammo. Opinions range all over the map. My guess is that fewer than 25% of players are using Gold ammo. I would assume that a significant % of the opponents I’m facing have fully-upgraded tanks and 100% training level crews, and I’m still winning at a rate ~7 percentage points higher than average.

I understand that at higher tiers, the extent of grinding to fully research and upgrade tanks increases, so that factors such as Premium do matter more. That said, I do believe based on my experience that while paying customers have an advantage, non-paying customers can still perform effectively. So it’s safe to say that this isn’t a P2W game.

If you’re just starting WoT and can afford to a Premium account, it’s worth it to speed up the leveling process. But if you don’t want to pay and just want to play, you’ll be fine without it.

P.S. here’s a screenshot of my 27 battles from last night. This was a particularly good series of games for me, grouped up with Sujitsu (WoT: L337Zeon) and Trajan (WoT: TrajanMVN) and running solo. My Churchill 1 crew’s training levels are 100/87/87/87/87, and I’m turning the corner with that tank. The crews for my Matilda and M8A1 are at 100% training level and just starting to work on their first set of skills.

  • Performance Rating: 1890 (Great)
  • Efficiency Rating: 1810 (Unicum)
  • WN7 Rating: 1749 (Unicum)

noobmeter-20130428 - last 27 battles

P.P.S. I’ve answered for myself the question of whether non-paying customers can compete – they can. As I plan to continue playing WoT but want to reduce the grind, I went ahead on May 1st and purchased a Premium subscription.

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Posted in Game Design, PVP, World of Tanks

Guide to Angling in World of Tanks


This guide explains the concept of “angling” in World of Tanks (WoT).

Angling is turning the hull (body) of your tank so that the front of your tank is pointed slightly to the left or right of your target. Angling your tank provides the following benefits:

  1. Incoming shells may deflect/ricochet/bounce off your armor
  2. Your effective armor is increased

Angling can significantly enhance your survivability, especially against enemy tanks that would otherwise penetrate your tank with their shells.

Keep in mind that tanks with low armor may not benefit meaningfully from the increased effective armor gained by angling, since increasing a small number won’t matter much. That said, by angling you can increase the probability of ricocheting an incoming shell, and that can make a huge difference for your survivability.

There are select tanks, such as the IS-3, that have a “pike-nose” front, which provides angling without having to actually angle the hull, so for such tanks you want to have your tank directly facing the enemy tank.

The following diagrams illustrate the concept of angling in various situations.
angling-scenario-1

angling-scenario-2

angling-scenario-3

angling-scenario-4

As Crueldwarf posted below, another angling technique is “sidescraping” in which you only expose your angled side to the enemy. With this technique you don’t have to peek-a-boo, you just whale on your opponent.

Sidescraping image

Sidescraping tends to work best when:

  • You have thick or angled side armor, and / or you are sidescraping at such an angle that shots that hit your side will likely ricochet
  • You are trying to cover obvious weakspots in your frontal armor, e.g. tank’s engine behind lower glacis for some German tanks, the hatch on the right front of the Churchill 1, etc
  • You are fine with getting “tracked” (tracks knocked off, which immobilizes the tank), and you want your tracks on the exposed side to absorb damage that was meant for your HP instead
  • You have a high RoF (Rate of Fire) gun and want to maximize your shots per minute, and your opponent for whatever reason is going to be in your line of sight for an extended window of time

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Posted in Guide, PVP, Video, World of Tanks

World of Tanks Video: M8A1


In this video, I discuss the capabilities of the M8A1 Tier 4 American Tank Destroyer in a match with Tier 4-6 tanks. The M8A1 is a mobile glass cannon that can snipe from great distances with an accurate gun.

Tank specs and statistics:

  • Crew level: 86-87% training level
  • Gun: 57 mm Gun M1 L/50
  • Equipment: Camouflage Net and Tank Gun Rammer for the the camouflage and loading bonuses
  • No premium account, gold spent, gold ammo, or consumables

Let me know your questions and feedback.

P.S. After a brief and disappointing experience with Age of Wushu just over a week ago, I installed WoT on a whim. That turned out to be a great decision, as WoT is a gem of a F2P game! I’m extremely impressed with the tactical nature of WoT teamplay and the rich design of the tanks and battle mechanics. I’d heard a while back that WoT is “pay-to-win” (which is part of the reason I never tried it until now) so I’ve been playing without a premium account and without buying gold, to see whether a noob player can compete against other opponents who have better crews, equipment, and possibly gold ammo.

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Posted in PVP, Tank Destroyer, Video, World of Tanks

The End of Culling in Guild Wars 2, a.k.a. Choose Your Own Lag


Guild Wars 2 (GW2) launched with a system called “culling”, explained by Habib Loew of Arena Net (AN) as follows:

In order to cut down on the network resources that were used by the game and to reduce the client-side system requirements, we implemented a culling system, which imposed a limit on the number of characters that could ever be reported to your client. This meant that only the characters closest to you would actually get reported.

While this achieved our goal of limiting bandwidth and client-side resource utilization, it had the unfortunate side effect of causing large battles in WvW to be confusing, as there were sometimes many enemy players that were completely invisible. Additionally, there were side effects of culling which could result in stealth characters getting up to two seconds of additional invisibility when coming out of stealth.

While culling created some negative experiences and was a sore point with the community, it also helped to prevent the kind of client-side lag due to mass combat that I’ve experienced in every other MMORPG, including WAR, Aion, and SWTOR. In those games in mass combat, the frame rate dropped significantly and the game client sometimes froze for periods of time as it struggled to render all of the characters and their actions.

ArenaNet’s Solution to Culling

In the article linked above, Habib explained that culling is being removed, and that AN is providing 3 settings that enable you to tune the experience / performance related to characters in WvW:

  • How characters are rendered: high resolution, low resolution “fallbacks” until the high-res loads, or nameplates only
  • The WvW character limit: how many of the reported characters render with a model and how many are rendered only with nameplates
  • The WvW character quality: how many of the characters rendered with a model use the high resolution models and how many use the lower resolution fallback models

The new system will allow players to fine-tune their WvW mass-combat experience, or as I like to call it: “choose your own lag.” We’ll have the see these changes in action, but on paper AN is providing an innovative and flexible solution for a very difficult technology problem not unique to GW2 or even MMORPGs. For most games, you have control over the graphics settings in general but not as much control as the 3 settings described above for character rendering.

I have a very solid Sager gaming laptop, but I know it’s not beastly and I hate lag, so I’ll probably try out the low resolution “fallbacks” option for how characters are rendered and with a limit of 25-30 characters, and see how well it works. For WvW, the most important thing is knowing the numbers of your opponents, then after that knowing what class/spec each player is. I’d rather have lesser graphics than lag that impacts performance.

Server performance will probably not be improved by these changes. It’s possible that with a higher amount of data for characters being sent from the server to the client that server performance may be negatively impacted.

This brings us to the next point: server performance.

The Removal of Culling Doesn’t Address Server Performance

There is a lot going on in real-time in an MMORPG: each game client talks to the server to relay each character’s actions, the server manages all the mob AI and combat calculations to determine outcomes of ability uses (damage, healing, players states due to CC, etc), and the server communicates back to the game clients what is going on, and each game client renders this information so that you see the visual effects of the combat, updates to HP bars, etc.

It’s important to note that culling does not address server-side load, which is why even with culling in place there are times when zones in WvW have server-side lag. After all, even if other characters are culled, the server still knows that they are there. You can tell when there is server-side lag when you and other players experience a noticeable multi-second delay before an ability activates.

What is causing the current server-side lag? I’m not sure, but ArenaNet made at least one design choice which increases server load: the way conditions were implemented.  Colin Johanson discussed the performance of conditions when explaining why there is a cap of 25:

Colin: Currently no. Interesting statistic for you: every condition in the game costs server bandwidth. ‘Cause we have to track how often the condition is running, what the duration of that condition is and what the stack is. So the more stacks we allow them more expensive it gets because we’re tracking every additional stack on there. And so we could, say, you can have infinite stacks. Number one: that becomes really unbalanced. But number two: it’s actually extremely expensive for us, on a performance basis. That’s one of those weird, kind of back-end server issues that can help make game designer decisions regardless of what you want to do with it.

But there’s more to tracking the condition stacks on a target – consider also that condition damage is dynamic in GW2 – that is, it changes over time. In World of Warcraft (WoW), if you cast a Damage-over-Time (DoT) spell on a target, the damage is fixed for each tick at the time of the attacker’s spellcast – that is, the damage is static and does not depend on the attacker’s “state” at the time of each tick. “State” is a term in computer programming that describes all of the variables for a particular thing, e.g. a character. The WoW model for DoT simplifies the calculations performed by the server. By comparison, when you cast a DoT in GW2, the damage inflicted for each tick of the DoT changes based on the state (in this case how much condition damage) the attacker has at the time of each tick. This is why the ticks from burning or bleeds on a target sometimes change over time. If you consider multiple attacker’s placing stacking bleeds on the same target, each set of attacker bleeds requires its own calculations based on the state of each attacker each time the conditions tick. These calculations add up (no pun intended).

Server-side scaling is a very challenging problem, and as I recently wrote in my first article on The Elder Scrolls Online, no game developer has delivered a system that gracefully scales for a high number of players in a small area.

We’ll have to see how AN’s removal of culling coupled with the new character settings pans out.

What do you think of the AN’s proposed system?

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Revision History

  • 2013/03/16: fixed “bugs” in my writeup per Michael’s Chowns comments, and reordered the sections for clarity
Posted in Game Design, Guild Wars 2, PVP, World of Warcraft
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