Prior to today, I hadn’t posted an article in months, and I’ve been mulling over a change in blogging philosophy.
My tendency with writing is to wait until I have specific insights and detailed thoughts that I want to share, e.g. my articles on game mechanics such as Why PVE Content Shouldn’t be a Coral Reef and class-specific guides such as my M*A*S*H melee healing cleric for RIFT. This is reflection of my personality – I tend towards perfectionism and I strive to “add value” to the community.
That said, that style of blogging doesn’t mesh particularly well when I’m busy in real life and my free time is limited but there are gaming topics that I want to dialogue with y’all about. Therefore, I’m going to change my approach in 2014 and post shorter-length pieces. As I’ve always said, I get as much value and enjoyment out of hearing your opinions as I do in providing mine, so I look forward to hearing from you!
Cheers,
Taugrim
P.S. I realize the irony of this post, given the long-ass article on WildStar and Action Combat that preceded this one. :)
Taugrim's MMO Blog 
Hey man, just glad to hear from you. Always will remember watching you in your prime during SWTOR first few months. Hope life gives you time to enjoy your hobby and share it with us.
It was a fun time, and I learned a lot :)
I hope so too!
It’s a shame you don’t play world of tanks anymore. You’re the reason I decided to pick it up.
I stopped playing after my wife helped me realize how aggro I’d get while playing the game. LOL. One of the guys I met and platooned with in WoT, Mark_Chopper_Read, was surprised at how frustrated I’d get with people on our team, because he’d never seen me like that in my streams or videos.
Aside from my aggro issues, WoT is a very good game, *BUT* it would be an amazing game if the developer removed premium ammo.
It doesn’t matter to me that premium ammo was changed to be purchaseable with in-game currency, because it’s still unfair for players who are low on currency because they are leveling thru tiers for new tanks and/or aren’t paying for premium. I want to lose to better players, not players who are firing superior ammo.
I never fired, let alone purchased, a single shell of premium ammo. I’m very stubborn with things like this that smack of unfairness.
That said, based on the new WN8 rating system, I was right around Unicum rating (~2350) for my last 1k battles, so that lowered my stats-based motivation as well, since I know I can still do statistically well even without premium ammo.
Yeah, I’ll be honest man, I don’t know what to think of your stats. I struggled through the really bad tier 7 medium grind and wanted to see how you compared. I don’t blame you for not playing them, but skipping terrible tanks can cause stat bias too.
To give an example, the panther is one of my most played tanks, and on several occasions I leveled adobe villages on desert maps so that other tanks with heavy alpha damage could get a clean shot on an enemy tanks. It helped us win the game, but 20 misses were tallied onto my record.
One of the new and weird things that have happened since introducing XVM and viewable global stats is that some players have created Fluffy Accounts. They are accounts where the majority of their games are Tier 8 Premium Tanks and Tier 10. The one I looked at yesterday was $1000+ to have made not including the gold ammo and consumables the player probably used in 15000 battles to obtain 60+% winrate. This clan leader I looked at, maybe made the account to help recruit.
I don’t know where I am going with this actually…. idk maybe the next blog can be on the negative impact of stats?
The great thing is that the WN8 rating system elegantly addresses the issue of discrepancies between tanks. WN8 compares your performance on a given tank to other drivers of the same tank.
You can see the average damage/win rate/spot/frag/defense numbers by tank here:
http://www.noobmeter.com/tankList
So with WN8 there’s no inflating one’s stats by playing the OP tanks, because you’re being compared to drivers of the same OP tanks. This holds true for underpowered tanks as well – you are not being compared against drivers of better tanks, but rather to drivers of the same tank.
Misses aren’t factored into WN8. Unfortunately spotting damage isn’t in the formula yet, AFAIK, because that data is not publicly available.
That being said, if you helped spot a lot of tanks with your actions, and your team wins, those will factor in favorably for your WN8 rating.
Well, there isn’t much we can do when players re-roll, so they have accounts with clean stats, instead of an account that includes games played when noob. Most people only pay attention to the more recent games (last 60 days, last 1k battles, etc) as a measure of whether or not a player is skilled.
Spending real money also provides tangible benefits to players in WoT, so while WoT is a high skill cap game, between equally skilled players, the one who pays has an advantage over one who does not.
I’m super pleased that you will be posting with increased regularity! I want to encourage you to not be overly concerned with posting information not up to your high standards, every time.
You already have tabs at for home, guides, gaming history, about, donations, and PC specs. If you want to divide further into something like, “Gems of Wisdom” and “Musings” newcomers to your blog won’t get bogged down trying to sift through posts that you spent hours researching/composing, and those that took 30-45 minutes.
Regardless of how you choose to proceed, I want to end by complimenting you on the quality of your blog. And, to say thank you very much!
Thanks for the suggestion!
What you see across the top of the page are static “Pages” in WordPress.
For every article, I do specify “Categories” such as “Game Design”, “PVP”, and “Guild Wars 2” just to name a few, so that readers can look at related content, and there is a Search box as well.
You can access the full list of Categories in the right rail (on desktop and landscape on most touchscreen devices) or in the bottom of the page on mobile devices.
Your comment does make me wonder whether I should move the Categories closer to the top of the right rail.
Interesting changes to your format… But have you considered a format where you state an uninformed opinion on a divisive subject fanning the flames of social discord, and then play referee while the two extremist pools of hateful nerds try to shout each other down in the comment section?
ROFL
That sounds a lot like Bleacher Report. There was a great article on them talking about how they intentional create divisive topics to get people to click and argue:
http://www.sfweekly.com/2012-10-03/news/bleacher-report-sports-journalism-internet-espn-news-technology/
pshh they’re amateurs