Wednesday, April 13, 2016

Wargaming's failure on the World of Tanks 5th Anniversary

Wargaming received a lot of negative feedback about a much anticipated event, the 5th anniversary of World of Tanks on the NA server.  The 5th anniversary specials weren't much better than a typical weekend special and were much less impressive than the previous anniversary specials.

This was the 5th anniversary specials page:
http://worldoftanks.com/en/news/premium-shop/5thanniversary-special/

Here is the feedback thread:
http://forum.worldoftanks.com/index.php?/topic/493021-5th-anniversary-x5-xp-and-the-hydrostat/

GhostPrime, on Apr 12 2016 - 17:16, said:
"I know a lot of people are not happy with this year's special. We didn't anticipate this sort of negative response, and that is our fault. The tanks we are focused on this month are the M41/90 and the Turan III. The Hydrostat is a tank bundle mostly intended as a tank collector bundle, and it’s not expected that everyone would want to own this vehicle.

We'll try to do better with bundle choices in the future. We're not able to change this bundle at this point, and I know that's not a popular answer. I want to reassure you that we are listening to all of the feedback, even if you don't see immediate evidence."

My reply to him was:


It seems that Wargaming didn't even look at the past when they created the 5th anniversary specials.  The specials were much less impressive than previous years.  The 5th anniversary is a big event and should have great specials both in the premium shop and in game that encourage players to spend money and gold and credits.  Instead you created tens of thousands of disappointing players on the NA server.  It feels like Wargaming didn't care about the event.  I'd be embarrassed to be anyone at Wargaming that deals with the players when the 5th anniversary specials were announced.

Many players think Wargaming is just saying they will listen to our feedback to keep us happy in the short term and hope we forget about this in a few weeks.  Wargaming North America and Wargaming in general seems to ignore player feedback:
1. Clan Wars 2.0 was a major fail, even in testing and Wargaming ignored the feedback and continued to implement Clan Wars 2.0, which drove many players away.
2. Wargaming took forever to try to "fix" clan wars 2.0.  Unfortunately by that point half of the top clans were "dead" and many players gave up on clan wars and world of tanks.
3. Wargaming has not listened to feedback about the current state of clan wars, which has driven many other players away.
4. There are thousands of players who aren't in the top 20 clans who want to compete in tier 10 clan wars, but they can't because the map is too small.
5. Wargaming has continued its policy of offering tanks for sale only in the premium shop and not in game.  Since September 2015, Wargaming has offered at least 29 tanks for sale in the premium shop only and not offered them for sale in game.  Players see this as a desperate money grab or see it as Wargaming punishing players who previously bought or won gold.
6. Many new and redesigned maps have become corridor maps with less places for concealment.  This means light and medium tanks have less opportunities to use cover and vision and flanking to help their teams.  Light tanks basically have become less armored medium tanks with lower it points so its made them useless in many maps.
7. Wargaming takes years to implement features in game that are in the most common mods used by its players.
8. The arty(SPG) game mechanic has been broken for years and players constantly complain about it.  Yet Wargaming has not done anything to balance it and require it to need skill instead of RNG.
9. How many years has Wargaming taken to make the game use more than 1 CPU core?  I have computer games that are 15+ years old that support 2 CPUs/cores.  Many of your players playing on low end systems would benefit greatly from proper multi core support.
10. Why doesn't SLI work properly in World of Tanks yet?


I actually left REL_3 and stopped playing World of Tanks for a while.  I was tired of the second job like grind that clan wars 2.0 was.  Then I came back and played casually to complete in game missions.  I was excited that the 5th anniversary was coming up and was planning to spend money, in game gold, and credits on the sales.  Instead I'm wondering if I should quit WoT again and go back to Armored Warfare because they actually try to listen to their community and use community feedback.  Last time I saw the statistics, the NA server players spend more per player than the other World of Tanks server regions.  yet we constantly feel ignored by Wargaming.

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