World of Tanks – what’s this then?

If you’ve been on TS the last few months you’ll likely have noticed a few of us are rather addicted to this wee game, and you might very well be wondering why. This is a valid concern because surely a free to pay tank game must be a terrible waste of time, especially one so obviously “arcadey” and therefore terrible, right? Well that was certainly my view, and that was even my view after initially trying the game during early 2012. I thought it was a fun game for a few rounds, but which had very little depth, and was clearly inferior to playing tanks in BF3….Enter bmstalker (calm down Paddy)…

I can’t remember what got him started, but he quickly became addicted and started to tell me so. It took maybe 3 or 4 months of him drip feeding me emails at work though, constantly telling me how awesome this game was, until I relented and finally gave it another go. What eventually sold me, was his assertion that I had not appreciated the full complexity of the game, and he used the video below to reinforce his point:

[youtube:2nggq7o0]wq5S8CrsUig[/youtube:2nggq7o0]

Now if you’ve managed to watch that before reading on, well done, but the “too long didn’t watch” version of the above is simply that there are a lot of mechanics at work within the game that elevates it well above the arcade status I’d initially assigned it, and that video only really covers ballistics.

So I gave the game another try and quickly found that there was much more to it than initially met the eye. Understanding the video above, and other mechanics in the game, really makes a difference, both in terms of your performance, but also in enjoying the experience. Finally I found myself having to think during matches, and it was satisfying when that resulted in a victory.

Anyway time’s gone on now and with over 6000 matches on my record it’s safe to say that I’ve put more time into this game now than I did with BF3, and believe me I didn’t expect that to happen. Along the way we’ve picked up a few others in XDC who’ve reached various levels of experience in the game, and who we’re able to platoon with on an almost daily basis. Platoons are an even better way to enjoy the game, introducing some real teamwork to the experience and allowing you to effectively carry the rest of your team mates (when it works). More recently, over the last month or so, Doc, Richard, Beer, and even Max have all joined in, and are currently progressing very well along the various tiers, and those of us with more experience have been trying to help them along through the early stages of the learning curve.

The purpose of this thread, and forum, is to help them a little more, plus introduce the game to others who may have wondered what we’ve been doing. I’ll cover some game basics which are not immediately apparent when you first play it, and if you want to try to put any of this into practice, feel free to jump on TS and give us a shout. Several of us have enough tanks available to play at any level within the game, so it’s not a problem joining you in a platoon to help out any time you feel like testing this out. I’ll split the thread up into a number of posts, just to cut down on the wall of text this is likely to become and hopefully make it a little easier to read through.