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Where is Wargaming taking World of Tanks?

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Hello everyone,

It’s strange or me to be writing this, but I don’t think I can avoid it more after all the drama with #FochGate… Even got it’s own hashtag!

First of all, why haven’t I covered the issue more? Basically I didn’t want to jump into it without getting all the facts right. Second of all, I didn’t see this as a massive issue and really though that “something got lost in translation”, and was all just a poor choice of words. Knowing Ph3lan I believed this was just all a big misunderstanding.

And the fact that Wargaming apologized to SirFoch and we had several statements where Wargaming EU admitting their mistake, was more than enough for me to believe this would soon be over and people would focus on the real problem: Where is Wargaming taking World of Tanks?

I started playing World of Tanks back in September 2010, way back on Closed Beta and I’ve seen several different stages of Wargaming. From the company that was 100% dedicated to interact with it’s community and we had Victor Kislyi on Tank Fest handing out t-shirts and talking about World of Tanks with passion, to Wargaming that wants to release Rubicon and players know sh*t about this, we are the developers not them.

One thing we all need to remember, Wargaming is a company that is here to make profit, either you like it or not. Their game model is Free-to-Play and still is and if you really believe that at the moment is “Pay2Win” just based on “OP Tanks and other sh*t”… You haven’t seen anything. Ever tried to play World of Tanks when only Top Clans could afford gold ammunition while playing Clan Wars and players who willingly spend money on Gold to buy ammunition just to spam it on Random battles and even better performance on their tanks because they could buy Premium consumables?

Those where the true Pay2Win days and thank Wargaming these are long gone.

Now, don’t think I agree with what Wargaming is doing to the game. No, I don’t and I believe there is a bigger storm coming with Update 9.19. But we will get there in just a second.

All this drama starts with SirFoch or Foch, for short, publishing a video ranting about Wargaming. Cutting to the point, it gets taken out and the reason was the foul language. Now, seems everyone focused on the part where Wargaming asked Foch to take the video down and very few actually looked into what Foch said in the middle of all that “F*ck Wargaming”:

  • Release of ever more Premium tanks that are better than regular ones;
  • A few of these new Premium tanks even encourage players to use Gold ammo;
  • Removal of frontal weak spots making players use more Gold ammo;
  • Buff to some tanks making them almost impenetrable with regular ammo;
  • Introduction of Bonds and special equipment and consumables that will increase the gap between good players and bad players.

These are just few points that Foch wanted to bring attention to. Now, what have we achieved with #FochGate? Did we get these points into Wargaming list of issues to be fixed?

I’ll tell what we got with all the drama: more sh*t! Wargaming EU is desperately trying to control the situation, while the Community goes berserk on Reddit, Facebook and Forums. Foch followers desperate try to get this into every post, stream and other things they can remember and #FochGate becomes a reality.

Meanwhile on NA, ASIA and RU player base, this goes unnoticed because why should they care about a EU Streamer? Some try to bring this into the NA Forum and WG NA handles this quite well, refereeing players to the EU Forum in the hopes that would make it easier to manage.

But for some reason this gets into Kotaku and Jim Sterling radar, and the sh*tstorm was about to reach its pinnacle, or so we thought.

In what it can be only describe as Wargaming NA trying to help out Wargaming EU, rapidly became the worse thing possibly done. Both Kotaku and Jim Sterling talk about something, we in the EU Server, never heard before:

Wargaming accuses SirFoch of hatespeech and homophobic slurs!

Wait, what? Where this comes from? I was baffled when I read Kotaku article and found this:


“We are more than willing to give members of our community second chances, but there is a level of toxicity and/or offensive language that is unacceptable. We regret having to go to such extreme measures in SirFoch’s case, but we also don’t consider those measures to be censorship because we weren’t trying to silence SirFoch’s opinion, we were simply seeking to curb the extremely profane language of a member of our contributor program. SirFoch’s latest claim that we’re somehow prohibiting him from making future videos involving our games is completely false – he’s more than welcome to make more Wargaming-related videos. If those videos continue to include hate speech and homophobic slurs, we’ll take the necessary and appropriate action.”

Source: Kotaku


This small text, quoting no source, made all EU EN Community Contributors ask: Where this came from? We got a statement from Wargaming EU Head of Community Management, Florian, where he says that “We at Wargaming never claimed and will never pursue a copyright strike on public available or given content based on criticism, negative reviews of content, opinions on content etc. as long as I am having responsibility for community management in Europe. The only exception can be content provided under conditions of an NDA. (…) I want to point out that there was no copyright claim done on SirFoch and I assure you it wouldn’t have come to that.” , and now we got another statement saying they will take the necessary and appropriate action?

It wasn’t until today, when Jim Sterling publishes a second video about this, that we were able to find Jim Sterling and Kotaku source: WG NA Senior PR Manager. I can understand that Wargaming is a Global company and that normally if an office of such Global company gets a question, they don’t point to another Region Office to reply… But in this case that’s exactly what WG NA should have done.

Wargaming EU and Wargaming NA Community Contributor Programs are completely separate. So, if we are treated separately, why Wargaming NA should now, of all times, much such a statement? Worse of all, they didn’t even bother to communicate to Wargaming EU before they did it, maybe I don’t know, to get more information and to give an common response?

And to make things worse, those accusations of SirFoch for hate speech and homophobic slur are false. Yes, he is a rather toxic player, but that doesn’t make him homophobic, does it? And did he get a second change? No, first strike he was out…

Just like Jingles said, “Left hand doesn’t talk to right hand. Left hand doesn’t even seem to care that right hand had the issue under control and is just making the situation worse. Left hand isn’t ruling out coming after me if I say anything they think is inappropriate.”

Instead of making things better, Wargaming NA Senior PR just made Wargaming EU a lot more interesting, to say the least, with not one but two EU Community Contributors, Jingles and PointyHairedJedi, leaving and possibly there will be more.

Hurray! #FochGate achieved absolutely nothing positive to the game!

Who do I blame for this? Lets just say I blame everyone, me included. Wargaming for doing what they did with the copyright strike, the Community for not taking it’s time to get the information and for overreacting, Wargaming again for the poor damage control and for having no coordination on what and who says what… And us, Community Contributors for not doing what we should have done, published information and asked our followers to keep it calm.

So lets ask again, did we manage to get Wargaming to point the game into the right direction?

Of course not, no one is focusing on what should be done and on what is coming just around the corner. Remember when I said Update 9.19? You really think that a few slightly overpowered Premium tanks are the worse of our problems? If you think that it is, then let me refresh your memory:

Bonds! Improved Equipment for Bonds! Improved Consumables for Bonds!

I’m really looking forward for Ranked Battles, but I’m not looking forward for Bonds. And I wish the Community had taken this opportunity with #FochGate to tell Wargaming what is wrong with the game, because that is what Foch was ranting about.

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15,466 thoughts on “Where is Wargaming taking World of Tanks?

  1. This game is GOING DOWN. This game last 1 and half year is pay to win, after this conflick with FOCH this is begining of the END. I stop play after 5 years of playing becouse new stupid patch and to many OP premium tenks

  2. Because for many people the Youtube censorship and abuse of copyright laws as well as slander of Foch is a bigger issue than the wrong direction that Wot development is taking , including people who are very p***ionate about wot.

  3. I was just thinking how it has all played very nicely into WG’s hands, distracting the m***es from the real issues.

    Well done outraged internet warriors.

  4. Whatever happens or happened between foch and wargaming is between them. I don’t know why gamers have to seize on every bit of drama and blow it up. Relax, if this bit of trouble is the worst foch ever has in his life he’ll be doing ok.

  5. i am afraid that this game is going down a path that has been attempted by other games. some succeeded and some failed. i really like this game but stopped playing when it started becoming pay to win, and with the introduction of op premie tanks. i don’t know about the chrysler tank but the defender is op, i have played against it. this bond stuff i don’t know anything about so i cant say anything.this foch fiasco , w-g did go overboard a-lot and foch was no angel either. he told the truth but in the way only foch could. wargaming needs to figure out how to fix this and soon. the game is going down the toilet and they need to stop it. i hope they do fix this for all involved.

  6. A comment about p2w. You say it was worse in the old days when top clans could use gold ammo and dominate where others could not (M4 105 and Vk3601 konish in particular). I was a member of a top clan then, and this was not really true. Almost all of the gold we earned went to 1) paying for our subscriptions and 2) paying for the costs of clan wars (spamming gold in clan wars, camo, etc). We simply didn’t have enough left over for shooting pubs, and I only know a very few who are wealthy enough that they just never cared about gold costs (and not all are unicums, some are just wealthy greens).

    So IMO, P2W is much worse. Foch is right — the game is power creeping, and its power creeping in such a way that the top tier heavy tanks dominate unless you spam gold. WG has always been greedy and profit motivated, and that’s fine…but we need to make it clear as players that we demand a balanced product, not P2W. That’s what this is about to me.

    WG is probably quite nervous that WOT is no longer growing and its other games have not been successful. They seem to want to cash grab. That’s reasonable, tbh, as long as the game stays balanced. What’s not acceptable is deliberately breaking the game to cash grab what you can in a cycle of imbalance before the game fizzles out.

  7. Wargaming SERIOUSLY needs to get their **** in order!
    They were doing a decent job at trying to repair and “listen to the public”… and now they seem to be trying to shoot it all up full of holes.
    I’m pissed the CCs are walking… completely pissed! Not at them, I fully support their choices in leaving. I’m pissed off at WG for allowing this to happen.
    Where is the CEO with all this? It’s getting global coverage now in the gaming world! I’m getting people who don’t even know the first thing about World of Tanks but know I play, messaging me asking who what WG is doing and what all this is about.

    It’s evident Wargaming IS NOT listening to it’s fan base, because they can’t even listen to each other!
    WHAT THE **** was NA thinking when they posted that reply? WHY did they even feel the need to chime in?

    I’m leaving it with this… unless/until Victor Kislyi comes forward and does blanket coverage of all this and gets this **** under control, Wargaming is done. I’m here for the tanks and battleships… but if they threaten the livelihood of our favourite community contributors over bull**** like this, then I’m out.
    World of Tanks is made fun in part by the contributors, and what fun is when you know its Pay-2-Win, and all you have left is the toxic snowflakes in chat.

    ****, I’d even give Warthunder another try.
    Sad ****in day for World of Tanks/Warships/Warplanes.

    Save your games Kislyi!

  8. WG is becoming money grabbing company with their new premium tanks

  9. WoT is going down the ******* and Foch killed it. Hope he’s proud of himself.
    Now he can go find another game to **** on.

  10. “What’s not acceptable is deliberately breaking the game to cash grab what you can in a cycle of imbalance before the game fizzles out.”

    Listen to yourself… what world do you live in?

    If they don’t cash grab before the game fizzles out when do they cash grab? They’ve every right to make as much cash as possible. It’s their company, they decide.

  11. Nostradamus like yourself have been predicting the death of WoT for years now.
    Truth of the matter is while EU is big, they can survive with their RU audience.
    It’ll be business as usual until they tire of us en***led EU brats.

  12. Left world of tanks as soon as gold ammo was introduced over three years ago it became ptw then, all of this since is old news.

  13. Foch didn’t kill the game WG did with gold ammo three years ago this applies to any game you could think of. Any ***le that allows you to purchase something that gives you an advantage is PTW this is all WGs fault just hope they don’t introduce gold ammo to their other ***le I play world of warships!

  14. The following opinion comes from a player in SEA region;
    For players in SEA region, this Foch Gate thing is really unheard off, especially when the player base is mainly Japanese players. When I first saw the video posted by Foch on YouTube about the rant, I was amazed at the way he brought forth his message, but I do remember that this is probably the only way to let the community uniformly informed about the current and future state of WoT. From my 4 years of gameplay, I noticed something that makes me really, frustrating to play, which is even more than for example Dota and League, if you don’t have the will of literally ***anium, you will never be able to F2P this game till Tier 10. On the path of even enough credits to buy a tier 8, you face furstrating bottom tier battles, ignorant T54s with their sizzles, the idiots that never reads the chat or look at the map, and Insanely Annoying Defenders that screws your day.
    I am sure WoT can be an amazing game to play if they implement the fixes of single tier battles and No Premium Ammo, but to be fair, that’s only possible with a longer waiting time per match and a monthly game p***, I am seriously fine with both of those. To put the waiting time into perspective, Dota match takes about 2 minutes, league 1.5 minutes, WoT is 10 seconds, that is impressive, but at what cost?

  15. they did claim claim copyright don’t think u clarified that. wot is Pay to win in a few ways. camos and premium ammo plus they lessened silver earnings to force premium time on people. it’s really all a gimmick to fire premium. buy tanks to grind silver for premium and tier 10s. buy premium time to spam hesh in the stars. I don’t have problems with premium tanks on ps4 since none are blatantly op. (waiting for Patriot to see) premium ammo, mm and game mechanics glitches are a bigger concern

  16. Ofc its their right,as is every sheeps to get milked hard and not even complain about it.

  17. This game is going down the ******* cuz of Foch?
    No offence dude,but based on this comment alone:
    How old are you?

  18. mate you typed “2) paying for the costs of clan wars (spamming gold in clan wars, camo, etc).” which means an eternal cycle for the top clans to remain top, except someone else who pays for gold ammo will be able to compete you equally …

    btw WoWs is going fine and is far from “not successful” …

  19. The game is going more and more into a pay to win,not as much as it was when you had to pay gold for better ammo,but still,they are daoing more premiums that surp*** in performance the regular ones,like Defender or Liberte,Patriot,and now this Chrysler. It is great they give us really good tanks but they must look on the other side,the players that do not have the money or the will to invest in a premium tank or account.they should make premiums that earn rewards to those who use them,but still to have some weaknesses that the enemy can exploit if he isnt careful,so that the balance of the game isn’t affected by them,and the regular players who don’t invest to enjoy the game anyway,and the premium status of the vehicles should remain to make credits faster,and not severely impact the game.

  20. First of all i and i believ more like me don,t want to buy premium tanks that are worst than regular ones. If i buy something i want to be a good product to deliver me credits and pleasure to play with it.
    People start to cry from everything…that tank is op that tank is **** and wg is a company that want money so is useless for them to make a tank worst than a regular one that nobody want to buy.
    And now if a tank has enough armor on the front is op…everything that kills me is op in our days. People prefer to load premium ammo than flank and shoot a tank on the rear or side…and if autoaim with premium ammo doesn,t pen the front of the tank the tank is op.
    People are so crazy about their wn8 and stats that they shoot premium ammo in paper tanks like leopard grille or 1390 amx.
    I,m worry about other things like wg ninja nerfed the income of premium tanks. I remember than when wg launched t34 as a premium tank often the income was above 100.000 credits. Now is not very often to achive this amount of credits in a battle with any premium tank.

  21. You are aware that receiving DMCAs can severely **** with a YouTuber’s channel and in this case is a gross misuse of YouTube’s automated anti-copyright systems.
    Wargaming EU tried to censor Foch and we shouldn’t just ignore that. Having said that I agree that we also shouldn’t ignore what Wargaming seems to be doing and should consistently complain about the things we want changed.
    I think that’s what Foch was doing but I personally dislike the method of delivery.

  22. Agreed. They’ll pay more attention to internet drama than the actual game.

  23. are you seriously saying game balancing is the “real issue”, rather than frivolous copyright blackmailing by corporate en***ies?!

  24. Sorry, are you saying game balancing is the “real issue”, rather than frivolous copyright blackmailing by corporate en***ies?!
    Dude, get “real”!

  25. While you are correct to some extent, for flanking the maps need to be designed right. And we all know how most of the time a flanking angle means you will get obliterated. The maps are way too corridor. (Think I’m in an IS and encounter a Chrysler k, I cant pen anywhere on the front with premium, I am no medium or light who can flank very easily and his traverse speeds are so good that he can quite easily keep his front towards you. And that is talking about a pretty decent tier 7 heavy…)

    And of course you are correct in saying you wouldn’t buy a tank that is worse than a regular tank, but that’s why we had premium MM. They should never have removed premium MM, cause I feel the biggest issue is not that these tanks are powerfull that isn’t the problem. The biggest issue that even with premium ammo most lower tiers cant even dream of penning the front, that is ridiculous. And that combined with the inability to flank on most maps causes these tanks to be extremely powerfull. Especially considering these recent premium heavies get more armour than most same tier heavies, more mobility and a better gun. Compare the patriot or Chrysler k to the t32 or Caernarvon and they are in a completely different league, the latter edge towards tier 7.5, where the premiums are more like tier 8.5. In a game which has clear e-sports aspirations that is a complete no-no, but you know for it to be a proper e-sport they will have to take out a lot of RNG as well, so….

  26. Compared to the rather exaggerated gold spamming in battle these days, I’m not so sure Rubicon emblems were such a bad idea.

    I’d rather go up against these “wallet warriors” with a few +% in general stats than have them auto-pen regardless of my gameplay.
    With more skill you can overcome any stats boost, but there is no player skilled enough to bend the laws of the penetration mechanics.

  27. BONDS are a great idea and I love it. Because we need those extra buffs/equipment to have a chance against the ****load of OP heavy tanks – premium or not – and manually balance the gap between tier10 meds and ****ty tier10 light tanks that 9.18 brought.

  28. I think they go for milking the very last euro they can get out of this game with these too OP premiums (Liberte, Defender, Chrysler) and days for this game are numbered. They cant be so stupid if they plan some future for the game.

  29. I’m saying Foch tried to raise an actual issue and instead played right into WGs hands by giving them an easy way to create a distraction.
    Now if he hadn’t been so immature about it we might be talking about the tank and the wider game issues. Instead all the rage is at something 99% of players don’t understand or care about.
    So some yoo-toober got threatened by a company and the company immediately backed down. Happens all the time.

  30. Everyone is ****storming each other o the EU and NA while the Asian server are busy farming wn8 and fighting the second Vietnam war xD

  31. That much was true I suppose, but as far as shooting gold in pubs that’s not really true. Besides WG told us one of the key reasons people bought gold was to play clan wars — rush to tier 10, buy gold ammo, upgrade crews, etc. I find this believable.

    And wows is decent but not really a big hit.

  32. I am sorry, but WOT is simply one of the most pay to win games I have ever played, and I date back to the earliest FPS online shooter (Quake) and the first online multiplayer network created by some guys a year behind me in high school (Mplayer). Using micropayments for cosmetic items in-game is one thing, but when you use payments for items that alter a games mechanics, alter a games performance, and alter a games user experience, it is a very delicate balance.

    I think WG has been cavalier with the way they default items to gold, the development of some premium tanks, and the way some missions campaigns are geared. WG is a business, and they need to make a profit, but in my short time playing this game they don’t really seem to be aware of this balance as much as they need to be. NA and EU playerbases may be afterthoughts compared to the Russian one, but the customers need to be respected and that delicate balance needs to be respected. If it is not, NA and EU dry up in a heartbeat.

  33. Easy for you to have this position when your livelihood isn’t threatened by a semi-automated and easily abused DMCA takedown system.

    People are most worried that Wargaming can literally force any YouTuber to ‘toe the party line’ on something by threatening DMCA strikes. It might not really affect you, and SirFoch’s content is rightly worth calling attention to, but it doesn’t negate the need for anyone YouTube related to focus on the things that directly affect them first.

  34. You do realize WG could also hit me with a DMCA strike because I publish “leaked” information from Supertest Server, right? Most probably it’s more dangerous to me than to Youtubers, because I share a lot of information that is protected by NDA (not myself because I never signed anything), but WG could easily decide that the information I’m sharing is breaking NDA and take me down. But with recent WG statement, I believe we all can rest ***ured that will never happen.

  35. The flip side is, you never signed any NDA or anything when joining the CC programme, and they can’t hit you with a triple-DMCA strike the way YouTube would because:

    a) You’re not a YouTuber
    b) WordPress doesn’t run a 3 strikes and you’re gone policy on DMCA takedown notices
    c) WordPress manually investigate every notice and actively defend ‘fair use’ (eBay’s system is almost fully automated)
    d) WordPress actively encourage you to submit a counter-notice if you believe you’re not infringing.

    See https://en.support.wordpress.com/our-dmca-process/ for your hosts’ policies.

    Now, if you migrated your WordPress blog off WordPress hosting onto a private host in another country (not Los Angeles, California) you’d be pretty safe, because the DMCA law only applies outside of the US if you’re a US citizen hosting ‘offshore’ (might prevent your content being taken down but not the copyright holder suing you), or are (or hosting on) a US owned business including hosting locations outside the US.

    As a Portuguese national and British citizen, you’re particularly advantaged by not using YouTube, however you should be aware of the TRIPS agreement, which was implemented as an EU Copyright Directive and Enforcement Directive. Hosting with an ISP that doesn’t promote infringement helps keep you safe, and may lead to an ISP p***ing on a DMCA notice but not acting on it. The directives are not law, but enforced in law by each EU member state.

    Also, A DMCA takedown notice isn’t a legal directive – it’s a request and not legally binding even in the USA (unlike a lawsuit and injunction).

    To quote joepie91 on LowEndTalk,

    “Most (all?) EU countries have a common-sense-based notice-and-takedown protocol, which basically says that “the provider has to be notified of it in a reasonable/reliable manner”. The exact interpretation of this varies by country, but it usually means in practice that “any clear notice that lays a claim to copyrighted works, and clearly indicates where those works reside” will do. This includes DMCA notices, as long as they fulfill these requirements.”

    an example of the above would be:

    “In general Bahnhof is not liable for content that you as a client publishes. You are! This follows from EU’s E-commerce Directive 2000/31/EC, Section 4 (Articles 12-15), which was transposed into Swedish law as Act on Electronic Commerce and other Information Society Services [Lag (2002:562) om elektronisk handel och andra informationssamhällets tjänster]. Hosters do not have a general obligation to seek facts or circumstances indicating illegal activity. When the hoster obtains such knowledge it may however be required to remove and block such content.”

    So hosts like dediserve will p*** on and otherwise ignore DMCA takedown requests…

    TL;DR If you are worried about this, move your hosting, if you aren’t, keep it where it is, but you’re still not at risk like the YouTubers are – if Wargaming actually threatened a lawsuit and could show something you posted would damage their bottom line, you’d remove it, but they’d do this in court not with DMCA takedown notices.

  36. Nice comment that the underlying points of the whole situation are lost under the rubble of a bombed out building, but NO ONE thinks that any point made is valid anyway, so the outcome is as expected. Lots of players feel there are unaddressed problems. Some complain about premium ammo, some about premium tanks, some about team plays by clans, some about not enough for the clans. Personally, i hate ranked battles. I dont complain about them, i just refuse to participate in them. People shot at the targets they choose, not always the ones i want, but i dont complain cause its not my tank firing. People dont like big hills cause it takes too long to get to battle, i drive a tog and loved those hills, though now they are gone, and i did not complain. When i started, i thought it was to be a team based game, not you vs 15 enemies vs 15 friendly enemies. And if you are worried about homophobic slurs and foul language, well, you must not listen in on the chatter much is all i can say. It is definitely not a family environment. I love the game when played in teams with friendlies. The graphics people have done great work, its beautiful. But the unbalanced team mechanic is ruining the fun people used to have and turning it into aggravation and hatred, cause threatening emails and hurtful messages to be sent to other players, who dont deserve to be stalked and yelled at for 2 days because they missed a shot. All this is ok, but if i speak negatively about all this, i will be threatened, slandered, lied about, so to discredit any valid point i may have made? Hmmmmmmmmmm.

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