World of Tanks Developers Q&A December 2019

Big thanks to Bolnoj, our in-house translator for taking is his time to translate the whole article. Answers to the bloggers’ questions on live stream by Maksim Chuvalov, Global Publishing Director of World of Tanks, Aleksey Ilyin, Product Manager of World of Tanks and Vyacheslav Makarov, Product Director of World of Tanks.

• Each episode of the next year’s Frontline will be more self-contained.
• Steel Hunter and Frontline will have unified progression and rewards. However you won’t be forced to play all episodes or both modes, all rewards can be received from either one. The rewards are going to be new.
• Regarding this year’s Frontline: yes, we may have overdone and there were too many episodes. Next year will have less of them.
• Crew rework is in a very active stage of development right now. We’re making various builds, testing and playing around with them.
• About the crew forgetting tanks it was previously trained for – yes, this system is complicated, inconvenient and simply irrelevant in the current circumstances, so we decided to simplify it. We’ll do it and later on tell more you about it.
• Q: You usually have so much trouble with the start of any event, and Halloween was cancelled completely. Why is this happening and what has to be done for everything to go smoothly?
  • This is our internal and rather complex problem. Right now we’re working on changing and improving certain processes. Generally, our development staff has recently been significantly expanded. And introducing, teaching and integrating people into our processes is a large amount of work all by itself. Also, some events were made with considerable participation of new employees. Someone failed at something.
• We’ll try to make the crew conversion fair and not wrong anyone. How it will look in numbers we do not know yet ourselves. But even if we miscalculate somewhere and the player will be able to trick the system a little, we’ll live, nothing too bad. The only important thing will be to not get any OP crews with everything already trained. — You won’t be able to change the nation of the new crew.
• If 2019 was mostly events, 2020 will be more about new features. Meaning there’ll be fewer events in the coming year than in 2019.
• Not counting double-barrels, 2020 will have two new lines: Italian heavies and another one, a secret for now.
• With the introduction of the new balance player stats will also be taken into account. There’ll be a new tab with stats for a given period of time that the player will see as relevant, and it’ll be much better than what we have today. We see it like this: on opening the profile you’ll see two tabs: general stats and current stats. The game will remember which one you picked last time and will automatically open it the next time you open the profile. We want it to be as convenient as possible, but there could potentially be some technical adjustments.
• We don’t want to give any details on Italian heavies yet, but they’ll be very interesting vehicles, though nothing double-turreted.
• Besides the two announced maps (Pearl River and Berlin), we don’t have any more maps for 2020. There’ll just be some improvements for the Steel Hunter map and various event maps, such as for Halloween.
• Team Battles mode was discontinued forever, nobody played it. That was the main reason for the shutdown. Even those few that did only used it to grind credits.
• We’re planning a VERY big tournament for the 10th anniversary of the game. TBA sometime in early 2020. Reminder, the game’s birthday is in August.
• We’re thinking of releasing another final Sandbox with all the supporting features: new simplified tech trees, statistics (if we manage it on the technical side) and all other balance changes. Will see how it all works together, and if everything is fine, plus if a lot of players participate, enough feedback is being given and it is positive, we’ll start thinking on how and when to release it. But we’re estimating it to be very late spring.
• We’ve already announced an equipment rework for 2020. In addition to that, its interaction with low tiers specifically will be considerably improved – it will be MASSIVELY cheaper for them and receive some other changes. Also, tech tree cleanup. Going from lower tiers to higher tiers will be different. No more of such abundance of tanks at the very bottom of the tree. We want it to be easier and more interesting for the player.
• The “Dragon Ridge” map will definitely not be reworked in 2020.
• New communication system planned for next year.
• The number of turbo battles was seriously decreased with a couple of MM tricks and other things. About by two times in the total span of the introduction of all the measures. And, it appears, this is the ceiling. But sometimes it just so happens that one team plays poorly, and the other – well, and we can’t do anything about that.
• You’re going to be surprised, but early spotting from both sides actually reduces the number of turbo battles. The earlier the mutual spotting happens, the more sense the teams put in their positioning. The main reason for the existence of such battles isn’t because someone shot poorly, but because some group of individuals rushed in some incomprehensible direction.
• In the last four months, we’ve been thoroughly monitoring LT statistics (not just the wheelies). With the release of the British lights we’ve been putting even more attention to it, the amount of lights in battles has become higher. Nothing extremely dangerous, but we’ve got a few thoughts… When we were testing MM for 3 SPG, so that the amount of them in battles could be reduced, we actually got good results. The numbers: before the MM rework the amount of 3 arty battles at T10 was estimated 70%, now it’s exactly 39%, and aiming towards 30%. The process isn’t fast, the system is learning depending on the situations etc. But the point is, we’ve already tried to do this same thing with lights. It works, but MM is getting it harder and harder because events affect the amount significantly. We’re not actively doing things about this right now, but we’ll definitely return to lights from the MM viewpoint sometime next year and will tune the spread of this class.
• Any unification of regions (RU/EU/NA) is very hard mostly because of the legal part. It’s different laws, different rules, regulations, taxes and so forth. The problem is with the legality, not technical limitations. And internally we already made and tested such technology long ago, “roaming” if anyone remembers it.
• Adding the tournaments and everything related to them directly into the game client was originally planned for 2020. But, after looking at our RoadMap 2020, we’ve reasonably evaluated our strength and understood we won’t have time to make it in 2020. We really hope it to be one of the main features to be released early 2021. Also: UI specialists are hard to come by, and making interfaces is costly. Instead of those tournaments, it’s easier for us to do another Halloween event, and I’m not exaggerating. We did improve somewhat with how we’re making interfaces, but still with its technical nuances. Equipment, crew – also all tied into UI. All forces are for now working in this direction. Both tournaments and crew have lots of new interfaces, and if we have to choose, I think it’s clear what we’ll pick of those two.
• Bounty Equipment will be a reward for Battle Pass. Bounty Equipment is equipment with standard characteristics, but which can be improved to the level of Improved Equipment, forever. This equipment will be able to be demounted for gold.
• There’ll be no reconsideration of the price of demounting Improved Equipment.
• Blueprint changes aren’t planned for now, but we’re working on a feature tightly connected to them. It will deliver more useful blueprints to a player grinding a line. Right now they’re dropping randomly, and we want to work on that. Will come in 2020.

 New features for clan players by Aleksey Plotnikov aka Orc, Competitive Gaming Manager of World of Tanks from the press-zone of the Moscow event.

• No new tank for CW.
• An event in January, not earlier than the 12th. Duration – 2 weeks, Tier 10.
• The strategical side of the mechanics won’t see any changes.
• New mechanic affecting battles. Similar to directives, but only for Clan Wars. The mechanic is a TEST, will be tried for this event. Everyone will get the same amount of them, no way to replenish/buy them.
• “Workshop”, an event CW mechanic. For participating in a battle both teams will receive an amount various materials, which can be assembled into components, from which you will be able to craft Tier 8 premiums. For better understanding – look at craft mechanics in Witcher 3. All players of each team will get an equal amount of materials. Will be parallel to Fame Points. Will definitely be able to craft tanks given before (IS-5, KV-4 Kreslavskiy, Chieftain/T95 and T23E3). How many tanks you’re going to be able to craft in total: unknown for now.

Source: WOT Express

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Harkonnen

Tank Nut and Gamer Wannabe! Huge fan of tanks and World War II history. Playing video games since I was six years old, from Streets of Rage on my Sega Mega Drive to World of Tanks, I’ve never stopped since and will always love games.

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