World of Tanks Gamescom 2018 Developers Q&A

First I would like to thanks Bolnoj for translating and doing this digest for all The Daily Bounce readers! This second Q&A from Gamescom was conducted by Amway, Russian Community Contributor, with Andrey Biletskiy, Creative Director of World of Tanks and Maksim Chuvalov, Publishing Director of World of Tanks. I’ve decided to publish it as it has some differences from what it was said during the English Q&A and more details into what was overall discussed.

• Polish tanks were very anticipated in Europe. Usually, WG tries to leave some room for action due to it always being better to buff than to nerf, but right now they’re very content with how the tree’s balanced.
• Wheels will have physics different from tracks, mostly on the level of controlling the vehicle. Wheeled vehicles won’t be able to just turn in place, but also will be much less “stoppable” – shooting a single wheel will only reduce its dynamics.
• Wheeled vehicles will have a different amount of wheels, from 4 to 8. Some will have a special mode changing the number of wheels used thus changing dynamics and general handling of the vehicle.
• Wheeled vehicles will be able to hold “W” while holding the brakes and then release the brakes for a sudden burst of speed. (They’ve already had tests of these vehicles and Biletskiy won a duel with a T-54 ltwt which didn’t manage to hit him once because he always used this trick to avoid fire.)
• Wheeled vehicles will be really different from the Lanchester we had in the fun mode, that was just a test that the work started from.
• Some of the mechanics wheeled vehicles will have were already picked, but a range of additional features are being tested to see what is worth being added and what’s not.
• WG will try to hold a test on “production” sometime in the end of the year: some number of players will be given the wheeled vehicles to see how they interact with the rest of the “ecosystem” of the live server.
• After that, wheeled vehicles will have some final changes to them, and then they are expected to come – possibly in the beginning of 2019, after around 2-3 updates, but it all depends on the results of the tests.
• WG is afraid the line will be toxic because the small, manoeuvrable and fairly unstoppable vehicles, they could turn out to be extremely annoying.
• Wheeled vehicles won’t be faster than T-100 LT, there’s some reasonable limit of that, considering how WoT’s maps are organized. However, they will be more dynamic.
• French wheeled vehicles are the champions of strange new mechanics like retractable wheels, and that’s why they were chosen. If everything’s fine with them, the other wheeled vehicle lines will be much easier to implement.
• Wheeled vehicles will mostly be mid-tier to high-tier. WG doesn’t want armoured cars from WW1 with machine guns. The ones that will be implemented will at least have proper cannons, and will generally be able to be described as “wheeled tanks”. They have to compete with tanks, and not only on roads or in cities but on rugged terrain, too. The period of appearance of such vehicles is usually later in the XX century.
• There’s a possibility of an event similar to “Battle of the Bloggers”, that is very soon to happen on RU, will happen on other servers. RU is the testing grounds for that, especially since RU community is the biggest and the CCs there can be divided into different “camps”. If that happens, EU and NA could possibly share the event.
• “I don’t know what has to happen for all chat to be returned” – Andrey Biletskiy. There are much fewer people who enjoy all chat than ones distressed by it.
• A new command menu could potentially come.
• A solution to stream sniping (a very serious problem for RU CCs) is to happen next year, no details.
• The start of the second half of the year is usually when WG discusses the plans for the next year.
• There are plans to return a number of old maps, Port is one for sure, Pearl River – possibly.
• WG is trying to do something map-related every update. Three ways they are focused on – improving ones that need work now, bringing back wanted old ones and making new ones.
• Increasing the number of maps allows the system that prevents a player from getting the same map several times in a row to work better, and could potentially allow the same system to prevent a player from getting lots of city maps/open maps in a row.
• A solution to Swedish TDs doing nonsense climbs is wanted, but WG isn’t sure how to do that. Changing the mechanics of siege mode could be disastrous for the vehicles and greatly disappoint their owners. A cheap workaround in the code could bring problems. The most obvious answer is changing the maps to prevent that, but even that could cause issues.
• No tiers above 10 in the traditional sense. WG doesn’t want to depreciate the value of a T10, the high-end content, player’s achievements and such. Modern tanks are possible in some other formats.
• Pref MM tanks: it was tried with everything WG could to prevent changing MM, for there are limitations of what it can do while still being fast and reliable. They chose KV-5 as the most prominent case, but a gigantic shitstorm over the proposed changes forced WG to revoke the idea and eventually decide to work on MM instead.
• Wargaming wants to create a system that would allow considering a greater amount of different conditions. It doesn’t only concern the pref MM tanks, but everything in general.
• Right now the MM only operates the tanks within a room, taking a number of tanks, shifting them between teams and dismissing the room if, in the end, it doesn’t fit the hard-set regulations. A new system could do much more than that, taking tanks individually and quickly placing them where they are needed, in essence not picking a tank for a battle, but a battle for a tank.
• As a moral compensation, pref MM tanks will receive buffs. But they shouldn’t end up being just like the T8s but never meeting the T10s, they are meant to be “tier 7.5”, and this is something WG wants to keep.
• Pref MMs are premiums, buffing them is risky, because you can’t nerf them. WG prefers to buff them numerous times if it turns out it’s needed rather than overbuffing them once and then having to live with it.
• The next update will happen in autumn.

About Author

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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