World of Tanks Q&A with Slava Makarov 30/07/2016
3 min read
– I played console and Blitz, and looking at the PC interface I’m in shock, not about everything of course but it’s different;
– After “Rubicon” we had meetings on how it came to this, the leadership of Minsk’ development changed heavily. The head left us, the designer lead also had to say goodbye. For now, since the end of last week, the decision was made to make me the creative director of tanks;
– When we initiatlly added it (arty), we had a specific goal in mind which currently doesn’t work. We have to remake the class so it does. The experiment we made is first of all just an experiment to receive results. We’re analysing them and planning the next iteration;
– Balance has to be redone as a whole, maybe we have overdone the scale a bit during the first iteration, but we honestly promised to regard each and every tank, which we did;
– Yes, there is such an term as pace of the game (turbo-wins/turbo-losses, e.g. 15:0, 0:15);
– 5 minute battles are delusions;
– I don’t know what’s happening to maps, I’ve wanted to talk to the programmers for a long time;
– Some new premiums are bad, first we have to make sure who did what exactly;
– Recently I was figuring out why historical battles didn’t work and the answer really surprised me;
– “Czechs are imbalanced”. Here it’s clear who did what, we’ll have to change the approach at testing vehicles;
– I’ll try to explain (that’s my task now) to the mapmakers, designers, sound-makers, balancing department and many others what the general idea is and what we want to achieve, and then decompose this into parts. Which technology we need, which approach we need at mapmaking etc.
– I finally managed to return an old colleague (Henry) from mapmaking. I was hopping this to happen sooner, but he only returned two weeks ago;
– Redoing maps is really tedious, we’re thinking about it right now and there are no final decisions yet;
– The new matchmaker & rebalancing requires the appearance of tier 10 LT, they’re hard to implement and balance. If it so happens that they’ll be balanced according to old statistics and values, it’ll be really bad;
– We’re all self-educated, there are no fixed rules on how to balance tanks. But we now have Murazor who has some kind of intuition;
– The psychology of a player, how he will behave on a newly made map have to be considered, and that’s exactly where we have problems;
– Honestly – we’ll do something about premium ammo;
– The number of premium shells didn’t inflate much, the problem lies in a general inflation of armor penetration and view range, now everyone shoots across half the map;
– Feedback of players is really helping. We might’ve been living obviously thinking everything’s all right without it;
– When we searched for documentation on Japanese tanks, this was a hellish story. It went something like this: we know that this tank might have existed, now write to all Japanese historians and ask if there is anything on it. This was one of the hardest branches to make;
– Someone who was working but left is returning to marketing, along with Anton Pankov who recieved some authority on this matter;
– Next patch is targeted for September, currently being tested;
– There will be a bigger patch around New Year;
– How statistics are being treated is a story for itself, but that it’s not being treated quite correctly is one of the problems. I’ll try to fix that;
– I think at some point we dived too much into statistics, harming the subjective perception. Statistics are important, but shouldn’t be exclusive;
– Mikhail Zhivets (Storm) will be playing a less important role in the project. He’s still helping us currently, but he is very tired;
– Personal missions have to be redone;
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