Everyone knows that Wargaming decided to change how the Top of the Tree Specials work. The new idea is that from March, it will be the players who choose what tank, from a class, will be the next Top of the Tree, and if you vote in the winning tank, you get access to special missions.
Up to this point I liked the idea of getting special missions, but then decided to have a look at it and see how it’s doing up the moment and analyse all the small details.
It’s been a week since you can vote, it started on 8th February, for what Tier X Heavy tank you want for Top of the Tree, and I decided to make an analysis of current results. I was surprised with the number of votes, in one week only 12,053 players actually bothered with voting.
Looking at the average number of players that are currently active in the EU Server, we get a number as high as 763,000 players that currently play World of Tanks (source from wot-life.com). What can we see from this?
Up to the moment only 1,58% of active players have voted on the English page. If we take on board that there is two more weeks to vote, if we take this average number of votes, we get a scenario where 36,000 players would have voted. Meaning it would be an amazing 4,71% of players were actually bothered to what tank they wanted to see in the Top of the Tree. From that 4,71% only a small percentage will have access to the missions.
*Update*
Seems you can vote several times if you just change the language in World of Tanks webpage. Thank you Goldshock and Homer_J for letting me know. I have added up the votes in all languages and came up with a total of 34,981 votes. This still only represent 4,58% of the 763,000 players. Using the same scenario as before we would get 105,000 vote, representing 13,75% of active players.
So my question is, is this even fair to the other players?
This means that a small group of players control what tank we see next, and we all know there are major flaws in this system. The first list of tanks showed one straight away, there was no restriction on what tanks were on the list, meaning that T110E5 could have been picked up again, even it was recently on the Top of the Tree.
Also we have the problem of popular tanks, there are particular tanks that are more popular than others. This leads to situations where players pick up these lines instead of other ones, and results with a lot of players already with the tanks not actually getting much out from the special.
Another important factor is that they are now only doing this once per month. This means we get less specials in a year. Before this we could have 20 different tanks in a year, looking that there were no specials during January and December. Now we are limited to a mere 10 per year, if they don’t decide that some other month they can’t do the special.
And above all, what was Wargaming thinking on showing the vote results straight away? This means that at the moment IS-7 is winning and most probably will win, because players will vote for it so they can have access to the missions.
OK, so far I only criticized this, and you must be thinking “What would you change to improve this?”
What would I change?
- Make the vote in game, not in the webpage and make it in a way not showing the percentage of each tank.
- This would mean all players that log in into the game, would have a chance to vote, and above all, no one would know what tank was winning before they voted.
- Keep the twice a month specials.
- 15 days for one tank is more than enough and gives the opportunity to get more specials.
- Do it by Nation, instead of Class.
- This would create a rotation system where all nations get some kind of special, doing it by class means you could have Russian tanks selected quite a few times in a row, for example.
- Give more special missions if you already have the tank.
- Instead of the same number of specials, give it for example twice as more. This means players will get some kind of ‘reward’ for having the tank already.
So what is your opinion on this and would you agree with my changes? Leave a comment and let me know what you think.
