Customization
- More customization options for tanks are on their way and will be shown soon. It’s an entirely new system, new interface, and new way to interact with elements that will allow players to further personalize the looks of their tanks.
- We will have Styles sets, which basically consist of a set of camos that you can quickly apply to your tank if you don’t want to spend too much time with the feature but still want to change your tanks visual aspects.
- We’re going to test the new effects, paints and styles on tier 8 premium and tier 10 tanks at first. It’s a complete overhaul of the texturing system on the game engine side, and we’re only getting started – we will be releasing the whole feature in phases, with each one adding more features to allow players to really make their tanks look unique.
- There will be all sorts of crazy options, including non-historical ones, but we will provide players with the option to hide all non-historical things with a check-box for those who want to keep the game as authentic as it is right now.
- Players who have purchased current camouflages, emblems and inscriptions using gold before the release of new customization system will get to keep them. For players who have used credits, compensation will be provided with the release of the new customization feature.
- The camo bonuses will remain unchanged with this new customization system – they will only apply to the hull of your tanks.
- Customization options will be purchasable for gold, but we will also make them available for rent in exchange of credits. The rental system will be based on battles, not real time, as we experiment to find out what players like the most between rental per battles or per time period.
- We’re still working on the pricing for new customization elements. We’re taking the time to get it right and ensure players will enjoy the new feature, and we’ll communicate the final prices as we get closer to release.
- Regarding styles sets, we also plan for the future to release different themed styles, like themed after historical events. There are not coming right away though as we first want to focus on making the system work for everyone.
- Some camos, like the historical ones, will be limited to certain nations. Others however will be applicable across nations.
Maps
- Working on upgrading maps to HD is very heavy on resources and time consuming. When we switch the client to HD maps, it will be for all maps, as we can’t run a mix of old, SD maps with the new HD ones side by side.
- Currently we’re working to make sure we have enough maps turned to HD for their release – but we’re not willing to commit to a release date just now. We’re almost there though, and we’re definitely looking at months, not years, when talking about a release window. We do not want to upset players by announcing a date and then having to postpone it.
- We are also very happy that we’ve made enough progress with HD maps to now start thinking about creating new ones, or bringing back old ones. We could for example consider new maps with an Asian theme, or getting inspired by some maps available on World of Tanks for console. Diversification of maps is very important to us, and while we’re not making any promise, locations is something we’re working on.
- We are also aware the current map selection system is not perfect, and we’re working on improving it. We like the idea of allowing players to veto some maps, but we need to take into consideration the core gameplay of the game when thinking about such features, making sure it’s not breaking any core game mechanics. It sounds a lot easier than it actually is to implement when listing all the things such a feature could potentially break. Because of this we’re not really considering a veto system for maps at the moment. Our developers are however tackling the question of how our servers are putting maps that our players want to play up first, and we’re not discarding any option on how to do that. We just need to figure out the challenges posed by our tech first.
- When moving maps to HD, our priority was to make sure the core gameplay of these maps remain unchanged, maintaining the sidelines, the covers etc. We did however change some items so that they better fit the HD improvements of the maps, but we have people spending a lot of time checking everything out carefully to ensure consistency. Some things will change, but we aim for nothing game breaking to happen. If you do notice any change impacting the gameplay negatively, please let us know! We want to make the game look beautiful without breaking it.
- We also switched off hundreds of climbs already, but our players are very creative and continue to find new ones. We can’t promise we’ll ever get them all, but please let us know when you find some as they are definitely not intended by our map designers.
- We are not considering implementing gun collision on tanks, we believe there are loads of reasons why this is a bad idea from a pure gameplay perspective.
Tank Balancing
- Looking at Japanese Heavy tanks, and in particular at the statistics, we don’t think they are crazy or overpowered, but we do know that they hurt skilled players the most, as they are easy to play for more inexperienced players. There is certainly an emotional weight to it, and we’re looking at it very carefully. We’re currently thinking that we need to tackle the question of shell types globally, better understand how they are used.
- We have a lot of ideas and plans for new tanks, but nothing we can share with you today unfortunately. Expect great stuff on this next year!
- We have made a whole bunch of changes to tank lines over the year in order to try to make each line make more sense. We are always considering all options when retiring or replacing tanks in a line, and we always vote internally for our favorite solution. Sometimes we split the tree in two and allow all players to choose to unlock either the old tank, or the new one, but it also happens that we just decide to make some tanks a relic for various reasons.
- We are going to continue our work on this of course, and we hope at some point we will also revisit some tanks that have been left alone so far, such as CW rewards tanks for example. This will require some time before we get to these though.
Matchmaking
- Current data shows the matchmaking is working as we expected, but still has some issues. We’re very aware it requires more work, and we’re looking at tweaking and polishing it further.
- The system is very complex and because of that we need to be extremely careful when changing the way it works.
New Year’s Event
- This year again we will have the in-game event to celebrate the end of the year with all our players. For those who have played it last year, it will be similar, with some significant improvements we hope players will enjoy.
- One big change is the fact that the entire garage will be customizable this year, with different styles and effects which can be applied to the snowman, the tree, the house…etc.
- We also made some changes to the way the crafting system works, and replaced the recipes with a machine that creates toys from the rewards obtained through the crates.
