Amway921: What’s the future of tanks with preferential matchmaking?
Pankov: We surely have a few scenarios and solutions ready, we talked about them. We tried to test solutions tied to the matchmaker (ie. increase their spread), which we simulated on servers. That didn’t work well, thus we’ll go to plan B – rebalancing. We talked about it during the lat WG fest, and the priority for now is the KV-5.
There are a lot of nuances regarding the rebalance of this tank, you have to understand how to do it without hurting the current owners of the tank, and while at the same time satisfying the new owners. The KV-5 will be thus the first tank with pref MM to change. The tank has a lot of weak points, like the iconic turret in front, or the weak penetration.
We will try a lot of options. It will begin with a Sandbox test, and then we’ll propose the current owners to test a rebalanced version. We believe that this way we’ll reach an agreement and the players will give us a green light. We’ll also give the option to get your gold back, get the new tank, or keep the old one.
Amway921: You mentioned that you want to ‘reconfigure’ the tank. Do you mean a KV-5 without the R2-D2 and a BL-9?
Pankov: There hasn’t been a firm decision. One variant would be to increase that small turrets armor. Another would be to increase the gun penetration, but decrease the turret side armor. There are sadly not many possibilities of changing the gun, that’s a different problem. We also have a way to change the low pen, but that will be done with the global gold ammo rebalance. Why the KV-5 first though? The tanks is suffering under the command of inexperienced players. After that, we’ll most likely do the IS-6.
Amway921: Any ETA
Pankov: In the foreseeable future.
Jove: This year?
Pankov: Indeed. We can’t postpone this any longer. Another problematic tank is the M6A2E1, which was god tier in the previous MM, but right now it’s a bit underwhelming. However, if we stay with the current matchmaking, the tank will be OP, and we don’t want that.
Jove: You said you’d rebalance all the pref MM tanks. Will it be one, two, or maybe a few tanks in one patch?
Pankov: We’ll do it gradually, as not to disturb the tier VIII MM.
Ushakov: So what should the current owners do? Leave them in their garages?
Pankov: Yes, of course. Better leave them, because rage selling them isn’t a good idea, since the tank recovery system ain’t out of rubber.
Amway921: You introduce trade-in sometimes, so here’s a question – why shouldn’t I just trade them in?
Pankov: In any event of the tanks being rebalanced, we’ll allow them to be traded in for something else, most likely without an additional fee. There are a few options, it all depends on which tank you want to return. You won’t be able to get a Defender, but we’ll give a lot of other good tanks to trade in for.
Vspishka: How many machines do you want to change?
Pankov: All with pref MM. Each one of them is very specific, and we’ll need a lot of time for each one separately. We’ll start from those that are the most ‘controversial’.
Vspishka: Does the rebalance concern all pref MM tanks or only tier VIII?
Pankov: Any and all pref MM tanks. We first have to prepare a methodology and ways how to proceed. After that, we’ll rebalance the first tank, and if the opinions are positive, we’ll be able to evaluate our work. The worst thing to do is doing all of that separately.
Amway921: Will the the new tank have normal matchmaking then, like the one from the tech tree?
Pankov: We want to retire preferential MM. That’s one of the reasons why we introduced tier X lights, because a three-tier spread for them was really bad in hindsight.
Amway921: But there are already pref MM tanks which are weak against higher tiers, like the Matilda.
Pankov: Yes, of course. We have separate plans for tier III-V.
