WoT Egor Rodionov Stream Q&A – 28th April 2020

Explanations from Egor Rodionov (head of the game design department). Very interesting artillery rework proposal.

• How the first iteration of Steel Hunter came to be – this is generally a very interesting story. We have programmers – for the server, client – at one time, as fans of games, and games who were popular at that time, gathered and decided to make such a “hackathon” – for some short time to make a Battle Royale prototype for World of Tanks; it turned out pretty well, but nevertheless there was still a lot to do.
  Right now, Steel Hunter 2020 is in active development, there will be changes, it will be interesting. The only thing that was very embarrassing was, of course, the number of additional buttons. Not all players liked this. It adds a lot of diversity, but also overcomplicates things. You need to find the balance of the right combination amount of abilities that each tank has access to.
  In general, we want to launch it more than once a year. What will happen to SH in 2021, we’ll see.

• Right now with the release of 1.9 wheeled tanks got a bug (Fixed already – Seb). The bug is a side effect of some of the physics corrections we made for wheeled vehicles. Unfortunately, it hit the release, in the next micropatch we’ll fix it. BUT this does NOT mean that we will not touch the problems associated with wheel hitbox. Those elements that are associated with mobility will be subject to certain changes.
  The bug with the wheels themselves concerns physics in general – this actually isn’t exclusive to wheeled tanks, but due to what role they fulfill, it is more noticeable. That is, in fact, the question here, is how much it influenced precisely the characteristics of specific vehicles. This is a special case.
  This is not an attempt to rebalance something hidden, it is a physics bug.

• Yes, after 1.9 FOV received a slight change. The situation is similar too. Due to the fact that we corrected certain client behavior on widescreen monitors. It is not very large, you can correct it yourself. But another interesting point is that this is a rollback to the patch 1.7.1. If we take the whole range of monitors on which the game starts, we get that the current state is more correct, because there was a problem with distortion of objects at the edges of large-format and large monitors. The request is to adapt a little, maybe adjust the settings a little for yourself, because now the behavior is more correct.

[Tank rental].
Recently, there was a QnA with Andrei Beletsky about this. We already have a similar thing in the Frontline, where you can rent equipment. The only thing, we are not entirely sure which tanks to implement this for – fully upgraded tanks, prems, promotional. Well, in general, we are now considering this option as an addition to the game so that actual tanks could be tested. There are some nuances here. Random things are not constant with us, it depends on many factors. Here we are a little worried that some (even good) tanks could have a streak of bad luck in games, because of which a person will have a distorted perception. Plus, the first battles should not go to statistics. This is necessary to correct, and this feature is in the primary stages of development.

ST-II: It performs quite adequately. It is in the middle of the list among all tier 10s. For example, in terms of average damage, it overtakes half of tier 10 vehicles. For winrate it overtakes, for example, Kranvagn. According to the number of battles, it is also located in the middle.

[Arty clickers].
In fact, the direction that we tested in the Sandbox, namely the different types of shells in self-propelled guns that are designed to deal with different goals, we consider this concept to be effective. We will redo it from the point of view of implementation rather tightly. But, in general, this is what we want to achieve.
If you look at pure statistics, specifically at average time players spend stunned, it does not look like this new implementation is very decisive. But psychologically, the fact that stunning is very annoying, we understand.
Bottom line: the artillery will have different shells, not all of them will have a stun. And we will give them more tactical meaning. It will be effective exclusively against those vehicles that it is aimed at – moving light targets.
The fact that one shot of an artillery causes several states at the same time that affect the tank handling, this needs to be changed. I would like to influence this with a rebalance. I believe that it is possible to make artillery logical. Either cause damage or stun. We will try to achieve this at least.
The rebalance of artillery should not lead to the fact that arty ceases to completely influence the battle and becomes irrelevant, this is not the goal here and we will strive for artillery to get a meaningful role.

• Tactical skills to reduce the damage received from HE shells and from artillery shells with the Crew and Equipment rework will come. But with such protection, you will sacrifice other, perhaps more important things. Keep this in mind.

• The fact that artillery fires at allies, stuns them, and does not become “blue,” is most likely a bug. We will see. There are fines for this, and they should work properly and discourage bad behavior.

• Bots are identified by an automated system and very efficiently, because their behavior model is quite understandable. We are fighting very actively.

• Yes, there really is a problem in the mismatch between the destroyed tank model (the model is simpler than the one on the server) and collision models of an “Alive” tank for example, Super Conqueror. The unpleasant property of the problem is that it is a large amount of manual work, and a very thin line. It may be that the model that occurs at the time of the destruction of the tank is not ideal to the real model. This must be manually edited for each tank. In fact, there may be some kind of straight pixels or centimeters that do not correspond to the visual model. For this you need to make a list of tanks and write to us so that we have such information – there are a lot of tanks in the game. Implementing tracks in this model is the most difficult. But we can never make a perfect match. And some kinds of unlucky accidents, when you hit an invisible mod in the game, they are not completely defeated.

• I would not want to give the opportunity for players in Frontline to choose out one of the maps. Perhaps if we really see or confirm that the winter map has some nuances that the players do not like, we would better fix them rather than make restrictions! If we allow this to be done, we will break the queue into 3 parts: players who want to play only on one, on the other, or on both. This will reveal new problems: the queue is longer, for certain regions this can cause the fact that battles will not be formed at all. It is not right.

• A serious update for the battle communication is planned this year. It’s not like pinging a specific point on the map in Frontline, it’s a more serious system. For example, the ability to interact with the objects within the 3D scene and pinging specific positions visually. A very convenient thing. For the first time, it will see the light in the Sandbox.

• The “Brawl” 7×7 mode launched this weekend is an exclusive test launch. We want to develop it further.

We will deal with wheel balancing, we have already announced that. Most likely, the changes will affect the dynamics, stabilization and hits on wheels. We understand what really annoys those who fight against wheeled tanks. These machines are very sensitive to tuning, we are afraid to nerf them too much that these vehicles will become overnerfed and stop being relevant. For example, nerfing max. speed at a small value, can very seriously affect its performance. We will test very carefully. We do not want to make it become pointless or not interesting to play with these tanks. We need to fix the things that make these machines toxic, as we call them.

• There will be new captured equipment (American King Tiger).

• According to our information, the questionnaires reveal that the most important factor why people leave the game is a lack of time. Family, work, growing up and for some reason belief that they can no longer play as much as they played before. In relation to the gameplay – what touches complexity, WoT is far from a simple game. The game is very learning-intensive.
  If we talk about the players who have been with us for a long time, these are usually for reasons not related to the game, or it is banal tiredness from the project. BUT such players actually rest and come back. We do not see a flow of users leaving the game specifically for gameplay reasons.

• In the equipment rework, we will add equipment that affects the flight speed of a shell. (Fin-stabilized shells)

• One problem is that the game doesn’t explain at all how tank gun marking really works, how real difficult it is.

• Soon enough we will be reviewing the rewards and, possibly, part of the conditions of the Daily WoT tasks (Daily Quests). Appearances will change, rewards will change. There is a demounting kit, but it rarely drops. I think it should appear more often.

• Corridors, powerful closed positions on maps – such things are needed by certain players at a certain skill level in the game. And, if there are none, it will be very difficult for such players. In the sense that we have certain map spots for different classes, how it has been in WoT for a while. In particular, this is also useful for players who are learning to play and must understand in general which direction they should go and which positions to take. Plus, not all maps in the game are all the same corridors.
  In our opinion, it is possible to change the tactical minimap for maps that have severe height differences, for a clearer picture.

• Ruinberg remake is in the works. Statistically it is one of the worst maps by winrate. Minsk, however, is one of the most balanced maps.

• Remembering the gamemode the player was in when changing servers is a necessary thing. We’ll try to add it to the plans, but so far it’s not there.

Battle Pass was added to many games 1.5-2 years ago. Why did it appear in tanks just now?
– We wanted to do it well and correctly. We pondered for a long time how it should work. There were a lot of discussions about the free part, we checked that it was comfortable for all players to go through it, so that it was not too difficult or simple. I made it so that the Battle Pass tanks really made sense and worked with all the other mechanisms.

• There are a lot of customizations planned for the stages of the 10th anniversary of WOT.
  3D-style of the T30 will be shown very soon. Right now I’m afraid to be exactly on schedule.