Hot MMO Action…Kind of

Yes indeed, I have taken a first horrifying step in to that world that has removed some friends from reality for periods of time (memories of waiting for Kelly to ‘find his corpse’ before we could go to coffee come flooding back).

So, what is this hideous beast that has brought me in to this realm of shattered lives and ruined existences?

I’d imagine that as soon as most of you who know me saw that title screen shot, it all started making a LOT more sense.

Yes, World of Tanks, a free to play Second World War era MMO game run by Wargaming.net, currently in closed beta. I was sent a key by a game clan on Empire Avenue (there will at some point during this challenge be a post getting in to Empire Ave) after expressing some curiosity, so I figured I’d check it out.

Now, I say that it’s kind of an MMO at the moment because they haven’t yet rolled out anything close to what the full and final game will consist of. Eventually, there will be a persistent campaign map of Europe with constant warfare occurring on various battlefields on a 24/7 basis. The results of those battles will shift the front lines accordingly, and certain regions will bring bonuses to whatever side controls them.

For now, it boils down to 15 vs. 15 armour combat on randomly chosen maps. Eventually, US tanks will be included, but right now it’s a choice between German and Russian gear.

Apparently, some sort of infantry model will also be included in the full game, but the ‘how’ of that hasn’t yet been explained. It sounds like they’ll be AI peons, but what their movements will be based on is a mystery. UPDATE : Actually, this has now been scrapped.  Kind of silly that battles will consist of nothing but armour, but I don’t know how they were possibly going to implement infantry in to the system anyway, so it’s probably a good decision.

My initial experience with the game was not good…actually, it was horrendous.

When you start out, you have a Tier 1 tank…aka a tin can piece of shit. They’re puny little vehicles that probably couldn’t halt a concerted attack by winged insects, and possess a ‘gun’ (and I use that term lightly) perhaps capable of causing someone a mild skin irritation were they to be hit by a round fired from it. There’s a German piece of shit and a Russian piece of shit, and both are manned by a piece of shit crew.

And that’s what you are left staring at, because this game has absolutely no documentation of any kind. I soon realized that with no credits (earned by fighting battles…yes, participation alone gets you credits…with being on the winning side, and killing, damaging and spotting opposing armour worth more), I couldn’t do much in terms of upgrading my piece of shit. So I flailed around a bit and found that there was a drop down menu under the big shiny Battle! button. Oh look, Training missions! That sounds like a good place to start!

Normally, yes. Here, no.

Apparently anyone can jump in to a training mission, though they don’t actually earn you anything…they’re just a place to learn how to play the game. Yet some people seem to extract inordinate quantities of jollies taking high end heavy armour on to the training field and obliterating noobs by the dozen. Apparently there is a sizable mentally retarded contingent to this game’s community, because I can’t imagine who else would be entertained by this.

So here is how the first ‘training’ mission went.

Okay…okay, easy controls. Moving around. I’ll go with this other dude in his piece of shit through the town. No targets yet…better take my time. Hey, an enemy tank…and he’s turned away! A rear shot, sweet! Line it up…fire…did my round just bounce off? He’s turning his gun at me. Man that’s a big tank. I just exploded…I don’t even know if he fired, I think my tank just blew up out of fear. Ummm…this is the game?

See, retard motherfucker had a Jagdpanther. I realize not everyone is up on their WW2 German armour knowledge, so I’ll dream up a scenario that closely resembles this and doesn’t require reference checks to historical tank sites.

Imagine a high end player invites a bunch of new guys to come learn a typical fantasy role playing game by fighting him. They’re so new that all of their characters are serfs with no armour, and they’re armed with slingshots. So they go running out to find him, and it doesn’t take long. Because he’s a dragon. With the ability to launch fireballs 300 feet with accuracy. And a rack of tactical nuclear missiles under each wing. And a sun launcher on his back…a gun that fires an actual, functional star at his enemies. And a dude hanging in a harness underneath to gracefully teabag his victims as he flies over.

Just in case that didn’t get the point across, here are pictures of this dickbag’s tank and the ones the rest of us had…

Guess which is which! Look at that piece of shit MS-1 on the right…MY ARM IS BIGGER THAN THAT GUN! Toys could defeat that thing in a straight up fight!

I tried 3 training missions, all of which ended with a similar fate. So I was left wondering if this was actually how this game worked. Was the whole thing this unbalanced? I tried poking around and saw that another Battle! option was Recruit missions, so I figured I’d try that out.

Holy shit, missions filled with just Tier 1 and Tier 2 tanks! Goddamn! It took a little while before I figured out how not to immediately die and actually get something out of it, and to figure out how to spend credits and experience (seriously, this thing NEEDS some basic documentation). You can spend experience points researching upgraded engines, guns, turrets, suspension systems and radios for the tanks you own. Then, if you choose to, you can buy and equip them on your vehicle. Making your way down the tech tree will also eventually open up the chance to spend a lot of research points unlocking a next tier vehicle (there are tanks, tank destroyers and self propelled guns). So perhaps by researching a better engine and gun for that MS-1, you can pick up a legit light tank or tank destroyer once you can afford it.

In the full game, you’ll be able to spend real money to buy gold coins. Some tanks can only be bought with coins, as can some upgrades. However, they can also be converted in to credits – the in-game currency. And beta players get 150 coins per day. 150 coins translates in to 60,000 credits, which is a serious chunk of change, and it let me go on a bit of a spree.

Here’s a few shots to illustrate some of what I’ve been talking about.

This is the garage view, where you can check out the tanks you currently own. This is my pretty little BMP-2 light tank, tricked out with brand new…well, everything. Over to the left are the crew of this thing. I’ve also got a T-26. You can have up to 5 tanks, though you can add more space to your garage by spending some cash. You can also add more room to your barracks, which looks the same as this only with people instead of chunks of metal. Crewmen have different positions (Commander, Gunner, Driver, etc.) and they gradually build experience as you play. There is also a ‘Train faster’ option on an elite tank (more on that later), but there’s no explanation for what you’re sacrificing for choosing that (again, documentation of anything would be cool).

The left side shot to follow shows the tank tree for the Russian side, with what each one progresses in to next. Self propelled guns are on the left, tanks in the middle, then the far right one is tank destroyers. The other one on the right is sort of a hybrid tanks/TD column. My BT2 is in that one, while my T26 is in the center row.

The other shot is of the tech tree for my BT-2. Later tanks have a lot more levels of available tech to research. At the bottom of it is the BT-7 research that will unlock it as a buyable tank model…I had just done so before taking this pic. Experience is used as research points, and now that everything has been researched for my BT-2, it’s classified as an elite tank. That means my crew should start improving more rapidly.

Let’s roll out…err…the kind of rolling out that doesn’t feature robots in disguise…

Two different examples of how the game starts out. Each team is assembled to be somewhat even in terms of equipment, experience, upgrades and types of armour. Then each team is give a central location (the flag). You can win by taking the other team’s HQ or killing every one of them. In the bottom left is the tank info screen and chat window, in the bottom right is the mini-map. As tanks are spotted, their locations appear there IF the spotting tank can transmit the location to you. That’s where radio upgrades come in…the better the radio you have, the further you can transmit that information.

That circle in the center is your reticule. That green bar around the upper left half is the status of your gun. When green like that, it’s loaded. After you fire, it slowly fills up with red as a new shell is loaded up, then turns green when you’re ready to fire again. The size of the overall circle gives an indication of your expected accuracy. This is WW2, so tanks dashing around at full speed are not very likely to hit jack shit. Also, you have to remember that turrets don’t spin on a dime (and yes, realistic turret rotation rates for the tanks is part of the game), so you’re often waiting for it to turn around and point to where your mouse cursor is…this can be maddening, but in a good way.

The bar in the bottom right of the reticle is your tank’s health indicator…the less that’s left, the more f’d up you are. This lets you get a basic indication of your status without looking to the bottom left screen, though that screen gives you more detailed info since individual tank systems can be damaged or destroyed. Having that basic info available right in the center of things is a little more valuable when you’re zoomed in to gunner view.

Anyway, between those shots you get some idea of the diversity of available battlegrounds. Urban centers, hilly areas, forests, swamps, grasslands, farm land and so forth are all in there. Also, in the final version of the game, as an area is fought over on a server it will display more and more damage to the countryside and buildings from track marks, rammings and gunfire. Seeing as you are in a tank, yes you can smash through walls and fences and most trees. Bigger tanks can drive right through a cathedral if they feel like it. You can bash your way in to a dilapidated house and fire a round through the hole in the wall in to the flank of an unsuspecting enemy. Of course, if you’re seen, you’re completely vulnerable to being torn to shreds.

At the end of a mission, you get the final report. This gives the final status of every tank (and their kill count). Separate tabs offer a personal achievements list for what you accomplished, and Battle heroes list that really doesn’t give much info, and is therefore kind of useless at the moment.

ArcticBlast (yours truly) did not accomplish much of anything before dying in this one. Oh, and when you die on the battlefield, you do need to spend some credits on fixing your hulk of burning metal up (you also need to replenish ammo stocks from time to time).

Now, unfortunately (maybe) I earned enough credits to buy my BT-7 light tank. That’s a Tier 3 vehicle, and here’s where a serious problem has presented itself.

After Recruit Battles, there are just Standard Battles that everyone is thrown in to that is driving anything above Tier 2. That means very few people are actually IN Tier 3 tanks, and all the long time Beta players are in Tier 7+. I’m back to not even scratching the paint of most of these things. So…what exactly am I supposed to do? It’s almost a lock that I will die every single round, meaning that half the 2,100 or so credits earned per round are going to fixing my tank. I also don’t have any gun upgrade for the BT-7 that is going to make a difference.

And it’s not like a bunch of high level players are being fucktards and jumping in to lower tier games to rack up kills…this is working as designed. This game is in desperate need of another controlled set of games between the Tier 1 & 2 recruit matches, limited to really light vehicles, and the free for all, because the Tier 3 (and a lot of the Tier 4) tanks flat out cannot compete with anything except other Tier 3 stuff. I have seriously hit these guys dead center in the rear…where their weakest armour is…and not caused a single percentage point worth of damage. How is this fun?

I’m hoping that I can grind out enough experience in Recruit battles to not only get my crew built up, but also to maybe research my way right in to Tier 4. Of course, depending on how much that next tank costs, it may be awhile. We’ll see.

Pre-posting update : I think I might be done with this. I’m hooped in any urban map, because I can’t use my speed to try to elude instant death. And too many of the rural maps have now devolved in to long range gunnery contests between the big boys, leaving me to try to race across the ground between the gunnery lines to scout…and quickly die.

And just scouting doesn’t do fuck all for earning experience…I’ll scout 6 vehicles on a map before being nuked, and get a whopping 90 experience. I need more than 3,000 experience to research the Tier 4 A-20. The entire system is so rigged towards rewarding kill and damage stats that I don’t have a hope in Hell of getting anywhere quickly since I flat out can’t kill or even damage more than two thirds of the vehicles I’m up against. I can soon have the credits to buy the next tank, but it will take so long to get the necessary research points that it just isn’t worth it.

It might be different if at least the whole game was running right now, but without the 24/7 Battleground Europe setup it’s just a series of badly imbalanced random map fights. This does not make for anything all that compelling after a week’s time.

It turns out that the entire game model is massively skewed towards those with money. There will be a number of very good tanks available to be outright purchased from the beginning for those who can throw down $50. And a number of high level equipment and ammo upgrades will only be available to those with premium paid accounts, as well as the ability to fight as a platoon (clan). Other free to play MMO titles have made a mint on micro transactions WITHOUT throwing the whole balance out of whack to massively favor those with the means to buy their way to bigger, badder gear. And apparently they’re going to charge $20 a month for a Premium account…I don’t see how the final version of this game will have enough meat on it to merit the going rate for much larger and deeply developed MMO’s. They’ve taken the ‘Free 2 Play with some micro buys’ model and skewed it to ‘Pay 2 win’.

And the final straw…too many legit questions about game mechanics in the beta forums are being answered with stupid “We can’t get in to that.” type answers by the devs. So nobody really understands exactly how anything in the game is being calculated in terms of damage and penetration, or why high explosive shells from lighter guns can nuke a massive IS-3.  This is kind of a problem in a game that’s all about armoured conflict.

So I’m done here. It’s a neat idea, but the balance problems have just shattered it for me.