(Not an actual review of the game, just a veteran rambling)

I have been playing WoT since 2013.

Back then...
- I enjoyed the times when there was almost no physics in the game where you could not fall off of a cliff or deal any DMG through ramming other tanks.
- Gold ammunition was only available for gold, making it more special, rare, and precious to use. Today, everyone is using.
- Gold ammo, making your armour obsolete, unless you sidescrap 24/7 which is impossible unless you have no weak sposts on your turret and you camp in one place all game, where as we know, everyone wants to get that "special place" on the map and will ram you toward enemy just to get it...
- Crew perks, Crew training and Researching new tanks used to take months. I remember getting ~300 experience per 15 minute battle without the premium account bought, where to unlock the last or second to last tier arty i had to amass 300,000 points of experience, so you can imagine it took me almost a year to get that desired tank. And mind you i was doing my job on the battlefield, those were not bad games, it's just how the rates used to be back then. Same goes for the crew members and their perks. I remember the shock i was in, when a friend of mind told me he's got 6 perks on a crew member and he cannot level them up anymore. That friend used to play this game 18 hours a day, playing special mode on the "global map", so for a regular player it was impossible to reach that level.
- Artillery used to be max VIII tier and there were no "stun" mechanics.
- The T92 SPG still has the biggest gun caliber from the entire game (topping FV215b 183) which is 240 mm yet it deals way less DMG than many other smaller caliber guns, which makes no sense unless you want to please people who despise "clickers" because they were barraged with thousands of DMG every 50 seconds so you had to "nerf" the arty.
- Russian tree still has the best tanks in the game (hidden favouritism), due to their armour shape which in some places has over 500mm (Medium tanks + Heavy Tanks [Hello Obj. 279e]), accuracy and gun reload (Arty),Damage / Penetration (Tank Destroyers, and premium Vehicles).

Nowadays...
- Artillery has been nerfed to the point where it's almost obsolete on the battlefield. The only thing that keeps them somewhat-useful is that if you stun someone who either ran out of first aid kit or forgot to buy it, because most of the times if you stun someone, they will auto-heal up and your hit for ~300 DMG does nothing to help the team, whereas stunning them actually weakens the crew, reload time etc, which is very helpful when you need to help your team with a high-priority target.
- They shove those battle-pass and weird game-modes down your throat every few weeks to keep veterans engaged in this game.
- After taking a few years break, i came back to nuances like double-barreled tanks. After composing myself from laughter at first i thought i was seeing things, or this tank was a unique, special, premium tank, but no, they've created an entire tree dedicated to this ridiculous double-barreled tanks.
- This may not be such a bad thing but it cuts down the time you spend in this game which keeps you engaged -- upgrading crew members and researching new tanks takes weeks now, if not days, whereas if you remember it took me several months to research 9-10 tier back in the day. It's not such a bad thing, but it makes "tomatoes" (bad players) obtain high-level tanks and play in the same match-making with other more advanced players who "maxed-out" their tanks, where the so called tomatoes not only do not know how to drive such a high tier but also they are mostly stock.
- Gold ammunition is available for credits now, which you basically can use auto-aim on X tier and still hit someone. This fact makes tanks purely dependable on armour (e.g. Japanese HTs, British TDs, American TDs...) obsolete, because they will always pen you (there are instances where some Heavy Tanks have so low penetration on gold ammo, that it's actually impossible to pen using only auto-aim, so thank you for that lol).
- To my liking, there are too many "new" special tanks / premium tanks. Most of the time when i play after taking a longer break, i see new tanks that are outside of the research-tree. Sometimes they change the tank's status to "special" or "premium" because all they did was put new camo on it. It's literally the same tank but with a different name and different camo on it. I guess some people are into it, i guess.
- In my opinion the new garage layout is furiously confusing and makes you open 5 different windows just to inspect your tank's stats, where in older patches it was displayed automatically next to the tank. I can't get used to it.
- Major changes to the tanks. On the top of making artillery a tier X now, they've changed some core meta of this game. Many tanks that i remember playing religiously, nowadays are forgotten and either nobody plays them, they are a different (lower) tier today or they were made a special vehicle with nerfed gun. Shoutout to KV-1S, T-150, Chaffee, Hellcat, Wolverine and many more...
- I have saved the worst change of them all for last. And those are Tier XI's...
I remember reading WoT wiki some 5 years ago, and there was this selectable button to view tier XI tanks. Obviously it didn't show any tanks then but it was there, to press. On the top of the tier X's being shown matched with Tiers 8-9-10 and 11, where there was no tier 11 back then. Also, every April fool's day used to focus on the joke about the devs either working on or introducing tier 11's to the game, but we all knew it was a fluke. Fast forward to late 2025, and it's a reality.
Boy oh boy, need i explain the significance of this change? The whole Global map, matchmaking, Clans, Gameplay and more got hit by this. Tier XI's as of today when i'm writing this 'review', are absolutely unnecessary in this game. I truly believe it was only introduced to keep people going, because there was nothing else to do but max out tier X's and then later switch to research other X's. Not only tier XI's are like unicorns in this game, having modules, "special abilities" (wtf) and "kill counter" only available for them (imagine what a guy must feel that the devs didn't think of introducing this kill-counter earlier, for those people who have over 10,000 battles on one tank amassed over the years) but also they have ridiculously huge amount of HP which cast a shadow on tanks like E-100, Maus and Type 5 Heavy. Like why? I have compared some tanks of tier XI's to the original X's and i say, the XI tiers are not necessary. If you truly wanted to change something in this game, perhaps adding yet another tank tree into the game would do the trick? Add another Artillery (yes i'm a clicker) to the game, or yet another nuance like double-barreled tanks lol! It's not like you guys only use tanks that were actually-manufactured, so you could let the imagination go and do it's own thing.
- I could keep going. Find more of those details that infuriate me or confuse me completely. The changes that could have been not implemented and we could've avoided all of this ruckus. It's either adapt and deal with it or quit the game all together with the thought of wasting 10+ years of grinding max crew and tank MoE's, all while reminiscing about the past and how good it was back then, but realistically nobody cares about that since these changed were introduced years ago.

Final thought
I enjoyed WoT back in it's golden days.
This is not an advertisement whatsoever. I just know that this game likes to be compared to WT, so here's my piece I have tried War Thunder for the first time sometime back in 2025, and let me say that i would rather preferred to have ground thousands of hours in WT that i had in WoT
Having first-hand experience from both of those titles, i can safely say that WoT is 90% Arcade and 10% simulator, where WT is backwards, which speaks volumes.

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Here I will leave this beautiful Capybara, whoever passes by can pet it and give it a thumbs up (I need Steam Points).

Map design is a complete joke