Should you play WOT ?

[Saïbaïman]

Hi there, i played WOT for years since the BETA
I got 6 T10 and many other smaller tanks.

I want to say to this community, this game is very good, but here are the main issues you will meet:
- This game is hard because the community mostly never teamplay, you should then find some clan to experience good matches. For instance: I never saw random people trying to help me in difficulties by protecting my hull or doing anything that helps survive a match.

- This game is very expansive. You have to understand that levelling is not that hard, but, it requires a lot of time to reach the T10. For a casual player, you need around 1year to reach your first T10 (without paying)

- Premium account. Without premium, you will never earn enough credits to be sustainable in the long term playing, repairing, re-ammo etc....

- T10 only playing is not worth it. Because the devs made the game so it is more expansive to repair and re-ammo your tanks, especially if you play high tier.
In this game you can not only play t10 and be profitable and avoid spending real money.
This game is not for hardcore gamers who don't want to spend more than 100$ in a game. In wot you will have to spend more each time you start a new tank tech tree because playing casualy is not profitable. (unlocking a tank in tech tree also requires earned credits in battles, so you wil never have enough credits to repair, reammo, special consumables and unlock new tanks to pregress in tech trees)

- Gold ammo ruins all the game because only people that can afford to use real money can afford it. You can buy gold ammo with regular in game credits you earn in battle... but you will never have enough credit to repair, refill gold ammo and keep playing without bankruptcy

- To avoid bankruptcy you can: buy regularly premium account, or buy premium tanks (such as Löwe aka Credit maker), which means real money. Playing as a premium tank will be boring because you will be constrained to play it only to make credits in order to play the tanks you want to play (eg: T10)
If you only want to play T10 and not spend real money, you will have to play premium tank 50%/T10 50% of your time..which is boring.

- Tanks personalisation requires (golds credits) real money most of the time but it is mostly esthetic...but not only.... (tank camo @-4% detection requires gold to buy it)

- The game doesn't evolve anymore. It is stuck to deathmatches for 15v15 or 30v30 ppl.
30v30 battles are a big mess because nobody teamplays and the maps are too small, and the devs never gave us tools to increase teamplay and coordination.

- Not enough new maps, and no real way to choose which map you play on. There are a lot of maps in this game but you will mostly play on 4-8 same maps, regarding the tank you are playing with, and a lot of maps are just sh*t. Most of the maps requires the same strategy and are built the same way with almost the same topology. They are ALL way too small to be realistic.

- Game events are mostly useless repetitive, time eater, not profitable and still the same years after years. They added a STR mode few months ago which is completely ridiculous and destroy the basic principle of beeing a tank arcade game fps

Most of the game features requires you to spend credits, gold and money excessively. This game was awesome at its start. Now it is mostly a milking factory

WoT is stuck 10 years ago. And many good games are now better than this one, because a lot of ww2 games are now giving the opportunity to players to play ships, planes, tanks, and infantry in the whole same game... without even the need to spend more money than buying the game itself (example: Hell Let Lose)
In Warthunder the economy is almost the same than WOT but you have a lot more features and gameplay possibilities (tanks, planes, realism, even teamplay...)

I enjoyed a lot WOT for many years, but in 2021 you now have much better tank games to play on for less money spent, and more fun. I think that's because the game is sinking that they decided to put it on Steam only now.

In the last years, WoT only evolved in a way to make you spend more money in it. To me it is the reason why I wrote this post, and why I don't play it anymore even if I got a lot of big powerful tanks...and spent a lot of money in it to get those.

They never evolved he best features in it (clan wars) has never been done the way players asked for. (bigger maps, more massively multiplayer game, supporting infantry, ships and planes in the same game which was a development promise when Wot came out). They finally released word of warplane and world of warships as stand alone games and that was a big fail because we were attending those fetures in the same game (like warthunder did).
The only features those 3 Wargaming's games share is... your premium account and gold credits....smart...

All that said, WoT is still a nice tanks game but with bad flaws that won't give you the desire to keep playing if you don't want to spend to much money in it.

If you like to play small underpowered tanks (low tiers) and historical tanks for fun, then WoT can please you.
But WoT scares away the old experienced players because of its economic choices, and the linearity of gameplay at high levels.
The tank you play is a movable cannon. That's all. No smoke, no repairing or repair'tanks in matches, no machine guns, no infantry, no mines, no air support etc....)
The realism of the tank you are playing stops to it's design which is very nice.
Even damages are not very realistics, but hitboxes management is not that bad.

Clan wars can be nice if you play in a good clan, but you probably won't, and clan wars battles are just regular 15v15 bttle so it is not very interessting.

Like many other games, Wot always argued to be a MMO game, but with 15v15 battles (even 30v30) it is clearly not the case.
it is an arcade game. If you seek realism this is not your game.

[HairballHacker]

^Good review.

[Saïbaïman]

thanks :)
I add that Wot is nice to quick play when most of the actual tank games requires at least 1hour of play, you can start a match and play wot for 15mn and then do something else

That is what i call an arcade game (not an MMo), and to me that the most interesting point ofthis game: you can "let off steam" for a small amount of time.

Adapted to casual gaming

[World of Tanks West]

Some solid points, but you can play completely free by playing mid-to-low tiers more and developing skills to be consistently top performer at higher tiers will also allow you to play high tiers without losing credits. The game does need a sink otherwise people swim in a sea of credits with nothing to do with them.

Like you mention gold ammo, this is balanced by playing low to mid tiers more as F2P or playing one of the free premium tanks handed our or earnable regularly :)

For the combination of games, this was investigated and found to be unsuitable in scope because it would result in your whole team being blown up by a warship not even on your map.

As you say WoT is an arcade game and should inform whether it's for you and a F2P model game as well. This is important for some people who either expect everything to be free or get the same level of content and speed of unlock as those who invest. You can pay to speed up your progress, at the end of the day as a game to make money, some reason to encourage people to invest is important. Many use the game as a hobby to play relaxed rather than be competitive and it's entirely up to you and what you look for in a game.

Overall a well informed review though, despite my own replies above, thank you for being well written and informative.

[Saïbaïman]

WoT is built around the principle of "the more you play, the more you pay"

Which is not a bad economic system, as an enterprise. And regarding the server costs and everything around....it seems legit...the more you play, the more you use the system.

But in videogames this principle is not good because it makes older and experienced players to move away progressively and beeing more casual because of the lack of profit in game (especially in wot).

To me, I don't plan to spend more than 500-1000€ in an entire game life if this is a very good game. And the most I spent was/is in Star citizen (2500€)

I would still be playing wot if I not had to earn credits with smaller tanks to rentabilize my playing session in T10 or spending more money than I already did since the launch of this game.
But that's a T10 player opinion which is not the path every player goes

[Cipher Esteria]

In short, you should not play this game, unless you are willing to Pay to Win every single match you play.

[ChairmanLMAO]

In short you definitelty SHOULD play. It's fun AF. The matches are really random and there are really skilled players out there. But you can skill up and I don't mean skill tree I mean real skills. It's WOT + FTW + LOL IMO

[Saïbaïman]

Originally posted by Mr.Cipher:

In short, you should not play this game, unless you are willing to Pay to Win every single match you play.

Not really.
I explained that this game is good for short playing sessions, as long as you don't play at a high level 100% of your playing time ecause then you will have to pay a lot