I'd been given the heads up about World of Tanks a few years ago by my brother-in-law who probably assumed I would be in there in a flash as the game is naturally tank-related. I'd watched my son in Massive Multiplayer Online (MMO) Player vs Player (PVP) games of Minecraft and as much as I came to enjoy the biggest Lego game on the internet for the building and exploration aspects, getting hyperactive and knocking players out of the game was never really my pint of beer.
Fast forward to 2015 and my son had started playing World of Tanks with a school friend, initially on the PC. Bless him, he had abstained from borrowing my laptop for the best part of a day while the game downloaded so all that was left for me to do was register.
The upside of starting WoT is that the initial tank availability is at the lower end of the power scale and that means at first having to use pre-war tanks or those from the early campaigns. Result! The German start tank is the Leichttraktor, after that you can go down various tech tree routes via the Pz 1, Pz 2, Pz 35t, PzJgr 1 or something I seem to remember resembling the Neubaufahrzeug. The British & French tree starts with the Vickers medium 1 and FT17 respectively. One thing a wargamer has to get his head round is that you have ahistorical combinations of tanks on a battlefield, even Brits vs Brits or Japanese vs French. I think there used to be a historical mode but that got dropped due to player pooling/server issues.
Straight out of the starting blocks, a new player is "destroyed in seconds" (as the say on the TV). Repeatedly so in game upon game. I gather many quit at this point. The controls aren't that complicated but with incoming rounds from unseen opponents it is easy for the beginner to panic or lock up. Either way your tank will be disabled in one or two rounds and destroyed in one or two subsequent hits so there isn't much of a chance to analyse what is happening. "Where's the fun in that?" you may ask.
This is just one problem I have with the game. I understand that it is an arcade style third-person-shooter and not a simulation, so the fact that Pz 1s can dart up and hose your Matilda to oblivion with MG rounds is silly but is just part of the artistic license of the game.
However, this business of being "one-shotted" gets a bit irksome after a while and I used to wonder whether I was forever being pitted against opponents that bought premium gold rounds for real money but it is doubly annoying when one is taken out by one extremely accurate artillery round. (Apparently, even experienced players hate 'arty' where in the higher tier matches it is even more prevalent.) I believe other platforms are somewhat easier to get along with, perhaps only because, for instance in the tablet version, there are no SP artillery as yet, or player-aid mods.
World of Tanks is completely free and many players play for nothing and never buy upgrades, special ammo or restricted tanks for hard currency. It has great graphics, nice gameplay features and if you have good internet, you will be able to install player-aid mods to help your win rate on the PC. And it has A9 Cruisers, FCM36s and CharBs to name a few.
It is very addictive, though. After quitting (for the second time) it took me 3 days for the urge to reinstall to subside and another 3 days to stop going on the WoT forum, so on balance I am glad I have decided it is not the game for me.
It has served its purpose on one level, however. I have been going through Horne's "To Lose A Battle" again, harvesting potential scenarios for games and will do the same with Goutard's "Battle of France" after that.
I have also been figuring out the usage & allocation of StuG3, SiG33/Pz1, PzJgr1 & Bunker Flak units in the campaign, so prepare for more games or modelling photos.
Long live miniatures gaming!
