Update: due to the undying interest in the topic, I did a more serious research in the topic, read that instead!
World of Tanks is an extremely successful game with 20 million users and 30% paying rate. That's 6M paying customer, in the same league as WoW, despite much smaller developer budget.
To make it more awesome, World of Tanks is a PvP game, while the other blockbusters like WoW, Farmwille are purely PvE, where no one is frustrated by defeat. Everyone can tell a dozen PvP MMOs that failed or linger with a few 10K subscribers. And unlike the other mentionable successful PVP MMO, EVE online, there is no "high sec" in World of Tanks. The only gameplay is going to the field and battle enemy tanks, head on.
PvP games are killed by the "PvP spiral": the bad players are pwned and stop playing, making the second worst group the worst, who are now pwned and it goes on until no one left but the hard core. World of Tanks is probably the only game out there that is not affected by it.
Of course the developers can tinker with the matchmaking system to give both teams equally strong players (as opposed to tanks), so the bad ones are carried by good ones. However it's just annoying but not a fix: in this scheme the bad ones would still be massacred, despite half of them would get a "you won" screen (that he probably don't even see as he exited battle on death). This was the first piece of puzzle that I could use to set up my tinfoil hat theory: I saved the results of 60 battles and found that:
The next clue is the winrate itself. 60% winrate gets you to world top 1000, and despite serious efforts I failed to find a single player below 40% winrate, even when I looked up players who griefed the team in battles I was. Yes, even active griefers manage to win 2/5 of the battles. I know, random battle, but still. Put a gladiator in a WoW BG and see how he both dominates the chart and also provides lot of wins. In WoT, even the best players are just "slightly above average", while even the AFKers and griefers are just "slightly below average".
The above alone explains the success of World of Tanks. It's a PvP game where no one fails. Everyone has wins and everyone has kills (if the best ones have just little more than average kills, the worst ones also have little less than average kills). A PvP game where no one pwns and no one is pwned, a game where everyone is competitive, where no one is left behind. A miracle. It's too good to be true. And probably it's not.
I started to get data about the misses and ineffective hits of me and my girlfriend while using the best cannon of the game, BL-10. It wasn't easy to get the data as the game has no combat log and the developers explicitly told that they never put in any. I had to make marks on a paper during battles, so probably made mistakes. This data is not at all accurate, but the result is so big that the signal-noise ratio is probably good enough:
On battles that we won 13% of the hits were ineffective.
On battles that we lost, 29% of the hits were ineffective.
I'd like to stress that below comes my opinion about the facts and not facts themselves. There are other explanation of the facts which can be true, therefore I can't claim my opinion be "the truth". The straightforward explanation is: "if you suck or unlucky, you lose", however it assumes that the battle depends on me. I saw too many AFK-leeches win battles to believe that. I can suck and shoot nothing but E100 turret front armor and still win due to teammates and can be "top gun" and lose (did that too many times). Also, why does my penetration rate varies so much between battles? I magically forgot where to aim in 5 minutes?
Now my tinfoil hat explanation: the matchmaker decides who needs a win to not fall too far from the average and who needs a defeat to not elevate too far from it and assemble the teams accordingly. The "winner" team gets a bonus to its penetration chance, the "loser" team gets a penalty. While you can make a miracle and with awesome play you can win even these battles, or lose a "won" battle to griefers or 6+ AFK-ers, but the bonus/penalty on average works, making sure that everyone is just slightly away from average. After the victory is decided, the players do the rest. As I already found, on the winner side the kills are much more distributed, half of the winner team scores at least one kill. So while in every battle the good ones "pwn", the "good ones" change from battle to battle.
Further proof is my gold ammo test: with item shop ammo I had 2.4 kills/battle and 69% wins (world top 100). My kills are simply not enough to explain the insane amount of wins, as I killed only 16% of the enemy. The solution is that gold ammo allowed me kills when I did not suppose to kill anything, turning a lost match into a won.
Even more proof: the statistics page lists which tanks has the highest win ratio:
T82: 59.09%
Marder II: 58.07%
SU-26: 57.32%
Lorraine 40 t: 57.03%
MS-1: 56.98%
Except the Lorraine, all of the tanks in the list are lowbie tanks. Why? Because lowbie tanks have very little armor compared to gun. If I shoot a Marder II with another Marder II, I simply cannot get a nonpenetrating hit without it being obvious bug or cheat. Even if my real penetration strength is just half of the formal value, I still can damage everything on the field (except KV front armor). So these tanks are able to bypass tinkering with penetration chances. With such tanks it's possible to get insane win rates.
One more time: the data can be insufficient and the results can be interpreted differently. However, even if they are completely innocent in rigging the matches, the case is a good example for maximum transparency: in the presence of combat logs, even the slightest shed of suspicion could not exist.
EVE business report: 4.13B (0.4B gifts). Remember that you can participate in our EVE conversations and soon group activities on the "goblinworks" channel.
World of Tanks is an extremely successful game with 20 million users and 30% paying rate. That's 6M paying customer, in the same league as WoW, despite much smaller developer budget.
To make it more awesome, World of Tanks is a PvP game, while the other blockbusters like WoW, Farmwille are purely PvE, where no one is frustrated by defeat. Everyone can tell a dozen PvP MMOs that failed or linger with a few 10K subscribers. And unlike the other mentionable successful PVP MMO, EVE online, there is no "high sec" in World of Tanks. The only gameplay is going to the field and battle enemy tanks, head on.
PvP games are killed by the "PvP spiral": the bad players are pwned and stop playing, making the second worst group the worst, who are now pwned and it goes on until no one left but the hard core. World of Tanks is probably the only game out there that is not affected by it.
Of course the developers can tinker with the matchmaking system to give both teams equally strong players (as opposed to tanks), so the bad ones are carried by good ones. However it's just annoying but not a fix: in this scheme the bad ones would still be massacred, despite half of them would get a "you won" screen (that he probably don't even see as he exited battle on death). This was the first piece of puzzle that I could use to set up my tinfoil hat theory: I saved the results of 60 battles and found that:
- 58% of the players had 0 kills
- Only 23.5% had 1 kill
- 10% had 2 kills
- 8% had 3 or more kills.
The next clue is the winrate itself. 60% winrate gets you to world top 1000, and despite serious efforts I failed to find a single player below 40% winrate, even when I looked up players who griefed the team in battles I was. Yes, even active griefers manage to win 2/5 of the battles. I know, random battle, but still. Put a gladiator in a WoW BG and see how he both dominates the chart and also provides lot of wins. In WoT, even the best players are just "slightly above average", while even the AFKers and griefers are just "slightly below average".
The above alone explains the success of World of Tanks. It's a PvP game where no one fails. Everyone has wins and everyone has kills (if the best ones have just little more than average kills, the worst ones also have little less than average kills). A PvP game where no one pwns and no one is pwned, a game where everyone is competitive, where no one is left behind. A miracle. It's too good to be true. And probably it's not.
I started to get data about the misses and ineffective hits of me and my girlfriend while using the best cannon of the game, BL-10. It wasn't easy to get the data as the game has no combat log and the developers explicitly told that they never put in any. I had to make marks on a paper during battles, so probably made mistakes. This data is not at all accurate, but the result is so big that the signal-noise ratio is probably good enough:
On battles that we won 13% of the hits were ineffective.
On battles that we lost, 29% of the hits were ineffective.
I'd like to stress that below comes my opinion about the facts and not facts themselves. There are other explanation of the facts which can be true, therefore I can't claim my opinion be "the truth". The straightforward explanation is: "if you suck or unlucky, you lose", however it assumes that the battle depends on me. I saw too many AFK-leeches win battles to believe that. I can suck and shoot nothing but E100 turret front armor and still win due to teammates and can be "top gun" and lose (did that too many times). Also, why does my penetration rate varies so much between battles? I magically forgot where to aim in 5 minutes?
Now my tinfoil hat explanation: the matchmaker decides who needs a win to not fall too far from the average and who needs a defeat to not elevate too far from it and assemble the teams accordingly. The "winner" team gets a bonus to its penetration chance, the "loser" team gets a penalty. While you can make a miracle and with awesome play you can win even these battles, or lose a "won" battle to griefers or 6+ AFK-ers, but the bonus/penalty on average works, making sure that everyone is just slightly away from average. After the victory is decided, the players do the rest. As I already found, on the winner side the kills are much more distributed, half of the winner team scores at least one kill. So while in every battle the good ones "pwn", the "good ones" change from battle to battle.
Further proof is my gold ammo test: with item shop ammo I had 2.4 kills/battle and 69% wins (world top 100). My kills are simply not enough to explain the insane amount of wins, as I killed only 16% of the enemy. The solution is that gold ammo allowed me kills when I did not suppose to kill anything, turning a lost match into a won.
Even more proof: the statistics page lists which tanks has the highest win ratio:
T82: 59.09%
Marder II: 58.07%
SU-26: 57.32%
Lorraine 40 t: 57.03%
MS-1: 56.98%
Except the Lorraine, all of the tanks in the list are lowbie tanks. Why? Because lowbie tanks have very little armor compared to gun. If I shoot a Marder II with another Marder II, I simply cannot get a nonpenetrating hit without it being obvious bug or cheat. Even if my real penetration strength is just half of the formal value, I still can damage everything on the field (except KV front armor). So these tanks are able to bypass tinkering with penetration chances. With such tanks it's possible to get insane win rates.
One more time: the data can be insufficient and the results can be interpreted differently. However, even if they are completely innocent in rigging the matches, the case is a good example for maximum transparency: in the presence of combat logs, even the slightest shed of suspicion could not exist.
EVE business report: 4.13B (0.4B gifts). Remember that you can participate in our EVE conversations and soon group activities on the "goblinworks" channel.
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