World of Tanks cheat: lucky and unucky shots

This is part 2 of a series, see part 1 first.

When you fire a shot, you can hit or miss. A hit can penetrate or not. A penetrating hit can damage or not. Damage can vary according to the random generator. Lot of variables, but all can only depend on tank stats, player skill and random generator.

I gathered data from 374 matches. All from the same tank, same gun: AT15, B-barrel. During these matches I faced practically every tank randomly, the large number (15*374 = 5610 enemies) guarantee that I had an "average target tank". My skill couldn't change much as I've had more than a thousand matches with British TDs and more than a hundred with AT15 itself. The only factor remaining is random luck. Let's see how random it is.

The average damage/hit is 141.3 (gun nominal value: 230). The standard deviation is 39.6. Now, according to the distance from the average I classified matches as "unlucky" (below average damage/hit), "normal" (around average) and "lucky" (above average). The boundaries were symmetric of course and were chosen as wide to make 1/3 of the matches "normal". With random distribution it would mean 1/3 lucky and 1/3 unlucky matches. It wasn't true, I had 29% unlucky and 38% lucky matches but let's ignore it now. It's important to know that the above classification ignored if I won or lost.

Let's see the average damage/hit for the three categories, separating wins from losses: The lucky wins aren't luckier than the lucky losses, so far, so good. But the extreme differences are troubling at best. I mean in the luckiest 1/3 of the matches I damaged almost twice as much as in the unluckiest. While random generator should be part of the damage/hit calculation this is a bit large, don't you think? Our skill should have larger effect on the outcome than RNG. But this is no cheat.

Let's see how being lucky affected the outcome of the matches? Oops! Why is it asymmetrical? I mean if my damage/hit increases from 100 to 140, it increases winrate by 6%. If it increases by an equal amount, it has no effect on the winrate. Luck is strange in World of Tanks. It has a binary "yes or no" form. Like it would be universal, deciding only one thing: are you meant to win or lose.

As a tank destroyer, especially a 20km/h slow one, I can shoot only when the enemy can kill the rushing faster tanks and break through. If they are lucky, I don't get shots. So my number of shots is a good measure of their luck and obviously should be uncorrelated to my luck. Uncorrelated heh? The team spirit is strong with this game: we are lucky together or unlucky together. You can see it yourself all the time: winning on one side of the map should be uncorrelated to winning on other side. Yet you rarely see games where your team reaches their flag on the left and they reach your flag on the right. What you see is your team being obliterated on both sides or winning on both sides.

Enough of stats, let's see how far "luck" can go to support a player! The infamous scout tank, T-50-2 can only trust in its speed as its 37mm armor on all sides can't stop anything that Tier 9 tanks throw at it. If it is hit, it's probably oneshotted due to its 500HP. Seriously how many shots and potential damage can this thing take before exploding? OK, there is one way to survive penetrating hits: component damage. The tank loses some part or crew but no HP. But even that wouldn't help a scout much: lose track or engine and it can't dodge more hits. Get a hit to the fuel or ammo and it burns or blows up. A hit in the radio or the periscope would stop it from spotting and relaying the location to the others. Where can you hit the damn thing without disabling it?

Want to be as lucky as him? Wait until the exploit post on Friday and I tell you how! Tomorrow we'll see that the legendary "I lost because I got into a fail team" has a strange meaning in World of Tanks.