Playerbase and Patch / Update progress

• Short Introduction

Within the recent Patch , where they introduced tier 9 the forum went somewhat upside down as far as i can read it, though iam not that active in the My.com forum at the moment. For the most part i already expected this to happen as well as the balancing issues that were introduced with it.
From my point of view there are a couple of reasonable points which my.com (they select the patch actually) didn't expected or calculated well, as for example the Player base or the failed balancing in high tier battles .

• In depth Player base

To explain why the EU or NA Player base isn't ready for such "high tier's" is fairly easy and quick, they lack the numbers which obviously the RU Player base has. Without a doubt , both other regions have less players than the RU server , so certain updates like releasing a new tier, might be a bad move , since the concern about lowering a population is rather realistic than unrealistic .

Even before the Open Beta, the RU cluster had more interest in a tank game or higher numbers than both EU and NA together. I guess this never changed regarding the playernumbers , even though the interest is good in both western regions as well, maybe not that hyped up like on the RU server.
This is not an excuse of course, since we have a most likely direct contact with the Dev's and to a certain point a lot of influence which player's didn't had in both other tank games i would say.

However i think that the Player's need to understand that there is a difference in gaming culture between RU and EU/NA , and that certain moves like the Super Test is on RU cluster (they have a lot less problems with having bugs, while NA is from what I've seen in the forum really picky, while EU isn't that strict) or being ahead in terms of releasing patches (about 1-2 weeks), so they can "test" it live, is somewhat okay for me and should be accepted by the western audience, at least for the part of being ahead with the patches, not so much about the Supertest.

Opinion

On the other hand, Obsidian should check to what people they are listening and what the results are. There is no doubt about the current result, that there was clearly a forum influence to favor certain parts of the community, at least it looks like that to me. This means as well that the current population which seems to be stagnating on EU and NA, by quite a margin , is not that good for the future of the game and Obsidian itself.

• Patch / Update progress

At the moment the RU server gets Patch 1-2 weeks before EU and NA , which i would say is okay, not a problem itself. A problem is, that the Russians obviously want their toys as fast as possible, meaning the T-14 needs to be available to them. This could be either a requirement from mail.ru / my.com or the player base over there itself. I can't tell you which of these 2 points is the problem, but going down that road, will be a problem for the EU and NA server, as mentioned before, both have not a very high player count compared to the RU server.

What this means is, that the few player's on the EU and NA server who have a tier 8, will have a tier 9 with a included PowerCreep and a even longer queue time with even more frustration for those who are still grinding . Competition is nice, as for games and ingame , but with such high PowerCreeps in between some of those tiers, it will end up in a downhill for the game itself on both mentioned servers.

EU and NA just don't have the player's to back up such tier difference, as for the RU server, it doesn't seem to be a problem , because they just have more players available. Another thing is, that from my knowledge the Russian's like to test their own stuff, meaning T-series all over the place, which is fine, but not if you count that into your statistics for balancing. If i'am not that mistaken , the current best T9 you can have is a T-90MS, which might be a wrong signal to most players who had bad experience's with such things, or otherwise called RU BIAS all over again . If the western audience is critical about stuff, then it is about BIAS, especially Russian bias again, due the bad past experience .

I guess you can take this all with a grain of salt, but you can do it fairly easy to avoid this. Literally you have 2 options.

1. First you just develop the game for the Russian market, so the western audience is not there to be the cow.
2. Second you don't focus the Russian market as your main audience.

If we see this with a realistic point of view, both options are not available. While the first one would be the easiest way to develop a game without having the western audience and their requirements for a good game, you won't earn a lot of money that way, at least i would assume that, since in WoT it is somewhat the same . To mention another point, Obsidian wouldn't be hired in that case.
The 2nd reason is probably the most favored one by the western audience, but not possible since the Company which makes this Project able to work is from Russia and they probably have requirements to what the game needs to have (T-14 ...... ).

Opinion




I know this will be a lot more work and might have some toxic replies, but in the current state of the game, they need to have different game versions and progress. Meaning add those tier's when the player base is healthy on EU and NA , and not only on RU, which is the current case. Next to that you really need to work on your Basic game itself before adding tiers.
At the moment you don't have a healthy player base on EU and NA, nor is there a balance for tier 6, tier 7, tier 8 and tier 9 now.