My.com fails and OE's attempt for balance

 My.com and events

Since the playerbase seems to be stagnating to a certain point, my.com had the feeling that they need to roll out some events which attract some players for a certain timeframe, and probably hope that they stick to the game a bit longer. The event(s) itself are quite good, as you can grind relatively fast during the given timeframe, but as it is, there is already a drawback.

Suiciders in PvP and stupidness in PvE, to get as much "doubles" or vehicles with reputation and money out of the event. Well you can't do anything against that, except making these kind of tactics inefficient, but as we know within the current system, this won't happen in future.

This is just an example, and maybe they got a bit spotting damage, but overall you get a lot for doing nothing. I could post another one, where a player done some intentional teamdamage / teamkills and still gone out with more EP than someone who done 1 shot with damage.

However to get to my point which i find pretty amusing and awful at the same time is their planning of events and how they perform those. I can understand if you launch your first event for a game, you will get experience from that and hopefully learn out of your mistakes. Obviously this is not the case for My.com employees or the overall staff that is involved in that.

First they have problems with the timezones, as they obviously were confused on what they said and what setting they used to launch the events.
Second part which is funny, is that they have problems with the right event gifts, as for some they are shown and for some other they are not.
Third is interesting as well, which affects the my.com launcher. You can claim a daily bonus, but that seems to be bugged without a doubt. Sometimes you can claim, sometimes you can not, or you get an error message and so on .

I don't know if they are learning out of their mistakes, but iam honest here, as it does not seem that they have the right persons in charge of those events or they are simply not capable of learning out of their fails and mistakes. I'm not picky when it comes down to customer service, but for sure these constant fails are a bit embarrassing to be honest.

OE's attempt to balance high tier

Lately they posted some pictures of their shiny tier 10 tanks, who are a combination of various upgrades from different periods of time with a cool new name.

There are two things we need to bear in mind when considering a vehicle for Armored Warfare:

• Its role in the game and any possible issues connected to it
• Historical accuracy

Inventing a new Version of a Tank seems really historical accurate, but as SilentStalker already said, those are not fantasy tanks, as in the past some of the upgrades were tested, but never reached the final production stage, so it is valid and historical accurate. I think WGN had the same argumentation when they introduced some of their tanks.
Guess we have some

here. :)

A nice coincidence i would say.

However most of them will have a high caliber , like 140mm or 152mm most likely. I find it really interesting when i have read their FAQ about the game and the their intention of balance.

We try to avoid vehicles that potentially represent a balance risk. Perhaps the most obvious of these would be the various tank destroyers or self-propelled guns of extreme calibers such as the British FV215b with its 183mm gun.

Yes there is still a difference between 140mm, 152mm and 183mm or 170mm, but overall the result will be the same. I would think of the lovely ISU with the BL-10 in WoT, where you can cripple almost every tank of the same tier for the whole match with just 1 penetrating shot.

we want to specifically avoid having such unbalanced weapons with potentially too high single shot damage (damage generally increases with gun caliber).

Interesting isn't it ?

Well Obsidian is probably aware of the tier 10 situation with the assembly kit vehicles, and they choose to try to balance them to the previous tier. I would have quoted that part, but i can't find it in the forum and i'm not that much willing to search for it . From what i have in mind, they don't want to have a power creep again, or maybe not an obvious one, therefore i don't see tier 10 anyway in the close / near future nor is it good anyway.

I don't know if they or even most of the community that can't even wait for another tier of imbalance, are aware that spreading a small playerbase even further is a good thing, but they should think about it. Another big item is the tier imbalance overall , which needs to be solved before adding a new tier. I know this is a logical move and i fully understand that Obsidian and My.com are not thinking logical when it comes down to map design, tiering and tier balance, but we can not give up here.

In short on why tier 10 and tier 9 are bad :

• small playerbase -> spreading the players even further, resulting in less players (EU and NA, RU maybe not so much )
• no balance to the next higher tier, starting at tier 6 and up
• balance starts at the bottom, not the top of the table (T7 needs balance, T8 needs balance)
• Introduce T9 and T10 when all western servers have enough players
• T10 is pure prototypes and fiction, based on "future" projects (your game won't last long enough to see actual T10 tanks for all other nations)

Conclusion

My.com does not learn out of mistakes when running events and OE tries to balance from the top to the bottom. The only reason why i "play" AW are those events, otherwise this is the first game for me, where you get punished for being interested in it. I really wonder on how long OE can resist the pressure from Mail.ru in releasing T10. (SS and his spaming mod Crew, said that this part is not true, but we know that already when they introduced T9)