6
All for the wrong reasons. and I'm not even talking about the completely unneeded buffs to Tier 8 heavies (252, Shark, Caern, Tiger II, looking at you).
Before 8.5 released, I purposely tried to downplay the credit changes that were going to be entering the game for all tiers. The reason for this was simple: I didn't want people panicking about changes that we couldn't test and experience. There was no point in encouraging that quite yet. When the update released, people were going to realize what was happening pretty quickly.
Update 8.5 released last night. It looks pretty bad. It's time to let Wargaming know.
When you log in later today, or right now, to play a tech tree tank from Tier 8-10: expect to not make credits. It looks like WG nerfed their gross income by ~30-50% (note= needs to be tested), so when you play with a full consumables and provisions loadout and fire the occasional premium round, you absolutely will burn credits. There is no way around it. There's so many things to rant about that I have trouble coming up with what to start with.
- Even the most successful battles without Premium Time in non-Premium Tier 8-10's are essentially guaranteed to lose credits (if playing a tank with premium shells/consumables/provisions), unless you earn one or more of the three medals granting credits. Credit boosters are now the new Premium Time: purple credit boosters are currently averaging more credits for a battle than the literal battle for Tier 8-10 non premiums.
- Speaking of Premium Time, its almost half as effective as before. When you're only able to make 30k credits w/o Premium vs the 50k credits before in a decent game for a normal Tier 10, the 50% bonus from Premium Time is earning the player much less credits. Really, really insulting to players that have hundreds or thousands of days of Premium saved up, and were expecting its value not to be diminished. It used to be that Premium Time would allow players to net a significant amount of credits, now it's hardly able to keep a battle go positive. This was something I knew was going to happen in 8.5 no matter what, I couldn't play this down and won't now either.
- The credit changes encourage playing without provisions and using the most basic consumables. Playing a handicapped tank will ensure that you don't lose credits, but also ensures that your tank is permanently handicapped. Little Timmy can play his Pershing with no Premium account, no provisions, no premium shells, and only a repair kit; while he contributes nothing to a battle for your team, he will still earn credits while you drop 3k damage and lose with a kitted tank, which means you lose credits. Sounds fair and balanced, and totally makes sense.
- With the removal of non-premium shell costs, there is no incentive to hit shots and be efficient with your shell choices for damage. Before, penning HE shells for additional damage with a cheaper HE round meant you were getting more value for your shots. Having a good aim and not missing rewarded the player. Now, it's completely irrelevant if you fire 10 AP shells or 100 AP shells for the same damage. How exactly is this supposed to encourage players to play well? I appreciate being able to take blind shots without a cost, but that's the only benefit for me.
- Premium shells are now effectively much more expensive, since their price didn't change and the tank makes significantly less credits. If you fire 4-5 premium shells at Tier 10, you're burning nearly as many credits as you are earning in gross. This is yet another nerf to tanks that are balanced in mind to shoot more premium rounds (lights and mediums). Meanwhile in the same update, we're getting massive buffs to mostly Tier 8 heavies including armor, pen, reload, and alpha.
- The special consumables and provisions that WG keeps pushing onto tank lines to balance them are now going to cost you an arm and a leg. It's also worth noting that you won't be getting a 10% discount on them from a Level 10 clan supply. Wargaming wants you to pay for the buffs to your tank through special consumables. From their perspective, it's brilliant. Why give a tank buffs that are free for the player, like a normal DPM/HP/accuracy buff; when you can make players pay permanently for the tank's buff?
- You can make a lot of credits through earning Ace Tankers, Kolobanov's, and Top Gun medals. Battles where you earn one or multiple of those medals will ensure a healthy profit, and in some cases, a significantly larger profit than before. The only problem with this is that earning these medals is not reliable for players, especially the noobs for which the changes were catered for, which is entirely contradictory to what WG was trying to do with this change in the economy. I'm all for getting people to play less popular tanks, but simply for the ability to farm aces to earn credits to stay afloat? That's not the way to do it.
- At least Premium tanks are earning a profit, although noticeably lower than before. The difference between premium and non-Premium tanks for credit earning is much more exaggerated now: the benefit is not just tenfold, but can be considered as infinitely more beneficial as Premium tanks will guarantee making credits, regardless of how poor the player's actions are and regardless of win or loss. Non premium tanks' goal rn is simply trying to break even. More reason to only spam broken Premium tanks, amiright?
Now, how can this be fixed? Here's a few ways I would approach the issue:
1) Completely revert the changes in 8.6 and pretend this never happened.
1b) Nah, this is Wargaming that we're talking about. Getting them to admit a mistake is rarer than a blue moon. I would be highly surprised if they reverted the changes (regardless of player feedback), especially since they implemented the changes in the first place with the hopes of fixing a supposedly broken system. Veterans have to remember that lots of players that have <10 tanks in their garage with no Premium Account or no Premium tanks, and they struggle to buy tanks. Not everyone is sitting on a pile of credits that couldn't be burned in years if they tried. Personally, I think this lack of credits for a lot of players stems more from making terrible financial decisions as opposed to a system being broken, but just look through the comments of the video that WG put out about the changes; 99% of the comments are from people saying how glad they are that WG is "fixing the system". Some comments even say things like "now I can afford to run provisions!" and "now I don't need a Premium tank to grind credits!". If only they knew...well I guess they're going to realize quickly now.
2) Reduce the cost of premium shells, provisions, and consumables. Since the use of the aftermentioned things shouldn't be encouraged to decrease, and the credit coefficient nerfs to tanks was significantly more drastic than the free non-premium rounds and repair costs, the remaining costs of the game should be lowered. Technically camo should make the list, but who is paying credits for camos in 2021? Well, maybe the people targeted for these changes. However, this doesn't fix how Wargaming has nerfed Premium Time.
3) Allow players other ways to earn credits in a battle for their battle actions. Blocked damage, initial spots, kills, duration of time that tracks are broken and enemies are spotted are options, although I'm wary of encouraging players to abuse this.
4) Allow players other ways to earn credits in general. Why isn't there a method of investing credits in a way that can earn passive income? It doesn't have to be an ever expanding way to exponentially make larger and larger credit investments, there can be a simple cap on credits earned in a single day. If barring that, allow players to invest either gold, free XP, or something else into a one time purchase that earns passive income of credits.
5) Expand the amount of medals that can earn credits, sooner rather than later. Maybe include Ribbons in there as well. IMO this is putting a Band-Aid on a bullet hole, but this could allow WG an easy cop out and the ability to double down on their changes, and its already something they mentioned they could be doing.
6) Increase the amount of credits earned in Ratings. Preferably, the way to encourage players to play Ratings is through a working points system that rewards skill and not battle spam in OP tanks. But, you gotta do what you gotta do. I can't come up with a reason why Ratings should earn significantly more credits than Randoms because they are almost the same thing in the long run, but Ratings needs more reasons to keep players there.
7) Increase the amount of credits earned in Tournaments. Not going to lie, the credit rewards in QT's and other tournaments are still terrible. Really love earning <400,000 credits for an hour at Tier 10 winning all of my matches when I could just grind that much in half the time playing a Tier 8 premium vehicle in pubs. There is absolutely no reason to de-incentify players from playing tournaments, and all the reason to encourage players to play tournaments as opposed to normal battles.
There's gotta be a lot of other ways to fix the 8.5 changes, but these are just ones that seemed obvious to me.
A report of how badly credit coefficients got nerfed should come soon from either Positive or myself. This seems like the most critical thing to test right now: how the credit earning calculations have changed, if at all; and what the most efficient way to grind credits is now.
Edited by __Frostbite, 17 November 2021 - 09:45 PM.
