Getting out of World of Tanks

Ach ja, it was inevitable. After almost one and a half years of actively watching streams of the game, I decided to get back into World of Tanks. Close to a year of playing later, it is time to say goodbye once again. It was fun, it really was, but if there is one lesson I didn’t learn from watching enough bad anime, it is knowing when to call quits.

So, what happened?

For the longest of time, only good things. At the time of my first post, I was only getting started playing the game, limited to the possession of tier six tanks. Low tier gameplay sucks. It is no fun, very unbalanced and prone to the worst flaws the game has to offer. But from tier six and beyond, this becomes less a problem, or at the very least less widespread and more condensed. The tanks get better, you get the feeling you are playing with the game and not against it and you are able to even prove your skill at times. Seriously, thanks to the newly (might actually be pretty old at this point) introduced blueprints, I was thankfully able to skip out on playing basically anything below tier four or five.

Grinding the tanks was actually a lot more bearable than imagined, though part of it comes from playing tanks with new mechanics for me. Even though I didn’t play particularly well, the Leopard line was a new experience for someone being mostly accustomed to standard heavy tanks, the Kranvagn line was almost stupid, once I reached the Emil I and the french light tracked vehicles demanded my best for it to become a good round. For all intents and purposes, this was the most fun I ever had in this game.

This enthusiasm didn’t burn down even after getting into the possession of my first tier ten tanks. I eventually figured out I am not the best light tank player and instead went for the ol' reliable, even if the tanks themselves were new to me. As of the time writing this post, I have acquired five tier ten tanks, with the sixth one, the CS-63, being only millions of credits away and a Conquerer at tier nine. I also became significantly better at the game as time went by, leading to better performance and games in general, rocking a respectable WN8 of 1325. However, the best decision I did was one I thought I would immediately regret instead: I paid money.

Owning a premium account is a literal bliss, as it comes with so many advantages that make the game so much more enjoyable, or, at the very least, less exhausting. First of, you do not have any money problems. I never had to farm for money or even lost some in a bad game, while I regularly go into the red in a good game without a premium account. Want equipment? Just buy some. Researched a new tank? No need to hesitate, just start playing it, as the price for your tier ten turns into literal pocket change. The economy in this game is a circus, might as well sit on top of the tent.

Experience also gets a decent boost. Sure, I can’t complain about the additional 50% on EXP, but the freely applicable +3x boosts are where it is really at. Nothing beats the feeling of having a great game and getting 450% of your value compared to a f2p match, leading me to only need a fraction of games to research new tanks. Also, you get so much more stuff, half the time I don’t even know why. Premium is the best. And while this is all fine and dandy, I am not the only one in possession of a premium account and other people truly intend to use their buying power to its full potential.

The game is fundamentally unfair. This is not up to debate. Premium rounds tend to make aiming at weak spots and knowing an enemies armor layout a suggestion instead a necessity, premium consumables are just a straight bonus and you could literally write your own post on how some premium tanks are so broken, they ruin entire matches. If you are free to play, you are not playing at an disadvantage, but stuck with a straight up handicap and the only solution being to pay up. It might not matter that much in individual games, but after playing over 4.500 of those, it adds up and you notice these differences more and more.

It also doesn’t help that I never had the opportunity to partake in any more serious and competitive modes, like the ranked matches, or the recent Onslaught event. Sure, I could have partaken in Onslaught, but with only a limited selection of (not so meta) tier ten vehicles and no premium time to dampen the necessary gold spamming in this mode, there were only so many matches I could have played anyway, not to speak of the fractions I would have enjoyed. Sometimes, this game feels very exclusionary in a roundabout way.

You also tend to notice the little things more and more too. Map design? Laughably unbalanced in most cases. Team mates? Basically encouraged to not help you out in a situation, if they are playing at all. This might just be the tinfoil hat on me speaking, but the game has it out for me, right? I know I am playing way better than the average and I have the stats to prove it, but I am also seemingly forever cursed to never escape the bottom 47 percent win rate, the only stat anyone ever looks at when confirming their bias of a player’s skill. Winning only 47 percent of your games… sure, it sucks but it also doesn’t matter that much, but not being able to flex with a win rate befitting of my own self image in this game and earning adoration from other players? Weltschmerz.

World of Tanks is a toxic relationship

Here is the thing. Coming back into the game, I already knew this was a thing and would come to annoy me yet again. Hell, it was one of the reason I felt finally compelled to quit back in 2014. And yet… and yet, here we are again, pretending I didn’t learn a thing. It reels me back in, I have fun, it gets worse and I have to live yet again with the feeling of inadequacy. Did I do something wrong, what is my fault? It can’t possibly be the game designed to make me suffer, right?

No Hansi, she is waving her red flags with pride.

Come on, she is not that bad. There were also good times.

Only if you enjoy losing over ten rounds in a row for those few second of fulfillment.

This happened like, two or three times max and I also once had like a 70 percent win rate over 15 games.

Everyday, she is literally eating more and more away at you psyche!

So does every game, right?

Except they do not. And even if they were, they shouldn’t. I know better than getting angry at video games like an enraged twelve year old. I have better things to do with my time and know how to not trick my emotions into destroying myself. “Good vibes only” I said after releasing my Precure video and I am a man of my word when it comes to promises made towards anime girls. Despite all the things said, World of Tanks is a fun game for me and when it is good, it’s good and when it is bad, I still come back without complaint, but it wears at me and I do not want to come to a point where I begrudgingly play the game in hopes of having a good time, instead of simply having a good time while playing.

For the last year, I basically played this game everyday to the point where I stopped questioning whether I should play it to begin with. It is not a matter of time wasted, but of principle. I should enjoy my time, this also includes judging what would make me happier in a moment: Playing the game or doing anything else. And this is simply not the case anymore. In fact, playing World of Tanks leaves me unable to engage with different things. Sure, time is time, but this can be compensated by a lack of sleep. Ironically, sleep, or rather zoning out for at least an hour afterwards, might be the only thing from keeping me from going insane, if I were to, for example, watch a few episodes of anime thereafter, while emotionally exhausted and or possibly agitated. You know what they say about being angry: Everything will look like a french visage.

Instead, I will pass the burden of playing the game myself unto other people that already do so and way better than I ever could and go back to interacting with the game only via watching streams. Life is a circle, no matter the radius, so might as well cut corners where it matters.

So, what now?

Well, while I initially thought about slowly phasing out, until I eventually stop playing entirely, this will clearly not happen in the near future. While I exclusively play the game with a friend and our sessions keep getting shorter, there is nothing in the way of us continuing like this for the foreseeable future, so I will have to make a decision I initially thought unnecessary for myself. I will set myself a date for the dead line. What date, you ask? Well, there are two that come to mind: The first one could have been the anniversary of my first WoT post on the first of February, but there is another date way more obviously befitting to quit: January 26 – the day I started playing this damned game again.

This will be the day of my last game. From there on, it will be cold turkey. Say goodbye to… definitely a time. Needlessly over dramatic? Sure, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. Leave without missing a word. No letter, no flowers. It might even bring another person to quit too and do something with their additional hour of precious time.

After all this is done, there is only one logical conclusion left: Re-watching Girls und Panzer for the thousandth time. As for the game? If history is doomed to repeat itself by those that did not learn from it, I guess we will see us in another four years again.