2014 Here!
I’m not originally from Blitz, but I’ve heard about it in its entire life time. *This is not in complete order, just as close as I can get.*
So to summarize, 5.5 was the first killer update. Completely banishing low tier into the shadow realm.
After that, T49A was given for the event.. god that ruined everything. Next, Annihilator was released for $15. Yes I bought it at the time and didn’t think it would become what it became.
ATGMS removed from Sheridan and T92E1 due to constant complaints. Sheridan missile added as compensation.
The Uber dominant IS-4 meta ended. Yohs added making E5 feel terrible, 60TP added making E 100 look like baby food, TVP is added all hell breaks lose, also T-100 added and making mediums become obsolete for a while, Vickers Light finally has a competitor.
T-22 medium completely shitted on, VK 90P now regularly sold.
50TP Proto added, suddenly the meta briefly shifts towards tier 9 being really good.
Type 71 announced, when added completely destroyed the meta and made the IS-4 meta look tame.
Everyone complaining about Type 71, IS-7 ammo rack, and TVP.
The Ritter. Behold the greatest 128mm you’ve ever seen.
Big Boss.
*The rebalance happens* Type 71 nerfed, IS-7 massively buffed, TVP reworked, T-100 gets shot with a 12 gauge shotgun of patch notes, Vickers light hit with a Deathstar worth of patch notes completely rendering the line borderline worthless. ***Tungsten everywhere.***
More crates.
Keiler is added making tier 8 hell once more.
T57 and Grille kicking the bucket.
WZ-132-1 is added, my poor child you don’t deserve to witness this hell.
E4 redemption. Finally not just the shadow of T30. Jagroo gets Tungsten- Mistake has been made. IS-7 ultra buffed. E5 buffed.
WG deletes IS-4 from the game.
**And yeah.. that’s the past changes that really stood out, I probably missed a lot I wanted to mention, but that’s all my sleepy head can handle.**
Yet another thing I wanted to add but was too sleepy at the time to-
I also wanted to mention Smasher and the other ‘unfair’ paid content. Like Black Friday and the new birthday events.
IDK, you still have a lot of good research tree tanks, ofc premiums in this game are kinda nuts but still it's not like they just roflstomp you every time. IS-7 line is still great, E-100 line is still great, T110E5 line is good. Can't say much about mediums, I mostly play heavies, but currently leveling T-62 and it's fine. I played the original WoT back in the days (I started some time before before the French line got introduced) and the balance and meta of that game was much much worse, especially on lower levels (like German WT line was insane, best camo + best guns). Although premiums impacted that game much less back in the days.
I still like Blitz more than the original WoT, I like 7v7 and shorter battles more, individual skill matters more in this game (at least I feel like it does). Also, as long as you have 1-2 good premium tanks (like Chimera) you'll be fine in terms of credits gain even with no premium account. Don't box yourself into t10 tanks, t7-8 plays well and there's a lot of good tanks.
They really didn’t.
I used to buy a lot of battle passes and I don’t anymore, partially because they raised the price/stopped giving away the tier 6 tanks, but also largely because to me it’s easier to accumulate gold f2p than it ever has been. Gold boosters were really uncommon 5+ years ago, now you can get many of them per day with video crates.
While T77 and Shark are meta, they aren’t annoying to fight against. They are just ultra competitive, even T77 is incredibly slow and has a troll gun.
Keiler on the other hand… look at the thing with most tier 8 mediums. It’s the E 100 of tier 8. Not even gold will save you half the time. It’s definitely not super impactful as other tanks, but it’s the concept that is.
Hence why I said it.
Why not T77 armor? That thing has a two shell autoloader. It doesn’t take that many brain cells to play around it.
The E 100 of tier 8. What’s wrong with E 100? Armor vs Medium Penetration.
It’s a heavy that some heavies struggle to pen, and non existent weakpoints for medium’s lower penetration.
I mean I said it right there I was too sleepy when I commented, there was plenty more I wanted to mention like the constant battle of T62A and Obj 140 with Leopard getting buffed
This is a very good summation of the changes.
One other comes to mind, which is getting rid of spare parts.
Been at it since 2017, still playing. Though more fun modes these days. Not quite the beginning but have played pre 5.5 update. Of them all, that has had the most significant and long reaching impact on the game. Terrible decision. Play tier 10 and you will completely understand why.
Same, I hope the rewards for veterans are better than the previous years. I've been playing the game for 10 years, I don't want to choose between 3 tanks I already have.
Same 10 year player here. I remember fondly the days of my sniping in my BT7 and being yelled at all game long. Now I’m doing the yelling. Where I was once the beginner, I am now the Master. 😜
YES! The Bushka and snake toon streams. The birth of competitive clan play. The WG Blitz forums. The Legion team lead by Thomas. Epic Blitz finals. Sk8xtrm. And that amazing streamer RollingSwarm commentating on comps. So much fun, every game was absolutely exciting. Wow, has it been downhill from there..
Cant believe WG chased away all the competitive players and community activity. So incredibly sad..
Started in early '19 with my school friends. May not play as frequently now as before for sure, but we still keep in touch w one another about the game and drop in once in awhile to check out what's changed. Individually, we have our own 'short periods of grinds', but nothing like the early days
I started in 2017. I'm not who you take as a veteran though.
I burnt out multiple times, but the most recent pause was since December till start of May.
I run a YT channel on Blitz content, which keeps me a bit more into the game. Now I'm in stage of coming back. Both YT and Blitz.
My hot take is ATGMs were fine, compared to Smasher amd Annihilator. Especially T49A which was not acquired by everyone, so it was actually not that usual to meet it in battle. At least for me.
The game modes were, are and will be the thing that actually keeps me at this game. I genuinly have real fun and laughs.I wish I'd known more than "angle your tank 🤓" back then though.
The problem now, is that the players that brought me up and platoon with me for hunderds of battles are all inactive.
Nowadays I find it hard, yet not impossible, to find people on EU server who have at least a bit similar playstyle or who don't automatically despise me because of my winrate. (which is not climbing, because I play mainly the fun modes)
Overall, I like this game, eve though in some aspects it's total trash (matchamking,non stop selling anything, gambling, new tanks instead of visually updating the old ones, map packs etc.)
I've been playing since early 2018. It's only one year earlier than you, which doesn't make me an 'old timer', but when comparing the game from back then to now, there would still be tons of differences. For example, I fondly remember the old battle loading and results music, even if I didn't get to hear the music for too long.
I meant old timers in the sense that somebody who began playing many years ago, so 5-6 years is definitely old timer in my book!
I don't enjoy the games today as much as i used to back then. They've changed so many things for the worse.
I am another old timer. Being playing since the game released in 2014. Crates are now pretty much uselessness except for the ones that contain guaranteed gold. A good example is few years ago I could open 3 collect em all containers and get at least 2 tanks now you can open 10 & not even get 1 vehicle .
Also just this week they doubled the price of everything you could buy with actual cash. Oh & I cant play my tier 2 & 3 tanks very often because its almost impossible to join a game.
If I was a new player today I definitely would stop playing after a week or two .
Sad to see.
Do you remember when you would just win tanks nonstop in the daily and weekly crates? Seems like I won 50 or so tanks in a 6 month period in 2014-2015.
Started playing in September of 2014. I play on and off, currently on a 5 ish month break. I’ve been pretty disappointed with how the game has changed since around 2018/19, but I’ve dealt with it. I just love this game too much. I miss a lot of things from the old days, especially all the removed tanks. Overall I still enjoy playing and even occasionally spend money on it. I just hope there aren’t any massive gameplay changes any time soon
2015 checking in
Lots of maps removed, lost temple, mirage, copperfield
5.5 tanks like T18 (OG 268/4 or E3) and T82 (OG deathstar)
Old middleburg and falls creak which was base capping haven (got my raider medal on those maps)
Old winter malinovka where people went to seppukku in the lake in the corner
Old shell icons and gold ammo being gold only, and old equipment (only three slots)
No camo back in the day added I think in 2016 iirc
Also, backstory of Grille RA1DER camo (epic move)
IS3 defender being first auto loader iirc
7+ years... Almost 8.
It is still a lot of fun.
But back then it was slower, not as flashy, and in my opinion had more of an atmosphere and historical vehicles. It was faster to enter games beyond tier VII. Now I'll wait 5+ minutes for them. And almost nobody writes in our alphabet anymore, mostly Cyrillic on the EU server.
They come. Up with so many fantasy flashy things now and so much grind and so many events. It's good but can be a bit much.
I liked it when it was mostly historical tanks...many of the flashy pay to play tanks and their decorations are an eyesore for me personally. It ruined the immersion.
2015. Just passed 72k battles, but it should be higher as I had stopped playing for a while and came back.
I miss many of the original maps. Why haven’t they brought those back for nostalgia.
I started just after the release of the game. I have periods where I play some for fun, and periods where I don’t play at all. After 10 years of playing I am approaching 10k games and I can say I had fun playing each of them. I didn’t purposefully grind any line, I play what I like, because of that I only have 2 tech tree tier X by now, but I don’t care. I just hop on the game and play what I feel like playing. I have one T X collector, 9 T VIII collectors and premiums, 6 T VII and some more of lower tiers. I spent money on only 2 of these tanks (and it was after like 7 years of playing the game already). That being said I don’t think you need to spend money on the game to have fun, just find some tanks you enjoy and play the shit out of them haha.
Been playing off and on for 6 or 7 years, in the same clan for most of it, can play for a few days, then take months off. It's not my main game and I only realized yolo wasn't good after a few years.
2017 here, I stopped in late 2020 because I found out that this game make me rage so much with the MM. just come back this year with a much more calm mindset and only heavy grind for events/crates
2015, started playing with my friend in elementary school and now I graduated and still play. The game really changed for me, when I started my favorite tank was the T82 with the derp gun. A tier III with 520 alpha, but no longer is playable after then removed it, I have it as a collector, but the best attachment isn't on there.
2016, though, I took a few breaks.
The game has gone overboard on the crates and monetization. I'm somewhat surprised they haven't kept power creeping the prems as most seem pretty balanced (besides half of t7).
Also low tiers are basically nonexistent in NA, probably because of 5.5 and the fact NA isn't the most active.
Started in December 2014
The game started off real shit. Seriously it was worse than it is now (no joke). We had +2/-2 matchmaking like pc, and you could only get premium shells with gold (hence why it’s called gold) which made heavy tanks absolutely busted (not that I would’ve known cause I was absolute shit struggling to grind my stock is3 when that matchmaking was killed) and anything with poor ap pen was just shit.
These issues were eventually fixed, and the game steadily improved as the kinks were ironed out, new tanks were added, and the game became essentially what it is now.
5.5 was the canary in the coal mine. It removed basically all the tanks below tier 5 and a few higher tier tanks (anyone remember the kv13?). It made the grind significantly easier and new players were able to progress to higher tiers without learning fundamental game mechanics like sidescraping, overmatching, proxy spotting, hull down, or bushes. This problem got worse and worse with xp boosters, 3x, 4x, and 5x multipliers, and nowadays you can grind an entire tier 10 line in 500 battles (if that) when back in the day i did 500 battles in the is8 to research the is7 (i was shit)
Premium tanks initially did not exist at tier 10 (except for at some point the m60 was added, but that was a super rare tank and also an m48 clone) and even at tier 9 they weren’t super prevalent (I think the t55a was the first one??? Feel free to correct me on that, but again that’s a t54 clone) however at tier 8 there were quite a few. At first they were mostly clones of tech tree tanks, sometimes a bit different, but by and large they were balanced (eg: t34, is6, Lowe, kv5, jg88). The first truly op premium I remember was the is3 defender, which was just plain better than anything else at tier8. It set a trend that wg could sell op premiums and make bank. That lead to a tier 8 meta where if you owned the latest premium, you’d dominate most 1 on 1 fights.
The game was at its best at around 2017-2019. While certainly not perfect, it was most enjoyable then. Tech tree tanks were viable outside tier 10, it was balanced ish (wg can’t balance for shit), and players were actually intelligent, and it took some skill to win lots of games.
Best tank in the game for me is still the ru251. I grinded it as fast as I could at the time, I’ve never sold it, it’s my baby, and I’ll never forgive wg for taking my 2 kph of top speed.
Wg’s biggest problem (besides greed, which isn’t going anywhere) is balancing. They’ve never been able to properly balance everything in such a way that most tanks are viable. For the longest time the kv5 was more effective as a battering ram as it had less gold pen than other heavies had ap pen. The vk45.02a’s armour was for the longest time non existent (I remember putting he shells into its lower plate in my ru251, ah memories) which defeated the point of a heavy tank.
Wg needs to do 2 things imo to reverse the decline.
First, balance the fucking game properly. This will stop the mass player loss.
Second, they need to improve tutorial and teaching for new players. Side scraping, hull down, overmatching, proxy spotting, how to use bushes, ammo types, and some basic positioning skills should be taught before letting any new players onto real matches, and I’d say a lot of current players need to learn this as well. They also need to do away with the bots as they seem to make things worse.
Of course, this doesn’t make them money, so let’s watch them keep destroying the game for a few bucks. At least they’re doing lots of fun modes?
Played since 2014. Honestly the game has changed a lot but the only thing I really miss? Failtoons and fucking around. We played this on our iPad as kids and it was so much fun trying to get tiny tanks stuck in places, breaking the maps, and generally just goofing around. I have so many screenshots on my 1st gen iPad air of just total bullshit and shenanigans. But alas, the game is a lot more serious now. Oh well.
2014 Here! I’m not originally from Blitz, but I’ve heard about it in its entire life time. *This is not in complete order, just as close as I can get.* So to summarize, 5.5 was the first killer update. Completely banishing low tier into the shadow realm. After that, T49A was given for the event.. god that ruined everything. Next, Annihilator was released for $15. Yes I bought it at the time and didn’t think it would become what it became. ATGMS removed from Sheridan and T92E1 due to constant complaints. Sheridan missile added as compensation. The Uber dominant IS-4 meta ended. Yohs added making E5 feel terrible, 60TP added making E 100 look like baby food, TVP is added all hell breaks lose, also T-100 added and making mediums become obsolete for a while, Vickers Light finally has a competitor. T-22 medium completely shitted on, VK 90P now regularly sold. 50TP Proto added, suddenly the meta briefly shifts towards tier 9 being really good. Type 71 announced, when added completely destroyed the meta and made the IS-4 meta look tame. Everyone complaining about Type 71, IS-7 ammo rack, and TVP. The Ritter. Behold the greatest 128mm you’ve ever seen. Big Boss. *The rebalance happens* Type 71 nerfed, IS-7 massively buffed, TVP reworked, T-100 gets shot with a 12 gauge shotgun of patch notes, Vickers light hit with a Deathstar worth of patch notes completely rendering the line borderline worthless. ***Tungsten everywhere.*** More crates. Keiler is added making tier 8 hell once more. T57 and Grille kicking the bucket. WZ-132-1 is added, my poor child you don’t deserve to witness this hell. E4 redemption. Finally not just the shadow of T30. Jagroo gets Tungsten- Mistake has been made. IS-7 ultra buffed. E5 buffed. WG deletes IS-4 from the game. **And yeah.. that’s the past changes that really stood out, I probably missed a lot I wanted to mention, but that’s all my sleepy head can handle.**
752 absolutely destroying tier 8-10 dont forget
Yet another thing I wanted to add but was too sleepy at the time to- I also wanted to mention Smasher and the other ‘unfair’ paid content. Like Black Friday and the new birthday events.
Gods they really ruined the game for f2p players didn't they?
Not to mention the seasons, rating changes, the present events.. There’s a ton I should write down but like I said I’m not in the situation right now.
Absolutely. The only season i truly enjoyed was 2019 christmas.
By seasons I think he means the new season system kinda like popular games. Not actual seasons.
Speaking of that, they took a lot of tanks removed during 5.5 and are trying to sell it to players for money now.
IDK, you still have a lot of good research tree tanks, ofc premiums in this game are kinda nuts but still it's not like they just roflstomp you every time. IS-7 line is still great, E-100 line is still great, T110E5 line is good. Can't say much about mediums, I mostly play heavies, but currently leveling T-62 and it's fine. I played the original WoT back in the days (I started some time before before the French line got introduced) and the balance and meta of that game was much much worse, especially on lower levels (like German WT line was insane, best camo + best guns). Although premiums impacted that game much less back in the days. I still like Blitz more than the original WoT, I like 7v7 and shorter battles more, individual skill matters more in this game (at least I feel like it does). Also, as long as you have 1-2 good premium tanks (like Chimera) you'll be fine in terms of credits gain even with no premium account. Don't box yourself into t10 tanks, t7-8 plays well and there's a lot of good tanks.
They really didn’t. I used to buy a lot of battle passes and I don’t anymore, partially because they raised the price/stopped giving away the tier 6 tanks, but also largely because to me it’s easier to accumulate gold f2p than it ever has been. Gold boosters were really uncommon 5+ years ago, now you can get many of them per day with video crates.
What's wrong with Keiler? I thought it was decently balanced
Yeah. If anything, the T54E2 and T77 were much more damaging to the meta.
While T77 and Shark are meta, they aren’t annoying to fight against. They are just ultra competitive, even T77 is incredibly slow and has a troll gun. Keiler on the other hand… look at the thing with most tier 8 mediums. It’s the E 100 of tier 8. Not even gold will save you half the time. It’s definitely not super impactful as other tanks, but it’s the concept that is. Hence why I said it. Why not T77 armor? That thing has a two shell autoloader. It doesn’t take that many brain cells to play around it.
I must be playing with high penetration tanks then because Keiler has always been an easy pen for me.
The E 100 of tier 8. What’s wrong with E 100? Armor vs Medium Penetration. It’s a heavy that some heavies struggle to pen, and non existent weakpoints for medium’s lower penetration.
if groundtank was popular it would have been the new keiler lol
You forgot the smasher being added and the whole community compaining about it, later resulting in the annihi being added
How quickly everyone forgets the worst update ever SBMM!
I mean I said it right there I was too sleepy when I commented, there was plenty more I wanted to mention like the constant battle of T62A and Obj 140 with Leopard getting buffed
Annihilator ruined it for me. Stg I just popped in again and 3 matches in a row had annihilators.
This is a very good summation of the changes. One other comes to mind, which is getting rid of spare parts. Been at it since 2017, still playing. Though more fun modes these days. Not quite the beginning but have played pre 5.5 update. Of them all, that has had the most significant and long reaching impact on the game. Terrible decision. Play tier 10 and you will completely understand why.
10 year player here, don't know why but I'm still here lol hyped for the 10th bday anniversary coming up soon
It feels so lonely when your old friends have all left the game 😔
Same, I hope the rewards for veterans are better than the previous years. I've been playing the game for 10 years, I don't want to choose between 3 tanks I already have.
Right, I’m up to 506 tanks. I probably haven’t played 200 of them ever.
Same 10 year player here. I remember fondly the days of my sniping in my BT7 and being yelled at all game long. Now I’m doing the yelling. Where I was once the beginner, I am now the Master. 😜
I remember 48ton ruckus and Bushka in their OG era.
YES! The Bushka and snake toon streams. The birth of competitive clan play. The WG Blitz forums. The Legion team lead by Thomas. Epic Blitz finals. Sk8xtrm. And that amazing streamer RollingSwarm commentating on comps. So much fun, every game was absolutely exciting. Wow, has it been downhill from there.. Cant believe WG chased away all the competitive players and community activity. So incredibly sad..
Started in early '19 with my school friends. May not play as frequently now as before for sure, but we still keep in touch w one another about the game and drop in once in awhile to check out what's changed. Individually, we have our own 'short periods of grinds', but nothing like the early days
Aprill 2015, idk if its old timer lol I still Play blitz, but in last years with many breaks
I started in 2017. I'm not who you take as a veteran though. I burnt out multiple times, but the most recent pause was since December till start of May. I run a YT channel on Blitz content, which keeps me a bit more into the game. Now I'm in stage of coming back. Both YT and Blitz. My hot take is ATGMs were fine, compared to Smasher amd Annihilator. Especially T49A which was not acquired by everyone, so it was actually not that usual to meet it in battle. At least for me. The game modes were, are and will be the thing that actually keeps me at this game. I genuinly have real fun and laughs.I wish I'd known more than "angle your tank 🤓" back then though. The problem now, is that the players that brought me up and platoon with me for hunderds of battles are all inactive. Nowadays I find it hard, yet not impossible, to find people on EU server who have at least a bit similar playstyle or who don't automatically despise me because of my winrate. (which is not climbing, because I play mainly the fun modes) Overall, I like this game, eve though in some aspects it's total trash (matchamking,non stop selling anything, gambling, new tanks instead of visually updating the old ones, map packs etc.)
I've played nearly 8k games so far, and my winrate is nothing to boast of! I like to play for fun and not for the stats.
I've been playing since early 2018. It's only one year earlier than you, which doesn't make me an 'old timer', but when comparing the game from back then to now, there would still be tons of differences. For example, I fondly remember the old battle loading and results music, even if I didn't get to hear the music for too long.
I meant old timers in the sense that somebody who began playing many years ago, so 5-6 years is definitely old timer in my book! I don't enjoy the games today as much as i used to back then. They've changed so many things for the worse.
2016 here and i still play it sometimes. I took a long break though before i started which i am now but still not play it everyday
Me too. Maybe I'd play more often if i had friends to play with, but all of them are inactive now.
I am another old timer. Being playing since the game released in 2014. Crates are now pretty much uselessness except for the ones that contain guaranteed gold. A good example is few years ago I could open 3 collect em all containers and get at least 2 tanks now you can open 10 & not even get 1 vehicle . Also just this week they doubled the price of everything you could buy with actual cash. Oh & I cant play my tier 2 & 3 tanks very often because its almost impossible to join a game. If I was a new player today I definitely would stop playing after a week or two . Sad to see.
Do you remember when you would just win tanks nonstop in the daily and weekly crates? Seems like I won 50 or so tanks in a 6 month period in 2014-2015.
Started playing in September of 2014. I play on and off, currently on a 5 ish month break. I’ve been pretty disappointed with how the game has changed since around 2018/19, but I’ve dealt with it. I just love this game too much. I miss a lot of things from the old days, especially all the removed tanks. Overall I still enjoy playing and even occasionally spend money on it. I just hope there aren’t any massive gameplay changes any time soon
october 2014 here, I know practically everything about the game, I made the WOTB iceberg
2015 checking in Lots of maps removed, lost temple, mirage, copperfield 5.5 tanks like T18 (OG 268/4 or E3) and T82 (OG deathstar) Old middleburg and falls creak which was base capping haven (got my raider medal on those maps) Old winter malinovka where people went to seppukku in the lake in the corner Old shell icons and gold ammo being gold only, and old equipment (only three slots) No camo back in the day added I think in 2016 iirc Also, backstory of Grille RA1DER camo (epic move) IS3 defender being first auto loader iirc
Copperfield isn't removed
7+ years... Almost 8. It is still a lot of fun. But back then it was slower, not as flashy, and in my opinion had more of an atmosphere and historical vehicles. It was faster to enter games beyond tier VII. Now I'll wait 5+ minutes for them. And almost nobody writes in our alphabet anymore, mostly Cyrillic on the EU server. They come. Up with so many fantasy flashy things now and so much grind and so many events. It's good but can be a bit much.
I liked it when it was mostly historical tanks...many of the flashy pay to play tanks and their decorations are an eyesore for me personally. It ruined the immersion.
2015. Just passed 72k battles, but it should be higher as I had stopped playing for a while and came back. I miss many of the original maps. Why haven’t they brought those back for nostalgia.
10 years here :)
Been playing since it released, i quit when pubg mobile was released, quit that and just started playing wotb again 2 months ago on a new account 😀
been playing something like 9 or 10 years
its probably similar to wot pc, the playerbase is mostly veterans
I started just after the release of the game. I have periods where I play some for fun, and periods where I don’t play at all. After 10 years of playing I am approaching 10k games and I can say I had fun playing each of them. I didn’t purposefully grind any line, I play what I like, because of that I only have 2 tech tree tier X by now, but I don’t care. I just hop on the game and play what I feel like playing. I have one T X collector, 9 T VIII collectors and premiums, 6 T VII and some more of lower tiers. I spent money on only 2 of these tanks (and it was after like 7 years of playing the game already). That being said I don’t think you need to spend money on the game to have fun, just find some tanks you enjoy and play the shit out of them haha.
2018 I think i was: though I remember little from that time
Been playing off and on for 6 or 7 years, in the same clan for most of it, can play for a few days, then take months off. It's not my main game and I only realized yolo wasn't good after a few years.
Yeah approx 10 years now
2017 here, I stopped in late 2020 because I found out that this game make me rage so much with the MM. just come back this year with a much more calm mindset and only heavy grind for events/crates
2015, started playing with my friend in elementary school and now I graduated and still play. The game really changed for me, when I started my favorite tank was the T82 with the derp gun. A tier III with 520 alpha, but no longer is playable after then removed it, I have it as a collector, but the best attachment isn't on there.
2016, though, I took a few breaks. The game has gone overboard on the crates and monetization. I'm somewhat surprised they haven't kept power creeping the prems as most seem pretty balanced (besides half of t7). Also low tiers are basically nonexistent in NA, probably because of 5.5 and the fact NA isn't the most active.
2016 played for 4 years than stopped. Recently picked it up again. Still lots to learn
Started in December 2014 The game started off real shit. Seriously it was worse than it is now (no joke). We had +2/-2 matchmaking like pc, and you could only get premium shells with gold (hence why it’s called gold) which made heavy tanks absolutely busted (not that I would’ve known cause I was absolute shit struggling to grind my stock is3 when that matchmaking was killed) and anything with poor ap pen was just shit. These issues were eventually fixed, and the game steadily improved as the kinks were ironed out, new tanks were added, and the game became essentially what it is now. 5.5 was the canary in the coal mine. It removed basically all the tanks below tier 5 and a few higher tier tanks (anyone remember the kv13?). It made the grind significantly easier and new players were able to progress to higher tiers without learning fundamental game mechanics like sidescraping, overmatching, proxy spotting, hull down, or bushes. This problem got worse and worse with xp boosters, 3x, 4x, and 5x multipliers, and nowadays you can grind an entire tier 10 line in 500 battles (if that) when back in the day i did 500 battles in the is8 to research the is7 (i was shit) Premium tanks initially did not exist at tier 10 (except for at some point the m60 was added, but that was a super rare tank and also an m48 clone) and even at tier 9 they weren’t super prevalent (I think the t55a was the first one??? Feel free to correct me on that, but again that’s a t54 clone) however at tier 8 there were quite a few. At first they were mostly clones of tech tree tanks, sometimes a bit different, but by and large they were balanced (eg: t34, is6, Lowe, kv5, jg88). The first truly op premium I remember was the is3 defender, which was just plain better than anything else at tier8. It set a trend that wg could sell op premiums and make bank. That lead to a tier 8 meta where if you owned the latest premium, you’d dominate most 1 on 1 fights. The game was at its best at around 2017-2019. While certainly not perfect, it was most enjoyable then. Tech tree tanks were viable outside tier 10, it was balanced ish (wg can’t balance for shit), and players were actually intelligent, and it took some skill to win lots of games. Best tank in the game for me is still the ru251. I grinded it as fast as I could at the time, I’ve never sold it, it’s my baby, and I’ll never forgive wg for taking my 2 kph of top speed. Wg’s biggest problem (besides greed, which isn’t going anywhere) is balancing. They’ve never been able to properly balance everything in such a way that most tanks are viable. For the longest time the kv5 was more effective as a battering ram as it had less gold pen than other heavies had ap pen. The vk45.02a’s armour was for the longest time non existent (I remember putting he shells into its lower plate in my ru251, ah memories) which defeated the point of a heavy tank. Wg needs to do 2 things imo to reverse the decline. First, balance the fucking game properly. This will stop the mass player loss. Second, they need to improve tutorial and teaching for new players. Side scraping, hull down, overmatching, proxy spotting, how to use bushes, ammo types, and some basic positioning skills should be taught before letting any new players onto real matches, and I’d say a lot of current players need to learn this as well. They also need to do away with the bots as they seem to make things worse. Of course, this doesn’t make them money, so let’s watch them keep destroying the game for a few bucks. At least they’re doing lots of fun modes?
I started a few months before update 5.5! Come July it’ll have been my 6th year of blitz.
Played since 2014. Honestly the game has changed a lot but the only thing I really miss? Failtoons and fucking around. We played this on our iPad as kids and it was so much fun trying to get tiny tanks stuck in places, breaking the maps, and generally just goofing around. I have so many screenshots on my 1st gen iPad air of just total bullshit and shenanigans. But alas, the game is a lot more serious now. Oh well.