!How wot was balanced!


During most of its development world of tanks has been balanced around the idea that the Historical data for a vehicle should be the determening factor of how that vehicle plays.
You can see this most clearly with vehicles like the tiger which has a reputation of being a armored behemoth, yet plays nothing like that because Wargaming chose treat its historical stats seriously and put it up against some worthy competition.
In the past historical accuracy was taken extremely seriously with tanks reciving updated armor models and even having modules removed or added with the purpose of making them more historical (as was the case with the german high tier engine rebalance for example).
The most extreme cases of this mentality was tanks like the fv 4202 or the T23 which were completely replaced and introduced back into the game as premiums with their historical caracteristics.
Of course there were cases where unhistorical elements were introduced for the sake of balance like buffs to the gun depression on high tier russian vehicles, but generally these cases were rare and often the result of flawed research.


!Soft stats!

Like any game there needed to be ways of balancing tanks other than with the historical stats. Without another way to balance them tanks like the STB-1 would just be a straight upgrade over vehicles like the leopard 1 or AMX 30B.
The balancing statistics in Wot are generally reffered to as "soft stats" and basically include any stat that is not tied to the historical data of the vehicle, these stats include things like hit points, accuracy, reload times, traverse speeds and module health.
Terrain resistance is an example of a soft stat, its used to determine how much resistance a vehicle will have over certain terrain types and thus the ease of which it can reach its top speed.
The role of terrain resistance in particular is to keep vehicles with high power to weight ratios and top speeds like the AMX CDC from outright replacing light tanks and also to keep tanks like the Maus and t95 viable despite their lower power to weight ratios.
Most of the "soft stats" serve simmilar roles and help the developers by providing many avenues for balancing tanks around their historical stats as needed, this has in turn allowed the diversity of tanks we see in the game today.
In short "soft stats" are stats that are used to compensate for a vehicles historical advantages or disadvantages, and are neccesary for balancing the tanks in the game.



!Changes in wot's balance process!

In patch 9,17 we saw a shift in the way WoT is balanced which was the result of the change in the head of the Balance department from Veider to Slava Makarov.
In the past each vehicle in a new line would have been balanced based on its historical strenghts and weaknesses with the help of "soft stats", but the new balance team showed itself to be completely unwilling or unable to try balancing tanks with their historical stats intact.
This has resulted in tanks that externally look the part but dont represent the vehicles on which they are supposed to be based in terms of armor, mobility or firepower, that is to say that they are more or less made up.
I can confirm that this was not due to a lack of information on these tanks as i was personally involved in the research and planning for the Swedish branch and had a contact at WG which i talked to regualrly.
We dont know for sure why the old balance system was abolished but around the same time Vieder was replaced, WG started talking about how they wanted to differentiate future lines from the ones already in the game, and this seems to have been a major goal of the new balance team.
In fact i know that the balance team wanted the Swedish heavies to be "close range fighters" compared to the French (long range) and the American (medium range), but in order to achive their goal the balance team choose to simply make up the stats of the Swedish heavies whenever it was convinient for themselfes.



To demonstrate my point here is how the Kranvagn balancing was handeled:

When it first appeared on supertest the Kranvagn recived a mostly historical armor layout but with a set of soft stats that were arguably worse than those on the French tier 9 AMX 50-120.
The balance team was probably worried about the Kranvagn outpreforming the AMX 50B thanks to its better armor and gun depression, but with a horrible dpm, a long intershell reload, low penetration and low HP compared to other tier 10's the Kranvagn ended up underpreforming and soon the balance team stated working on the 2nd itteration of the tank.

When the Kranvagn appeared again on the first version of the common test server it had recived massive buffs all round.
The soft stats were improved to the point where the Kranvagn was now faster and had a better damage per minute than the AMX 50B.
But Instead of just improving the soft stats the vehicles hull armor was completely re-aranged which not only created an unhistorical weakspot by going from a historical 145mm thickness on the lower glacis to 115mm, but also the historically weak upper glacis armor was buffed to 110mm (15mm over the real value) and the side armor was doubled from 37mm to 70mm thick.
In addition to the new made up hull armor the turret front was increased from 170mm to 225mm (a increase by 55mm!) this in turn made the turret practically impenetrable from the front even without using the gun depression.
Obviously the tank was completely overpowered with the new fake armor in combination with the generous soft stats and soon a third version of the tank was underway.


The final version of the Kranvagn so far was added to the 2nd itteration of the common test server.
After how the tank overpreforemed a rebalance was inevatable, the tank was just too good at everything with the made up armor and the good soft stats.
It seemed like this would have been the perfect time to drop the fake armor and lower the tanks mobility by increasing the terrain resistance, thus letting the french heavies keep their niche.
With lower, but still good mobility and a well armored but not impenetrable turret a lot of the other stats could have been left alone and the Kranvagn would have made for a very versitile alternative to the other top tier autoloaders.
What actually happened was that the Kranvagn had pretty much all of its stats nerfed including the historical engine power (by 200hp), and amusingly the upper hull was reduced to 90mm which actually made it 5mm thinner than the real life values.
What was not touched in the rebalance however was the main thing that had made the tank overpowered in the first place, the fake turret armor.
In essence the Kranvagn was turned into a one trick pony, a vehicle that can only do one thing well, and in this case that thing was relying on its fake turret armor.


So what can we learn from how the Kranvagn was balanced?
If a goal of going away from the old way of balancing tanks was to better be able to balance vehicles then i think the way the Kranvagn was handeled shows that this was not achived.
The truth is that at best the new balance system provided no benifits over the old one and at worst it hurt vehicles like the Swedish heavies by removing the versitility they would have enjoyed under the old system.
These changes also served to make the Swedish tanks pointlessly unhistorical and this helped anger the historians that had been working on the tech tree, myself included.


!Diversity!

The one thing we know for sure was a goal of the new balace system was that WG wanted to make the new lines stand out from existing ones, however id argue that many of the balance team's decitions actually achived the opposite (largely thanks to the ability to change any stats instead of just soft stats).
The mobility, good gun traverse and gun depression of the Swedish TD's were all toned down to the point where they just became another itteration of the german Waffentränger line with different top tiers.
Even the medium tanks like the Leo and Strv 74 also had their engine power change completely which resulted in the removal of one of the main things that had differentiated these tanks from their counterparts.
The situation with the Strv 74 is something i found particularly odd as the Volvo A8B engine from the Strv m/42 could have just been added if the devs wanted a better engine for the tank (this had been suggested several times during the lines development).
But even given a historical alternative the Balance chose to go out of their way and change the horsepower of the top engine on the Strv 74 from its real value.
It also needs to be said that both the Strv 74 and the Leo could just have had their mobility issues resolved by the use of terrain resistance tweaks.

The only vehicles which the balance team actually suceeded to differentiate was the top tiers in the "td branch" which after the buffs to the sige mode top speed and enter/exit times actually play more like 2nd line mediums and are suprisingly great additions to the game.
Another notable thing about these vehicles is that they actually mostly retained their historical stats, which goes to show that even the new balance team was capable of using the older methods when they wanted to.
The thing is though that these vehicles were already so far removed from their counterparts that they would have played differently either way due to their small caliber guns and their uniqe suspension system.